Never the Easy Way: David and Beulah Bulkley and the Founding of City Union Mission
David and Beulah Bulkley opened the City Union Mission in September, 1924 (City Union Mission)
Thanksgiving is, for the fortunate, a time to give thanks for blessings and plenty.
That was true in Jackson County 100 years ago - again, for the fortunate.
For those not so fortunate, there were places like Kansas City’s City Union Mission, a relief agency which recently observed its 100th anniversary.
This story, in slightly different form, previously appeared on FlatlandKC (flatlandkc.org), the nonprofit digital newsroom operated by Kansas City PBS. The Jackson County Historical Society appreciates the opportunity to re-post it here.
BY BRIAN BURNES
In 1923 David Bulkley, a Kansas City Methodist minister and social worker, began telling his wife about his “terrible compulsion from God.”
This apparently divine impulse, he explained, compelled him to more directly serve what he called “God’s human sparrows.” Those were the broken individuals he could see from his office window sprawling or sleeping, defeated on the sidewalks of Kansas City’s North End - and deserving, he believed, of his prayerful intervention.
From the window in his Kansas City North End office, David Bulkley had a constant view of what he called “God’s human sparrows.” (City Union Mission)
He was already doing this full-time as social and religious work director at the Helping Hand Institute, a relief organization that offered beds, meals and chapel services five days a week to those without homes or resources.
Yet he felt a need to do more, to leave his steady job and start a new street-level storefront ministry.
But that wasn’t all. He asked his wife Beulah what he thought of selling their northeast Kansas City home and, taking along their four-year-old daughter Ruth, moving to the “Skid Row” district of the North End, known for its lodging houses, saloons and brothels. There, he said, they could personally attend to what Bulkley - according to one family memoir - called “the poor families and the throng of forgotten men for whom nobody seems to care.”
A few days later Beulah wrote her mother in Louisiana.
“Dear Mamma, David Bulkley has lost his mind,” she wrote. “Please send money. Ruth and I are coming home.”
The “compulsion”
That didn’t happen.
Ultimately Beulah agreed to it all, although it was not an immediate decision, and while City Union Mission now has served as a reliable relief agency for 100 years, its founding was not inevitable.
Diary entries by Beulah and letters written by David today document different personal challenges over several years, among them David’s faith-testing reaction to the trenches of World War I, several miscarriages suffered by Beulah, and the 1918 death of their infant son.
All that preceded the “compulsion” David began to describe to his wife.
“My grandmother called it my grandfather’s obsession,” said Johanna Beth Liebling, one of the six grandchildren of David and Beulah, and a retired City Union Mission staff member.
Still, the family sold their home and in September, 1924, opened the mission.
Meanwhile, personal income for working Americans increased 24 percent during the 1920s, contributing to the rise of a new consumer economy.
One measure of that, as described by Rick Montgomery and Shirl Kasper in their 1999 book, “Kansas City: An American Story,” was the local “beauty parlor index.” The number of such parlors surged in Kansas City from 26 in 1923 to 223 in 1926 - a 757 percent increase over three years.
In 1923 one of those parlors had opened in the new Country Club Plaza, the posh shopping center just north of where real estate developer J.C. Nichols was marketing homes in his fledgling Country Club District. In 1922 Nichols had filed a plat for the Armour Hills residential development; by 1924 more than 300 families had acquired homesites there.
Yet, that same year an unknown number of families were living on life’s other side, the grim district of despair Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams later would sing about.
The 1920s today are routinely described as a time of plenty. But about 60 percent of families during that decade earned less than $2,000 a year, an income level the recently-established Bureau of Labor Statistics classified as the minimum needed for a family of five.
It’s unknowable today to estimate the resources available to those families who then lived in hovels constructed from trash pit debris in and around Kansas City’s East Bottoms area.
David Bulkley knew where they lived.
In one diary entry, Beulah described the “most dreary neighborhoods” her husband frequented, sometimes bringing her and their young daughter with him.
“I had Ruth in my lap,” Beulah wrote in one passage.
“No one was in sight, so David went into a rundown shack to find out if anyone was home. Crowded into the room built of tin and other material picked up from the city dump, the whole family huddled around a little stove.”
Some 10 years before workers employed by Kansas City’s Board of Social Welfare, considered the country’s first municipal welfare agency, had documented similar dwellings. They also found North End lodging houses with no sanitary sewer services and entire neighborhoods without access to clean drinking water.
In 1916 the Helping Hand Institute installed a water fountain outside its 408 Main St. door; just on one hot day an estimated 5,000 people lined up there.
Soon after opening in Kansas City’s North End, where some residents didn’t always have access to clean drinking water, City Union Mission installed a public water fountain. (City Union Mission)
Soon after it opened the City Union Mission installed a drinking fountain outside its own door, one block south at 545 Main St.
The Bulkley family, meanwhile, had moved into a North End apartment.
At first, David and Beulah had imagined an easier path.
In 1915 he had distributed flyers advertising himself as available to work “Tabernacle, Tent and Individual Church Meetings;” the following year he married Beulah Loyd.
Before World War I their plan included the possibility of him becoming a less nomadic preacher, perhaps a pastor with his own congregation.
Their first son, David Loyd Bulkley, had been born in January, 1918, while Bulkley was overseas serving as a Young Men’s Christian Association chaplain during World War I.
Maybe, after the war, they thought, David could would work a plot of land; Beulah’s parents lived on a former Louisiana plantation.
“In his letters from the war, he talked about coming back to farm,” said Dan Doty, City Union Mission executive director from 1992 through 2020.
But then David Bulkley saw the trenches.
Ministering to the “unchurched”
His letters from France, while including reveries of a bucolic future, also were vivid with the visceral realities of a chaplain’s duties.
By September 1918 those included ministering to soldiers but also walking for hours before sunrise, carrying litters in which to carry the expected wounded, and being sufficiently close to harm’s way to personally come upon those same wounded, as well as the dead. Sometimes Bulkley wrote of collecting the canteens of fallen Americans to give to those still ambulatory.
On one night he believed he experienced both despair and divine solace within moments of one another.
In a September 23 letter David described a pre-dawn march during which he noticed his canteen was missing its cork, as well as about one-third of its water.
“I dare not drink,” he wrote, describing his panic of the moment. “It may be a day before I could get more.”
But a timely rain shower he deemed heaven-sent.
“Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it by life or death,” he wrote, citing the 20th verse of the first book of Philippians.
“I bit a small piece of bread but water I dare not use, so I held up my left hand and caught the drippings from my helmet. I became a new man.
“You say to me, what did I think? Or rather, what were my thoughts.
“I saw beauty and glory. I saw hell and demons.”
He returned from France soon after, at the the same approximate time his son, whom he had never seen, died in the influenza epidemic.
David Bulkley served as a Y.M.C.A. chaplain in France during World War I. (City Union Mission)
Four months later David signed on at the Helping Hand Institute, a relief agency located near Fifth Street and Grand Avenue.
There was no ignoring what was visible from his desk.
“Once he started at Helping Hand, he was looking out the window and seeing all the people on the streets, and it just broke his heart,” Doty said.
Those on the sidewalk didn’t look much different from those he had seen in the trenches, added Liebling.
“He got to the front and it was pure grief, followed by his desire to do something,” she said.
That contributed to his talk of compulsion some four years later, she added.
“It was some kind of epiphany, something that had moved him strongly, something he believed God wanted him to do,” Liebling said.
The couple argued.
Her grandmother, Liebling said, had endured several miscarriages and had been cautioned by her doctor that she could be rendered an invalid.
Learning this, David grew emotional.
His distress, in turn, saddened Beulah.
“My stubbornness, my arrogance and my pride suddenly melted away,” she later wrote.
“She decided that if God would let her get over her illness and be able to walk, she would put her heart into it,” Liebling said.
David resigned his position at Helping Hand.
The Bulkleys took a six-month lease on some square footage at 545 Main St. With the remainder of their savings they invested in items helpful in mission work, among them a speaking platform, a used piano, and 200 chairs.
They opened on Sept. 15, 1924.
About 600 people showed up.
The mission’s incorporation papers detailed that it would serve “the unchurched families and men of the North Side.”
Then, as now, the mission had no specific denominational affiliation. While documents filed in Jefferson City listed an executive of the Church of the Nazarene, it also named as officers the operators of a printing company and an accounting firm, as well of the owners of companies selling grain, fuel oil, and furniture.
Beulah’s health crisis diminished, Liebling said. Her doctor, meanwhile, forgave his fee after attending a mission service.
“I cannot ask you to be indebted to me, when you are doing what you are for the cause,” wrote E. A. Reeves that November.
Others would be inspired to donate assets of their own.
Those would include Kansas City’s most high-profile madam.
No names mentioned
Annie Chambers advertised.
Annie Chambers, Kansas City’s most high-profile madam, deeded her former brothel to City Union Mission before her 1935 death. (City Union Mission)
In 1932 she placed the same recurring classified ad in the Kansas City Star and Times announcing that every night at 8 p.m., she “would tell her life’s history and all of her memories” to all who paid a 50-cent admission price at her door at Third and Wyandotte streets.
The ad promised that no names would be mentioned.
Charitable outreach by Kansas City faith communities goes back well before the 20th century; many - among them Protestant, Catholic, Jewish - worked to weave together their own safety nets.
Only City Union Mission, however, placed the dodgy legacies of Kansas City’s three most luxurious houses of ill repute in service of its own higher calling.
By the late 1930s mission leadership either had acquired, leased or received outright all three buildings, all standing adjacent to one another on or near Wyandotte Street between Third and Fourth streets.
The mission moved into its first former bawdy house in 1927 when its bookkeeper made it available to the Bulkleys. He had purchased the building - operated by an entrepreneur known as Madame Lovejoy - as an investment.
But after few buyers appeared, he leased it to the Bulkleys.
In what became their bedroom the Bulkleys discovered a trapdoor leading to a Prohibition-era wine cellar. A first-floor ballroom - highlighted by a frieze of dancing girls - the Bulkleys converted into a chapel.
David Bulkley named “The Harbor,” a place of shelter and refuge.
Soon the Harbor’s doorbell rang and Beulah opened it to see a woman who identified herself as one of the women working in the nearby building owned by madame Eva Prince.
The woman had delivered an infant who had died. She asked if David Bulkley conduct the funeral.
“I am a bad woman but my baby was never bad,” she told Beulah.
“The little casket containing ‘the innocent fruit of the not so innocent’ was set up in the chapel,” Beulah later wrote.
David delivered the sermon. In 1929 the Bulkleys bought the Eva Prince building at a reduced priced of $2,000 on the condition - requested by Prince - that if ever a former employee would knock on the door, the woman would not be turned away.
Soon the Bulkleys would meet the owner of the third building.
By the early 1930s Annie Chambers had shut down her brothel and was operating it as a rooming house.
Annie Chambers’ 1934 donation to City Union Mission was big news in Kansas City. (The Kansas City Star).
Her name first had appeared in a Kansas City newspaper in 1869, when the Kansas City Journal included her as being among 20 “soiled doves” who in December appeared in “Recorder’s Court” to pay a $16 fine. The paper described the amount as a “fee” that apparently allowed Chambers to continue pursuing what the newspaper described as her “lucrative means of support.”
Recorders were city officials authorized to fine those they considered unscrupulous.
Chambers routinely paid such fines in the decades that followed for operating what the newspapers described as a “gilded palace of sin,” or “bagnio” or “maison de joie.”
Now and then police officers descended upon Chambers’ operation in an organized manner, or in what the Kansas City Journal in 1871 had described as their “periodical forays” into the prostitution district.
But Chambers never seemed to be out of business for long.
By the early 1920s an apparent relationship with the city’s elite seemed certain to some.
“It is understood that within a few hours after the woman and seven girl residents of her place were arrested Friday afternoon in a raid by the police, certain wealthy men of the city had raised $40,000 to be used if necessary to gain her freedom,” the Kansas City Post reported following a 1921 arrest of Chambers and several other women at her house.
In this way, for some 40 years, Chambers had operated in plain sight.
But by 1932 she was 90 years old and close to blind, her only significant financial asset her 20-room property.
She had told the newspapers of her wish to sell it, suggesting a new nightclub could be successful at her well-known address.
But after that idea had received little traction, she began telling her story every night at 8 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Her presentations grew popular.
About six months later a neighborhood home distillery blew up - Prohibition wouldn’t end until late 1933 - and in the crowd that had gathered outside, Beulah Bulkley met Chambers. The latter from Kentucky, and the former from Arkansas, they recognized each other as natives of the South.
Beulah began making regular visits to read biblical passages.
Over time, Chambers told her own story.
A married schoolteacher, she had lost one child in a miscarriage. Years later, she said, she was carrying a second child when she entered an unexpected coma. When she awoke many weeks later, she learned her husband had died in a carriage accident. Later she delivered a stillborn infant.
Done with the straight-and-narrow, Chambers started her own business.
But, given her growing relationship with the Bulkleys, she decided in 1934 to convert to Christianity and resolved to announce that in the most public manner possible.
According to one version of events, Chambers called the Star and identified herself as one of its advertisers.
Soon A.B. MacDonald - the Star’s first Pulitzer Prize winner - appeared at Chambers’ door.
The resulting article occupied most of a Sunday Star section front normally devoted to fashion and society news.
The article quoted Chambers as to how - when the Bulkleys’ funeral service for the deceased child began - she had stood at an open window and listened.
“When they carried the baby out,” Chambers told MacDonald, “I could hear that poor mother crying and I knew her own sorrow because, when I was a good woman and wife, away back there in the beginning of things, I had two babies of my own that died.”
She credited the Bulkleys, Chambers added, with her personal redemption, and said she would deed her former bawdy house to the mission.
Beulah’s diary notes how she and David aided Chambers, sometimes referred to as “Anna,” buying hose or underwear for her, or bringing her meals.
From January 1934 through to Chambers’ death in March, 1935, Beulah recorded brief diary notes on their visits as the end approached.
Beth Liebling holds her grandmother’s diary. As death neared for Annie Chambers in 1935, Beulah Bulkley recorded Chambers’ response when her husband David Bulkley asked if she wanted him to sing for her: “Don’t ask stupid questions - sing.” (FlatlandKC)
January 24, 1934: “Anna medicine until 11 p.m.”
February 2, 1934: “To Miss Anna’s for signing of deed etc.”
February 15, 1934: “Interview with AB MacDonald Reporter for KC Star…”
February 18,1934:: “Front page article in the Star…Cars galore going by all afternoon…”
January 6, 1935: “Miss Anna ill.”
March 9, 10, 1935: “Miss Anna Very low!”
Mach 20-23, 1935: “David Bulkley: ‘Want me to sing for you?’ Miss Anna: ‘Don’t ask foolish questions - sing.’ “
March 24, 1935: “Miss Anna went to sleep at 7:10 a.m.”
Not enhanced by Hollywood
David Bulkley died in 1940 from a heart attack, at age 62.
In a 1940 diary entry Beulah described how she had lamented the pain her husband was in, and had wondered out loud why God wouldn’t ease his struggle.
Hearing that, David called Beulah over.
“Beulah” he said. “I never did ask for the easy way.”
While watching the 1940 movie “The Grapes of Wrath” at Kansas City’s Uptown Theater, David Bulkley insisted to fellow film-goers that the poverty depicted in the movie had not been exaggerated. (Public domain)
In another 1940 diary entry Beulah described the day she and David had decided to see the new film “The Grapes of Wrath.” They found themselves seated just behind two patrons who snorted at the film’s depiction of extreme want.
“ ‘This story is too far-fetched,’ one said,” Beulah wrote. “ ‘Those people eating from garbage cans - you know that’s just pure fiction in our land of plenty.’
"David Bulkley could not stay silent.”
Her husband, she wrote, reaching to touch the “fur-clad shoulder of the speaker,” said he could show her the places where families scavenged for food. When the woman demanded how he would know such things, Bulkley handed her his business card and invited her down to the mission.
“I’ll take you with me when I go down to the Bottoms to distribute a carload of bread,” Bulkley said, “and you will see how they leave the garbage of the city dump and surround the car for bread.”
Upon her husband’s death, Beulah began 14 years of serving as mission superintendent before retiring.
In 1974 the Star, noting how all three prominent brothels long had been demolished, published an interview with Beulah, who was still insisting on the dire need she had witnessed some 50 years before had not been enhanced by Hollywood.
“You just can’t imagine how bad it used to be in the North End,” she said. “I was so sorry for those people.”
Beulah Bulkley died in 1980 at age 92.
Brian Burnes is the former president of the Jackson County Historical Society.