Peer through the windows at 4303 Jefferson St., and there’s a shop full of inventory: bags of incense, futons, dream-catchers, candles, handmade jewelry.
But Temple Slug, once a destination of alternative home décor and an accidental landmark of counterculture retail in Kansas City, has been closed to the public since the early days of the pandemic. Answers to questions about its future have been hard to come by.
The uncertainty deepened this spring, when founder and longtime owner Bob Gamer died at the age of 86. His stepson, Keith Buchanan, who managed the shop in its later years, died two days later.
It is presumed that the business and property were left to May Lin Gamer, Bob’s wife and Buchanan’s mother. The Star was unable to reach May Lin. But friends and former Temple Slug employees said she lives in a retirement home, and the property south of Westport is now being managed by a trust.
Carol Hillman, a close friend of Buchanan’s, said that because he had no siblings or children, she and a few other friends and neighbors stepped up to help with proceedings following his death — writing the two men’s obituaries and organizing upcoming celebrations of life. But she’s in the dark as to the future of the place.
“Nobody outside the family or the trust company really knows what’s going on (with Temple Slug),” Hillman said. “We’ve heard from a lot of people with fond memories of the shop, and who are interested in turning it into something that honors the history of the neighborhood. I know a lot of people are curious about its future. But a lot of us are in that same boat, too.”
Among those that would like to see the building preserved are the members of the Steptoe Lives Coalition. The group is attempting to keep intact what is left of the Steptoe neighborhood, a historically Black community located south of Westport, between Summit and Wornall from 43rd to 44th Streets. Many of the homes and structures in the area have been demolished in recent years to make way for new apartments and the expansion of nearby St. Luke’s Health Center.
“I grew up in an original house in that neighborhood and spent a lot of time as a kid at Temple Slug,” said Leah Suttington, a member of the group. “The area was a beautiful crossroads of the white and Black communities in Kansas City. It’s a special part of Westport history. It’d be nice to preserve (Temple Slug) as some kind of tribute to that, instead of just tearing it down to make room for more apartments.”
Suttington said she’d heard that the Temple Slug building as well as several other houses Gamer owned to the east on 43rd Street were going up for sale soon. But she couldn’t confirm where she’d heard that, and the properties are not listed for sale on any real estate sites.
According to Jackson County property records, those buildings are still owned by Gamer’s company Jefferson Associates Inc. But that business was administratively dissolved by the state of Missouri in 2022 for failing to file a registration report.
Deitra Nealy-Shane, who also grew up in Steptoe and is a member of the nearby St. James Missionary Baptist Church, said she is concerned about what will happen to that block now that Gamer is gone.
“Bob had been on the board of the Plaza/Westport Neighborhood Association and was always very committed to preserving affordable, single-family homes in Steptoe,” Nealy-Shane said. “There’s often tension between business owners and residents in a neighborhood, but Bob was always a champion for Steptoe — for keeping that history alive.”
A Westport counterculture legacy
Temple Slug was never just a shop. It began its life on April Fools’ Day 1970, when Gamer, a UMKC political science professor returning from a four-year stint in Singapore filled a former grocery store in Westport with Indian textiles, dried flowers, strobe-light candles and a lot of incense.
“They had all these wonderful things in Asia, and Vietnam veterans were bringing them back home,” Gamer told The Star in 1995. “I wanted to introduce these things to Kansas City.”
It soon morphed into a head shop, selling bongs, rolling papers and lava lamps. As the sign outside Temple Slug still notes, the shop was also one of the first in the country to carry waterbeds — a profitable niche in the 1970s. Temple Slug became a hub for Westport’s budding alternative scene.
“It was a center for artists and liberal thought, a gathering place,” recalled Michael Felix, who worked at Temple Slug for 12 years starting in the early 1990s.
“The magic of the Slug was all about Bob,” said Apryl Murray, who managed the shop in the mid-1990s. “He treated every single person who came in as an old friend and taught me to do the same. It was never about the hard sell — it was all about the person and making everyone feel comfortable.”
Merchandise evolved with the times. When the futon craze of the 1990s hit, Temple Slug was already there.
“We were on the cutting edge of that,” Felix said. “This was before IKEA, and the knock-down furniture trend was really hot. We sold a lot of futons to kids and young professionals in the city.”
Buchanan, a trained industrial designer and adjunct at the Kansas City Art Institute, took over the shop in its later years, adding a tea shop next door in 2010.
“Keith had his hands full taking care of Bob and May and everything else,” said Murray.
COVID shut Temple Slug down in 2020. Hillman said Buchanan continued to fulfill online orders for a year.
“But then it just petered out entirely,” she said. “It’s been sort of like a mausoleum in there ever since.”
Bob’s death was not unexpected — he’d been managing Parkinson’s for a while, Murray said. “But Keith was a surprise, though maybe not in retrospect, considering everything he had been trying to manage for so very long.”
Hillman said she is encouraging friends, neighbors and former Slug employees to attend a celebration of life that’s been organized for Bob at Simpson House (4509 Walnut St.) on June 21 from 1 to 3 p.m. Another for Buchanan will be held the week of June 27 at Conroy’s Public House in Westwood (4730 Rainbow Blvd.).
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