The Kansas City Star

1729 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri 64108, United States

Founded by William Rockhill Nelson in 1880, the Kansas City Star is the city’s longest-running newspaper. The building from which it operated at 1729 Grand Avenue (now Grand Boulevard) was built in 1911 and was designed by Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt in an Italian Renaissance style.

Hemingway worked in the large open newsroom on the second floor of the Star building as a cub reporter from October 1917 to April 1918. The room, the centre of operations for one of the best known and most highly regarded newspapers in the country, was filled with cigar smoke and the clacking sound of typewriters and teletype machines.

Hemingway’s working hours at the Star were from 8 am to 5 pm (although often he didn’t finish until much later), six days a week. His only day off was Sunday. For his probationary first month he was paid $60 but this was increased when the Star decided to keep him on. As a cub reporter, his assignments included covering “fires, fights and funerals, and anything else not important enough for the other more experienced reporters”, according to his sister Marcelline Hemingway. In practice, this meant frequent visits to Police Station No. 4, Union Station and the city’s General Hospital – the “short-stop run”, as it was referred to.

In his articles for the Kansas City Star, Hemingway wrote of a gun battle outside a house used by drug addicts, of the victims of violence that were treated at the city’s General Hospital, and of the violence accompanying the laundry workers’ strike.

He also did some serious investigative journalism into corruption on the hospital’s Health Board and criticised the city for its mishandling of the smallpox outbreak that was happening at the time.

And of course, America was now at war, a war Hemingway would soon volunteer for, and so some of his stories were about the men of Kansas City being recruited into the military. Two of those recruited to the new Tank Corps were Kansas City newspapermen, and another recruit lived on the same street as Hemingway, Agnes Avenue. (While he was working for the Star, Hemingway enlisted in the Missouri Home Guard and took part in training exercises at Swope Park. He also applied to be a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Red Cross in Italy, which is where he ended up when his time at the Star came to an end.)

All of these articles and more combine to create a vivid portrait of the city – or at least of a young newspaper reporter’s experience of it over a century ago. Writers for the Star usually went uncredited, their articles were published without bylines until around 1930, but a number of Hemingway’s articles have since been identified. These are available in books and to read online.

In 1940, shortly after the publication of his great Spanish Civil War novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, Hemingway stopped off at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City and was himself interviewed by a reporter from the Star, Paul Fisher. Hemingway told Fisher how his editors at the newspaper had fostered good writing and how important he’d found the Star’s celebrated news-writing stylesheet, with its 110 writing guidelines. “Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” he told Fisher. “I’ve never forgotten them.” Those rules included the following: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

In later years, Hemingway told his friend AE Hotchner (known simply as ‘Hotch’) that “Contrary to the professors’ published reports, my first job on the Kansas City Star was to find the labor reporter in one of several drinking haunts, get him sobered in a Turkish bath, and get him to a typewriter. So if the professors really want to know what I learned on the Star, that’s what I learned. How to sober up rummies.” (Papa Hemingway, p.208)

The building where Hemingway worked at 1729 Grand Boulevard was home to the Kansas City Star for over a century but was sold by the newspaper in 2017 following declining fortunes for the newspaper industry. Renamed Grand Place, the building is currently being redeveloped at a cost of $95 million into a mixed-use destination and will offer over 250,000 square feet of office space, a European-style market, a private business club etc. when completed.

Inside the old building was a bronze plaque that listed the names of those who had worked at the Star and also served in World War I. One of those names was Ernest M. Hemingway. I’ve never seen the plaque in person but I very much hope it will once again be put on display when the current redevelopment work is completed.

The Star itself relocated to an impressive $200 million copper and glass building at 1601 McGee Street, just a few minutes walk from its old premises, but moved out of that building in 2021. In 2022 the newspaper announced that they were planning to move into an office tower at 2405 Grand Boulevard in the Crown Center complex in Kansas City.

The Star, which has won eight Pulitzer prizes throughout its existence, continues to be a thriving newspaper.

Next … Union Station