Westport covered wagon ends 61-year run. This man (then a boy) was there at its debut
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The historic Kansas City Star photo shows three brothers in cowboy hats and a girl they didn’t know. And, of course, the Westport covered wagon, which after 61 years has ended its journey. Wednesday it was set to be carted away.
Kevin Maxon of Lawrence, now 68, was 7 back then. He is the older of two young boys pictured on the rocks. In his Howdy Doody-like outfit, he stands with his adult brother, Tom — half-brother actually, 25 years older from their dad’s first marriage.
Not too old to dress up, though. Tom, now long gone, was a good guy in that way.
Closer to the Conestoga wagon — the featured attraction that Saturday, March 2, 1963, for the opening of the Old Westport Shopping Center — that’s 5-year-old Tim, now 67, and retired from the Shawnee city public works department and living in New Mexico.
Kevin is a retired too, a former avionics supervisor.
“Thirty-six years at Honeywell,” he said.
Now the old Conestoga wagon at Westport Road and Southwest Trafficway is being retired, too, after 61 years settled in the same spot. Boards rotting away. Cover having seen better days. It’s got an axle from the 1860s. A “new” wagon — a replica from the 1976 United States bicentennial — was scheduled to replace it on Wednesday morning.
The 1963 Saturday of the shopping center’s grand opening, the mayor showed up. Native American students from the Haskell Institute were invited to appear in period dress. An a cappella choir sang.
The deep details of that day escape Maxon. But he remembers being there with this brothers. Because for the Maxons — his mom, Leona (she died in November in Baldwin City at 103) and his dad, Thomas L. Maxon Sr. (gone long ago, in 1980) — reenacting history was a huge part of their lives. And wagons, too.
The family owned a business, Maxon Transfer and Delivery. They used trucks. But they also had a farm in LaCygne, Kansas. Wagons literally hung from the barn rafters. His dad loved them.
“That was the generation he grew up in,” Maxon said. His dad was born in 1906. “Like I play with cars and motorcycles, he played with any horse-drawn vehicle.”
They had their own carts, buggies, carriages and covered wagons. The family were ardent members of the Westport Historical Society. They dressed in period costumes: his mom in polka dotted finery; his dad in a long coat, Abe Lincoln-like stove pipe hat, a paisley vest, at times, like a gambler. Sometimes he’d dress as a Union Army officer. They pulled wagons in parades, with a placard for the business across the side. Maxon has tons of photos of those days.
So they were certain to show in March 1963 for the shopping center’s grand opening, a celebration that lasted three days. The Conestoga was there. The historical society was placing a plaque in honor Westport’s earliest pioneers.
“Dad, like I said, he was so into it,” Maxon said. “You can see articles about this in the paper, too. He built a replica of a wind wagon.”
That’s a Conestoga wagon woefully outfitted with sails to ostensibly use the wind to streak westward across the prairie. Walt Disney in 1961 made an animated short, “The Saga of Windwagon Smith,” based on a tall tale believed have been born of true events of Westport in the 1850s.
Maxon is sorry to see the old covered wagon go.
“Its too bad,” he said. “You can only leave those wagons out for so long. I knew it couldn’t last forever. But it’s disappointing to see it go.”
He has that photo, though. He has those memories.
