Reaching for the phone, I pressed the “talk” button and greeted my unknown caller with my broken-record hello: “Garden City Arts.”
“Brian. It’s Don. Can you keep a secret?”
Several weeks prior, Don and I had submitted a grant to the Lois Kay Walls Foundation in Wichita requesting $30,000 to restore the Windsor Hotel tower and $150,000 to restore the lobby. The suggestion to submit the grant had been through fellow Windsor Hotel supporter, Karin. I first met Karin when she hired me to photograph her mother’s 100th birthday bash. While capturing Grams’ big day, Ms. Karin and I discovered that we, along with her husband, Richard, were all alumni from the same small college in Winfield, Kansas.
Though the birthday cake is long gone, Karin and I continue to cross one another’s trail of bread crumbs. Last spring I booked a 24-hour train ride toward Disneyland to visit my sister. Upon arrival at the Garden City train depot, I sat my duffle down and approached the ticket counter. As I stepped into the waiting line, a woman turned around. It was Karin. She and Richard were on their way to Arizona. Together we departed the platform at 6:21 a.m. While I spent the majority of the journey west with the Baudelaire Orphans and some rather unfortunate events, I did manage to bag my books, for a while, and explore Albuquerque with my two traveling companions. We parted ways in Flagstaff. More recently—after Don’s “secret” call to the art gallery—I met up with Karin and her husband again at the museum during the opening of my most recent exhibit, “Rangers & Grangers, Settling Up Southwest Kansas.”
“Have you been out to California lately?” Karin asked.
“Not since March,” I said. I then brought up the grant. She smiled. Karin had been childhood friends with Kay Walls and had presented our grant to the Lois Kay Walls Foundation in person.
“He knows our secret,” Karin said to Richard as he approached us and shook my hand.
“I helped write the grant,” I said.
Don wrote the majority of the grant and then e-mailed it my way. Having recently attended Gina Tyler’s grant writing workshop in Liberal, I was eager to “unlearn what I had learned” as a wise Jedi once said. Grant writer Gina Tyler had expressed the importance to include anything that would help secure the grant and to research the source as much as possible. So, I googled the Lois Kay Wall Foundation. The result: a mailing address. No website, no information. I was at a loss. We needed more muscle for our grant. The namesake of the foundation had roots in Garden City—or at least fruits and vegetables. The Garden City Walls IGA opened in 1951 on the corner of Sixth Street and Laurel Street. It caught fire when I was a toddler. The long-time business was sure to have a history. Lucky for me, I have a key to Garden City’s history.
There are seven large file cabinets containing the vertical history of Finney County at the Historical Museum. I was in need of the Walls family folder, which I discovered sandwiched in between WALLER, JAMES THOMAS and WALTER, CHARLES.
WALLS, J.C. contained enough documents to pass for a short novel, including letters, obituaries, family trees and newspaper articles. One article, dated Friday June 22, 1951 was announcing the Walls’ IGA grocery store grand opening the upcoming Sunday. It was praised to be the “most modern independent food department store in Kansas” with speedy checkouts and even a public address intercom. As interesting as the Independent Grocers Alliance of America was, I had doubts the information would help us acquire a grant—even if the organization does date back to1925.
Then I came across a more recent article: Kay Walls’ mother’s obituary:
“Nettie Kaye Jane (Wolley) Walls aged 99, passed away January 23, 2007 at Larksfield Place in Wichita, Kansas. She was born August 26, 1907 six miles north of Medoc, KS. Her mother was Minnie Wilhemina (Sebert) Wolley and her father was Charles Seth Wolley. She married Henry Briggs Walls March 17, 1929…”
Briggs.
Earlier in the year I had entered the Windsor with a photograph of a Windsor Hotel manager’s living quarters, in hopes to identify where the photo had been taken. While I could not confirm the room location, I was yet to forget the manager’s name: Mr. Briggs. If this was the same Briggs family, then the Walls had a direct connection with the Windsor Hotel. I created a web from the folder’s contents and dug into several other folders to confirm my suspicion.
Lois Kay Walls was the daughter of Nettie Kaye Jane (Wolley) and Henry Briggs Walls, who moved to Garden City shortly after their marriage on March 17, 1929. They operated the Walls IGA Grocery Store for many years and eventually bought and operated the Garden City Dillons Supermarket. Henry’s father, Joseph C. Walls, was the founder of the local J.C. Walls grocery business. He came to the area in 1899 and soon began managing the men’s shoe and dress goods departments at the George Inge Dry Goods Co., which was located on the ground floor of the Windsor Hotel. By 1907, he was managing the hotel, but only for a short while. The same cannot be said for his brother-in-law C.E. ‘Doc’ Briggs (Kay Walls’ granduncle and the same Mr. Briggs who I was already familiar with). Doc Briggs acquired management of the Windsor Hotel in 1895 and eventual ownership. He continued operation of the building, on and off, through 1930. Briggs had a third brother George, who lived in Kansas City and would spend four weeks out of each year in Garden City, using the Windsor Hotel as his headquarters. There he attracted men’s apparel owners from all over Kansas twice a year for a showing of men’s hats. The Briggs brothers were often reported in local newspapers as active community members and dedicated fans to the Windsor Hotel. As Lois Kay Walls was of direct lineage of these men, the Windsor Hotel most likely played a part in her life as well. Relations between the Briggs/Walls and the Windsor Hotel offered an ideal connection to acquire at least a portion of the grant we were to request. Restoration of the hotel tower for $30,000 would be ideal.
Funding for the tower would allow us to repair supporting rafters in the structure, which has served as a large pigeon birdhouse for the last thirty years. Weather, water and bird bombs have degraded the four-sided structure, standing as a decorative crown to the hotel, reminiscent in design of a captain’s walk from earlier times. Originally, a wooden flagpole stood as a lookout atop the tower. Efforts took two men and a boy to run the American Flag up to its height of fifteen feet. With the grant, the flag could fly once more, while also restoring the region’s skyline.
The additional $150,000 for lobby restoration was an unlikely addition, but worth attempting. We had failed to acquire a $50,000 grant during the Pepsi Refresh Project in July. This was our next chance to restore the hotel lobby, which no longer reflects the original. Once upon a time the original facade featured stained glass windows and two entrances in the lobby. The main entrance stood directly under the tower, the second provided a direct exit from the grand staircase. The grand staircase was constructed of solid mahogany wood and was six feet wide. Meeting the same fate as characters in Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the grand staircase vanished, only to be replaced by a lifeless shell of a dark u-shaped stairwell.
Additionally, the eighteen-foot ceiling was cut in half by constructing a mezzanine in between the first two floors. When the hotel closed, the two entrances were removed and replaced with windows, leaving no direct entry into the lobby. But the largest devastation—at least for the Windsor’s original architects, J.H. Stevens and C.L. Thompson—was the horrific 1970s addition of a glittery popcorn ceiling. Stevens and Thompson would question the grandeur of a ceiling that crumbles upon mere touch and then attracts directly to the human eye as if magnetic. Such a disaster is beyond words, and is sure to leave even Herbert Morrison speechless. Yet, a fully-funded grant would be able to reverse the alterations of time. With the renovation of the lobby, a welcome center would be established and allow authentic access into the hotel for tours. From there, the Windsor Hotel restoration project could continue to snowball until completion.
We submitted the grant. I heard nothing more until the Alliance president called me at work.
“Brian. It’s Don. Can you keep a secret?”
Soon after, an article was published on October 28 in the Garden City Telegram. Next to a photo I had taken myself, was the feature headline: Windsor gets $180k.
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