James Patrick Lyons abandoned his family for a life on Kansas City’s
skid row. A town drunk, he was arrested eighty times for public
intoxication. On the night of his last arrest, he was taken to the city
jail and held in solitary confinement. The next morning he was dead.
Officials said it was natural causes—yet they could not explain his
broken neck.
When Richard Serrano
learned of the grandfather he had never known, the longtime journalist
embarked upon a search that led him deep into the city’s wide-open and
ignoble past. He stumbled upon his maternal grandfather’s death
certificate from 1948 and discovered that the evidence pointed to murder
in that basement cell. That revelation triggered a blizzard of questions
for Serrano and provided the impetus for this engrossing story.
Part memoir, part
investigative report, My Grandfather’s Prison takes readers back
to a crossroads year for Kansas City. The Great Depression and World War
II were over, yet vestiges still lingered from the corrupt Pendergast
political machine. The city jail itself was a throwback to the old
lockups and rock piles of popular fiction, while the sheriff’s office
was dishonest and inept—and tried to cover up the death.
Much has been written
about Tom Pendergast and the iron hand with which he ruled Kansas City
until his fall. Serrano’s personal journey into that time takes the
story further into those crucial years when the city tried to shake off
the yoke of machine politics and political corruption and step into a
new era of reform.
In
his quest to uncover the details of his grandfather’s life, Serrano
re-creates the flavor of mid-twentieth-century Kansas City. He shows us
real-life characters who broaden our understanding of the city’s
history: sheriffs and deputies, political bosses and coroners. And he
also discovers a city filled with lost souls like James Lyons: the
denizens of Kansas City’s skid row, a neglected area near the river
bottom that once housed the city’s gilded community but now was home to
derelicts and drunks.
As Serrano gradually
comes to terms with the darker side of his family history, he traces a
parallel reconciliation of the city with its own sordid past. James
Lyons died just as the old ways of the city were dying, and this
spellbinding account shows how one town in one time struggled with its
past to find a brighter future.
