Mission Hills businessman writes of encounters with ‘nude nuns and other peculiar people’

Mission Hills resident Chuck Wells can still remember walking with his friends in the 1950s from Prairie Village across the state line into Brookside, catching a bus to 22nd Street and Brooklyn Avenue, and spending the afternoon watching the Kansas City Athletics at Municipal Stadium. All without parents.

“This was considered a perfectly safe and sane thing to do back then,” he said. “It really was idyllic.”

Such remembrances are part of a Wells’ “Nude Nuns and Other Peculiar People,” a collection of stories and essays he published last year after scribbling away for the better part of a decade. Wells caught the writing bug in the early 2000s after sending travel accounts to a small group of friends.

“My audience had grown a bit, and people would tell me, ‘I love your stories, keep them coming,’” Wells said.

So Wells polished up 21 pieces, and put them together in the book, which is available Bruce Smith Drug Store and Rainy Day Books, locally. Two of the chapters, “Prairie Village” and “Baseball,” deal specifically with his time growing up here.

“It was such a fun time to be a kid,” he said. “There were no helicopter parents back then.”

For more on Wells and his book, check out his website.