Star sports columnist Vahe Gregorian is changing uniforms this spring and summer, acting as a tour guide of sorts to some well-known and hidden gems of Kansas City. Send your ideas to Celebrated on magazine covers, deluged in fan mail, addressing audiences around the country, Ed Dwight Jr. in the early 1960s was a national sensation on trajectory to become the first Black man in space.
Only to be ostracized and obstructed from the launchpad, he fervently believes, because he lacked not the right stuff but the white stuff — and effectively lost his most elemental advocate when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. “When Kennedy died,” Dwight told me with casual bluntness, “they wanted me to die with him.
” Stunningly sharp and vibrant at 90 years old, Dwight now tends either to laugh about or otherwise convey the wisdom of reconciliation when he speaks of that time. That perspective stems at least in part because after he left the pre-NASA program in 1966 devastated, he propelled himself into a career as an artist whose and in Kansas City. , where on a recent tour with the museum’s Paul Gutierrez I was stupefied to learn that the remarkable artist of whom he spoke was the same man who had just rocketed into space and who was made in virtually every way in Kansas City, Kansas — including that he’s known his wife, Barbara, since they were 2 years old and that his father played for the Kansas City Monarchs.
That heritage is what led to this t.