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“They had an empty space here and they were running short on cash,” the younger John recalled. But after they were forced to close their Dixie Cream shop and their Overland Park tenant left, the Taylors felt pressure to make a move. John and Velma had initially bought the building on Floyd as an investment property, and were happy to take rent from a car repair shop on the site while they ran their first store, Dixie Cream Donuts, in midtown Kansas City. So my parents came up with that name, ‘Space Age Donuts.'” “We hadn’t reached the moon yet, but there was a lot of excitement about it. “It was the middle of the space race,” the younger John said.
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SPACE AGE DONUTS FULL
Fifty years later, their sons John and Rodney dish out the same glazed, custard-filled and iced-with-sprinkles pastries that gained the shop a loyal following back in its first years, when NASA’s Apollo program was in full swing. John and Velma Taylor first opened John’s Space Age Donut Shop at 8124 Floyd Street in 1967. Through all that change, though, one sweet little shop has remained. The last remnants of the Eisenhower-era motor lodge culture that dominated the neighborhood in its formative years have faded away, and new multi-family housing projects promise to bolster the renaissance already in progress. Literally hundreds of businesses have come and gone. Weekend mornings see a crush of customers heading to John’s Space Age Donut shop in downtown Overland Park.Ī lot has changed in downtown Overland Park the past 50 years.