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Grandpa vs. The Leader of the Free World

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Last Saturday was my grandpa Tevis’ 82nd birthday. He doesn’t like to go out in the evenings much, so I took him to lunch at a place he used to take me when I was a kid: Fritz’s restaurant in Kansas City. There’s a new one in Crown Center, but the original location is our favorite. Fritz served in World War II on the same ship as my Uncle Jimmy, so we treat it as a family place.

As we were waiting for the little train to deliver our hamburgers and onion rings, Grandpa leaned closer. He speaks quietly and not often, so we listened carefully as he said, “the last time I ate out there was a man with a gun on the roof.”

We let that sink in for a moment.

“Do you mean here?” I asked. “No,” Grandpa said. “At the cafe in Brookside. When George was in town.”

President Bush was in Kansas City on August 22 to speak at a VFW convention. That’s where he made a speech saying that if we’d only stuck it out in Vietnam a little longer that things would have turned around. He sure is a believer in persistence, that one. But before the speech he and his entourage had breakfast at the Corner Cafe in Brookside Riverside — a place my Grandpa frequents for breakfast.

Grandpa went on to explain that as he pulled into the parking lot there were a lot of cars, but he didn’t think anything of it at first. He entered through the back doorway and saw a sniper up on the roof who was looking all around, ready to snipe things. Grandpa asked him what was going on, but the sniper ignored him. Maybe the sniper didn’t hear him, I thought. He is pretty quiet.

Inside, he said, most everyone was part of President Bush’s entourage. There were even Secret Service in the restrooms “being nosy.” He eventually got a table and learned that the President had shown up without the restaurant staff expecting it. Everyone was kind of rattled and a bit star struck. Not my grandpa, though. “My breakfast was late,” he said. “And the coffee wasn’t quite right.”

A half an hour later President Bush emerged from a back room where he’d been eating with George Brett and other locals.

“Everyone stood up as he came in,” says Grandpa. “But not me. Someone said that I should stand up, but I didn’t. He walked right by my table shaking hands with people and he looked at me. I just kept drinking my coffee and reading the paper.”

“You didn’t stand up to greet the President of the United States? Why?” I asked. “I respect the office,” Grandpa said, “but not the man.”

Maybe that’ll show him.

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