Star Stuck

Turner White left his post running Union Station and Science City this week, but the effects of his lousy management will be felt for a long time. Here's how the Strip knows.

Way back when this sermonizing sirloin was tenderizin' itself in that great meat-packing plant known as graduate school, it found a really cool part-time job. For three years, the Strip worked as a planetarian.

For the uninitiated, that's what you call the person behind the controls at a planetarium, twistin' dials and flippin' switches to make the stars come out at noon. Now, this particular sky theater, housed in a drab building in the back forty of an ugly community college, was a real challenge to operate, seein' as how it had been built 30 years earlier and relied on technology that had been cutting-edge back in the Kennedy administration. Nothing was computer controlled; if something as simple as a moonrise was called for, this poor slab found itself twistin' like an acrobat to turn dials and hit buttons on a console that looked like something out of Frankenstein's lab.

We're talking really, really low-tech.

But it didn't matter. Day in and day out, the place was jam-packed with school kids. At night, whole neighborhoods turned out to fill all 170 seats for a tour of the cosmos. The Strip was fortunate enough to work with some smart folks who knew how to get the most out of the wheezing star projector and the arcing dome, and the place's reputation preceded itself. Schools for miles around knew that students sent down for a field trip would get not only a kickass show but also a head full of information about life, the universe and everything.

And that's why this beefsteak knows for a fact that former Union Station honcho White didn't have a clue what he was talkin' about when he spun The Kansas City Star like a freakin' top in January.

See, the Star asked White why Kansas City's own major planetarium, a facility called City Dome that sits next to Science City, was closed, scheduled to reopen as a mere entryway into the failing museum.

White's explanation for the theater's demise? The planetarium never caught on with Kansas Citians because its technology wasn't cutting-edge for 2004 and didn't make use of digital equipment for projecting a night sky, he told the newspaper.

What a load of cow manure.

Last week, Mayor Kay Barnes announced that she'd appointed a new panel of civic leaders to investigate why Science City has been such a colossal flop. She wants to see the panel's results before letting Kansas Citians vote on a tax increase that White said Union Station needed to stay open.

This crusading cutlet hopes the panel does some real investigatin' into the matter. Which means talking to folks like Michael Bakich and Richard Hirsch, who told the Strip recently why the City Dome reallyfailed.

Bakich is an editor at Astronomy magazine now, but back in the day, he was the dude running the tiny fifty-seat planetarium at the Kansas City Museum. So he was pretty stoked when, in 1994, he was asked to design the new planetarium that would open alongside Science City. For several years, he dreamed up the best theater that money would allow, splurging on some things and saving money on others. Some of the equipment wasn't the latest in breakthrough technology, but Bakich knew that programming and staff creativity are a lot more important to a planetarium than how its stars are projected. Eventually, the City Dome was built to his exact specifications. But before the place even broke ground, Bakich says, he was dumped.

It was nothing personal, he was told. But for some reason, the suits in charge of Science City decided that the planetarium Bakich had designed wouldn't need a director.

Bakich couldn't believe his ears. Build a planetarium without a director?

"I asked many questions," Bakich says. "Who's going to install the shows?" Part-time staff would take care of that, he was told.

The response told Bakich everything he needed to know about his managers: They didn't know what the hell they were doing.

Soon after the planetarium and the rest of Science City were supposed to open, for example, there would be a total lunar eclipse visible in Kansas City in January 2000. Bakich explained that a planetarium director would know how to make a special event like that translate into a huge boost for the museum. With help from the large number of local astronomy buffs in organizations such as the Astronomical Society of Kansas City, Bakich had used a previous eclipse to get 4,000 people out to the old museum -- in the sketchy Northeast neighborhood! With even modest marketing, he says, he and the ASKC could have attracted 10,000 to 20,000 curious folks out to Union Station for the event.

Instead, he was sent packing. Bakich moved to El Paso, Texas, and the City Dome failed to take advantage of the eclipse.

"We had more people in my backyard in El Paso for that event than they had at Science City," he says.