Cruisin' the 'Calf

We had to get out of the office.It was just that simple.

So, like all good Kansas Citians, the first thing we did was get in our cars. But we couldn't just drive aimlessly. We wanted to learn something about our city. In an effort to challenge our own assumptions, we drove to a street that we thought we knew, a street we thought was all about traffic and sprawl.

Certainly we found those -- much in progress. A "lifestyle center," modeled after the Northland's new Zona Rosa, is planned for the area around 135th Street and Metcalf. Across the road, construction workers were smoothing a layer of asphalt for a parking lot that will serve a bank branch, a furniture gallery and a Ben & Jerry's. Jeff Swan, the construction supervisor, also built the nearby Chipotle and Starbucks. "You start with dirt, and all of a sudden you have a building there," Swan told us.

He was describing the satisfaction he takes from his work, but he could have been speaking for all of Metcalf Avenue -- and all of Johnson County. When we started talking to other people, though, we discovered something else: a side of the street we didn't know.

8:40 a.m.
Bob Sight Lincoln Mercury
7701 Metcalf

Santol and Shamoz Lacy -- they're brothers -- race against evaporation. The cars and trucks on the lot have been washed, and it is the Lacys' job to dry them before streaks settle on the factory-fresh paint. Armed with chammies, Santol and Shamoz move quickly through the Aviators, Sables and Grand Marquises.

Santol, 24, wears rubber boots, sweats and a skullcap. Shamoz, 23, is dressed in a powder-blue T-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. Shamoz is the beefier of the two; they share the same friend-making smile.

The Lacys work for Carter's Mobile Wash. Santol and Shamoz each make about $100 a day, traveling from dealership to dealership with their boss, Joe Carter, and his son, Anthony. Most workdays begin at 6 or 6:30 a.m. and end at noon. "The rest of the day is ours," Shamoz says.

Santol and Shamoz, who live in Wyandotte County, spend their free time and money making rap and R&B records. Each produces and runs a label. (Shamoz also performs.)

"We original," Shamoz says.

"We don't sound like nobody around here," Santol says. "It's all real, all street, all shit that's really happening."

Lately Santol and Shamoz have had more time to devote to their music. Carter's business is down -- more dealerships have brought washing duties in-house. (Some have built on-site car washes.) "We're about one-fourth of what we used to have," Anthony Carter says as he waits for his father to pick up a check from the cashier at the Bob Sight dealership. The crew is bound for a lot in Bonner Springs.

Santol expects that he and his brother will be making music full time by January. One opportunity to advance their careers may be imminent. "The Isle of Capri is supposed to be having a talent contest," Shamoz says. -- David Martin

10:30 a.m.
Aubrey Township cemetery
191st Street and Metcalf
Larry Pettit's yard is a molded menagerie. A plastic deer stands alert next to a molded Jersey cow. A concrete lion guards two swan planters. A 12-inch butterfly clings to the small house's white steel siding next to a window with an American flag decal that appears backward from the outside. At the street, Pettit has mounted a mailbox on a 21-foot-long pipe. "Airmail," he explains. "Wife seen one like that in Oklahoma."

Pettit has lived next to the Aubrey Township cemetery since 1962, when Metcalf was U.S. Highway 69 and 191st Street was a gravel track known as Tibbetts Road.

Plots that were $40 apiece in 1962 now cost $100. Pettit owns four spaces near his yard -- one each for him and his wife and two for any of their six children who might need them. When his time comes, Pettit says, "All they have to do is throw me over the fence."

The Pettits will join more than 100 years' worth of dead Johnson Countians in the 2-acre cemetery, final resting places marked by new, red-granite blocks and old, white monuments -- Tuggles and Branches, Moons and Zimmermans, Baumgardners, Harrisons and Morgans.

"Dead people, at midnight, they come across the yard to go fishing in the pond," Pettit says. "When they go back, the only thing you can see are the skeletons of the fish they've eaten."

Pettit's round body stretches the clean, white cotton of his T-shirt, which tallies various things God is like: Coke, because "it's the real thing"; General Electric, because God "lights our path." He's also like Pan Am, Alka-Seltzer and Hallmark.

Now retired, Pettit spent most of his working life atop heavy equipment for Reno Construction, refilling an old quarry at 167th and Metcalf. It was 100 feet deep when he started. Rock carved from the giant hole was thrown into a hopper with sand, lime and asphalt oil and heated to 460 degrees to become the pavement for cul-de-sacs, circle driveways, major and minor arterials, a new 69 Highway and even for Tibbetts Road when it became 191st Street.