Anne Kniggendorf

Listen to this episode of A People's History Of Kansas City, a new podcast from KCUR 89.3. For more stories like this one, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and Stitcher.

It was 1956 in Kansas City. Leila Cohoon had just left her job at a salon to find some new shoes for Easter on the Country Club Plaza.

And then she saw an object in the window of an antique store that would change her life. A little woven wreath in a gold frame — hair art.

Cynthia Hardeman, a playwright, knew that families along the Troost Corridor enjoyed the Drama Time children's program that she and performer Victoria Barbee created in 2017.

The 10-week program, where kids could show up, slip into character and act out a story completely different from their own, was popular. But until a few months ago, she didn’t have a permanent address for that project, and worked out a borrowed temporary space at Just Off Broadway Theatre.

Listen to this episode of A People's History Of Kansas City, a new podcast from KCUR 89.3.

Before Cassius Clay took the name Muhammad Ali, he was a 22-year-old who’d been rechristened “the champ,” the greatest boxer in the world.

Long-time Life magazine photojournalist and renaissance man Gordon Parks was assigned to cover the young man twice, once in 1966 and again in 1970. What Parks found after many meetings was a 24-year-old with bruised fists looking for approval — a side of the superstar the public hadn't seen.

Listen to this episode of A People's History Of Kansas City, a new podcast from KCUR 89.3.

Kansas City hip hop artist and producer Justin "Info Gates" Gillespie, 39, died unexpectedly at the end of January. Those who loved him are reeling but not at a loss when explaining how Gillespie will live on.

"He was not shy about uplifting people in whatever way possible," says Kemet Coleman, a member of the Phantastics and a friend of Gillespie.

As a teenager in Queens, New York, Vladimir Sainte often didn't want to go home after school. So he didn't. His parents, Haitian immigrants, worked several jobs, and Sainte had become a defiant and anxious boy.

When his parents decided they could no longer manage him, they shipped him to Kansas City to live with his uncle. He was 16 then. But now, years later in his career as a social worker, he sees he could have been taught to manage his emotions better.

Children, he notes, don't have the "verbal literacy" of adults.

Caitlin Corcoran has been a fixture in Kansas City's hospitality industry for about 20 years. She started as a barista on the Plaza as a 15-year-old and went on to tend bar, serve, manage and finally own a restaurant, Ça Va in Westport.

Now she's taking a break — possibly a long or permanent break — from this city's restaurant scene.

For a good chunk of her career, she figured, as many women do, that a hostile work environment came with the territory.

A dancer who hears "elevé" knows to push herself up onto her toes. In 2010, when retired ballerina Lisa Choules needed an apt name for her fledgling dancewear company, the term sounded just right.

Everyone needed a lift: She was a single mom scouting for a new career; ballerinas needed a better-fitting leotard.

Jeffrey Hall is worried about our well-being.

"I think this is a really serious social concern. I think there are a lot of reasons to believe that loneliness is on the rise," says Hall, a communications professor at the University of Kansas.

Gift-giving can be challenging enough when you're human. But when you're a mouse, it's really tough. Kansas City artist Charlie Mylie has just released his first children's book about this difficulty.

"Something for You" is about a mouse who delivers a cake to a friend and finds her unwell, not in cake-eating spirits at all. He must find something to cheer her up, so he takes to the surrounding streets, meadows and mountains.

Donna Maize, who has recently been promoted to serve as the first female fire chief in Kansas City's 150-year history, says the role of the fire department has changed since she joined the force in 1992.

Recently, she said, their service has been morphing into the areas of social service and emergency healthcare.

"In Kansas City, unfortunately, we do have a certain amount of homeless population and kind of those transient people who really don’t have other resources or there's a lot of people that live without healthcare," Maize said.

Saturday Night Live cast member Heidi Gardner understands that times are hard. The native Kansas Citian says she’s regularly approached and thanked for a funny line or the tackling of a tough issue, even when she wasn’t directly involved with the bit.

“People really need to laugh, because the current political climate is so crazy,” she said.

Kim Horgan is known as Kansas City's biking Instagrammer.

The freelance photographer had already done a lot of adventuring — and Instagram-posting — but after winning Amtrak's "Take Me There" contest in April, she had a chance to take travel to a new level and discover some unexpected similarities between biking and train travel.

There's a bit of Indiana Jones in everyone, which is why people continue to be fascinated by ancient Egyptians and their tombs, says Julián Zugazagoitia, the Director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

That, he says, and "we all search for immortality in some way or another."

At its core, Zugazagoitia says, Egyptian art is about preserving the "life presence" of a person. Egyptians believed that for the soul to live in the other world, the person needed to have her depiction in sculpture form.

News about border wars in other nations can feel so distant that it's easy to tune out. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has raged for decades and so has the Kurdish-Turkish conflict, though that one has recently escalated.

But writer Farooq Ahmed asks everyone to hold up for a minute and recall that the years leading to the United States' Civil War offered much the same sort of fighting. In his novel "Kansastan," Ahmed adds a twist to that part of Kansas-Missouri history.

A little boy in traditional Italian clothing twirls while hanging onto the skirt of his mother's 18th century peasant dress. The two are in a Columbus Day parade in New York City, and photographer B.A. Van Sise figured it was the best shot he'd get that day.

After receiving a box of 35 mm film as a gift, Van Sise, who shoots for Atlas Obscura and Buzzfeed, set a challenge for himself: Take one photo a day with real film. The box contained enough for one year.

By the time he was 14, David Steinberg had been constructing crossword puzzles for two years. He thought they were pretty good, so he began sending them to New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz.

Attempts one through 16 received a hard no.

"Then the 17th one came back as a 'maybe,' instead of a 'no,'" Steinberg said. "It was a code-related puzzle, it had kind of a coded message, and he wanted the message to be related to code somehow. I had to rethink the theme a little bit."

After seeing national "best of" coffee lists skipping the entire Midwest, coffee blogger Leanna Bales started a website Many States of Coffee.

Those lists, she said, "didn't really reflect what I was seeing in Kansas City, which was just this really beautiful coffee culture where I think there's a lot of movement between coffee shops and community."

Kansas native Scott Thomas' writing style has been described as Midwestern Gothic. His new book "Violet" easily fits the definition of gothic horror, even if it doesn't match the genre's usual characteristics.

European gothic tales involve castles, wherein lie the sins and dark secrets of the aristocracy — beheadings and betrayals. In Southern gothic, Spanish moss-obscured plantation mansions hide the secrets of the slave owners. The Midwest isn't exactly famous for a particular style of structure that would lend itself to the gothic.

Performer Christopher Barksdale has given it a lot of thought, and has come to the conclusion that it's quite possible Jesus lived in a "cancel culture" just like we do.