On Leave In Kansas City. 3 x 4”, 20 unnumbered pages. Original pictorial wrappers. Illustrated with drawings. 

A World War II “vest pocket guide”, provided by the Kansas City Welfare Department for visiting “men and women in uniform”. Among its listed recreational facilities were a bowling alley, a swimming pool, and two tennis courts for the use of “Negroes” – who also had a service club of their own – the Paseo, on East 18th Street. Rare, possibly the only surviving copy; WorldCat locates no institutional holdings of this little imprint.

Located in the “historic heart” of the city’s Black “ghetto” (now locale of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum) the Paseo offered a weekend of rest and recreation for hundreds of Black servicemen on leave from Fort Riley, Kansas, 135 miles to the east, including one who was world famous – Corporal Joseph Louis Barrow, known to millions as boxer “Joe Louis”, heavyweight champion of the world.  Other Black GIs (in segregated regiments commanded by white officers) may have come to the Paseo for spirited dancing to the rhythms of the city’s WPA Band, but Louis, according to a newspaper report of July 1942, spent most of a “quiet weekend” at the Paseo, “where he was free from the autograph seekers who follow him wherever he goes”.  He did “find time for a round of golf”, but if there was a golf course set aside for African-Americans, this little booklet neglected to mention it.