To the editor:

Regarding the T-shirt wars (“Quantrill-themed T-shirt stirs bitter emotion,” Nov. 14): In the early 1930s my father’s family moved from the West Side neighborhood of Kansas City, Mo., to the Rosedale neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan. My mother’s family remained on the West Side, so, of course, my father had to marry her before he could bring her to Kansas to live (see Mann Act) and raise their family.

In the post-WWII years, we regularly went to my Grandmother Murphy’s on the West Side for Sunday dinner with my mother’s family. Most of the time, we four and our dozen or so cousins played happily together, but inevitably, there were times when taunting and name calling were indulged in. On such occasions, my younger, baby boomer cousins would call us “Jayhawkers,” to which we would, of course, respond with “Missouri pukes!”

My siblings and I were proud of the fact that we were not only on the right side in the Civil War, but that our side won, as well. However, none of us – sibs or cousins – went on to play college football.

In recent years, I’ve often thought about how a war that was fought long before we were born found its way into our mundane Sunday afternoon play some 80 years later. And now, more than 140 years later, we have T-shirt wars.

And yet, we can’t seem to understand Sunni-Shiite differences of opinion that go back hundreds of years.

Ruth Hull,

Lawrence