KCK’s Horizon Darts Is One Of The Last Of Its Kind In America

Inside an old roller rink in KCK, a mother and son manufacture and sell hand-made darts thrown by players worldwide.
Over by the hallway to the restrooms at the Blarney Stone is a small glass cabinet that looks at first glance like a display case for exotic insects and butterflies. What it actually contains is a mix of shafts and flights for steel-tip darts - a popular pastime at the midtown dive bar.
It’s convenient to have spare parts on hand. Darts are sharp but fragile. They sail through the air, bounce off the board, snap on the hard floor. In the 1980s heyday of American darts, back when the Kansas City Dart Association boasted more than a thousand players in different divisions and skill levels, these cabinets were as familiar a sight in local taverns as cigarette machines.
“That’s pretty much how we got our start - servicing bars in the area,” said Melody Foster, owner of Horizon Darts. “We had the parts, and we’d send guys out to the bars to take the money and restock the cabinets. And the orders just got bigger and bigger.”
That side of Horizon’s business all but dried up long ago. Electronic dart machines displaced the steel-tip boards, and Amazon obviated the company’s niche middleman status. League numbers dwindled.
But Horizon, over on the edge of the Turner neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, is still in the game. Quietly, it is one of the last companies that still manufactures American-made darts.
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Great store with great quality products