Too Long in the Wind

July 2007

Fish food

[July 31]   The first poem Mom taught me was not some Carl Sandburg melodrama about little cat feet or whose woods those are, although those were nearly the first. The original poetry imprinted in my soft brain was about fishing.

Fishy, fishy in the brook.
Papa caught him on a hook.
Mama fried him in a pan.
Baby ate him like a man.

I tried so hard for a while to be that baby who ate fish -- fish sticks, fried catfish, fried trout, fried bluegill, and our school lunchroom's canned-salmon patties and pollock squares served on Fridays. With apologies to Wynona Unruh, Mary Stimatze, and Carole Bowman, there wasn't enough tartar sauce in Barton County to cover the taste. The only fish I remember enjoying was a channel cat baked in foil on a Scout camping trip.

What it came down to was that Dad didn't catch many fish, Mom didn't like frying them, and I, the big baby, didn't like eating them.

But then in 1974 the Pawnee Rock Lions Club gave me the gift of a lifetime -- membership in the Kansas Lions State Band, which that summer went to the international convention in San Francisco.

Two other musicians, from Hiawatha and Lawrence high schools, joined me in traipsing around that non-Kansas city. For lunch one day, we stopped at Fishermen's Wharf and ate unbreaded seafood: clams, broiled flounder, broiled shrimp, and sauteed scallops.

Maybe it took getting out of Pawnee Rock to free my mind to like seafood, or maybe it was the freshness of the fish or the saltwater ambiance, a word permitted in San Francisco but not in Pawnee Rock. Regardless of the reason, that one culinary experience revealed to me that I could handle pleasures I had not previously imagined.

Last night my wife fixed salmon patties, using humpbacks the boys and I caught in a rising tide two days before; the photo shows Nik holding our stringer of pinks.

I ate the fish like a man, without tartar sauce, and as soon as I can get my fork into some halibut, I'm going to eat that too.

Not every bite will remind me of San Francisco, but at least now not every bite will remind me of Friday in the school lunchroom.

The pioneers

[July 30]   I've been reading a collection of diaries kept by women as their families took the Oregon Trail in the 1850s onward. I am sure those women faced trials similar to their sisters on the Santa Fe Trail, so it gives me an idea of what people were thinking as they passed Pawnee Rock.

The diaries also make me think of today's wagon trains -- those endless parades of motorhomes and fifth-wheelers that fill the highways during the summer where we live now. The Alaska Trail -- excuse me, the Alaska Highway -- is 1,600 miles of asphalt track over the Rockies and Coastal Range, and good drivers don't want to come too early or too late at that altitude and this latitude, just as wagoneers had to mind the calendar on their way to Oregon.

RV folks are much like the trail riders of the 1800s. They are self-sufficient and generous and frugal, and they band together on the road and in Wal-Mart parking lots to ward off raids by state troopers and thieves alike. Like the one-way pioneers of old, these folks are bid farewell by loved ones whose inheritance they are spending and who wish in their heart of hearts they could go too.

Pat Croff, who you may remember as Patty Wycoff of Pawnee Rock, is one of those RV folks. She and her companion, Ray, left their place in northern California and arrived this month in Alaska. They invited me out to their fifth-wheeler when they parked a half-hour's drive from my home, and we chatted for three hours until suddenly it was time to pat their cats goodnight.

Pat told lots of great stories about the 1940s and Pawnee Rock. One of the tales was about how she departed from Pawnee Rock.

Her father had left her mother and siblings, and things were hard, as they were for many people in Pawnee Rock during the depression and war. One day, Mrs. Wycoff bought a truck that was kept in a now-gone barn next to the Miller place, which is across the street south from the old Methodist Church.

Mrs. Wycoff made some improvements, such as putting a wooden box in the back for Pat's seat. And then the many Wycoffs set off from their home at Santa Fe Avenue and Rock Street, going north a block to the curve at the end of Rock, then west, then north past the salt plant. The first day was hard; they had a flat within five miles. But they persevered and made it to Hays and, by careful use of ration cards, to a relative's home on the West Coast.

Think about that.

Those are tough people, the kind you'd expect to find on a wagon train. The kind who, whether or not they're written up in the history books, are just like the pioneers we revere.

Most long-distance travel these days is done for fun. The Lower 48 states have been conquered by concrete, and no longer do the caravans coming to Alaska bring only those who intend to stay. Now road-smart travelers, like Pat Croff, make the trip both ways in a summer, heading south again before the promised land gets cold and appears less like a vacation postcard.

But look around you, even in our hometown. Families with gumption are moving inconspicuously across our country, looking for a safer home, a place where they can just earn a living or give their kids a better start. Like the settlers on the Oregon Trail, the vacationers on the Alaska Highway, or the Wycoffs on their way to a fresh start, they're the pioneers of the new day.

Adventures at the table: I have enjoyed eating the spicy pork sausage known as chorizo since I first made its acquaintance in a Texas newsroom in 1979. But that was before yesterday, when I bought a pound of beef chorizo and my wife showed me the label.

You'll notice that beef itself is not the most important ingredient of this particular brand. And there's this: How do you go about separating salivary glands and lymph nodes from the rest of the cow?

The world is a more exciting place than my stomach wants to imagine.

Fun in the mud

[July 29]   The young men wore t-shirts with the sleeves torn off. Their haircuts were a half-inch this side of skinhead, and they had more silver studs than my winter tires do. These were not the guys you'd ask to take your daughter to the prom.

Their pickup was a stripped-down black Ford of a decade ago. Its tailgate was gone, and so was its rear window. A bench seat was bolted into the bed.

And the truck was stuck, buried to its rear axle in wet silt. Its four-wheel-drive was taking the truck nowhere.

I don't think the men were at the creek to catch pink salmon, as the boys and I were yesterday. I imagine they were just in this gold-rush-era hamlet for the weekly weekend party and had driven to the end of the street to turn around in the mudflats.

As Alaska boys, they're used to driving on gravel, rocks, asphalt, and snow and ice, but Alaskans in this mountainous part of the state rarely come across real mud more than an inch deep. So there they were, flummoxed.

But I grew up in the land of mud, where the only thing worse than having to call Willard Wilson or beg a farmer to pull you out was the pure shame of getting stuck in the first place. So I, and you, learned how to get unstuck.

When I saw the guys standing around the truck, I felt a sneer coming on but I also felt pity. I strode over, thinking I'd help push the truck out, but it didn't take long to realize that tactic wasn't going to work. I got the driver to help me carry some heat-broken rocks from an old campfire and put them in the watery trench that the rear wheels had dug, and then I ordered the other guys to help push the truck as the grateful driver strained forward onto drier soil.

I'm glad I could help, I told them, and headed back to my car, which was parked on grass. They weren't such bad fellows after all, I thought. They let me teach them something.

A photo I like: No. 45

[July 28]   I like images I can feel. Usually, it's something that stirs up strong attraction or distaste. This time, the feeling is all in my fingers.

You and I have walked along the shelterbelts and found the fruit of the bois d'arc or osage orange tree -- hedge apples. This time of year, they weigh down the branches, and we find them on the ground under the tree and in the tall grass in the ditch. Pick one up. Did you remember how they're heavier than a softball? Remember the texture? I hope you brought some water to wash the milky sap off your hand.

I made this photo next to the shelterbelt just southeast of Pawnee Rock last summer.

Burned at the stake in music class

[July 27]   This would have been around 1970. Jim Quinn, who taught music to the junior high classes, was taking us through some love song by the Carpenters, and our mixed chorus just wasn't making beautiful music together.

Mr. Quinn was a pleasant fellow and fairly new to teaching. Our classes -- I was in eighth grade -- were full of nice people. But you remember how it is between teachers and pupils. There's always some tug of war being played out.

On this day in the basement band room, the chorus was winning. We were yanking Mr. Quinn's rope a little too hard with our civil disobedience, and finally Mr. Quinn went red and snapped out an ugly word.

I think we were surprised. We never had heard a teacher, other than a football coach, speak like that. And in the presence of the Carpenters' ballads, too. Still, we knew we had been asking for it.

One of the seventh-grade girls, a perpetually petulant neighbor who must have learned the bad word at home from her brothers, immediately announced that she was going to tell the principal. The rest of us kids knew she was playing with fire, and we leaned forward to see who burned first.

Mr. Quinn was no dummy; he knew what Mr. Stone and the school board could do if he got crossways. So he apologized in words that must have tasted bitter. That didn't work with the girl, who was the kind who could smell fear.

Inspiration came to Mr. Quinn. He wrote the word on a scrap of paper, pulled out a book of matches, and right in front of the chorus burned that paper.

"See, now it's gone," he said. "Now it never happened, right?"

I used to think that episode showed weakness by Mr. Quinn, yet at times in my own career I've found myself caught like he was. In his case, he was finding out that he couldn't undo an action that an opportunistic seventh-grader had taken up as self-created moral crusade.

It's easy now to say that Mr. Quinn should have just let go of the tug-of-war rope and gone on with the class. It's easy now to say that I, or someone else from the class, should have said, "Let's sing." But, I think, he was just too conscientious and we were not too courageous.

I don't know how that episode ended officially; maybe it never was put into Mr. Quinn's Permanent Record. Mr. Quinn kept his job until the school closed a year later. And in the end, I remember him with affection and her with none.

Rock of ages; signs of the times

[July 26]   We've all driven by the historical marker on the southwest corner of Pawnee Rock. You know the place: That brown board in the narrow shade of a line of wind-bent elms and cedars.

Quick -- what does the marker say?

We could furrow our brows and dig into our personal knowledge of local history and answer in generalities like these: The Rock was used by Indians first to look for bison and other tribes, and then to look for Santa Fe Trail wagon trains. The Rock used to be higher before it was chiseled down so the stone could be used to build the town. And Kit Carson shot his mule there.

I'm glad I pulled over at the marker and took a photo, because my mind needed the refreshing.

Here is exactly what the signs say. (You can see images of the signs on today's homepage.)

The current sign says this:

A mile northeast is Pawnee Rock, a famous landmark on the Santa Fe Trail. Considered the mid-point of the long road between Missouri and New Mexico, Pawnee Rock as a symbol of challenges overcome. Many early travelers mentioned it in their journals, and many of them scratched their name into its soft surface. Here young Kit Carson, standing guard one dark night in 1826, is said to have shot his own mule, mistaking it for a Pawnee. Perhaps it was his unkind companions who named Pawnee Rock to commemorate the young man's blunder.

Freighters, soldiers, goldseekers, and emigrants admired the rock as they paraded by on the trail. In later years local settlers and railroad builders quarried the rock down to about half its original height. An overlook, monument, and historical signs now grace its reduced summit.

Erected by Kansas State Historical Society & Kansas Department of Transportation

The older marker described the same things in much more colorful language. Here's the version found on a postcard used in the 1940s:

One half mile northeast is Pawnee Rock, a famous landmark on the Santa Fe Trail. As a lookout and ambush rising from the prairies where millions of buffalo provided an easy living for hostile Indians, the Rock was one of the most dangerous points on the central plains. Pike, Webb, Gregg, Doniphan and other travelers mentioned it in their journals. Here 17-year-old Kit Carson, standing guard one night in 1826, shot his own mule, mistaking it for an Indian. Trappers, Soldiers, Goldseekers, Freighters and Emigrants carved their names in the stone. In later years railroad builders and pioneers stripped the top of the Rock and greatly reduced its elevation. It is now a State Park. A road leads to a Shelter House and Monument on the summit.

Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

In a comparison, these things stick out:

• The marker, although it's standing in the same place as before, now is described as being a half-mile farther from the Rock. As the bullet flies, the distance is actually eight-tenths of a mile. If you drove to the park and walked to the summit from the gate, you would cover 1.04 miles.
• The "local settlers" were once "pioneers."
• The explorers are named in the early sign. Now they're forgotten.
• The Kit Carson anecdote now is worded so it won't offend anyone except people with a sense of humor.
• The new marker ignores the bloodshed between Indians and the wagoneers. The bottom sign, written when the blood wasn't quite as faded, mentions the "lookout and ambush" of "hostile Indians" and says (in my favorite clause) "the Rock was one of the most dangerous points on the central plains." (I think it's wrong for the current marker to ignore the U.S. war against the Indians, but the old marker shouldn't have called the Indians "hostile" for protecting their homeland.)
• The Rock, according to the new sign, was "quarried." According to the old sign, it was "stripped," which is a much more accurate term.

It seems clear that while history itself doesn't change, those who write about it do.

Elsewhere in Kansas: Cheryl Unruh finds no thrills in Kansas' new license plate.

Peg Britton tells you where you can find wind turbines near Kanopolis, but don't expect her to be a gracious tour guide for these scenery-desecrating monuments.

The town of Bushton hopes to build a biodiesel plant to produce fuel from the seeds of plants such as soybeans and canola, according to Jerry Buxton's story in today's Great Bend Tribune.

One door to the past is closed

[July 25]   As a youngster, I walked through this door many times. It's the side entrance to what once was my dad's second carpentry shop, a garage rented out by one-time postmaster Roger Unruh, the Pawnee Rock Herald office, and possibly even a mortuary. It's owned by Ronald Mermis now.

Now the building is shuttered and locked, its two-kinds-of-sandstone alley wall barely standing up against the weight of history.

The building, at 406 Pawnee Avenue, must be one of the oldest in town, for it contains sandstone hewn from Pawnee Rock. Its architectural companions include the old opera house and the early 20th-century stone school that stood two blocks northwest of this site.

Even the 1970s when dad rented it from Roger and I was in there almost every week, the building was a mystery. It is spacious, when it's not filled with dusty junk, and there's room for almost every activity you'd want to do in Pawnee Rock. I liked sitting in the small office in the southwest corner. I could sense that a building of those dimensions must have had an interesting history, and I would have moved in if Dad had told me that it once had been the newspaper's office.

It's next to a building that in the first half of the 20th century was used as the school lunchroom. That red-and-yellow brick facade is still impressive, but it's a mask hiding a lot of decay.

The idea that these old buildings have ghosts is plausible.

Your own town: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to create a town you'd like to live in? Cheryl Unruh does just that in her column this week in the Emporia Gazette.

Fred Chapman: Fred Chapman, a carpenter who died Sunday, will be buried Friday in the Pawnee Rock Cemetery. His wife, Sandra, survives, as do five sons and three daughters. Four sons -- Fred II, Daniel, Raymond and Jeffery -- live in Pawnee Rock. (Obituary)

The home on the homepage

[July 24]   Joan Smith saw the early 20th-century photo of her and Virgil's former house on the homepage (now in the Gallery) and wrote:

"I was pleased to see the picture of the original house in Pawnee Rock. It had been remodeled long before we moved in to it. Charlie Mull did some major remodeling on the inside in the early '60s and made it much more convenient for us. Some thought we ruined it. I think the Norm Converses, who lived in it before us, thought so."

Brent Bowman: Joan was also kind enough to point out the typo in Brent Bowman's name in July 22's discussion of architects raised in Pawnee Rock. Now it's fixed.

Out of curiosity, I Googled Brent, who I knew by sight but not personally because he was eight years ahead of me in school. He's quite the big shot in Manhattan, where he teaches at K-State and has designed some nice-looking buildings.

Brent and his brother, Jim, are the sons of Dorothy and Edward (Sonny) Bowman. (Thanks, Joan.)

You remember their house -- the big one on the northwest corner of Centre Street and Bismark Avenue. Brent would have graduated from Pawnee Rock High School in 1967, I think. Here's his class photo from eighth grade, in 1963.

You can visit Brent's web page at K-State.

Speaking of homes: Lots of towns, especially it seems in central Kansas, have offered land to families willing to build a home and settle down. Here's the program put together in Ellsworth.

Could Pawnee Rock do something like this? Our hometown has nice lots in town with grown-up trees and utility service already in place.

The lots wouldn't have to be nibbled out of a milo field on the edge of town, as some of the places in other towns are.

Fred Chapman: Fred Chapman, who was 66 and lived at Cunnife Avenue and Rock Street, died Sunday at the hospital in Great Bend. Services are pending.

The singer in the car with me

[July 23]   DeWayne Davidson and I used to frequent the Great Bend Drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights when we were in high school.

We often parked toward the back, as we were cool guys in search of romance. While we dreamed out loud of driving off with girls, we ate a lot of popcorn, watched little kids play on the swings up front, and slouched our way through the double features.

Some of the movies were classics, in their own way. "Night Call Nurses" was symptomatic. The main attraction was what you'd expect -- a couple of attention-grabbing scenes in which women took off their upper clothing -- followed by 80 minutes of forgettable sex comedy or slashing. But there were real movies, too. We saw "Electra Glide in Blue," a cops-on-motorcycles movie starring Robert Blake; "The Man Called Horse," with Richard Harris; and "Lady Sings the Blues," with Diana Ross playing jazz singer Billie Holiday.

The soundtrack of "Lady Sings the Blues" never left my head although the movie itself did. The music was unlike anything I had heard on the area's radio stations or on friends' eight-tracks.

And that was because, well, you know, she was b-l-a-c-k. Unknowable by white boys, and unattainable.

Twenty years later, I was living south of Dallas and occasionally drove up through Oklahoma City and Wichita to Pawnee Rock to see Dad. It was a nine-hour trip, so I'd stop at a discount store on the way north and pick out a couple of casette tapes for entertainment. One winter morning I found a tape of Billie Holiday hits with a movie song that had stuck in my head: "God Bless the Child."

The sky was long dark by the time I was on Fourth Street Road heading for U.S. 281. It was a night to wallow in sentimentality, and there I was, held fast by Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday." It's a piece about a woman who considers taking her life because her man has died.

More worldly listeners already know the song's other name is "The Suicide Song" because, legend has it, people have been driven to suicide by the depth of the lyrics' sadness.

Suicide was not in my mind, however. The song's evocative phrasing -- "Little white flowers will never awaken you / Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you" -- had the opposite effect on a semi-romantic boy raised in a cemetery. When I listened to "Gloomy Sunday," the stars were brighter, the air was sharper, the reflective tape on highway signs was more intense.

The world was more alive because Billie Holiday opened her soul and sang to me, just the two of us rolling down the blacktop road toward a distant home.

Can this house be saved?

[July 22]   Leon Miller, the architect from Dallas, has in several e-mails expressed his disappointment with the way some of the houses in Pawnee Rock -- in particular, the one he grew up in -- have been abandoned.

After seeing my paragraphs last week about how the late Drake house wasn't alone in its need for a loving hand, he was moved to write again.

"Your comment today sure hit the nail on the head. One of the worst houses in the community is my former home on South Centre Street. I'm really surprised it hasn't been torched."

"When I was at the school reunion last Memorial Day I visited with some lady who described the former occupant as . . . [someone] who went by the name of 'Peek A Boo.' She said this woman had a car with those words painted on the outside of it.

"You mention about getting an architect to come in and draw up some plans to revitalize Pawnee Rock. You're probably unaware that Pawnee Rock was the spawning ground of three architects, which is a profession not very commonly known about.

"Those three include Brent Bowman, the son of Edward and Dorothy Bowman, who has a successful practice in Manhattan, Kansas; my cousin, Randall Norstrom, who is with Toll Brothers in Phoenix, Arizona; and myself, retired after practicing 40 years in Dallas, Texas."

Below is Leon Miller's childhood home, on South Centre Street next to Chet Spreier's old place and across from the site of the former American Legion hall. When I photographed it in 2005, I was struck by how far removed the house was from the neat and orderly place it had been in the 1970s. Still, if you clean out the cluttered yard, the house has a pleasing shape with the covered porch and the sunset-catching window.

But the question is: If it can be saved, will it be?

Thomas Peschka: Thomas Peschka of Great Bend, who married Sherry Crosby in 1985, has died. He'll be buried Monday afternoon in the Pawnee Rock Cemetery. (Obituary, July 22)

A photo I like: No. 44

[July 21]   This stretch of road -- known by outsiders as SW 60 Road -- just south of the Pawnee Rock Cemetery is a fine place for catching your breath or having it taken away. The ridge line just east of here is at 2,000 feet, making it the place to be when looking for tornadoes and sunrises, sunsets and stars.

Bicycle riders know that this flat spot is midway between the top of the long hill leading up from town and the salt plant, where the hills begin again. Now it's a raceway for four-wheelers too. If you slow down in the summer, the mosquitos will find you.

Other memories come with this road. Many of us have followed the black coach of sorrow into the cemetery.

These few hundred yards are generally a peaceful place where the wind is a steady companion and the air carries the scent of the dryland fields.

Improvements to Pawnee Rock

In case you've forgotten, here's what the old steel elevator looked like less than a year ago.

[July 20]   The twin bins of the new Farmers Grain elevator have been erected and await finishing, as you see on our homepage. Demolition work on the old elevator started in February. You'll find photos of the work in progress in the most recent pages of the photo gallery.

Empty lot at Flora and Rock: The old Drake house is finally gone, as you see in this photo, which Gary Trotnic sent yesterday.

I'm sorry to say it, but there are other places in town as well that ought to be removed if they're not going to be renovated.

I'd rather see them renovated, because they're a part of my history as well. I know, however, that it's expensive. Still, if the property is even moderately cared for and if the lawn is maintained, maybe the owner or landlord can persuade someone from Larned or Great Bend to buy the place and do the rest.

Pawnee Rock has an interesting history -- this whole PawneeRock.org site is built on our history -- but our hometown could use fresh blood too.

Wouldn't it be great if someone bought an early 1900s house, restored it to its classy look, and put in a restaurant or, say, an architect's office?

Check out eBay's listings of real estate in rural Kansas to get an idea of possibilities. If the houses aren't improved or sold, they're just going to fall down and the owner's going to look bad. I don't think anyone wants that.

Interested in Pawnee Rock: Occasionally I get e-mails from non-Pawnee Rockers looking for tips on real estate or jobs or placement as shoot-'em-entertainers for our next rodeo.

But the following note doesn't fit any of those categories.

If you can help Ms. Dodd, please do. It's not every day you get to meet someone from hurricane country who is from the hometown of Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre.

By the way, I checked and there really is a Regina Dodd in Kiln and the address is real, according to maps.google.com.

I AM HOSTING A LADIES PRAYER FELLOWSHIP DINNER IN JAN 2008 AND THE THEME IS ROAD TRIP AND WE ARE FOCUSING IT ON VACATIONING AROUND THE WORLD. SO I AM CONTACTING YOU IN HOPES OF GATHERING MAPS AND BROCHURES FROM YOUR CITY FOR A DISPLAY AND SOME SMALL PROMOTIONAL ITEMS FOR PRIZES. ANYTHING YOU CAN DO WILL BE A BLESSING. THIS IS A GREAT WAY FOR THE LADIES TO SEE WHAT YOU OFFER FOR FAMILY VACATIONS. THANKYOU AND GOD BLESS.

REGINA DODD
3600 ROAD 528
KILN, MS 39556

Ms. Dodd's e-mail address is Ginakiln @ aol.com (if you e-mail her, close up the spaces around the "at" sign).

More about the Maupins

[July 19]   Earlier in the week, I asked for more information about the Maupin family, which owned the drugstore in downtown Pawnee Rock in the middle of the 20th century. Leon Miller had written a few humorous paragraphs about Mr. Maupin and a 10-cent comic book.

Joan Smith, now in Arizona, thought back to the old days:

I read Leon Miller's letter with glee.

Ruth Maupin was in my high school class. I think she still lives in Hugoton, KS. She had an older sister named Jackie, and I don't think she is living. Maupins lived on Houck Street directly across the street from John Howertons. It was a white two-story house on the corner, a block from the highway.

I sent Joan a photo of the house I thought she was talking about. It sits at the southwest corner of the intersection of Houck Street and Flora Avenue.

Joan responded:

Now that I see the picture of the Clawson house, I'm not sure. It doesn't look the same. Earl Allen Schmidt, who was in our class, might have better information. Just talked to Glendora Schmidt, and she seemed to think the Clawson house was the one.

George and Fannie Vassar owned the drugstore before Tutaks. We seem to think Vassars bought it from Maupins but can't confirm that either. I think it closed when Stan owned it.

I do remember the fountain early on, because my parents used to travel from California to Kansas every harvest. We used to go to Pawnee Rock to the drugstore for fountain treats when I was a small child. To this day I can still remember the wonderful fountain smells when we walked in the door -- a great memory. This doesn't give you a whole lot of information, but it's all this old mind can remember! Joan

You can see Joan Spreier Smith at the drugstore on gallery page 6, and Stan Tutak is serving customers on gallery page 9 in the 1950s.

Are you free?

[July 18]   It wasn't until this past week that I saw the 1969 movie "Easy Rider."

The low-budget movie -- as probably everybody but me knew because I'm the last grownup to see it -- is about drugs and the search for freedom while driving a motorcycle to New Orleans. It's a cooler movie than, say, 1971's "Billy Jack," which contained a lot more shooting and hating your neighbor.

One scene in "Easy Rider" in particular resonated with me because I saw a bit of myself and a bit of old Pawnee Rock too.

Think back: We were taught young to keep a sharp eye on long-hairs who came through town, because they were all potheads and thieves. They purposely chose to look different from us and to question things we believed, so they were bad. It wasn't just Pawnee Rock, was it? Wasn't it that way all over America?

The movie scene comes in a backwoods cafe in Louisiana, where the travelers seat themselves in front of some highly interested girls and a hostile gallery of local men. George Hanson (the lush lawyer played by Jack Nicholson) and Billy (the hairy hippie played by Dodge City native Dennis Hopper) speak these lines:

George Hanson: You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it.

Billy: Man, everybody got chicken, that's what happened. Hey, we can't even get into like, a second-rate hotel, I mean, a second-rate motel, you dig? They think we're gonna cut their throat or somethin'. They're scared, man.

George Hanson: They're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent to 'em.

Billy: Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.

George Hanson: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.

Billy: What the hell is wrong with freedom? That's what it's all about.

George Hanson: Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what's it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Billy: Well, it don't make 'em runnin' scared.

George Hanson: No, it makes 'em dangerous.

Road trip: When is it OK for a booster of Kansas to admit she likes another state too?

Cheryl Unruh, the doyenne of FlyoverPeople.net, is unabashedly in favor of living in Kansas and Emporia in particular, yet she admits her fondness for the bumpy state to the west.

Everybody needs a place where we can imagine ourselves.

The 10-cent financial lesson

[July 17]   My piece yesterday on kids and comics struck a memory nerve for Leon Miller, who was born in the Depression and grew up in Pawnee Rock. He wrote:

When I was maybe 7 or 8 the drugstore in town was known as Maupin's Drug Store. It had the soda fountain, sundries section, pharmacy section plus the comic book stand. While I was in the store one morning, I was perusing the latest edition of Ace Comics, with the Katzenjammer Kids, when Mr. Maupin came up to me and said "Why don't you buy that?"

I replied, "I don't have any money." To which he answered, "Then I'll just let you charge it!"

I asked, "What do you mean?" He told me that I could take the magazine and when my dad came in he would have him pay for it (It cost $0.10 at the time). So I said, "OK!" and delightfully took my "purchase" home to read. When I came in the door my mother asked me where I got the magazine. I told her at the drugstore. She asked where I got the money to pay for it and I told her I "charged it."

She was FURIOUS with the answer and grabbed me by my ear, turned me around and marched me back out the door with the instructions to take the magazine back to the drugstore and NEVER pull a stunt like that again!

It was a lesson well learned and a funny one that I see very little of today. Needless to say, I've never had to file bankruptcy over credit card debt.

I wrote back, asking Leon whether he knew where the Maupin family lived and whether he thought they were related to the Maupin family of Lawrence, which created the large Maupintour travel company.

I don't remember where the Maupins lived. I don't think there was any connection between them and the Lawrence travel agency. I believe the man who owned the drugstore was near my parents age at the time, which would have put him well over 100 if he were still living today. I think they did have children but none were in my age group. In fact, I think he closed the store sometime after World War II and moved away from Pawnee Rock.

Does anybody else remember the Maupins or have a photo of the family?

Letting history pay off

[July 16]   Gary Trotnic has gotten what looks like a pretty good price for the old Santa Fe Trail sign he bought at an estate sale in Ellinwood and sold this past week on eBay.

After seeing that happy ending, I want to hit a few estate sales myself.

Bookshelves for kids like me

My handiwork, created nearly 40 years ago, now belongs to my sons.

[July 15]   It's a lucky man who has a memento that he and his dad worked on when he was a child.

My dad was the carpentry leader of the Pawnee Rockets 4-H Club. Every week or so in the winter, a bunch of us boys (once or twice a girl, I think) would gather in the evening at Dad's shop downtown and work on our projects.

Some kids made windowstops, a simple piece of pine cut at different heights and put into an open window. Others made elaborate cabinets. My projects were in the middle and just right for a preteen: a couple of bookshelves and a toolbox.

There was the cutting and sanding, and then more sanding. There was fastening, with glue and nails or screws. There was even more sanding, then finishing with paint or varnish. Over my shoulder, watching how I sanded and always wanting more, was Dad.

My toolbox has come with me everywhere since I left Pawnee Rock. It sits now in the garage downstairs, still holding the Ranger hand saw, the fiberglass-handled hammer, and the plane I used in 4-H.

The two small bookshelves -- a base into which I glued two rounded pieces of wood -- belong now to my sons and hold their books. I was about the boys' age when I made the bookshelves.

I was never the woodworking prodigy my dad hoped for. He looked at a pile of lumber and saw what it could be; I'm better at doing that with words. But I still have the tools. My wife uses them. She's the carpenter around here -- the floor-to-ceiling bookcase builder, the porch builder, the furniture refinisher. The only real thing I've made in 20 years is a canoe.

But I do have the toolbox and the bookshelves, and three 4-H fair carpentry ribbons.

Going to the county fair was the highlight of summer. When our club was affiliated with Barton County, the fair was at the old fairgrounds at the golf course between Great Bend and Hoisington.

The best day to go look at exhibits and livestock was the day of the chicken barbecue. The long pits stretched out along the eastern side of the grounds, next to the highway ditch. We stood in line, got our half-chicken and drink, and walked our supper back to the car to eat. Just in case the chicken wasn't savory enough, a little packet of salt was included with the plastic utensils, but the most exotic item was the moist towelette that came in the foil envelope.

Today marks the 50th time the birds are being barbecued, according to Pam Martin's story (421KB pdf) published Friday in the Great Bend Tribune (it quotes Pawnee Rock's own Berny Unruh, the county extension agent). I wish I were there.

A photo I like: No. 43

[July 14]   Great Bend's first Wal-Mart glowed at night in 1972 or 1973, across from the Apco gas station. (I think it sat along West 10th Street.) The store was fairly small, compared with the global monster's outlet now, and it was similar to Gibson's and TG&Y. It was a place to get a few things cheap; there were still lots of other stores where you could buy good fishing tackle or clothes or school supplies.

I always liked driving through Great Bend on rainy nights, probably because the reflections in the streets made the city seem alive. The night pulsed with possibilities, and the interior of my car twanged with rock 'n' roll or country.

This I believe

[Friday the 13th]   When it comes to superstitions, you either believe or you don't. Do you believe it's unlucky to let a black cat cross your path? Would you stay in a hotel room on the 13th floor? Will you change your habits today because it's Friday the 13th?

Well, I don't believe in those superstitions either. I know there's nothing to them.

Are you afraid to whistle past the graveyard? I dug graves and cut grass in the Pawnee Rock cemetery, and I whistled up a storm on that windy hill for many years before I heard you weren't supposed to do that. It's possible, of course, that I just haven't realized that I had a bit of subsequent bad luck; maybe I'd be a millionaire living in Hawaii if I had gone tuneless. Furthermore, perhaps that's not the kind of luck involved with cemeteries.

Ignorance is one of the concerns with superstitions. If you don't know about them ahead of time, are you still liable or do you live in a state of grace?

Sometimes the real world will let you know how graceful you are. If you walk clumsily under a ladder you face a real danger of being unlucky whether you know the rule or not. As Dad told me more than once (I was a slow learner), "The paint's going to fall on you" or "Watch out that my hammer doesn't hit you."

One of the first superstitions I learned from my grade-school classmates had to do with cracks in the sidewalk. This superstition was different from most because if you violated it, someone else could get hurt.

There's not a crack on Santa Fe Avenue's sidewalks that bears my footprint. I never took a chance that I'd break my mother's back.

You just never know.

Good kids step over the cracks.

Carefree days of childhood

[July 12]   Last evening I was walking the dog on one of the back trails in our neighborhood and came across a young boy, maybe in second grade, who was sitting on a cherry-red, single-speed bike.

He waited on a little rise for his mom, who was walking their family husky, to catch up. She examined his back tire and gave him a pat.

Ah, I thought, now that's a happy summertime life. New bike, happy boy, nice doggy. Reminds me of my carefree days of scooting around Pawnee Rock, every week getting to go a little farther until I had the run of the town's bumpy sidewalks and sandy streets.

Wouldn't it be nice to be a kid again, I thought.

The young fellow pulled his legs up onto the pedals and rolled toward me, his moon-pie face gleaming. His mom followed, laughing gently as she nodded hello. It was more than a how-are-you sound; it was a happy-for-my kid laugh.

She wore a gray sweatshirt from a Ronald McDonald House, and it wasn't until I was down the trail that I realized the boy's face hadn't been fat, but swollen.

My young days were generally blissful, and I hope yours were too. Amid our reveries, though, it does us good to remember that sometimes a carefree childhood happens a little bit at a time.

We hear what we need to hear

[July 11]   Warren, a part-time co-worker, jumped to his feet. "Somebody call my name?" he asked loudly.

Ears-deep in editing a story, Warren had overheard a snippet of conversation between two other workers 20 feet away.

No one answered. Warren looked around, and I let him stand there for a moment.

"He said 'Good morning,'" I told Warren.

"I thought somebody said 'Warren,'" Warren said, still looking not sure that he hadn't.

It has happened to all of us, getting jerked out of our isolated realms when our ears pick up something that sounds like our name. I suppose it's a survival instinct, honed in grade school classes where Mrs. Wilhite's voice was likely to interrupt a daydream.

The incident reminded me of a story another teacher told once. I'm pretty sure it was Shiela Sutton Schmidt, but I'm not sure whether it was told at Pawnee Rock Grade School or in a Sunday school class at the Mennonite church.

"A husband and wife were steady churchgoers, but the husband always fell asleep during the service. It embarrassed the wife terribly.

"One Sunday morning, in the middle of the sermon, the husband jumped up and said, 'Amen!'

"The sanctuary fell quiet. Everyone else was still seated, except for the preacher, who was gripping the pulpit. All eyes were on the husband, who looked around, turned red, and sat down in a daze.

"On the way home, his wife told him the secret. While he was sleeping through the sermon, she had nudged him and whispered urgently: 'Stand up! We're praying!'"

This tale has the ring of truth, like an anecdote in Reader's Digest. Anyone who has stayed up a little too long on Saturday night or who likes to rest like a lamb on a Sunday morning in July, even on those hard pews, knows how it could happen. We're always at the mercy of our more attentive spouses.

All aboard! In her column this week in the Emporia Gazette, Cheryl Unruh remembers the good and bad parts of a Lions Club train trip from Pawnee Rock to Dodge City.

Dental followup: Leon Miller, born in the 1930s, writes in answer to my request for information about dental care in our hometown: "I vaguely remember my relatives talking about a dentist in Pawnee Rock, but that would have been long before I came along. The first dentist I went to was a Dr. Mitchell in Great Bend."

The dentist's friend

[July 10]   I was about 20 and working as a reporter for the Larned paper when I met the commercial photographer who had set up shop in the former dentist's office just west of the Tiller and Toiler.

He gave me a tour of his studio, capped off by a private showing of portraits of his wife. But the thing I remember most viscerally was stepping into the first room behind the receptionist's cubbyhole.

That was the room where I first lost a tooth to the pliers of a dentist.

Even though that was a baby tooth, probably a molar, it haunted me so much that I got the shivers. I don't think it was the wrenching that stuck with me so much as it was the needle.

You know the needle -- that stainless steel implement that's so big the dentist needs a thumb hole on the plunger to get a grip strong enough to push all that painkiller into your jaw. The needle that's so big that dentists deaden the gum before shooting you up.

Sometime during my high school years, our family switched to Dr. John Gutschenritter, who had an office just north of 156 near the futuristic Northside Grade School on the west side of Larned. Despite being a pleasant fellow with nice hair, he had a name out of darkest Germany and he had needles too.

He used them several times before breaking apart my wisdom teeth: two teeth the day before Thanksgiving, and two the day before Christmas Eve. (Under the influence of Novocain and laughing gas, I flirted with the dental assistant. What an eloquent yet slobbering impression I must have made. I blush to this day.)

Yesterday was Dentist Day, when my early morning hours were set aside for scraping, X-rays, and general prodding. My dentist has a new toy: a digital camera that presents pictures of your teeth on a monitor attached to the Dentist Machine of Drills and Fear. High on the wall is a TV to entertain patients during long visits. The dentist has hired nice people -- my hygienist was 30 minutes late, so they gave me gift certificates for $10 worth of bread at a bakery. It's a new world compared to the 1970s.

And yet . . . on the counter behind the dentist was a box of steel hypodermics, poised in a row. I mentioned those to the assistant, who pulled a six-incher with a needle out of the box and caressed it. "Yours," she said, "would be a 30-gauge."

Hometown dentistry: Pawnee Rock had a dentist in the early days, according to advertisements in the Pawnee Rock Herald of the 1910s and 1920s. Possibly there was a dentist later as well. But business wasn't very steady, and soon Pawnee Rockers were trundling their toothaches to dentists in Larned and Great Bend.

If you remember a Pawnee Rock dentist, please let us know who it was and where the office was. What was it like going to the dentist then?

Around town, around Kansas

[July 9]   Gary Trotnic has decided to sell the expensive oval Santa Fe Trail sign he bought this past weekend at an estate sale in Ellinwood. Keep an eye on Gary's page on eBay.

It turns out that the signs, with artwork by Irvin Shope, have a lot of history. Larry and Carolyn Mix of the Santa Fe Trail Research Site have a long page that's full of information.

A larger photo of the sign is in the photo gallery, page 31.

Chicken dinner: The pan-fried chicken we grew up on far surpasses the deep-fried chicken found at many restaurants, writes our friend Peg Britton of Ellsworth. Peg praises the time-honored way of cooking and lays into the Brookville Hotel restaurant in Abilene, which apparently isn't faithful to the way the frying used to be -- and ought to be -- done.

The chicken-dinner restaurant, which earned its fame in Brookville before being closed and shuffled east to be reborn closer to the interstate, is by virtue of its age listed as a candidate for the 8 Wonders of Kansas, a promotion run by the Kansas Sampler Foundation. You can vote.

Different moralities: Leon Miller, who grew up on South Centre Street, read Sunday's piece about kids' absolute morality. He remembered his dad, Cobb, enjoying his bourbon at the American Legion Hall across from their home, although his mother "was a teetotaling Methodist."

As it did for me, the end of high school proved a memorable time for Leon, who remains a light drinker: "The only time I can recall getting drunk was the night before our senior high school trip to Wichita in 1951."

He adds: "The one thing that stood out in my high school social life was the Mennonites did not believe in dancing so they kept one of their members on the school board to prohibit dancing never at any Pawnee Rock High School sponsored event, i.e., senior prom or school dances of any sort. Maybe that changed in the '60s and '70s."

Cal "Scooter" Wiebe, who lived down the hall from me at KU and now is a respectable lawyer in Wichita and still enjoys a beer at home, wrote to ask "why would Budweiser, Jack Daniels, or any alcohol company be permitted to sponsor a driving event, even if it were only a 'parallel parking rodeo'?"

Kansas on the world map: You've often wondered how Kansas' economy and population measure up internationally, haven't you. Strange Maps has the answer to those questions and others you and I might never have considered. A lot of the good maps are down that page quite a ways.

Rules to live by, for now

[July 8]   Clint Bowyer -- the only NASCAR driver that we know of who might have a link (albeit secondhand) to Pawnee Rock -- ran a good race yesterday at Daytona. As you might expect from a fellow driving the 07 car on 07/07/07, he finished 7th.

He did lead the race for quite a while and until the closing laps had a good chance to win. Because NASCAR is all about advertising, the race announcers on TV frequently mentioned Bowyer and his sponsor: Jack Daniels, the maker of whiskey.

And every time "the Jack Daniels car" was spoken, my son Sam would say "beep" to block it out. Sam and Nik do that with the alcohol-related cars: Dale Earnhart Jr.'s Budweiser car, Kurt Busch's Miller Lite car, and David Stremme's Coors Light car.

The "beeps" come from a good upbringing and from believing that alcohol is bad for you. As earnest as he can be, Sam says: "It's inappropriate."

I used to be a moral absolutist, too.

My Mennonite/Pawnee Rock morality helped me avoid tough decisions in the face of teenage peer pressure. I would say, "I don't want any, but you go ahead."

I didn't drink, I didn't smoke, I didn't do drugs, and I didn't do that other thing all teenage boys dream of doing. Well, I did drink a couple of times when I was in high school, but that was with my church group.

In the first three months after I graduated from high school, however, my pent-up curiosity ran headlong into adulthood. The first semester of college was even more of an adventure.

To this day, though, I've neither smoked nor used any drugs that would interest a police officer. But I have to wonder: At what point do we lose our moral rigidity?

Do we come to the conclusion that our original belief was wrong? Wine, celebrated in the Bible and Western culture, turns out to be good for us in moderation. Or do we simply decide that being absolutely against that one thing just isn't worth the hassle? Is it a decision to loosen up, or more of a convenient slide? Does rational thought overwhelm belief?

Someday my sons will have a Budweiser or a taste of Jeff Gordon Merlot or a sip of whiskey. Maybe they'll even visit the Jack Daniels distillery and think back to Clint Bowyer and his 2007 racing season, laughing at themselves for "beeping" out the advertisers' names.

But for now, they have their absolute morality about drinking. That rigidity lets them put aside one distraction while they work out the other issues of growing up, and I'm absolutely in favor of that.

A photo I like: No. 42

[July 7]   This gnarled cottonwood was in a shelterbelt north of Pawnee Rock, living the well-watered life near a windmill. Even in this place, secluded to a great degree from the wind, a twist grew in a branch.

I've always liked shelterbelts, perhaps because it's easy to gravitate to the place that's different from the pastures and tilled land. Even when they don't have a windmill and stock tank, these rows of hardy trees protect colonies of rabbits, birds, flowers, and daydreaming boys.

One step forward or back?

[July 6]   Do you know that feeling that comes from standing on a cliff at the Rock, or up on the pavilion when you scoot under the pipes and stand on the edge of the concrete pad?

You're afraid you might fall.

Well, think it about it. Aren't you really afraid you might jump?

We all have that perverse side, I suspect, and I mean "perverse" in the sense of doing what we know would be harmful to ourselves.

Does a Barton County farmer standing next to his tractor's PTO ever think about what it would be like to just once touch the spinning shaft? When no one's watching, does the farmer dare himself to put his finger close?

Think about the dares we give ourselves, or the bad ideas we talk ourselves into because they're faster than doing something the right way. The farmer might stick his hand in the auger, or the kid with the lawn mower might think that he could mow this yard barefoot, or the cook might lay her knife edge-up on the counter.

We do these things willingly. We drive too fast under bad conditions. We chase foul balls into the fence. We drink too much, and after the first time for any of these things there's no excuse for not expecting trouble.

Sometimes the penalty is embarrassment. The story that haunted a generation of Pawnee Rock kids was of a boy who applied a vacuum cleaner to himself and had to be treated at the hospital. Sometimes the penalty is severe. This past week, a woman in another state looked down into a live fireworks tube to see why it hadn't shot into the sky.

Maybe the general instinct for survival is fading. When you get your theory of reality from TV and indoor living, you don't know how to attack life. Or how life can attack you. And that's when the pile of rocks at the bottom of the cliff looks like a bed of pillows.

Cheryl Chapman, a friend who grew up a few decades ago in the Piney Woods of East Texas, was remarking this week about how her playmates had come through childhood relatively unscathed by their adventures in trees and on horses. She thinks that anymore, people just don't have real-world experience. "It's all up here," she said, tapping her head.

Standing on our personal cliffs, we challenge our common sense and sanity. We get used to the thrill and want more. That's what helps humanity grow, and that's what helps humanity prune itself.

The trick is to step back when the perverse urge gets too strong, and it will. We're all lucky to still be here.

McDonald's reopens in Great Bend

The new look of McDonald's in Great Bend. Gary Trotnic made this photo.

[July 5]   A few Pawnee Rock kids have worked at the Great Bend McDonald's restaurant, and I imagine that everyone in town has eaten there. But the McDonald's of the 1970s is gone. After extensive remodeling, it will be replaced this very morning by the new-look restaurant.

Gary Trotnic sent us this photo of the new place, which is on the same site on 10th Street at McKinley, hard by the railroad spur.

The first 100 customers inside or through the double drive-through will get a chance to supersize themselves. They'll receive a free "extra value meal" every week for the rest of the year, Gary wrote. All this week, the price of hamburgers, cheeseburgers, sundaes, and sausage and biscuits will be 74 cents, to reflect the fact that the store opened in 1974.

Bon appetit!

City fills jobs: Nancy Woodrow has been hired as the part-time maintenance person and city clerk Kathy Bohn will also assume the duties of the city treasurer, Gary writes. These hirings were made at Monday night's city council meeting.

Life off the highway

Beeler is nestled in the Walnut Creek valley west of Ness City. (Margaret Unruh photo)

[July 4]   Some towns are just too easy to drive past.

It's not that way for Pawnee Rock, of course, because our hometown has a geological marvel that has become a state park.

But think of towns just off the road, places that haven't had much going for them for a hundred years and where the historical marker, if there is one, is a quarter-mile from town. The towns and their elevators had to be laid out next to the railroad tracks; the road builders, who came later, sometimes thought it was more important to have a straight road than a useful road. Thus, K-96.

When you think of towns hidden in plain sight, you might think of Seward, which isn't quite on the way to anywhere, or Dillwyn. To the northwest, there's Antonino, south of Hays, and Beeler, a grain elevator surrounded by old houses and elms a few miles west of Ness City and 90-minute drive from Pawnee Rock.

Beeler, born in 1887, has refused to die despite having no surviving businesses in the town proper other than the farmers' co-op, the post office, and a church. Maybe it's because of the town's isolation that its surviving members -- the zip code's median age is 54 -- hang together so well.

I have a Biking Across Kansas friend, Linda Dolsberry, who, when BAK stopped in Beeler last month, asked some of the fellows lounging on the community center's grounds what the town's population is. One of them started counting, ticking off names on his fingers. He reached 14.

And it's a fair guess that all of them turned out to feed and chat with our 800 bikers. The women ran the kitchen, and the men who weren't sitting inside the community center eating sloppy joes sat outside in folding wooden chairs and discussed crops and sports and us bikers. The fire trucks had been pulled out of the building, lined up outside with the sensible sedans and high-horsepower pickups.

The community center had once been the town's school, but countywide consolidation had closed it. Yet it was kept up, and Beelerites let us wander the hallways and admire the class photos hanging on the walls.

I know Beeler sounds like a bit of rustic heaven, but life can't be all that easy out here on the dry line. It's 16 miles into the sunrise on K-96 to Ness City for the nearest doctor and videos and groceries. Even the Kansas state library website, Blue Skyways, offers only a half-year endorsement of this town's placement on the plains: "The location in the valley of the south fork of Walnut Creek is beautiful when the prairies are green."

And still Beeler refuses to disappear into the history of the Walnut valley. It's too all-American to give up and too tough to be blown away.

Some towns are just too easy to drive past. I do it all the time. But wouldn't it be something if we left home a few minutes earlier on our next trip and used that time to pull off into some town we haven't visited in 10 years.

Mail yourself a postcard from there. Pose for a photo. Make Seward, or Antonino, or Beeler a part of your history too.

Beeler's original state historical marker, in honor of George Washington Carver, "the foremost genius of his race." Don Ross sent this photo from his collection.

The 2007 "Homestead of a Genius" historical marker, which has different wording. (Margaret Unruh photo)

Happy Fourth of July: I trust you still have all your fingers and the roof hasn't been ignited by bottle rockets. But here you are -- no mail, summer reruns, and it's just plain hot. Thank goodness you have the Internet, eh?

PawneeRock.org is proud to provide these holiday amusements:

• Cheryl Unruh, the voice of Emporia, starts her column near Pawnee Rock and goes to dinner in Reading in this week's Emporia Gazette: "No Man Is an Island."
• Feeling a little morbid? Calculate what your body is worth.
• For those who have some kids to amaze or who want to win a bet at work: Cut a hole in a 3x5 card you can step through.

Flash memories

Born on the Fourth of July: A child's first snake grows in a Pawnee Rock yard.

[July 3]   The best night of summer childhoods is July 4. All across western Kansas, families lay out a blanket at the stadium in the county seat and sit back to watch the fireworks leave their spidery tracks in the darkening sky.

That's the holiday dessert, a gift to the youngsters who have spent a week praticing their own demolition and aerial extravaganzas.

Like every other kid, or at least every other boy, I did my part to keep the fireworks industry alive in the 1960s and 1970s. I'd take my allowance down to the stand along the highway and convert it into Black Cats and bottle rockets and punks, and into sparklers if Mom said I had to.

I tired quickly of polite explosions and learned from friends how to twist two or three fuses together to extend the milliseconds of fun. It was a cheap way to have multiple blasts without shooting up a whole 16-pack at once. I suppose we also liked the added risk of having two or three blow up in our fingers at once.

Luck always stood by my side; I think I got numb fingers only once from a too-close explosion of a thrown firecracker. Only once? Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough. Some kids seemed to have it happen every year.

I blew up anthills, piles of driveway gravel with sticks standing in them (influenced by Vietnam War footage, I imagine), tin cans, and once even a hapless toad behind the Christian Church, for which I am still sorry. Some of the neighbor kids were simply dangerous to be around. They dropped M-80s into the mailbox outside the post office and flushed cherry bombs in public plumbing. The Tutak boys, our neighbors, stood in front of their house and tossed M-80s into a puddle across the street, back when Santa Fe Avenue was dirt and sand, and enormous depth-charge explosions raised the water to the limbs of the elm above.

I'm not a saint: I sold fireworks in Larned. Especially back in the days when it was freshly legal to import them from the People's Republic of China, firecrackers cost almost nothing wholesale and we sold them for a markup of hundreds of percent. It sounds like a ripoff, and maybe it was, but the buyers got what they wanted: things that sparkled and exploded. I remain amazed that it was so easy to suck money out of the pockets of kids -- who were just like me -- and their parents.

Still, ask any kid -- ask yourself -- what comes to mind about summer. I bet fireworks and the Fourth will be right up there.

Maybe your mind goes to back lighting fuses in your yard, or to watching your cousins ignite fountains and snakes at your grandparents' farm, or to the shows in Memorial Stadium in Larned. You still know the smell of burning punk, your legs remember that moment when you wanted to run but weren't sure the fuse was lit, and your fingers feel the hot wire of the sparkler.

You remember the percussive punch of the big fireworks, the crackle of a thousand firecrackers ignited on a string.

Wednesday night's firecrackers and pyrotechnics will be gone in a flash. But that's not really the point, is it? We'll be outdoors with our faces turned to the stars because the young ones like the show and the rest of us remember what it was like the first summer we lit a firecracker.

Great Bend fireworks: The Great Bend fireworks show, which is billed as the largest in Kansas, begins at 10:15 Wednesday night at the expo grounds near the airport.

The gate opens at 6 p.m., and the concession stand opens at 7:30. The show is expected to last 20 minutes and the fireworks will be set to patriotic music, according to Chuck Smith's story in Tuesday's Great Bend Tribune.

Admission is free.

Sand-hill plums, the joy of summer

[July 2]   Doesn't Virgil Smith's homepage photo of sand-hill plums make your mouth water? I bet you can imagine driving that sandy road by the river, parking sort of in the ditch, and walking up to the bush to pick them.

Most of the plums go in your bucket, but the ripe ones get a taste test, because you deserve a reward for standing there in the stickers and flies, and it's just a little warm even so late in the day. If you listen carefully, you might even hear the Herefords lowing in the pasture just over the rise.

Virgil grew up on a farm north of Pawnee Rock, and his family was one of many that toured the back roads along the river when the plums ripened. Here's Virgil's story:

"When I was growing up, there were many such bushes growing along the road sides and field edges, in the sandy soil south of the river. People seemed to regard them as a food source to be used. Later, they were regarded as a nuisance and torn out to make farming and road maintenance more efficient. When the berries turn red, my parents, siblings and I would go out and pick them into recycled syrup buckets (pancakes were a breakfast staple) and pour them into a fruit basket to take home.

"There my mother would boil them on the wood-burning stove, adding sugar and whatever else that was needed to make it into jams and jellies. She would mash it through a colander to remove the seeds. It would then be poured into various shaped jars that all had a standard opening so that they could be sealed with a red rubber Mason Jar ring and a lid. After they had cooled, melted paraffin would be poured on the top of the jams to make a seal and the lids would be screwed on.

"They would be taken down into the cellar to be placed on shelves alongside other jars of vegetables and fruits and sometimes, meats. In the fall the potatoes and onions in the garden would be dug and stored there in gunny sacks."

Hometown link to NASCAR: Pawnee Rock has a connection of sorts with the NASCAR Pepsi 400 race this Saturday at Daytona. My Sister the Writer, Cheryl, sent a link to an Emporia Gazette story about the F-15C pilot who'll lead the patriotic flyover before the race. The pilot grew up in Emporia.

The race will include Emporia's Clint Bowyer, an up-and-coming driver. For the occasion, the Emporia city council issued a proclamation identifying July 7, 2007, in his honor: 070707 Day, because he drives the 07 car and because it'll be 07/07 on the calendar.

But to get back to the point: Cheryl also told me that Debbie Unruh James, daughter of the Unruh Automotive chain family and the mother of the pilot, mentioned once that she has a Pawnee Rock connection.

So, there's Pawnee Rock's link to the race. Salute Air Force Capt. Chad James, and cheer for Clint Bowyer.

Harvesting memories

[July 1]   Here it is July 1, and already we're half done with 2007. To my surprise, I've accomplished about half of what I had planned for this year.

Harvesting memories: Leon Miller, who has written about his job moving wheat from Dundee to the old air base and about selling hamburgers, now tells what it was like to work as a harvest field hand near Pawnee Rock. His dad, Cobb, was the Mobil fuel distributor and did business with many of the farmers.

That was a beautiful picture of the combine in the wheat fields today. [Gary Trotnic's photo is now in the gallery.] It reminded me of my first experience in the wheat harvest in the late 1940s.

I was about 14 or 15, and got my first job driving a steel lug McCormick-Deering tractor pulling a Gleaner-Baldwin combine for a fellow named Jess Franklin, who had a couple of quarters a few miles west of town and needed help in the harvest. Most of the farmers had sons to help them on the farm but Jess only had two young daughters, whom I don't believe were even school age at the time.

Mr. Franklin was a customer of my Dad and I'll have to give Cobb credit for getting me the job.

I packed a bag and moved in with the family for the two weeks of harvest. We would start the day at the crack of dawn, have breakfast and head to the fields where the wheat was ripe for cutting. I would be on the tractor and Jess would be on the combine. He was putting a lot of faith and trust in me as I hadn't driven a tractor before. The critical part of my job was driving a straight line in the fields, making sure I didn't overlap the swath or miss a strip of grain.

We would break for lunch, go to the house and grab a bite then return to the fields for an afternoon of harvesting. About 4:00 p.m. it would be getting pretty hot and the chaff and dust from the operation would be covering my back. At quitting time, when it was almost dark, we would stop the tractor and head back to the house where Mrs. [Glenda] Franklin would have a hot meal ready for us on the table.

First, though, I would have to get a shower, which was a contraption built outside the house with a barrel of water sitting on top of a frame and a canvas enclosure around it for privacy. I would be totally caked in dirt and dust so had to make myself respectable before showing up at the dinner table. After the meal I would go straight to bed as I was totally exhausted from the day's work. But again, at the crack of dawn we were up repeating what we had done the day before.

This operation lasted about two weeks as we harvested as much wheat during this time as they guy in the today's picture did in one day. Also, we weren't sitting in air conditioned cabs listening to the latest Kenny Chesney tunes while we were working.

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