Joseph Popper, Kansas City Star columnist and chronicler of the common man, dies at 74

Joe Popper, whose columns for the Kansas City Star often spotlighted the ordinary American trying to find meaning in the everyday of their lives, died at his home in Kansas City, Thursday, January 10, from cancer. He was 74.

Joe’s father, Martin Popper, a lawyer prominent in progressive political circles, and his mother, Kathryn Trosper Popper, who had been Orson Welles’s assistant for many years, created a home in New York City saturated with ideas of equality and social fairness that influenced Joe throughout his life and especially infused his writing with a keen awareness of the suffering of others.

While studying at CCNY (City College of NY), he became deeply involved in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, along with many of his friends, including Andrew Goodman, the civil rights worker killed alongside Michael Schwerner and James Cheney in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Joe was a marshal for Dr. King on the famous Selma-to-Montgomery march, in 1965. Those experiences stayed with Joe all of his life.

Joe’s piece in The Star, “Airman Kept Flying in The Face of Adversity” (July 10, 1999), reflected his fierce devotion to social fairness.

          “ For even as they trained to fight fascism abroad, they confronted an Army Air Corps filled with white officers who believed the very idea of black combat pilots was absurd. That attitude had been bolstered by an Army War College report concluding that black people lacked the intelligence and courage for combat flying. That cruel and ludicrous report became near-doctrine despite the remarkable valor demonstrated by black regiments in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and World War I.”

The Kansas City Star column was the culmination of a lifetime of writing begun as a free-lancer after his stint as an organizer for Local 1199, the Hospital Workers union in New York. In the early 1970s, Joe left New York and headed on a journey west first to St. Louis where he wrote for St. Louis Magazine, then on to Colorado and Oregon before finally settling in Kansas City, Missouri, where his love affair with the Midwest and its wide-open spaces took root. He began writing for Kansas City Magazine in the mid-1980s, eventually finding his professional home at the Kansas City Star, where he remained until his retirement in 1999.

Joe is survived by his wife, Judy Popper, his three daughters, Jennifer Bond (David Bond), Anne Post (Michael Post), Kassie Popper, his sister, Laura Popper (Edward Shain), his five grandchildren, Zachary Bond, Nova Bond, Tessa Bond, Alex Post, and Johnny Post, and a multitude of others who loved him dearly.

Please join the family and raise a glass to Joe Popper on Sunday, January 27, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. at The Heim Room, Boulevard Brewing Company, 2501 Southwest Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri 64108. Casual clothes required.

In keeping with Joe’s lifelong commitment to voting rights and social justice, in lieu of flowers please consider supporting The Andrew Goodman Foundation, https://andrewgoodman.org/.