The Fabric of Our Community: The Legacy of Buzzy and Margie Klapmeyer

By Diane Euston

 When I started my journey researching and telling the stories of Kansas City’s history, I started a lot smaller in my own neighborhood. The stories that fascinated me the most were the ones attached to the names etched in stone at the New Santa Fe Cemetery. Just steps down the hill from my childhood home, that cemetery was a playground for a curious seven-year-old.

  My bedroom faced an empty lot, and just beyond it peeking through the brush was an old cinderblock barn that just years before my birth in the 1980s held a handful of horses. And just beyond that, near the creek and at the base of a large hill (now part of Timber Trace subdivision) was an old antebellum home that fascinated me to the core. 

  As I often lament, Kansas City loves to tear down old structures and erase the past from our landscape. But in south Kansas City, there were remnants of what once was a farming community 14 miles from “the big city.” The cemetery held so many stories, as did that old house that I was told was once a tavern on the Santa Fe Trail.

  History should be told in stories so that we feel connected to it, and only a handful of people remember the days before suburbia crept up and captured the rolling hills of the area around Martin City.

  Few people could say they watched south Kansas City transform from sweeping farmlands with dirt roads into subdivisions, busy roads packed with cars, and shopping centers. Even fewer would be able to claim a legacy quite like Clarence “Buzzy” Klapmeyer and his beloved wife, Margaret “Margie” Kempinger Klapmeyer.

  They were married for 80 years. 

  Digest that for a minute.

  When I met this amazing couple back in 2019, they were still living together in their home on Holmes Road where they raised their three children, Don, James and Karen. 

  I knew I wanted to talk to the well known Klapmeyer family, as they were one of those names that kept coming up in my research of the area. They’d been here for generations, and when Buzzy and Margie’s grandson, Brian was open to arranging a meeting with them, I was eager to invest the time into hearing their story.

  My mother, Helen (also coined my “unpaid research assistant”) and I parked the car in their driveway and walked up to their door in March 2019. As cars on Holmes Road buzzed by in the distance, the front door opened to reveal a tall, older woman with glasses. What I recall the most was her smile and her large, welcoming eyes.

  “Com’on in,” a 96-year-old Margie said as she shuffled back to her seat next to the large picture window. 

  Her husband, Buzzy wasn’t too far behind her. He gingerly rose up from his seat and stuck out his hand to me, and as I shook it, his stooped stature didn’t overshadow the size of his hands- roughened, chapped hands from years of hard work. I was simply in awe of the two of them immediately. 

  Buzzy was a bit quieter, gauging my interest and truly unaware of how special this moment really was. They didn’t think they were anything too special; to them, they were just Clarence and Margie Klapmeyer, 97 and 96 years old. 

  Simply stated, they didn’t think they were all that interesting. 

  But I was absolutely fascinated by their story.

  There on that rainy day in March over my Spring Break, I gathered information so I could write about them – I was going to tell everyone about Buzzy and Margie Klapmeyer. Time got away from me, as it often does. I was working on my second master’s degree, bartending part time and teaching full time in addition to writing my column in the Telegraph. I planned on meeting with them multiple times in order to record all I could about them.

  I did, luckily, meet with them twice. And then the pandemic hit and everyone’s lives became a bit more complicated.

  I shelved the article, only writing down slices of their story that would hopefully one day be shared about this sweet, devoted couple who oozed a simpler time with less distractions. And, ironically, it was all of the distractions that snatched me away from printing these words in their lifetime.

  You see, what was once going to be a story of their incredible life together on Holmes Road now must be a story of the past. I can’t pick up the phone and ask any follow-up questions; I can’t enjoy another piece of cake that Margie baked on that first meeting as a celebration of my mom’s birthday. I can’t follow through with them because Buzzy and Margie are no longer with us.

  But their story is still alive – it’s been dusted off, picked up off the shelf and the old recordings played once again. When I went to meet Clarence Klapmeyer, Jr., I was curious to know about his family’s long-standing legacy in the community.

  What I received instead, thank goodness, was the lovely story of Buzzy and Margie’s life.

The First Klapmeyers in Jackson County

  Before we learn more about Buzzy and his wife, Margie, we need to take a trip back in time to his original pioneer relatives who took the gamble on a slice of farmland in southern Jackson County.

   The Klapmeyer name is synonymous with the history of southern Jackson County. Records indicate that German immigrants Johann Heinrich Klapmeyer (1801-1879), known as Henry, and his wife, Catherine, met and married about 1836 and settled in the Midwest.

  Before landing in what is now south Kansas City, Henry purchased land in the East Bottoms near a small settlement of German immigrants that also eventually moved south. By 1841, the growing family opted to purchase land in southern Jackson County along the Blue River. The farm included land bordering current-day 137th to 139th Street from Oak to Troost Avenue. 

  The couple had five children born between 1836 and 1850, including their youngest son, James M. Klapmeyer, born in 1850.

   Today, a small burial ground just west of Holmes Road is still preserved and maintained by Ozanam. This is the only remnants of the original Klapmeyer landholdings. 

  In 1885, James Klapmeyer set out on his own and married Nellie F. Watson (1867-1926), oldest daughter of New Santa Fe’s town doctor, James Ellis Watson (1834-1881). Nellie grew up inside the antebellum home across the street from where I grew up, their long driveway winding down from the Santa Fe Trail at 123rd and Belleview. 

  That home where Nellie Watson Klapmeyer grew up was one of the biggest inspirations for me as a child. 

  With his new wife in tow, James Klapmeyer built a beautiful home in 1885 where Klapmeyer Park is today at 124th and State Line.  He tended to about 300 acres of land that extended from south of Santa Fe Trail to Blue Ridge Boulevard and from State Line Road to Wornall Road.

  James and Nellie had four children: Ray (b. 1886), Harry (b. 1888), Clarence (b. 1890) and Nellie (b. 1893). The family stayed on this large farm until 1906 when James was asked to be the president of the newly established Westport Avenue Bank. They moved into a home at 40th and Central and kept a hold of the homestead in southern Jackson County.

  Their oldest son, Ray took over the farm in 1913 and moved into the old homestead. After that point, the land wasn’t used for farming purposes but was used for stock raising. 

  After James Klapmeyer’s death in Kansas City 1919, the farm and the land passed to his wife and then to his oldest son. Ray remodeled the old homestead in 1927. In addition, the property boasted a buggy shed, chicken coop, a two-room tenant house, smokehouse and barn. 

Clarence and Cecil Kuntz Klapmeyer

  Clarence, Sr. was born on the old homestead off State Line Road in 1890, learning farming and stock raising from his father. After spending part of his youth in Kansas City while his dad operated the Westport Bank, Clarence returned back to the Martin City area.

  He settled on land once owned by his father on Holmes Road. In 1913, he married Cecil Kuntz (1894-1984), oldest child of Henry and Alice Sweeten Kuntz. 

  Cecil’s father, Henry Kuntz (1865-1951) settled with his wife, Alice near Martin City after their marriage in 1893. A skilled carpenter, Henry helped build onto a farmhouse at 122nd and Holmes Road after their daughter married Clarence Klapmeyer in 1913. The couple moved into the home and began their family. The house still stands today.

  Clarence and Cecil welcomed their first son, Ralph, in 1918. Just over three years later on December 27, 1921, the couple welcomed their second and final child, Clarence Crawford Klapmeyer, Jr. 

The Early Life of Buzzy

  How Clarence, Jr. became known as “Buzzy” was certainly one of my first questions when I sat in their tidy living room listening to them recall things of their past. 

  Buzzy looked down quizzically when I asked him the origin story on his nickname. “I don’t know,” he hesitated. “I was raised up with it.” 

  Margie wasn’t about to let her husband get away with a little white lie. She raised her voice as she looked toward her husband and back at me. “Oh, I’ll tell ya how he got that name,” Margie protested. “He kept throwin’ up [as a child] so they called him ‘Buzzard.’ Then it got down to Buzzy.”

  Needless to state, the story garnered a lot of laughter from the room, and I caught a crooked smile on Buzzy’s face when his wife ratted him out.

   The farm on Holmes Road managed by Buzzy’s father grew to just over 250 acres. He managed 65 acres on State Line, 190 acres on Holmes Road where they lived, and a patch of land across the Blue River from approximately 117th to 122nd Street.

  There, Buzzy and his brother Ralph learned farming and the dairy business. His father sold milk to Wolferman’s. The dairy business was a common scene in the Martin City area after the turn of the last century; many of the old farms still owned by pioneer families were transformed into dairy farms that sold milk to businesses and homes in Kansas City. 

    Sitting down with Buzzy Klapmeyer was like opening up a well preserved time capsule. His memories run as deep as the transformation of south Kansas City. 

  Buzzy vividly remembered mounting his horse at about eight years old and going on an adventure with his Uncle Ray. “I helped drive a herd of cattle from our farm, down State Line and over to the Lee Farm on what’s now Lee Boulevard,” Buzzy recalled.

  The Kansas City Journal claimed in 1928 that Martin City was the home to a whopping 170 people, but the way Buzzy described it, it was a bustling town with everything the child of a farmer/dairyman could ever need.

  Astonishing as it is today to imagine, this was the simplistic perfection of farm life that Buzzy was an active participant in. He recalled the days when Holmes Road wasn’t paved and the roads abruptly ended in Martin City.

  But life wasn’t always that easy for the family of four. During the Great Depression, Buzzy’s parents survived off of oil wells they had installed on their property in 1928. 

  When oil was found on the Klapmeyer farm, it made the newspapers and became all the buzz of the area. There was hope in Martin City of bigger rewards on the eve of some of the hardest years in modern American history when oil was discovered.

  “They are all happy in the hope that some day they’ll be rich, living in big mansions, driving large motor cars and enjoying life generally in an elaborate fashion,” the Kansas City Journal wrote.

  Although they weren’t rolling in cash, those oil wells got them through the Depression. 

  The old Martin City grade school was the source of most of Buzzy’s education. The school was situated in the town about one and a half miles from his home, and Buzzy would take his bicycle up Holmes Road to attend school. 

  When he was a little bit older, Buzzy upgraded the bike. “I used to ride a motorcycle to grade school up in Martin City,” he told me matter-of-factly.

  He recalled when two stills during Prohibition blew up across the street on Holmes Road at a neighboring farm in the early 30s.

  He attended dances and picked up basketball games on the second floor of current-day Jess & Jim’s Steakhouse There was a time in Martin City’s history when several meat markets, multiple gas stations, a lumber company and a hotel stood as signs of prosperity- and Buzzy easily recalled their existence.

On the Eve of World War II

  When Buzzy was old enough, he moved from the grade school in Martin City to the middle and high school in Grandview, Mo. To get to school, he had to walk up Holmes Road to Blue Ridge Boulevard where he would catch the bus.

  But Buzzy was ready to get his start in the world. After 10th grade, he successfully convinced his father to send him to the Missouri Aviation Institute at the Kansas City Municipal Airport to learn sheet metal fabrication and mechanic trades. “I think it cost my dad $160 to send me there,” Buzzy said.

  As part of the six-week program, the institute guaranteed employment in California. Still a teenager, Buzzy packed his bags for San Diego, armed with the $12 ticket supplied by his father to get him there.

  He stayed in sunny California for about a year helping build four-engine C-planes, but fate would intercede and lead Buzzy back to the dairy farm on Holmes Road.

  A chance encounter at a filling station in Hickman Mills in 1941 would change Buzzy’s life forever.

   There, 19-year-old Buzzy met 18-year-old Margaret Rose Kempinger, and their lives together began with a brief courtship. Little did the teenagers know there were 80 years of memories to make on the horizon.

A Quick Courtship

  In November 1941, 19-year-old Buzzy ran into Margaret “Margie” Kempinger at the filling station off old 71 Highway.

  He didn’t know Margie, but he did know her older brothers. They’d gone to school together in Grandview before the Kempingers moved to a dairy farm on Longview Road east of Blue Ridge Boulevard in the Hickman Mills neighborhood.

  Margie was the seventh born of eight children to German immigrant Edward Kempinger (1881-1962) and his Austrian-born wife, Ludmilla (1892-1957). After living on the east side of Kansas City, the Kempingers moved south.

  Margie went to school in Hickman Mills, leaving after her junior year. And there she was, at that filling station, catching Buzzy’s curious eye.

  “We started to go together. We went together for a week, didn’t we?” Buzzy said with a hearty laugh as he glanced over at Margie.

  It certainly was a short courtship. In about a week, 19-year-old Buzzy pledged himself, heart and soul, to 18-year-old Margie.  They decided to tie the knot.

  But there was a problem, you see.

  They decided to go to Olathe to say their vows, and when asked why they made the trip 12 miles west to say “I do,” Buzzy simply stated, “They’d marry you in a hurry over there.” 

  So the couple motored to Olathe and straight to the courthouse, but they ran into a small problem upon arrival.

“She was old enough,” Buzzy said as he pointed at Margie. “But I wasn’t.”

  At the time, a groom had to be 21 years old, and a bride had to be 18. According to the law, Margie was old enough to make a decision about the rest of her life, but Buzzy wasn’t.

  Undeterred by the inconvenience of the law, Buzzy and Margie headed back to Martin City and straight to his parent’s house at 122nd and Holmes Road. There, his mother, Cecil, listened to her youngest son plead his case.

  Buzzy needed his mom to be present at the marriage. “My mother didn’t know Margie from Adam! She’d never even seen her before,” Buzzy recalled amidst laughter in the room.

  Cecil Klapmeyer complied, climbing into the car and taking that trip to Olathe to see her son get married. But by the time they arrived, the courthouse was closed.

  After a little bit of scrambling, the couple was instructed to go to the judge’s house, and shockingly, the judge complied.

  Clarence Klapmeyer, Jr. and Margaret Kempinger were married November 29, 1941 in front of the fireplace at the judge’s home in Olathe.

  The couple returned to the Hickman Mills area on their wedding day and decided to stop off at the Log Cabin Restaurant and Bar, a well-known establishment at the time at 10403 Hickman Mills Drive.

  Buzzy grabbed a beer and situated himself in a booth next to his bride, and in walked Margie’s father, Edward. He nonchalantly walked up to the bar and ordered a beer, unaware that his 18-year-old daughter was in the joint.

  Buzzy and Margie walked up behind Edward and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “We got married,” Margie announced.

  Edward didn’t miss a beat. He looked at the happy couple and replied, “Well, gotta have another beer on that news.”

  Just one week after their marriage, Pearl Harbor rocked the nation into the war.

World War II and a Return to the Dairy Farm

  Shortly after their marriage, Buzzy and Margie headed out to Whittaker, Calif. where Buzzy continued his work building aircrafts. But this was short-lived; about three months later, they returned to the Martin City area and moved in with Buzzy’s parents on Holmes Road.

    It wasn’t long before Buzzy decided to join the war effort, and in December 1942, he joined the Army Air Corps.

  He was an Aircraft Armorer for the 788th Bomb Squadron servicing and maintaining bomb racks and weapons onboard the bomber aircraft. 

   Margie remained home, living with her in-laws in their house on Holmes Road. When she gave birth to their first son, Don, in 1943, Buzzy was overseas stationed in England.

  Buzzy received six Bronze Stars as a part of his squadron’s participation in campaigns in the European Theater, and he returned at the close of the war to Martin City.

  Buzzy and Margie’s growing family required a bit of separation from Clarence, Sr. and Cecil, so the couple with son Don moved into a tenant house they called “the little house” behind the main home on Holmes Road. The house stood near current-day Mission Lake and was near the chicken house and dairy barns.

  While living in the little tenant house, the couple welcomed two more children, Clarence James in 1946 and Karen in 1950. 

  After the war, Buzzy and Margie worked the dairy farm, waking up at four in the morning to milk 20 cows. When they moved to pasteurization, more equipment was added to the farm.

  Buzzy continued to assist his father on the large 250-acre farm, and the family watched as they redid the railroad tracks south of their home on Holmes Road for safety reasons in 1954. Various accidents due to the many railroad crossings had the railroad restructure the tracks along the winding road between 127th Street and Blue Ridge Boulevard. 

  Occasionally, Buzzy would drive a wagonload of grain south to the mill near the railroad tracks near Martin City. Run by a diesel engine, the mill was used by the local farmers for many years.

   Buzzy worked many different jobs to support his young family. When he wasn’t helping his father on the dairy farm, he worked for airline manufacturers in Wichita and Topeka, drove a delivery truck for Coca-Cola and drove an electric bus in Kansas City.

  When the Ruskin Heights tornado blew through the neighborhood just south of the Klapmeyer farm on May 20, 1957, Buzzy was away in Wichita working. Margie was left with her three children that day, and when the winds howled and buildings crumbled in the tornado’s path, Margie ran with her children up to her in-law’s house for cover – the little tenant house had no basement.

  Margie recalled how unafraid her three children were during the event. But once the family took a trip up the street to the little town of Martin City, the true power of the storm hit them all immediately. Although they had no damage on their farm, the event – like with so many survivors of the time – certainly affected her.

Selling of the Past

  Buzzy loved cars just like he loved motorcycles as a young child. His time as an aircraft mechanic also gave him the unique ability to tinker with the engines of the vehicles he purchased. 

  His first car was a Model A Roadster, but he owned about six different motorcycles while growing up. Margie seemed to admire her husband’s ability to fix things up, but she was a wee bit embarrassed of some of the “modifications” Buzzy made to his cars.

  One 1940 Chevy pickup was altered to have dual exhaust pipes. “You could hear him clear down at Red Bridge Road comin’ up the hill!” Margie explained.

  The south Kansas City suburbs were slowly taking over the old farming community where Buzzy’s family had lived for three generations.   Clarence, Sr. and his wife, Cecil watched as large swaths of land that were farmed by many of the same families for over a century were sold off to make way for bedroom communities.

  In 1955, Buzzy’s uncle Ray opted to sell off a large amount of the property where their father grew up to make way for Blue Hills Country Club. He kept a hold of 13.5 acres where the original homestead, barns and pond were at 126th and State Line. By 1959, all of the land that now encompasses Blue Hills and Timber Trace subdivisions  was sold off.

When Ray passed away in 1970, the original 13.5 acre homestead was given to Kansas City “to be utilized by the city as a Municipal Park, called Klapmeyer Park.” The house and buildings were razed shortly thereafter, and all that remains today is the original driveway often blocked with a chain and the pond that once was the backdrop to the Klapmeyer home.

  In 1960, Buzzy began a career with Western Electric as a sheet metal fabricator – a career that would carry him into retirement. In that same year, Buzzy built a new ranch-style home about 50 yards south from the home occupied by his parents at 122nd and Holmes Road. 

  Margie continued to enjoy managing her vegetable and flower gardens on their small property, working for some time at the Red Bridge Gift Shop and a Hallmark store in Olathe.

  Buzzy’s father, Clarence stayed active even as his farm and dairy business slowed down, serving as Hickman Mills Old Settlers group in 1956, succeeding J. Vivian Truman, President Harry S. Truman’s brother. And Cecil Klapmeyer was highly involved in the Grandview chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, also an organization frequented by the Trumans.

  The Klapmeyers stayed on their land, watching numerous changes happen each and every year. In 1963, Martin City- the little town that held so many memories for Buzzy – was annexed to Kansas City. All of these modifications meant that the old farm roads once used to carry a solo Buzzy by motorcycle to grade school in Martin City were being modernized for more traffic.

  When the city installed sewer lines, Clarence, Sr. was responsible for paying the taxes for it. This proved to be too much, and he opted to sell off a bulk of the old dairy farm in 1973 to a real estate company planning the Mission Lake development.

  The pond remained, but the little tenant house where Buzzy and Margie started their life as a growing family was razed along with the barns.

  In 1975, Clarence, Sr. passed away at the age of 85 inside his home, and six years later, Cecil, 90, passed away in a nursing home in Grandview. Shortly after, the house where Buzzy and his brother, Ralph, were raised was sold.

  But Buzzy and Margie held onto a small parcel of this original property, living past Buzzy’s retirement in 1981 right there on Holmes Road, keenly watching from their little white ranch home as the land and the suburbs evolved around them.

  They enjoyed camping and traveling by camper and trailer all over the United States, staying active by camping and bicycling into their 80s.

Happily Ever After for 80 Years

  Sitting in that living room in 2019, listening intently as two relics of the past (albeit hard of hearing), retell the story of their lives in the country outside of the town of Martin City, is a memory I will not soon forget.

  I told them that I was going to tell their story so that suburbanites who own patches of the old Klapmeyer land could appreciate how quickly things change. We can all appreciate the legacy of this family, and we’d learn about the fabric of this community.

  I left that day with over two hours of memories tucked into a recording on my phone with plans to divulge their decades of stories into an article. But life got in the way.

  On July 31, 2021, Margie closed her eyes for a final time at the house on Holmes Road.   She was 98 years old. She left Buzzy behind after 80 years of marriage.

  It’s probably no surprise to anyone in a marriage this long that they relied solely on each other, and the passing of Margie meant it was time for Buzzy to move on, too.

  In September 2021, Buzzy sold the little home occupied by his family for over 60 years and moved to Gravette, Ark. to live with his daughter, Karen.

  On December 16, 2024, just 11 days before his 103rd birthday, Clarence “Buzzy” Klapmeyer passed away. He was brought back to Kansas City and buried next to his beloved Margie at Mt. Moriah. 

  They are survived by their three children, eight grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and four great-great grandchildren.

  My fascination with how much they saw in their century of life in the Martin City area led me to hear their unique memories of a much simpler time when the farm community around Martin City, Hickman Mills and Grandview was tightly woven around relationships, hard work and determination. 

  Eighty years of marriage, obviously, is no small accomplishment. I had to know- what was the secret to a long marriage? 

  Buzzy barely batted an eye at the question, smiling delicately as his eyes shifted over to Margie. 

  “It’s a secret,” he said with a light chuckle.

  “We get along, that’s for sure,” Margie added.

  And that secret was sealed forever between them. This special couple- Buzzy and Margie Klapmeyer  – saw so very much in their years along a country road called Holmes, where they watched it transform from the farming community of Martin City into the suburbs of Kansas City.