Kansas City

One of my first road trips as a naive twenty-something was a cross-state drive to Kansas City for the World Science Fiction Convention in 1976. I had the experience of hearing one of my favorite SF authors, Robert Heinlein, speak in person. Since I had discovered his novels in junior high, I was especially excited by the prospect.

With my partner and several friends, we also had delusions of grandeur in thinking we could launch our new SF magazine at the convention. That didn't work so well and had a lot to do with me categorizing myself as naive. We didn't know about fanzines until we got there and the business portion of the venture was a complete and utter failure. But I had a good time otherwise and it wasn't the last time I would go to a SF convention.

I met Spider Robinson there before he was well known - and he also became one of my favorite authors. But more about the experience was simply the challenges of the trip - long, late night driving across Indiana and Illinois, my first glimpse of the Mississippi River as we crossed into Missouri, and a short visit to the Kansas side of KC for dinner one night. We slept six in one room and it was chaotic, but we were all pretty much broke. It was sort of like summer camp without the evening campfire.

The only other memory I have of the trip was the unusual sight of traffic lights on poles at the streetcorners instead of being suspended from overhead lines in the middle of the intersections. Downtown KC was the first time I had seen this variation and it made for some tentative driving.