Whenever guests come from out of town and have some time on their hands, we invariably send them to two places, and they invariably come back mighty impressed with our town. One is the National World War One Museum at the Liberty Memorial. The other is the Steamboat Arabia Museum.
The magic of both places is that they blow away whatever notions you might have had about what museums can be. The World War One Museum is a solemn, at times mournful, and exquisitely produced display of what war, in its most elemental being, contributes: namely, human suffering.
The Steamboat Arabia Museum blows you away because the first they do is escort you into a tiny movie theater and tell you a story about how the museum came to be: Five men from Independence, none of them with any excavation or historical training, dredged up the remains of a steamboat sunk in 1856 -- and, more importantly, 200 tons of cargo, mostly housewares for families to purchase before settling on the frontier.
At the end of the little film, a museum guide gives a little talk before opening the door to show you the cargo, laid out beautifully and en masse like it was a pre-Civil War Crate & Barrel.
Over the years we've visited Steamboat Arabia at least a dozen times, and more often than not our guide was one of the Hawley brothers, David and Greg, who had spent half their adult lives turning a crazy idea into a profitable and one-of-a-kind historical showcase.
I was sad to see that Greg Hawley was killed in an auto accident over the weekend.
The story of sunken riverboat treasure retrieved on such a total scale is utterly singular and entirely American. And for as long as I've been in Kansas City, the Hawleys have been looking for another boat from a different time to pull out of the silty earth. Just the day before, they were on the prowl near Lexington, Mo., where a boat had gone down in 1822.
I remember meeting Bob Hawley once and wondering if his two boys would succeed in locating another boat before he passed -- but I never imagined this.
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