Several months ago I decided that the location of the office of “Equity” newspaper and the publishing headquarters for NEQUA should be closely looked at. My intuition paid off as I found that the demographics of the office location held some very interesting information. I drove to Topeka and easily found 115 east 5th Street, it was a big vacant lot. An example of the advantages of American Urban Renewal.  There isn’t any renewal only an unusable vacant lot.

A call to the Shawnee Public Library had gotten me connected with a man who knew all about buildings in Topeka and also about removed buildings. He said that he was sure that a photograph of the building existed because he remembered that the 115 location was the home of Langston Hughes when he was seven years old. The story was that Langston’s father had gone to Mexico and Langston and his mother were in Topeka where she worked for a Lawyer.  Incidentally Langston was his mothers surname and Hughes was his fathers surname.

When I expressed amazement  at the idea of Langston Hughes living in a commercial building, in the center of Topeka,  the gentleman supplying this information said it wasn’t unusual as the area for several blocks was a commercial district that was racially integrated, at that time.  By living one block off the main drag of Topeka, Langston’s mother had only a block to walk to work. 

I got a copy of the photograph and it was a concrete and brick two store building with rooms upstairs and a couple of commercial spaces downstairs. This  was “mixed-use”, an existent idea one hundred years ago, before the Urban Developers reinvented the idea in 1960. It allowed for Doctors and Dentists and lawyers to have “offices” in their living quarters.
Well I proceeded to check on the property owner and recheck the construction method, which was concrete meaning that it could have still been in use today if some bureaucrat somewhere had decided that Urban Renewal might include a minor makeover, instead of a scorched earth conclusion.

I went back to the census pages to look at who might inhabit the same building. In addition to Mary Lowe’s family, there was a Dr. Sunday, a black physician, an attorney and two “chinamen.” Obviously a highly integrated area one hundred and fourteen years ago in the middle of Topeka, Kansas.

Last week I spent the day at the Watkins Museum in Lawrence, Kansas. Why? because Lawrence has had a lot of strange people go through there, and so I figure that one of the persons I am looking for who worked on NEQUA just might have spent some time in Lawrence.
The Watkins is in a grand old building downtown on Massachusetts Ave.  Being my bull in a china shop, self I just ambled in a minute after it opened. They run their place on an appointment basis. How the public is supposed to know that I do not know. Of course I was able to slide by the rules with my best sad face showing.
They put me in touch with a woman named  Mary Wallace, a volunteer archivist. She had actually been responsible for preparing the files in the section where she works, which was great because I just told her the story of what I knew about the NEQUA crew and she wrote down a couple of key words and pulled the files for me. It only took about two hours to go through  the potential files.
Mary also gave me a card for the “Collection Manager” who she said could do a search of the notations on photographs and see if there were any  photographs of the dozen or so names I gave her. 
Two days later I got an email saying, No Luck, but it included a couple of suggestions of other places to check.
It is this type of service that I have come to expect from research people.  They know there section of information better than anyone else or they should, and they usually have an idea how to play their intuitive card which sometimes pays off with very unsuspected information.

Seems there is always one more place to check.