For more than twenty years, Dr. Sharon Lee has been providing medical care to the region’s poor and uninsured at her non-profit, safety net health clinic on Southwest Boulevard. Among the earliest treated at the clinic were HIV AIDS patients, when few in Kansas City knew anything about the disease. Today, it’s diabetes, high blood pressure and other health issues, all treated regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. Remarkably, Dr. Lee pays herself the same salary as the clinic’s janitor and receptionist. That’s right: an MD who makes $14 an hour. Sean Holmes produced our story.
Our KCPT Difference Maker segment has been made possible by support from the insurance firm of Haas & Wilkerson.
Kansas City has never had a major children’s musuem like a lot of big cities although there have been plenty of people over the year’s who have advocated for one and still do.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t places you can go NOW in our metro where kids can experience the wonder of discovery. We take you to a converted elementary school in Shawnee, Kansas where they’ve been filling kids with “wonder” since 1989. They call it Wonderscope.
In 1988, the Johnson County Commissioners established a task force to study programs and activities available for children and their families in the local community. The study concluded that there was a shortage of hands-on, interactive programs of interest to entire families. In response to that unmet community need, Wonderscope Children’s Museum was founded in 1989, offering exhibits and programs in a former elementary school in Shawnee, Kansas.
Also in 1989, Children’s Museum of Kansas City opened to its first group tours in the Carriage House of the Kansas State School for the Visually Handicapped. Marty Porter, the museum’s founder and executive director, had started conversations about a children’s museum in Kansas City, Kansas in 1984. In 1990, CMKC moved into the Indian Springs Shopping Center, offering exhibits, programming at the museum and through outreach, and the Recycled Materials Center.
In 2003, Beyond the Book incorporated to serve children and families with a unique hands-on approach to teaching children about the arts and sciences through literature. Beyond the Book was also committed to creating a leading-edge children’s museum experience in Kansas City.
In spring of 2006, the respective boards of Wonderscope and Beyond the Book agreed that it would be in the best interests of both organizations and the community to explore the potential for a collaborative approach to achieving the common vision for a large-scale children’s museum. In May 2007, Beyond the Book merged into Wonderscope, creating one combined entity, with a combined board, combined leadership and integrated programming. The merged organization began conversations with Children’s Museum of Kansas City. In May of 2008, Children’s Museum of Kansas City merged into Wonderscope Children’s Museum to become Wonderscope Children’s Museum of Kansas City, operating out of Wonderscope’s site in Shawnee. This merger effectively brought all of the children’s museum interests in the metropolitan area together to achieve the vision of developing a world-class children’s museum for Kansas City.
In the summer of 1868, paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh boarded a Union Pacific train for a sightseeing excursion through the heart of the newly opened American West. While most passengers simply saw magnificent landscapes, Marsh soon realized he was traveling through the greatest dinosaur burial ground of all time. Ruthless, jealous and insanely competitive, Marsh would wrestle over the discovery with the other leading paleontologist of his generation, Edward Drinker Cope. Over time, the two rivals would uncover the remains of dozens of prehistoric animals, including 130 species of dinosaur; collect thousands of specimens; provide ample evidence to prove Charles Darwin’s hotly disputed theory of evolution; and put American science on the world stage. But their professional rivalry eventually spiraled out of control. What began with denigrating comments in scientific publications led to espionage, the destruction of fossils and political maneuvering that ultimately left both men alone and almost penniless.
Picture steam rising from a sewer grate on a rain-slicked street. The sound of footsteps come closer and closer behind you as you walk down a dark, downtown Kansas City alley. If this scenario entices you, then you just might enjoy Kansas City Noir, a new anthology of short stories that takes readers on a journey through Kansas City’s seedy underbelly. The book’s editor is Steve Paul from the Kansas City Star who writes in the introduction that this is a city that’s home to its share of serial killers and moral turpitude. He sat down with Randy Mason to share that gritty side of our town.
The book includes short stories from some of the region’s best authors including J. Malcolm Garcia, Grace Suh, Daniel Woodrell, Kevin Prufer, Matthew Eck, Philip Stephens, Catherine Browder, John Lutz, Nancy Pickard, Linda Rodriguez, Andrés Rodríguez, Mitch Brian, Nadia Pflaum, and Phong Nguyen.
Steve Paul and contributors Catherine Browder, Nancy Pickard, and Linda Rodriguez will be presenting readings from the book on Saturday, November 3 at 11 a.m. at Mysteryscape which is located at 7309 W. 80th St. in Overland Park.
KCPT has partnered with Black & Veatch to bring a mentoring program to the Hickman Mills School District on engineering. The program which goes through December 11 has put an engineer in the classroom each week mentoring fifth grade students at Santa Fe Elementary and Dobbs Elementary on a variety of topics from carbon footprint, water treatment, where electricity comes from, what energy is and why it is important. The mentors have also engaged the students with fun activities relating to the topics. The goal of the program is to open up the world of engineering to the students and encourage them to consider a career path in the future.
Martin Clunes (Men Behaving Badly) returns for the fourth season of DOC MARTIN as the brash doctor Martin Ellingham, whose blunt opinions and tactless manner cause mayhem in a small Cornish community. Ellingham – once a celebrated London surgeon – flees from his position after developing a phobia to blood. After retraining as a general practitioner, Ellingham gets a job in the beautiful but sleepy village of Portwenn replacing their deceased local doctor. But his abrasive personality doesn’t exactly mesh with the pace of life in Cornwall. In this fourth season, “Doc Martin” continues to deal with the strange cases and stranger personalities of Portwenn. He deals with the mysterious illnesses and odd events that plague the town, including the strange death of a local sheep farmer, a paranoid and constipated school headmaster, a visitor with a rare genetic disease, and the unexpected pregnancy of a person very close to the good doctor.
In this first episode of Season 5 of Doc Martin – “Preserve the Romance”
Dr. Martin Ellingham (Martin Clunes) is struggling to come to terms with fatherhood. The baby boy born to him and his estranged partner, Louisa Glasson (Caroline Catz), is about to change their lives dramatically. Doc Martin had planned to resume his high-flying career as a consultant in London. He had packed his bags and moved out of the surgery to make way for the new GP, Dr. Di Dibbs (Joanna Scanlan). However Dr. Ellingham begins to have serious doubts about the competency of the new GP after she misdiagnoses a patient, and dishes out prescriptions for totally inappropriate drugs. Dr. Dibbs realizes she has to go, and Dr. Ellingham agrees to resume duties at the surgery until a replacement GP can be found. With all the upheaval the doc is unprepared for a devastating personal blow with the death of Aunt Joan.
