RSC Building - Historic "Find" at Forest & Linwood by AlbuqRay
I originally called this tip, "Funky Buildings Near Troost and Linwood Blvd." and said "I wonder who built the building with its blue front and round windows on the side. Now it is the home of ASAP Bail Bonds, a great name I must say. For sure I would want my bail bond as soon as possible. It's located at Linwood and Forest, one block east of Troost." Little did I know what the building had been. The blue front and round windows just happened to catch my eye.It turns out in trying to determine what the Troost Community Market building used to be, I found out that the RSC stands for Russell Stover Candies! This was one of its early locations in Kansas City. Take a look at the 1989 picture in the Kansas City Public Library collection. It may have also been the location of Russell's Restaurant.
Russell Stover was born in 1888 in a sod house in northwest Kansas. Clara Lewis was a farm girl too. She was born six years earlier in Iowa. They met at the University of Iowa and later married. It was in Omaha that a chap approached Stover with the chocolate-covered ice cream bar idea. In 1921 the Stovers introduced an edible "brainstorm" named the "I-Scream" bar, which was later called the "Eskimo Pie." It was a chocolate-covered ice cream square in a little bag. They produced and sold it for a year. After the first mad surge for the novelty, sales dropped off and the Stovers bailed out with $25,000.
They moved to Denver where they began "Mrs. Stover's Bungalow Candies." In 1931 they moved their by-now thriving business to Kansas City. There they barely weathered the Depression and the sugar-short World War II years that followed. However, they emerged with a multi-million dollar a year enterprise and world-wide sales. For two decades the business carried the name "Mrs. Stover's Bungalow Candies," but in 1943 it became "Russell Stover Candies."
