Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
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50 free Kansas City trivia questions with answers. Kansas City is really two cities on one state line, and this quiz covers both. Fifty questions run from the fur-trading landing on the Missouri River to Tom Pendergast's wide-open town, the jazz clubs of 18th and Vine, Henry Perry's barbecue pit and the fountains that gave the city its official nickname. There is plenty of sport too: Lamar Hunt's move from Dallas, the Royals' two titles, Sporting KC, the record-setting noise at Arrowhead and the teams that packed up and left. The early questions are ones any local should get. Later ones dig into Walt Disney's failed Kansas City studio, the Union Station massacre, the shuttlecocks on the Nelson-Atkins lawn and why the Country Club Plaza looks like Seville. It works as a pub quiz round, a classroom warm-up on Missouri and Kansas history, or a test for anyone who claims to know their hometown. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the institutions' own pages, and the source is shown under each explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Thanks to more than 200 working public water features, what is KC's official nickname?
The City of Fountains
Locals like to say only Rome has more; the biggest privately funded ones sit behind the outfield at the Royals' ballpark.
Q 02Which NFL team plays its home games at Arrowhead Stadium?
The Chiefs
Opened in 1972, Arrowhead is now the oldest stadium in the AFC and the largest sports venue in Missouri.
Q 03Kansas City's Major League Baseball team is named after which annual event, held in the city since 1899?
The American Royal
The American Royal is a livestock show, horse show, rodeo and barbecue championship rolled into one, and it beat out other suggested names because of its pageantry.
Q 04Which greeting-card company has been based in Kansas City since Joyce Hall moved there in 1910?
Hallmark
The company still runs the Crown Center complex around its headquarters, and it also owns Crayola.
Q 05Along with brown sugar and tomatoes, which ingredient defines thick, sweet Kansas City-style barbecue sauce?
Molasses
The sweetness is relatively modern: Henry Perry's original sauce was harsh and peppery, and the molasses style spread with KC Masterpiece in the 1970s.
Q 06Burnt ends, the Kansas City barbecue delicacy, are cut from the point of which smoked meat?
Beef brisket
They were once handed out free at the counter while customers waited, long before food writers made them a menu item in their own right.
Q 07Which political boss dominated Kansas City by 1925 and helped launch Truman's career?
Tom Pendergast
The machine collapsed in 1939 when its boss pleaded guilty to tax evasion, and the crackdown that followed ended the city's jazz heyday too.
Q 08Which future president ran a Kansas City haberdashery and became a Jackson County judge in 1922?
Harry S. Truman
The shop failed in the early-1920s recession, and he was famously still paying off the debts years into his political career.
Q 09Before moving to Kansas City in 1963, Lamar Hunt's AFL team spent three seasons where?
Dallas
As the Dallas Texans they had just won the 1962 AFL title, but they could not out-draw the NFL's Cowboys in the same town.
Q 10Kansas City's NFL team is named for the nickname of which figure, who lured it from Texas?
Mayor H. Roe Bartle
Bartle earned the nickname 'The Chief' as a Boy Scouts executive; a fan contest picked the name over keeping 'Texans'.
Q 11Which team did Kansas City beat 23-7 in Super Bowl IV, the last before the AFL-NFL merger?
Minnesota Vikings
The Vikings were 12.5-point favourites; Len Dawson won MVP and mob boss Nick Civella was later caught on tape discussing bets on the game.
Q 12What reading did Arrowhead Stadium hit in September 2014 to regain the loudest-crowd record?
142.2 decibels
The record was set against the Patriots on Monday Night Football, taking it back from Seattle's CenturyLink Field.
Q 13The Royals have won the World Series twice: 1985 and which other year?
2015
They beat the Mets in five games, a year after losing Game 7 to the Giants at home in 2014.
Q 21The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum shares its 18th and Vine building with a museum devoted to what?
Jazz
Buck O'Neil, the former Monarchs first baseman, sat on the baseball museum's board until his death in 2006.
Q 22Which future Brooklyn Dodger hit .387 as the Kansas City Monarchs' shortstop in 1945?
Jackie Robinson
The Monarchs also gave the Negro Leagues Satchel Paige at his peak, and their run from 1920 to 1955 makes them the longest-lived franchise in that history.
Q 23Which cartoonist founded Kansas City's Laugh-O-Gram Studio in 1921, two years before it went bankrupt?
Walt Disney
The studio's staff included Ub Iwerks, Friz Freleng and Hugh Harman, and its last film, Alice's Wonderland, became the pitch that launched the Disney studio in Hollywood.
Q 14Which pharmaceutical executive founded the Royals in 1969 and now has the ballpark named after him?
Ewing Kauffman
He commissioned the stadium's outfield fountains, said to be the largest privately funded fountains in the world.
Q 15Which major-league team played in Kansas City from 1955 to 1967 before moving to Oakland?
The Athletics
Senator Stuart Symington threatened baseball's antitrust exemption over the move, which is how the city got the Royals two years later.
Q 16Under what name did Kansas City's Major League Soccer club begin play in 1996?
The Wiz
A trademark dispute turned the Wiz into the Wizards after one season; the club became Sporting Kansas City with its 2010 rebrand.
Q 17Which NBA franchise played in Kansas City from 1972 to 1985 before leaving for California?
The Kings
For their first three seasons they were the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, splitting home games between the two cities.
Q 18The NHL's Kansas City Scouts (1974–76) are the ancestor of which current franchise?
New Jersey Devils
The Scouts became the Colorado Rockies in 1976 and moved again to New Jersey in 1982.
Q 19Which bebop pioneer, nicknamed 'Bird', was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1920?
Charlie Parker
He learned by hanging around the alleys behind the Twelfth Street clubs, and his sound came to define the leap from swing to bebop.
Q 20Which pianist joined Bennie Moten's orchestra in 1929 before forming his own famous big band?
Count Basie
After Moten died in 1935, Basie built a new band from the remnants and took the Kansas City swing style national.
Q 24Which novelist spent six months as a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star before joining the Red Cross in WWI?
Ernest Hemingway
He later credited the paper's style sheet, with its 'short sentences' and 'vigorous English', as the best rules he ever learned for writing.
Q 25Which architect designed Union Station, opened in 1914 as the third-largest US train station?
Jarvis Hunt
Traffic peaked at 678,363 passengers in 1945; the building was rescued by a five-county bistate sales tax approved in 1996 and reopened in 1999.
Q 26The 1933 Kansas City massacre outside Union Station was an attempt to free which captured fugitive?
Frank Nash
Four lawmen and Nash himself died in the gunfire, and the FBI responded by arming all of its agents for the first time.
Q 27Which Kansas City landmark, dedicated in 1926, was designated the country's official WWI museum by Congress in 2004?
Liberty Memorial
At night the top of the 217-foot tower emits a 'flame' of steam lit by red and orange lights, visible across the city.
Q 28Which French marshal attended the 1921 groundbreaking of Kansas City's WWI monument?
Ferdinand Foch
Pershing, Britain's Admiral Beatty, Italy's General Diaz and Belgium's General Jacques joined him before a crowd of 200,000, the only time all five met in one place.
Q 29The Country Club Plaza (1923) was built in Baroque and Moorish Revival style echoing which Spanish city?
Seville
Its tallest building is a half-size replica of that city's Giralda tower, and the project was mocked as 'Nichols' Folly' because the valley was pig-farming land.
Q 30On which night each year are Kansas City's Country Club Plaza holiday lights switched on?
Thanksgiving
The tradition grew from a single strand of 16 coloured bulbs hung over a doorway in 1925; the formal ceremony began in 1930.