The Nation: A GRACIOUS TOWN IN THE HEARTLAND

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Rolling Countryside. Kansas City's tone and civic esprit are set by a cluster of local business leaders like Joyce Hall and his son Donald (Hallmark Cards, which has its headquarters in the new $350 million Crown Center) and Henry Bloch (H & R Block, the tax firm), who likes to say: "No one is anxious to cover all this beautiful rolling countryside with concrete." The town is full of monuments to the leaders' enthusiasm. There is the Nelson Art Gallery, for example, built by the estate of the late William Rockhill Nelson, founder of the Kansas City Star. The gallery now has one of the most important collections of Chinese art in the world.

Some other attractions next week: the Kansas City Royals, currently one of the hottest teams in the American League, will have three home games.

For those who can get tickets, Yul Brynner will be appearing all week in The King and I at the Starlight Theater in Swope Park. On the whole, however, few will be tempted to say, in the style of Dr. Johnson: "When a man is tired of Kansas City, he is tired of life."

Pitch a Tent. Kansas City has gone about preparing for the convention with the solid and discreet industriousness that is the city's trademark. Some 2,500 volunteers have been mustered in 54 committees, with each assigned a delegation. It has been difficult making housing arrangements for the incoming delegates, alternates, their families, newspeople, hangers-on and, as it seems, half the U.S. Government. Roughly 80 hotels are being used, some of them as far away as Topeka, Kans., 65 miles to the west. But only a score are fully first class, and that includes such motels as Holiday and Ramada inns. The remainder are mostly second-or third-rate places, although all are supposed to be neat, clean and helpfully air conditioned.

A crisis erupted when Richard Frame, vice chairman of Pennsylvania's delegation, complained that staying at the Hilton Airport Plaza Inn would be like getting stuck in the middle of "a cornfield—you can't walk to a bar or get a suit pressed." Though the Hilton Plaza is eleven miles from the Kemper Arena, it is not in a cornfield, has four bars, swimming pool, tennis courts and one-day valet service. Accordingly, Manager Maurice Bluhm threatened to cancel "the whole damn delegation" when he heard Frame's remark and suggested: "Let them go pitch a tent in a cornfield." Frame apologized, but Bluhm is still fuming.

Transportation at the convention should be fairly good. The city has mobilized 200 buses and 1,000 taxis. The fact that downtown Kansas City clears out at 5 p.m. may be a blessing; the Kemper Arena is only a mile from the heart of the city, and traffic should be light in late afternoon and evening hours.

New Yorker Writer Calvin Trillin, a native of the city, has rather eccentrically written that Kansas City has the best restaurants in the world. The best of the best, says Trillin, is Arthur Bryant's barbecue restaurant. Actually. Kansas City has few very good restaurants. The best are the American Restaurant in the Crown Center complex and Jasper's, seven miles south of downtown. In general, places like McDonald's will probably do very good business during the convention.