I have never stopped bragging about my old Missouri hometown, but there have always been boosters in Kansas City who thought I bragged about the wrong things--barbecue and the cow on the top of the American Hereford Association headquarters, for instance, instead of Continental restaurants and similarly sophisticated cultural attractions. I liked the motto Kansas City had when I was a boy: "The Heart of America." The boosters liked the motto "More Boulevards Than Paris, More Fountains Than Rome."
In the 1970s some of the boosters hired a New York City public relations firm to persuade people that Kansas City was...