1991 Annual Gathering of American Mensa
The 1991 Annual Gathering of American Mensa, Heartland AG 91 / Goin' to Kansas City, was held in Kansas City, Missouri at the Hyatt Regency Crown Center. It lasted from June 26th through June 30. Kim & Tony Jackowski were the AG chairmen.
The Crown Center complex is where the Hallmark corporate headquarters are located. The Hyatt Regency there was the site of a notorious hotel walkway collapse, about ten years before the AG, when over 100 people were killed during a (non-Mensa) convention. Probably as a result of this tragedy and the redesigned reconstruction of the floors involved, the third and fourth floors, within the convention area, have two disjoint sections requiring people to go down to a lower floor and back up again to get from one side to the other.
Glass-enclosed "Habitrail-style" walkways connect the various buildings of the complex, including a shopping mall that includes a food court, which provided a dining alternative for attendees who didn't buy the meal plan, but found hospitality food insufficient as the sole diet for the length of the AG. Unlike the previous year, this year's hotel couldn't be negotiated into allowing outside food for hospitality, so it was all hotel-provided, and fairly boring. A private hospitality suite set up in a guest room one night by the Chicago group to advertise their HalloweeM RG had better eating, and attracted such a crowd the cops came by to ask them to quiet down.
A curious thing about hospitality is that instead of being in one place it was spread out over four rooms on four floors (plus two game rooms on two other floors), requiring a lot of walking and elevator-riding to get between the different suites to see what was going on there, and from any of them to the other events.
A "Scientific Creationist" talk drew argumentative debate from opposing Mensans which continued well past the end of the speech; the time slot ended at 5:45 PM, but the hotel staff finally had to kick the debaters out of the room at 8:00.
| Preceded by: 1990: Orange County |
Annual Gathering of American Mensa 1991 |
Succeeded by: 1992: San Francisco |
