Tough Wife of a Gunn
For the past couple of years, it’s been hard to make plans with Michael Gunn.
With his wife Jan battling cancer, Michael wanted to make sure all of his time was hers first. That’s why if you asked him to meet for a drink after work, it had to be a spur of the moment thing; if you wanted to go to a Royals game with him, you would be buying the best available tickets offered at that night’s box office.
A lot of people don’t know this, but Michael Gunn is one of the great baseball minds of Platte County – probably places a lot further, too. He’s a great guy to watch a game with. He’s constantly talking about the game – the game at hand, the players from the past – and he treats the game for what it is supposed to be, namely a way to pass the time. And he doesn’t just like to talk baseball, he likes to argue about baseball. Michael is known as a pretty tough litigator, so I feel that much better whenever I successfully outduel him on matters concerning the Royals.
When I told him I met Yankee pitcher Don Larsen, Michael’s first reaction was to tell me his exact height. He didn’t mention the perfect game, didn’t mention how he was a good hitting pitcher, he gave me his height. Growing up in rural Kansas, Michael said he used to memorize the back of his baseball cards.
“Wasn’t a lot to do,” he would say, only half-joking.
With Jan sick, suddenly there was a lot to do. Trips were made, and weddings were pushed up. Lately, it became clear that Jan was losing the fight, a fact that would visibly choke Michael up whenever he spoke about it. He wouldn’t offer too many specifics when he spoke of Jan’s condition, particularly during the past few months. He would shake his head and look you straight in the eye with a look that perfectly, tragically, show frustration, helplessness anger and concern all at once.
A lot of you remember Jan Gunn. She used to own Home Embellishments and River’s Bend Gallery. She was the one who could be seen tending to Pocket Park, wrestling with plants in the Hwy. 9 traffic triangle, tangling with the folks at the Post Office. She was the self appointed parking maven of Main Street – if you owned a shop on Main and took a potential visitor’s parking spot with your car, you heard about it.
The first night I met Jan was her last night as a merchant on Main Street. Her and about 15 of her friends met behind Wines by Jennifer and sat, drinking wine, telling stories well into the night. I think it was our third or fourth issue, and we reported on the party with a photo spread. I remember feeling that it looked like Jan was decompressing instead of celebrating, kind of like the way you would after a long, busy day at work. I immediately understood where she was at, so I asked if she wouldn’t mind sharing a few stories from her career on Main.
She took the time to tell me a lot of “background” stories regarding Parkville’s downtown, but instead of being the usual “look out for this guy” stuff I was usually hit with, she would tell me her ideas about how downtown should work, what a community looks like.
It looked like a community at Jan’s memorial service last Wednesday. Hundreds of people came to pay their last respects to a merchant they all admired, a friend they would miss – the tough son of a gun, wife of a Gunn, may she rest in peace.
Good luck, Michael.