At 90, this KCK native became oldest person in space. But that’s only part of his story

Your Guide to KC: Star sports columnist Vahe Gregorian is changing uniforms this spring and summer, acting as a tour guide of sorts to some well-known and hidden gems of Kansas City. Send your ideas to vgregorian@kcstar.com.

Celebrated on magazine covers, deluged in fan mail, addressing audiences around the country, Ed Dwight Jr. in the early 1960s was a national sensation on trajectory to become the first Black man in space.

Only to be ostracized and obstructed from the launchpad, he fervently believes, because he lacked not the right stuff but the white stuff — and effectively lost his most elemental advocate when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.

“When Kennedy died,” Dwight told me with casual bluntness, “they wanted me to die with him.”

Stunningly sharp and vibrant at 90 years old, Dwight now tends either to laugh about or otherwise convey the wisdom of reconciliation when he speaks of that time.

That perspective stems at least in part because after he left the pre-NASA program in 1966 devastated, he propelled himself into a career as an artist whose work can be found around the nation and in Kansas City.

Some of his latest can be seen at the Kansas City Museum , where on a recent tour with the museum’s Paul Gutierrez I was stupefied to learn that the remarkable artist of whom he spoke was the same man who had just rocketed into space and who was made in virtually every way in Kansas City, Kansas — including that he’s known his wife, Barbara, since they were 2 years old and that his father played for the Kansas City Monarchs.

That heritage is what led to this trip to Denver to see Dwight, who has been swamped with interview requests but made time for me because he still figures “anyone from Kansas City is OK with me.”

And anyone from Kansas City ought to feel proud that Dwight is one of our own, something I understood all the better after one of the most compelling interviews I’ve been privileged to do in 35 years in the business.

To spend a few hours with the amiable Dwight made for a tour into space and of the arc of American history itself in his art.

That calling, part of a rich and captivating life he calls “a series of anomalies,” became so fulfilling he didn’t need a journey into space to feel whole.

Or so he thought before he finally experienced the realization of a dream not so much deferred as resurrected from the way a Star headline put it in 1963: “From Ward High Gridiron To Chance for Moon Flight.”

‘I lived a good life’

On May 19, Dwight and five other civilians blasted off into the final frontier. They wore Blue Origin aerospace suits with a patch depicting the Gemini spacecraft of Dwight’s aerospace training era uplifted by a hand representing Dwight’s artwork.

The liftoff in West Texas that made Dwight the oldest person to enter space — eclipsing William Shatner’s record by just weeks — was jolting.

When the New Shepard rocket lit up, as Dwight put it during our June interview in his ever-buzzing Denver art studio, he initially sensed “the whole damn thing exploded.”

At least, he fleetingly thought to himself, he could say, “I lived a good life.”

The same surge of fear returned as the capsule separated from the booster. But soon, a more tranquil consciousness of a life well-lived seized him amid the magic around him.

Peering out a 10-foot window, for a second he perceived a blue-black drape inexplicably descending to block his view.

Then he realized he was witnessing the transition from Earth’s atmosphere into space itself.

Contemplating the planet from the sky he’d gazed up into with endless fascination since his childhood, “the spiritual stuff” engulfed him.

One way in particular:

Discerning no lines between countries, divisions between states or racial barriers in the blue below, he thought about how there’s no sensible reason that all these fools down here shouldn’t get along.

“If everybody on Earth could go up and look at the Earth from a distance, it would change the Earth,” he said. “It would change people’s attitude about what we’re doing down here.”

Most of all, he pondered the mesmerizing vastness, beauty and serenity of feeling he was among the planets, stars and constellations that his mother taught him about with her flashlight during his childhood in the 1930s.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Dwight said. “Absolutely mind-boggling.”

He meant the universe.

But he could just as easily have been talking about his place in it, literally manufactured in an out of the way studio that makes you wonder if you’re in the right place when you arrive but spawned by his Kansas City roots.

No wonder some 70 years after he left, Dwight says the last visions in his head every night as he falls asleep are of his childhood back here.

Son of a Kansas City Monarch

Ed Dwight Sr., often known as Eddie, grew up in KCK and played in the Negro Leagues (1925-1937), almost entirely with the Kansas City Monarchs. His No. 28 Monarchs jersey was donated to The Smithsonian Institution and can be seen via the Smithsonian Learning Lab online. (His son’s sculpture bust of Duke Ellington is part of the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.)

The elder Dwight was understood to be well-deserving of his two nicknames:

“Pee Wee,” because he was about 5 foot 5, and “Flash” because his “speed and base-stealing ability were comparable to that of ‘Cool Papa’ Bell,” per “The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues” as excerpted on the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum website.

His namesake son still revels in that exceptional speed, saying his father had raced Olympic great Jesse Owens (and alternately won and lost) in exhibitions that Owens was known to perform around the country.

But he was less enamored of the inherited height that he once was playfully told made him too short to be able to swagger the way other prospective astronauts did.

He used to tease his mother, Georgia, about why she sought out the short guy among all the taller Monarchs after a game in Sioux City, Iowa, in the late 1920s. She accepted a wedding proposal on their third meeting and married him in 1929. They had five children, including Ed Jr. in 1933.

As one of the few members of the team who abstained from alcohol, Ed Jr. said, his dad also often drove the team bus. The franchise was such a part of the family’s lives that Ed Jr. was a batboy and also remembers sitting on the lap of legendary pitcher Satchel Paige — who liked to slip nickels in his pockets and generally seemed to “command the universe.”

Meanwhile, though, the Dwight family’s orbit seemed just the opposite of a grip on the universe: utterly chaotic.

All these years later, he marvels at how he made it out of the “rathole” of “aberrant behavior” where alcohol, drugs and violence ran rampant.

And that was just in his own extended family.

His father’s brothers, he remembered, disdained education and went after one another with knives and stole — including his parents’ wedding presents.

Despite that cultural quagmire all around him in a veritable family compound on Tremont Street, his parents managed to forge a haven and a path for Dwight and his siblings.

That was partly because his father somehow transcended the dysfunction around him, later becoming a chemist and in 1946 opening Dwight’s Soda Grill next to the house they moved to at Seventh and New Jersey.

But it was largely driven by the mother who was a force of nature: Georgia Anthony Baker Dwight, aka “the most incredible woman who ever graced the face of this earth, my mom,” as Dwight puts it in the dedication of his autobiography, “Soaring on the Wings of a Dream.”

‘No stop signs up there’

It wasn’t just the last words she said to him every night before he’d fall asleep, as he put it in his book: “Son, you are smart, and you are beautiful and you can do anything in life that you want to do.”

It was how she engaged and enabled that, filling him with visions of what he could be in the world around him and, for that matter, the one above him.

She started him in a preschool program when he was 2, secured his first library card when he was 4 (and promptly asked him to explain the meaning of things he was reading) and nudged him by age 9 into his first jobs: delivering The Call and Kansas City Kansan newspapers.

Self-conscious as he might have been because of a stutter and his height, the imagination and education she stoked ignited his curiosity. He reveled in art, nature and mechanical dynamics: Observing grandfather Lobe Dwight salvaging junk informed his creative brilliance.

“He taught me metal,” said Dwight, gazing around his studio. “That’s why I’m so good at making sculptures and metal because I was his assistant. He could make them (into) anything.”

Most of all, though, he became consumed with the sky.

Around age 4, he created what he’d call a “one-man plane” … out of orange crates. Ever since he can remember, he drew birds and aircraft. He absorbed lessons about the Milky Way and lunar phases and such from his mother.

Dwight even studied how pigeons landed when he was feeding them on what became regular walks or rides to the Fairfax Municipal Airport — where for nickels or dimes he cleaned out private airplanes of hunters. He was about 7 or so, he reckons, when one of the men took him up in the air for the first time for perhaps 30 minutes.

To his eternal enchantment.

“No stop signs up there,” he said, laughing.

It wasn’t long before he started learning about stop signs down here.

The power of example

When Bishop Ward High School wouldn’t integrate her Catholic children, Dwight said, his mother fought for change all the way to the Vatican.

As family history has it, Pope Pius XII himself intervened to bring about integration.

Whatever the reality, Dwight’s sister Rita became the first Black student at Bishop Ward in 1947 — without TV cameras or a national guard presence, as he notes in his book — and was subjected to vile racist abuse before gaining acceptance and becoming the school’s first Black graduate in 1949, Dwight said.

When he arrived a year later, he said, the school insisted on a separate shower and dressing area for him, and hundreds of students transferred to public schools in protest.

Bishop Ward could not confirm that specific exodus but on its website writes that “a number of families withdrew their students and their support” after the school was integrated in the 1940s.

But Dwight ultimately found approval through sports and art, and he has revered the school over the years. He was honored that art teacher submitted his accomplishments and a portfolio to the Kansas City Art Institute — which he said offered him a scholarship that his father talked him out of as impractical.

He was working on his associate’s degree in pre-engineering at Kansas City Kansas Community College, and still doing his paper route, when he was awestruck by what he saw on the front page of the Kansas City Call:

It was a photo of U.S. Air Force Lt. Dayton W. Ragland standing on the wing of his F-86 before he was shot down and missing in action during the Korean War. Indeed, the picture could be found exactly as he described it in the Dec. 7, 1951, edition of the Call.

(Ragland, a highly decorated ace, and Kansas City native, had been credited months earlier with destroying “Eight Red Planes,” as The Call put it. Ragland, a poignant story in himself, was released in 1953 but shot down in Vietnam in 1966 and never found; his name is on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.)

While Dwight had no notion then of the depth and breadth of Ragland’s heroism, he saw something he never knew existed: a Black pilot.

Since he saw it, he knew he could be it.

No matter how much his attempts to apply for pilot training were dissuaded, either on the basis of his height or skin color, he ultimately prevailed largely because of his persistence — including writing the Pentagon, he said — and acumen for the test material he’d in a sense been training for all his life.

Dwight joined the Air Force in 1953 at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

‘Raising the morale and stature of my race’

Over nearly the next decade, Dwight built his Air Force career. He served as an instructor pilot and medium bomber pilot, earned an engineering degree at Arizona State and ascended to a captain’s rank and became air operations officer at Travis Air Force Base in California.

So when he received a letter in 1961 inviting him to apply for a training course at Edwards Air Force Base in preparation to become an astronaut, Dwight initially thought it a hoax.

Even if not, there was no way he wanted to take that on. He was on track for further promotion and working on a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and had it all, he said.

To say nothing of how little still was known about what he jokingly called “space goblins” even in those months after Alan Shepard became the first American to make the trip.

He became persuaded by his mother and others, though, that this was about something more than just himself — much like what the example of Ragland had meant to him.

With the understanding that Kennedy effectively was his sponsor as Kennedy sought to advance his civil rights agenda and garner support from Black voters, Dwight embraced it.

He articulated the point in a letter to Kansas Sen. Frank Carlson a few months after entering that program and while being considered for the next phase: Aerospace Research Pilot School, to which he was accepted in March 1963:

“My selection to this course will go a long way in raising the morale and stature of my race in this country as well as abroad,” he wrote Carlson, according to The Star’s report at the time.

When Dwight’s name was announced among what would become the next 26 candidates for the program, Dwight said Kennedy himself called his family to congratulate them.

All much to the chagrin of program commandant Chuck Yeager, who viewed Dwight as an unqualified annoyance foisted on him — as Yeager suggested in his own autobiography and Tom Wolfe characterized it in “The Right Stuff” — and whom Dwight contends in his book “oozed bigotry” and had rallied others to shun him.

Yeager died in 2020, but in 2019 in an exchange with The New York Times he disputed Dwight’s characterization of his treatment and emailed, “Isn’t it great that Ed Dwight found his true calling and became an accomplished sculptor?”

Only after the anguishing disillusionment ahead, though, not long after Dwight became part of a media frenzy.

In the days to come, Dwight’s name and aspiration to be one of the first men on the moon (“I’d like that tremendously,” Dwight told The New York Times in 1963) was lauded in newspapers around the nation.

He was on the covers of everything from Jet and Sepia magazines to Catholic Digest and the front page of Le Figaro — the French daily paper. With the backing and promotion of Washington, he made hundreds of speeches around the U.S. and received what he called thousands of letters.

But almost immediately after the assassination of Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, all the promise that had been implied evaporated for reasons that never have been officially clarified.

In a blurry fog of politics and race, though, Dwight went from frequently feeling spurned or dismissed (he was not among the 14 selected to Astronaut Group 3 in October 1963) to feeling persecuted.

The message from the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, he said, was that it wanted him to fade out while Johnson put forth his own Black nominee.

What he described as a hellish next few years included an ominous threat relayed to him by a frightened young Black crew chief as Dwight was about to embark on a normal test mission: The day before, he said he was told, two civilian men asked the crewman what it would take to fix Dwight’s plane so that it wouldn’t come back.

Among other accusations, Dwight said he also was threatened with years in the stockade, that the Air Force had sought to have him declared “mentally incompetent” and that years later he’d discover that his background file had been stocked with false accusations against him including “plotting a coup to murder President Johnson.”

That’s why he resigned in 1966 — and why he believes he was rejected for 32 jobs before being hired by IBM in Denver as a marketing rep and systems engineer by a man he’d known in the Air Force.

‘I’ve got big plans for you’

As Dwight worked through his heartbreak, anger and bitterness, he also appreciated that he had seen the world and been exposed to politics — both the aspects that boosted him and kicked him in the teeth.

And, as ever, he heeded the counsel of his mother, who had instilled in him that he had a responsibility to anybody who didn’t have what he had to make the most of what he did.

So he could “go in your corner and shrivel up” … or remember that everything he did should have a purpose and meaning to it.

That drove him into reinventing himself through investors and entrepreneurship, including a business flight service, a construction company, real estate and a restaurant chain.

“It was called the Rib Cage,” he said, smiling. “I’m from Kansas City, and they don’t have any good barbecue here.”

He also began to return to art, including welding things together with metal left over from his construction sites.

Through his businesses, he got to know high-profile people like Bill Coors, the Coors Brewing Co. heir, and decorated what he recalled as 23 fence posts at Coors’ house on Eagle Mountain.

But his most pivotal experience was engaged by George Brown, a Lawrence native, University of Kansas graduate and former Tuskegee Airman and journalist who was elected lieutenant governor of Colorado in 1974.

Ascending to that office meant a sculpture would be made in Brown’s honor, and he had seen enough of Dwight’s dabbling and understood his spirit to think him the person for the job.

Dwight initially was uninterested as Brown pressed him and insisted it was about more than merely that project.

“I’ve got big plans for you,” Dwight remembered Brown saying, adding that Brown went on to point out that “you can’t go to a city park, a town square, a museum, a library and find any images of anything Black people have ever done.”

Still unmoved, Dwight said, Brown “almost came across his desk” at him and challenged him about his ignorance of the likes of George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

Dwight became intrigued and acquiesced. He soon traveled to witness for himself the stark absence of Black public images in places like Atlanta and Detroit and New York.

Next thing you know, Dwight was reading 16 books Brown gave him about the Black history he’d never been taught — “I got mad,” he said. He soon sold his companies and went back to school, earning his master of fine arts in sculpture at the University of Denver en route to entering the stratosphere of his most defining mission.

When a few dozen of his bronze images from a series entitled “Black Frontier in the American West” were exhibited in 1978 at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, gallery director Alan Garfield understood the significance of that work — and seemed to foresee where Dwight was headed.

“Dwight has achieved visually what Alex Haley accomplished with words in ‘Roots’ — a masterful, definitive study of (the) history of Blacks in America,” Garfield told the Omaha World-Herald. “His work is very important educationally and aesthetically.”

‘You’re the story here, not me’

Over the decades, Dwight has created nearly 20,000 gallery pieces and 132 large-scale memorials around the nation — befitting a man who views himself as much a historian as artist.

His works include monuments to Carver, Douglass, Haley and Tubman , the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (several), the Underground Railroad (also in several locations), Rosa Parks, the Tulsa Race Riot Memorial and “The Inauguration of History and Hope” — life-size bronzes of the Obama family on inauguration day with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts that remains on national tour.

His second major series, “Jazz: An American Art Form,” featured tributes to jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman and Kansas City’s own Charlie Parker — and was inspired in part by Dwight’s fond memories of seeing music back in Kansas City “where all the jazz started.”

As for back home, Dwight’s work also can be found at the Folly Theater ( “Concerto” ), on the Country Club Plaza (bas-relief sculptures about the history of Kansas City), Linwood Shopping Center (“Phoenix Rising Out of the Ashes”) and in busts of civil rights leaders Bruce R. Watkins and Lucile Bluford — the renowned publisher of the Kansas City Call whose nephew, Guion Bluford, in 1983 became the first Black man in space.

(Lucile Bluford was among those to greet her nephew in Houston and presented him with a proclamation from then-Kansas City mayor Richard Berkley declaring the Challenger Shuttle launch date “Guion Bluford Jr. Day.”)

Considering part of the reason Dwight ended up on a flight path to begin with was because of Bluford’s newspaper and its image of Dayton Ragland, that makes for an ironic twist in his tale.

Over time, Dwight established many more once-improbable connections and relationships, including with the likes of Motown’s Berry Gordy (whose home Dwight also said he decorated), basketball legend Magic Johnson and civil rights icon and former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Mandela, he said, “was my buddy.”

Behind Dwight’s studio desk is a photo of him with Mandela, whose arm is draped over Dwight during a ceremony presenting Dwight’s statue, “From Apartheid to the Ballot Box.”

The approximately 8-foot tall statue depicting Black hands cascading into one ballot box was unveiled at the Library of Congress, Dwight said, where Mandela was physically keeping him on stage when Dwight tried to sit back down.

Recalled Dwight: “He whispered to me, ‘You’re the story here, not me.’”

‘Keep it full of wonderful stuff’

When Dwight speaks to school classes, he likes to begin by asking children “what’s the most important organ in your body?”

Usually, the first answer is the heart before another kid says what Dwight’s looking for: the brain.

“And then I talk about how important what you feed it is, and how you train it to help you …,” he said, later adding, “Everybody’s got one, and when it comes to you it’s almost empty, and it’s your job to fill it up. And to keep it full of wonderful stuff.”

Dwight brought this up when I asked him how to account for his yet-acute mind and energy, which he also said is bolstered by a daily regimen of weightlifting and walking.

But keeping his mind full of wonderful stuff speaks not just to who he is today but how he got here:

Whatever bitterness he once harbored about how his NASA hopes were dashed is one of the few things his brain no longer has room for.

Especially since over time he’s come to realize that that experience would have deprived him of becoming what he believes he was most meant to be.

And it would have left him today, he said, laughing, “sitting on my dead (rear) trying to beg people to hire me to make a speech.”

Instead, he’s been as much or more in demand today as he was in 1963.

Sparked by the release of a National Geographic documentary (“The Space Race”) centered on Dwight and other Black pilots, scientists and engineers in the space program and all the more by his venture into space last month, Dwight has been besieged by national media outlets.

It’s an irresistible story, after all, one that led to our visit and one of those rare conversations that just keeps generating layers and revelations and, most of all, prompting thought.

But while he was gratified to finally enter space, where Asteroid 92579 is named after him and his art preceded him on earlier missions, Dwight long ago achieved his most proud and consequential legacy.

“Oh, God, yeah: I’d give up all this space (junk),” he said. “That sounds weird, but it’s true. Because these sculptures, they’re going to be here (for) two or three hundred years.”

About as mind-boggling as space itself.