Just across the street from last week’s subject, the New York Life [Aquilla] Building, stands “The Bunker Building.” Built just a few years earlier than its taller, more imposing neighbor, this red brick edifice housed a function for which Kansas City is still well-known—syndication of newspaper features, stories and comics.
    Syndication in this case means that the employees of the Western Newspaper Exchange, operated by W. A. Bunker, who also constructed the building and modestly named it in his own honor, daily clipped news stories, features and editorials from midwestern newspapers and then distributed them by mail to subscribing newspapers west of Kansas City.
    This was all done in the days before the Associated Press or the old United Press International provided the same service nationally. Daily newspapers cropped up in towns big and small across the Great Plains. Each needed signficant copy to fill the “news” section, but did not want to employ large staffs of writers to generate said copy. Enter the “middle man”—W. A. Bunker and the Western Newspaper Exchange.
    For a fee much smaller than the wages paid to starving journalists, small local newspapers could keep up on the happenings in “big cities” like Kansas City, St. Louis, or even Topeka or Columbia. The service did much to stimulate the initial growth of outstanding Missouri and Kansas small town newspapers that created an aura of sophistication around the two otherwise quite rural states.
    The Bunker Building itself has stood the test of time much better than the Exchange. In the 1970s, it underwent a thorough renovation and restoration that won an award for the architect, Kenneth M. Frashier. Beyond that, its renovation was part of a series of such efforts that tranformed what had been a block down on its luck to one of the restored showplaces of Kansas City—the 100 block of West 9th St.
    Today, together with the New York Life Insurance Building, the Kansas City Dime Museum Building, the Orient Hotel Building and the New York Life Building, the Bunker provides an anchor of visual stability to a district unmatched for its 1880s flavor anywhere else in the region.
    Note: last week’s story about the New York Life Building mistakenly identified the sculptor who created the wonderful bronze eagle over the entry as “St. Gaudens” when, in fact, he carried the hyphenated name, “Saint-Gaudens.”
Dr. Bill Worley, Instructor in History, MCC-Blue River