Too Long in the Wind

September 2007

Well-polished memories

Kiwi shoe polish, since 1906.

September 30   A long time ago, when men wore real hats, they also wore real shoes. Leather shoes, the kind that needed polish.

I was the guy who wanted to polish them.

Our family had a wooden shoeshine box -- about 18 inches wide and maybe 10 inches tall and deep -- that contained an aromatic world of waxy wonders. There were browns and blacks and oxbloods and tans. There was a bottle with a spongy tip for painting white bucks.

Because our family had one of these boxes, it seems reasonable to think that many other families in Pawnee Rock also had them. Ours became mine when I showed an interest in making a buck through earnest labor; for a while, our family had the spiffiest shoes in Barton County.

I shined the shoes of a few family friends and became a dedicated white-buck painter when I was in the Argonne Rebels Drum and Bugle Corps. Although I never did open a shoeshine stand of the sort we read about in Grit newspaper stories featuring young men who lifted themselves up by their own bootstraps, I daydreamed about setting up shop outside the lumberyard.

I knew shoes then -- the stitching, the nails, how heels were attached. It was an honorable realm.

Now, of course, so many of our shoes -- worn to work, restaurants, and even to church -- are made of cloth or that horrible plastic that is molded into Crocs, and it appears the shoe-polishing heyday is long gone.

I admit that of late I had fallen out of the habit of polishing my own leather shoes. But then, at my wife's insistence, I rediscovered the scent of shoe polish, and now I keep my slip-on and shoestring work shoes shiny. I even polish my hiking boots, and no one pays me a dime.

I'll tell you my favorite part of polishing shoes. It's the can. It is sized to fit in my palm, its circular shape makes loading the rag easy, and it has the little metallic wing that you turn to pop the lid off. Barely changed over the decades, that little wingnut is elegance in action.

Do you remember how the dying Charles Foster Kane whispered "Rosebud" in the movie "Citizen Kane"? I might whisper "Kiwi."

A photo I like: No. 54

[September 29]   Bob Dole has long been my favorite Kansas politician, although sometimes he used to infuriate me. Like on the day I met him.

But Senator Dole did everything you might ask of your senator -- he brought federal money to Kansas, he ran the national party, he ran for vice president and president, and he did it all without bringing the stench of corruption to the Sunflower State.

I suppose that when a man has been at death's door, as he was in World War II, nothing intimidates you anymore. Not even shilling for Viagra.

This photo was made in June 1974 at the dedication of the Santa Fe Trail Center west of Larned. At the moment of the photo, the fairly new senator was speaking with Dorothy Bowman of Pawnee Rock; she was a reporter for the Great Bend Tribune.

In case you're thinking, "Is that Dole? He looks so young!" it can be noted that he was only 50 years old then and almost 51. He's 84 now.

Power, speed, and glory

[September 28]   Quite a few boys in Pawnee Rock were motorheads and lived for shop class, where they could fiddle under the hood and tinker with their eight-track stereo systems.

Several schoolmates had bona fide hot rods. Some of the Dodges and Chevys, however, were simply loud -- like their owners.

As you know, motors are a big part of any rural community. In town, cars and trucks are often kept in the front yard for easy mechanical access, and we've all spent Saturday afternoons trying not to obsess over the neighbor kid goosing his throaty engine. Any farm -- Olin Unruh's, for example -- worth its fertilizer harbored both tractors and a go-kart made of welded pipes and a lawn-mower engine.

Then, like now, I had simple tastes in cars. The car I owned for eight years was a Plymouth Gold Duster, with a six-cylinder, 229-cubic-inch "power" plant. I moved on to a Datsun 310 GX, which was sportier but small enough to fit in the back of today's pickups. Since then, I've had a couple of small SUVs, a sedan, and a pickup, and now I've abandoned oversized vehicles for a Honda hatchback. I'm just not a muscle-car guy.

Still, I've always been a little jealous of the guys who loved machines and could make a car go strong and sure on the sandy roads along the river. It has less to do with the fact of speed and more to do with respect for creating sleekness and muscle. It's a kind of intelligence I don't have a lot of.

Our preteen sons, who have not once taken a lawn mower apart, have nevertheless absorbed the motor-racing world. They drip with stats about NASCAR, but they are motorheads once removed. They're in it for the competition and collisions, rather than for the nuts and bolts and thrown piston rods.

The boys might be excused for their sheltered life. Where we live, we don't have the wide-open country roads where speed is both a game and a necessity. The boys have existed without dirt-road fishtailing and dirt-track Saturday nights and, when it came time, were ushered straight to the summit: a hands-on tour of a high-dollar, top-of-the-line race track.

When our family toured the Kansas Speedway last June, we got the scenic overview from the president's suite in the grandstand and an hour's visit to the middle of the track -- the garages, the media center, and pit road.

The boys sat in a racing-school stock car, and we all laid our palms across those big treadless tires. We walked through the pits, maybe strolling exactly where our favorite drivers will get new Goodyears in this weekend's races, and the boys snuck and rolled out a tire and pretended to put it on a car. Our rented RV lounged where the racers' own RVs and car haulers are standing right now.

At the finish line, Sam put his hand in the widened hole in the chain-link fence that his driving hero, Tony Stewart, got a foothold in when he climbed the fence to celebrate his victory last autumn. Like Stewart, both boys raised their arms in Victory Lane -- trying exultation on for size.

But I, a guy who'll never be a motorhead, had the time of my life too. When we stood in the pits and the racing-school cars crescendoed past us at the starting line and lifted up into the banked turn, my go-kart spirit went with them.

So this weekend, my wife and I and the boys will gather in front of the Sony and watch the NASCAR races in Kansas City. We'll cheer for our favorites: Tony Stewart, Jimmie Johnson, and Clint Bowyer.

The boys have never driven a car, so they'll not know the vibration in the steering wheel or sense the moment to shift or get that sinking-gut feeling when the back of the car slides out of control. But they know the scream of the exhaust, they've climbed through the driver's window, and they remember the expansive sweep of the raceway.

We'll keep an eye on the garages and the track and pits, and I suspect we'll yell with pride when we see the places where for an hour our lives paralleled the exotic world of power, speed, and glory.

Extruded expanded puffed grain product

[September 27]   Once in a while the past is not as great as I have remembered. This unsettling thought came again yesterday when I tasted a handful of Kix.

You remember Kix, those pale puffballs that floated in your bowl of milk even after you weighted them down with spoonfuls of sugar.

My wife bought a box for the boys last week because we try to expose them to popular culture once in a while and because she remembered them fondly too.

"Kid-tested, mother-approved" is Kix's slogan. Man, you've got to wonder about that General Mills family.

I expected some kind of golden richness from my handful of Kix. What I got was less than cardboard.

But at least the Kix puffballs were amusing in their emptiness. I looked up Kix on Wikipedia and learned about the way they're made. Aside from the historical aspects, there's nothing there that would persuade me to buy a box tomorrow.

My favorite detail in the process is the description, written as you'd find it on the patent application: "Kix is an extruded expanded puffed grain product."

I guess "extruded expanded puffed product" is how I'll have to think of my sweet childhood memories as well.

Kansas history: Yesterday I wrote about Kansas counties and wished I could find a certain page showing maps of Kansas in its stages of settlement and development.

Larry Mix, the sage of St. John, found the page of Kansas county maps. It's on the state library's Skyways server.

Larry, who with wife Carolyn runs the Santa Fe Trail Research Site, also suggested three other pages:

• Kansas Historical Quarterly
• Kansas Territory and Its Boundary Question: "Big Kansas" or "Little Kansas"
• Kansas County Name Etymologies

52 weeks: Leon Miller wrote to say that as much as he enjoyed his trip to Alaska a few years, he's pretty happy not having to endure winter's long nights.

Furthermore, he wrote: "One of the best things about Dallas is that I can play golf 52 weeks out of the year."

Washington, Peketon, and Barton County

Barton County Courthouse in August 2006.

[September 26]   Our home of 895 square miles, Barton County, was as we all know named for Clara Harlowe Barton, a Civil War nurse and the founder of the American Red Cross. The county was established in 1867, just after the Civil War, and Ms. Barton's name was topical and available. Barton County is the state's only county named for a woman.

Well, that's what the good folks in the county tourism office would have us believe.

According to the Kansas Historical Society, there was once a Shirley County (probable license tag abbreviation: SL). Some people say it was named in 1860 for a man who a century earlier had been the British governor of Massachusetts Colony, but, really, who believes that?

The historical society's Shirley County page says: "Andreas's History of Kansas, however, asserts it was as a joke named for Jane Shirley, a lady of questionable character in the Leavenworth area. By request of the first representative, J.B. Rupe, the name was changed in 1867 to Cloud County."

Now, did you know "Barton" was not the only name our land was known by?

In the beginning, the Kansas Territory stretched from Missouri to a north-south line linking the summits of the nearest Rocky Mountains. But there was a governmental void in the middle of the territory, because very few white people lived there. (I wish I could again find the historical society pages that document this.)

As settlement crept westward, more counties were delineated and our broad southwestern Kansas area became known as Washington County (abbreviation: WG). Eventually the Washington name was set aside for a normal-sized county (WS) on the Nebraska border, and the area was given a new name: Peketon County (PK).

It's easy to guess who Washington County was named for. Peketon's name, however, is a mystery that the historical society sums up as "Possibly from a Sac Indian word meaning flat land."

Peketon, which included what is now McPherson County and the land south and west of there, doesn't exist as a county anymore. It was put on the map before statehood but never officially organized, and it was declared defunct in 1867.

Kansas had 26 counties that were declared defunct as the state matured and its innards stopped jiggling. Some of the other defunct county names were Billings, Foote, Godfroy, Irving, Kansas, McGee, and Wise.

Furthermore, for a while Barton County extended south to include half of what is now Stafford County. Finally, Barton County retreated and a small strip of land on the southern edge of Barton County was quibbled over and finally split between Pawnee and Stafford counties, which is how those counties came to have shapes that look as if they were cut by a jigsaw.

When autumn leaves start to fall

Starting with the upper right: high-bush cranberry, fern, fireweed, dwarf dogwood, primrose, birch, moss, and, behind it all, devil's club. (Inset photos below: devil's club (the size of a dinner plate) and a collection of birch, aspen, and black cottonwood.)

[September 25]   The things that stick in my mind defy easy explanation. Why, for example, would a 1956 romance movie -- The Autumn Leaves -- shown on Grandma's black-and-white Zenith in the 1960s be unforgettable despite its dreary setting in a mental hospital?

Maybe it was because trees were so precious on the plains around Pawnee Rock. Or maybe it was our proximity to Larned State Hospital. Or maybe it was because of the theme song, which I learned to play on the trumpet. Here are the words:

The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

I can't walk down the street in the autumn without that melody slipping around between my ears. I don't mind; it's a very nice song that Nat King Cole sang.

There's one advantage to living 1,575 miles north (and 3,311 miles west) of Pawnee Rock. Here, we don't have to suffer through a drawn-out September and October before we see the cottonwoods turn, as Pawnee Rockers do.

Fall has been in full swing in Eagle River for a couple of weeks. Most of the trees that turn yellow -- birches, aspens, willows, black cottonwoods -- have done so, and there's new snow on the mountaintops. We have a lot of rain and high temperatures in the mid-50s.

This past weekend, as I kicked leaves around the yard playing football with Nik, it occurred to me to try something that you all no doubt have been doing for some time: scanning leaves.

Yesterday afternoon, the boys and I hiked along a trail to a waterfall and filled a Tupperware container with leaves. We collected leaves of the high-bush cranberry, ferns, moss, primrose, fireweed, devil's club, and alder, as well as all the yellow trees.

At home, we laid the leaves face down on my scanner's glass and put a couple of sheets of white paper atop them. When we held the lid down, the leaves were fairly flat.

For Sam and Nik, it's a quick 'n' easy art assigment, and they didn't catch on that it was a nature class too. They were too busy discussing leaf shapes and tasting berries to notice that they were learning anything.

Personally, I'm glad to have the leaf images. I'm sure they'll come in handy for a hundred things, not the least of which is prompting "The Autumn Leaves" to run through my mind again.

And when autumn does come to Pawnee Rock (or New York or California or North Texas), I hope you'll scan your leaves in too. I'll still press some in a book of never-read poetry; technology doesn't replace the romance of the old ways.

Al Carris for president: Leon Miller of Dallas wrote to ask whether Al Carris ("He must have been quite a character," Leon says) is still alive. Can anyone here answer that?

Leon, a retired architect, remembers those Reagan-Carris-Bush years well:

"The initial 4 years of Reagan's term were some of the best times of my business career. However, with the tax law of 1986 the downfall of the real estate market was cataclysmic; caused mostly by the Resolution Trust Corporation or RTC! Billions and billions of dollars in the 1988-1993 era went up in smoke as the RTC took a sickle rather than a pruning fork to correct a problem that went from a grass fire to a holocaust."

Fun in Ellsworth: The Great American Cattle Drive commences Thursday and heads north toward Ellsworth, which is having a three-day blowout to recall its heyday as a trailhead.

The cattle should be in town on Saturday. It looks as if it's going to be a lot of fun. If I could pick one central Kansas event to attend this fall, it would be this one.

A full schedule of events is on Peg Britton's KansasPrairie blog.

Also, if you're going to be up toward Ellsworth or Salina in October, you might check out the new Mom's Diner, which opens October 1 in Kanopolis.

Al Carris' White House dream

[September 24]   One score and four years ago, Pawnee Rock brought forth a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Al Carris, who had run the grocery store for a number of years and who lived in the northwest corner of Bismark Avenue and Rock Street, announced his plans in the fall of 1983. His goal: Beat incumbent Ronald Reagan, "a swell guy" but someone who was "letting them get by with murder up there."

Now, some might say Reagan and his team of Iran-contra scofflaws and big spenders were part of the D.C. problem, but that might just have proved Al's case.

According to reporter Luke Brown's story in the Great Bend Tribune, Al had plans for an America different from the one we're living in today.

For starters, he wanted to abolish the federal income tax and fund the government in a different way, but he wasn't willing to share the mechanics of his plan just yet.

The rest of Al's platform is summed up in the Tribune's story:

"Carris also plans to shape up the economy, stop inflation, put people back to work, reduce crime by 85 to 90 percent, improve moral standards, clean up smut on television and increase long distance freight on the railroad.

"He said he would accomplish many of his goals by putting a freeze on wages and prices, printing more money to reduce the national debt, eliminating the use of alcohol 'except for medical purposes' and discouraging divorce.

"Crime could be almost eliminated by having capital punishment, 'but I'd make darn sure they was guilty,' he said."

As it turns out, America wasn't quite ready for a prohibitionist execution-ready president, despite the crying need for packing more freight by rail. And we still have the income tax.

When I saw Al Carris' description of his platform (my sister, Cheryl, unearthed the newspaper clipping (467KB pdf)), I was surprised by its radical sensibility.

Al, who had come to Pawnee Rock from Alden in the mid-1960s, had always seemed to be a likable guy at the grocery store -- one time he used the store's fire extinguisher to put out the flaming carburetor in my car, which was parked next to the high sidewalk in front of his store -- and I enjoyed being around his son Alvin.

I knew the Carrises were different from most of the families in town, however. On the west wall of their living room, the family had hung a stylized picture of Martin Luther King Jr., which I'm willing to wager was the only such image in Pawnee Rock.

Now, 24 years after his candidacy for president, let's lift a ginger-ale toast to the big dreams of Al Carris. He stepped out of retirement to stand up in public for what he believed in.

1960s basketball: Roger Hanhardt wrote to correct the year in the (formerly) 1962 basketball team photo in the Gallery. It's 1964, he says, and it was his senior year. The photo caption has now been changed to reflect the right year.

Roger, you may remember, compiled a two-volume history of Pawnee Rock High School. The book isn't in print anymore, he says, but there are copies at the Barton County Historical Society and at the Kansas State Historical Society.

Benny Brown, the man who smiled

[September 23]   Benny Brown was one of the favorite teachers at Pawnee Rock High. His art classes were low key and fun, he was always looking out for us, and he never seemed overly concerned with what people thought of him. That alone made him different from just about every grownup we knew.

I don't remember whether I had an art class in his narrow enclave near the office, but I do remember him for his coaching during my freshman year in track. He always encouraged me -- he never had a bad word, and that sometimes must have strained his patience. And it wasn't just me he cheered for.

Three years after PRHS was closed and many of us went to Macksville, we ran into Benny at the state indoor track meet at Manhattan. Although he was there for Larned's athletes, he stood along the pole vault pit and runway and cheered for our Rob Bowman.

I missed Benny after he went to teach in Larned. But Benny was one of those irrepressible people you somehow manage to see again.

A photo I like: No. 53

[September 22]   In the mid-1970s, two boys from Great Bend came to Pawnee Rock State Park to practice their climbing and rappelling skills, making a mountain out of the biggest, rockiest molehill in central Kansas. I came across them in the evening and took their photo. In their kindness, they let me come down cliff on the southeastern face by rope.

I didn't quite get the hang of it -- this business of walking down a cliff with one's back flat to the ground is unnatural -- but now every mountain climbing story I read is real in a way it wouldn't be if I had passed up the chance.

This is one of my favorite -- if badly printed -- shots because it shows people having fun on Pawnee Rock. They're using their imagination and dreaming of bigger places.

To the climbers and to all our readers: Best wishes on this final day of summer.

History through souvenirs

[September 21]   Long before I tagged along on the Pawnee Rock school spectator bus, I was an avid reader of the programs and souvenirs the older kids left behind.

My dad, Elgie Unruh, often drove a bus to away games -- sometimes the team bus, which left early, and sometimes the spectator bus, which left just in time to get to Hanston or Bazine before the game.

When he cleaned out the bus later in the garage, he'd save a program for me. I'd pore over the names and numbers, and it was a happy night when the previous owner had left cryptic notes about the game or homework.

The big trip came on March 9, 1967, a Thursday. The beloved Braves were playing in the Class BB state tournament in Dodge City. While most of us stayed close to the radio at home to listen to the KGNO broadcast, Dad drove a bus to Dodge, about 60 miles to the southwest.

He came home with a program -- and it was unlike anything I'd ever seen. It was a booklet, 24 pages of photos, statistics, and records. When I listened to Pawnee Rock play Denison in the consolation round the next night, the book was by my side on the living room floor as I tallied points and fouls. (Pawnee Rock beat Assaria in the first round, then lost to Burden in the second and to Denison in the consolation game. Read the write-up in the yearbook.)

The book put faces to the names and made me think of towns far outside my little fourth-grade realm. I tracked down each team's hometown on the map, and it was probably the genesis of the Unruh Theory of Hometown Relativity.

Although only the Pawnee Rock players really interest me now, the booklet still has entertainment value. I get a kick out of looking at the ads for businesses in southwestern Kansas:

• Alco Discount Stores
• Gibson's Discount Center
• Warner Angus Ranch (Jetmore Star Route)
• Leonard Jewelry, 207 Gunsmoke ("Have your class rings shined free -- anytime")
• Mammel's Super Markets
• Harry C. Gum, insurance ("Stick with Gum")
• Penney's ("Use your Penney's charge card today")
• Gambles ("The friendly store")
• Whirla-Whip in a Tub ("Puncho -- The World's biggest cone: 7 flavors")
• Thunderbird Motel ("Swimming Pool. Free television. West side of Dodge City.")
• The Southwest Milk Producers Association ("All we have, we owe to udders")
• There's not a single ad for McDonald's or Dairy Queen or Taco Bell, although there was Mom's Drive Inn ("We serve the best. Open 24 hours.")

These days, we might chide our spouses or kids for keeping programs from athletic events or school plays. I daren't speak out in favor of household clutter, but I do want to recognize how some souvenirs never lose their ability to bring up cherished memories.

Where did we go from here?

Pawnee Rockers wore their letter jackets at Macksville football games.

[September 20]   It was about this time of September 35 years ago when the Kansas Supreme Court told Pawnee Rock that Larned's USD 495 had the right to close our town's high school. As we all know, that was the beginning of the Pawnee Rock diaspora, when families suddenly had to focus on events outside of Pawnee Rock instead of on those in town.

I have a lot of praise for the families, teachers, and staff members who kept the middle school and eventually just the grade school alive for so many years after 1972.

As I've written before, a lot of kids took advantage of the change of high schools to pave their way out of town. Although to my eye it seemed that some kids merely chose a different stage on which to play out dead-end choices, for the rest of us students it provided variety in education, friendships, and experience.

Sometimes that meant students were more likely to leave Pawnee Rock for good. After all, how were our parents going to keep us home once we had seen the gay lights of Otis-Bison or Macksville?

Still, no matter where we went, we were all Pawnee Rockers.

It's where our homes were and where our hearts belonged. No matter where we went, it was the one thing that held us together -- and still does.

Walking to the Rock

Going to the Rock: The footbridge, the pump box, the lilacs and gate, and the little bridge on the Rock (below). (All four of these photos were taken on walks, albeit sometimes from the road instead of the sidewalk.)

[September 19]   At some point, maybe during high school, kids lose their inclination to explore their landscape. I suspect it has to do with their unwillingness to walk after they get a driver's license.

What a loss. When kids finally get to the age at which their rational minds can do some good (hormonal surges notwithstanding), they've surrendered the pleasure of seeing things close up.

I'm going to ask you to think back as we go on a short stroll.

Let's walk to the Rock. You remember the way, because you walked it as a kid. You stepped past Sonny and Dorothy Bowman's house, past Howard and Carole Bowman's house, over the humped concrete bridge spanning the draining ditch, and then past the big house owned by Unruhs and later Smiths.

As you walked up the gentle hill, you passed a concrete box that I was told held a water well. Maybe you remember the rusty iron fittings.

Overgrown grass brushed your calves. Over your head were elm trees planted in the first decade of the 20th century. They marched all the way up to the Rock, before disease and chainsaws got them.

As you walked, you saw corn and milo growing across the road. Sometimes Keith Mull gave permission for people to pick a few ears for their table. That's why those pickups were parked along the road.

Eventually you reached the big lilacs and the sandstone pillars that marked the entrance to the park. In a car, you'd never stop to read the Santa Fe Trail marker, but on foot you might.

If you're like me, you sometimes pedaled up this hill and the Rock, too. You might have wondered whether anyone would notice if walked your bike up instead.

On a bike, you'd zoom down the park road. But on foot, you might be tempted to sit a spell and admire the little stone-and-concrete bridge over the ditch on the south side of the Rock.

I know there are problems with going by foot. When we walk, somebody might think we are too poor to get our car fixed or too unimportant to be in a hurry. We might have to go to the bathroom, or maybe the weather's too hot/cold/windy/humid.

In our hurry-up times, a 15-minute walk to the Rock is a one-minute drive and each thing we glimpse is pushed out of our head by the quick arrival of the next thing until we're safely back home in front of the television.

Maybe it's too late for you and me, but put yourself in the shoes of your kids or grandkids. Think of what they see -- what they explore -- when they walk. What will they remember of their childhood town?

The first wedding on Pawnee Rock

[September 18]   Shiela Sutton Schmidt's wonderful 1986 book about our landmark -- Pawnee Rock: A Brief History of the Rock -- has a section about the first known wedding there.

Now, there could have been weddings among people on wagon trains, and the Sioux and Kiowa and Pawnee may have had their own ceremonies. But this event was the first Rock wedding among people of our settlement, 64 years after it was founded.

Here's what Mrs. Schmidt wrote:

The First Wedding on Pawnee Rock

"It was an absolutely beautiful day," said the bride of fifty years ago about her wedding day. "The fields around The Rock were golden with wheat awaiting harvest." Just after sunrise, at 7:00 a.m., on June 14, 1936, the first wedding took place on Pawnee Rock.

Lois Gilbert, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Gilbert, became the bride of Harold Becker, son of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Becker. Rev. B. E. Parker performed the ceremony.

Those attending the wedding were the parents of the bride and groom, the groom's brothers Elmer and Larry, Mrs. Lucy Houdyshell, Mr. and Mrs. Vin Houdyshell, Mr. and Mrs. Vance Houdyshell, Mrs. Rebecca Parker, and friends of the bridal couple.

Following the ceremony a wedding breakfast was served at the home of the bride's parents by Ethel and Glenda Houdyshell. The bridal couple had a honeymoon trip to Colorado.

On June 14, 1986, Harold and Lois Gilbert Becker will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. "Those who love on Pawnee Rock love forever."

The secret code

[September 17]   When I was in grade school, Ida Deckert was my truest friend who was a girl. She was my age and had a little sister who was a year younger than mine, and her mom and big sisters and brother baby-sat me and my sister in their turn.

Adam and Helen Deckert lived in the fine two-story house at the east end of Santa Fe Avenue, the place with the porch, a hedge, and trumpet vines. Their house, built early in the century, had push-button light switches.

Ida's sisters were Anna Sue, Frances, and Amy. They and brother Howard also had another sister, Cora, but Cora died when Ida was very young.

One day when I was at Ida's house, she gave me the "Secret Code Book." Its cover was emblazoned with symbols, and its pages were full of substitution codes, secretive languages, and tips for writing in invisible ink. For a boy who liked mysteries, math, and words, it was a beautiful gift.

Though I wanted "Secret Code Book" more than anything, I handed it back. I remember thinking that Ida would surely get in trouble for giving it to me; in fact, Anna Sue's name was written on the title page.

When I got home that afternoon, Mom told me Helen had called to say that Ida was in tears.

Most people, you know, would have understood the social mechanics of gift giving, but others of us stand with one foot outside that circle. We mean well, but we don't make the connection when it needs to be made.

For all the ease we have with Morse code or Cowboy code, there's still a social code that is just beyond our comprehension. As we grow older, we pick up clues more adeptly and usually solve the message, but it's frustrating for us and for the people who quite reasonably think they're speaking an open language.

Ida did give me the book again, and I want her to know that I've been forever grateful. It is my favorite.

Kansas' racing star: Clint Bowyer, the only NASCAR driver with a possible Pawnee Rock connection, won his first Nextel Cup series race yesterday. He's from Emporia and you might find a story about him today in the Emporia Gazette.

Property tax benefits

[September 16]   With the sale of the old school/city hall, Pawnee Rock residents can expect lower property taxes. Are you curious about who -- which property-owning business or family -- has the most to gain from the lowered taxes?

The City section of PawneeRock.org has a PDF showing the assessed valuations of Pawnee Rock property. It lists the property by street and street number and by the owner's name, plus the 2006 and 2007 valuations.

A photo I like: No. 52

[September 15]   I was walking along the Midway of the State Fair of Texas in the late 1980s while my wife worked on the Dallas fairgrounds in the Science Museum. Fascinated by the moving metal and blinking lights, I took a few photos of this spidery machine whipping people into a screaming froth.

I enjoy this image because it feels like fun. On another level, it shows a human enjoying herself even in the jaws of a machine -- and who doesn't feel like that at work sometimes?

Soup and sandwich weather

[September 14]   There's one day every year when it's clear that autumn has arrived. Sometimes a brisk morning shows up out of nowhere, and occasionally the news is delivered by a rain that knocks down leaves that suddenly couldn't wait to fall off the trees.

Such a day is the start of sweater weather -- the day when soup and a grilled cheese sandwich becomes the meal of choice.

I don't know whether it's this way for everybody who grew up with the old Pawnee Rock schools, but sweater weather brings up fleeting memories of Friday night football. The nights were rarely bitterly cold, but they were chilly enough that fans standing in the bleachers or along the cable fence sometimes thought about going to sit in the car instead.

No matter how casually we dressed during the day, football nights forced many of us into jackets; we never seemed like a town for sweaters. I guess we just had too many rough edges for knitted clothing; not personally, of course, but our rural life was full of wires and rusty pipes, branches and static.

The big reason to rely on a jacket, though, was the wind. Nothing short of lined nylon or denim made standing along the football field pleasant on some of those evenings.

As we approach the equinox and plunge headlong into long nights, I look forward to putting on a substantial jacket. Call me crazy, but it just feels good. It reminds me of home, like a bowl of beef and vegetable soup.

Chapman convicted of killing Treasa Carter

[September 13]   On January 11, Treasa Lynn Carter was killed in their yellow rental house at 515 Rock Street. Yesterday, her husband, Duffie Roland Chapman, pleaded guilty to a charge of voluntary manslaughter.

Chapman will be sentenced on Nov. 9. Sentencing guidelines range from four years, seven months, to 20 years, plus a fine up to $500,000.

Read the full story by Susan Thacker in the Great Bend Tribune.

Pawnee Rock gases up financially

[September 13]   A few months ago the city of Pawnee Rock sold the old school building, bringing in $300,000 or so. Now the city has sold its gas pipeline system -- pending public approval.

Councilman Gary Trotnic sent word that at the city council meeting Monday, "We came into an agreement with Midwest Energy to sell the gas line to them. Within 40 days there will be a ballot sent out by the county clerk in Great Bend for the registered voters in town to vote on."

If more than half of the voters agree, "Midwest will pay us $70,000 for the gas line, then they will bill, read, and keep the system operating on their own. Midwest will pay for the expense of the ballot."

So it looks as if the city would get a nice bundle of cash up front, and Midwest expects to make a profit handling the gas line.

I asked Gary whether the pipeline sale would reduce the town's property tax mill levy.

"The mill levy will be reduced not because of this sale but because of the money from the school," he wrote. "Our mill levy was over 100, and it will go down in the 80s."

Troubles on the trail: You may have heard already about the troubles the Great Santa Fe Trail Horse Race had yesterday near Canton. Two women rode up to the finish line and were supposed to stop racing, but they apparently decided to keep going. A half-mile later, they collided with a car and their horses died. The women were airlifted to a hospital in Wichita.

The McPherson Sentinel story by Greg Tammen said that the horses left skidmarks.

Thanks to Brenda Jones and Gary Trotnic for sending the news.

The never-ending story

[September 12]   Fifth Columnists were the boogeyman terrorists of World War II. They looked just like "real" Americans but spoke with German and Japanese accents instead of Saudi accents.

If you ever saw the Hitchcock movie "Saboteur," you know what I'm talking about. Fifth Columnists were the ones who sank the ships they heard about from your loose lips.

By chance when I was in junior high around 1970, Fifth Columnists came to my attention through "G-man vs. The Fifth Column." The story was a Better Little Book, a pulp fiction series that measured 3.5 inches by 4.5 inches with a drawing on every right-hand page. That particular book had flip pages -- you held the open book in your hand and let the picture pages flip out from under your thumb to achieve a movie effect. I practically memorized a copy that Dad got when he was a kid during the war.

The tale was about an FBI agent defeating thugs full of anti-American treachery and deceit, and explosions and pistol fire punctuated the story. Before I knew it, I was looking for Fifth Columnists every time I went to the post office. If I could, I was going to be a hero and knock 'em dead.

I doubt that such kids' books would be allowed on the market now, although just about every action movie follows those lines. When I think about it, it seems clear that we're reliving a part of the World War II homefront.

Suspicion is everywhere, and it has been since bullies and their groupies found power a little easier to hold on to six years ago. Don't you look twice at everybody at the airport? What about the stranger who asks how tall the elevator is? At Wal-Mart, don't you listen a little too carefully for a misplaced accent or for a careless phrase that demeans Our Leaders or Our Faith?

Are there Fifth Columnists among us today? Possibly. Once again, we live in perilous times.

But out of peril comes literature. Kipling had his wars in Africa, Dickens the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and Edwin C. Johnson the saboteurs. What we read and write helps us sort out our fears.

And that is why there is great literature, and why there are exposés, and why there are books that boys will read.

We read because we all want to be the hero.

Trail riders visit Pawnee Rock

Viewers who turned out for the trail riders got to buy homemade root beer at a stand run by Tom and Jean Isaacson of Salina. The stand was placed on Centre Street next to the city park. "They were a real nice couple," wrote Gary Trotnic, who took both of these photos.

September 11   The Great Santa Fe Trail Horse Race endurance ride passed through Pawnee Rock on Monday. Gary Trotnic was there with his camera and can-do attitude. Here's his report:

"Monday started out cloudy and cool around 54 this morning and got up to 63. I guess when the horses came in they were up north. Some came from the west up north of the Rock, so we didn't get to see them come into town. But when they left some of the riders rode through town. They were going to 281 Hwy south of Great Bend to the other vet check.

"The crew that follows and helps came through town afterwards, and most of them stopped to visit and get root beer and brats and hot dogs from us.

"I guess they canceled the Pony Express run through the small town and were only going to do the big towns.

"About 10:30 it started to rain pretty hard here, so we closed down and went home, where it was dry.

"All the riders sure thanked us for serving them with food. They don't get that at every small town."

Horse trailers line up Monday in front of the Christian Church at Centre and Santa Fe, across from the city park, as the trail ride passed through Pawnee Rock.

New city council member

At the city council meeting Monday night, councilman Gary Trotnic wrote, Mayor Tim Parret suggested he would like Nicki Roof to be on the council. The council voted to approve her, and city clerk Kathy Bohn swore her in.

Former Pawnee Rocker helps others

Janice Romeiser, the wife of former Pawnee Rock HS football coach and teacher Gary Romeiser, is doing good things for kids in Emporia. Her work is detailed (and she's in a photo) in the Emporia Gazette. (Cheryl Unruh brings this to our attention.)

Santa Fe Trail Horse Race comes to town

[September 10]   Today's the big day for fans of pageantry and history -- the Santa Fe Trail Horse Race endurance ride is coming to Pawnee Rock.

The town is rolling out the red carpet from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with freshly cooked food: hamburgers, brats, and so forth.

Around 10 a.m., a "Santa Fe Trail Pony Express" rider will come up to the post office. Although the true Pony Express route was quite a bit north of Barton County, it's a nice commemorative gesture that helps us remember that the first traffic on the trail was commercial trading between Santa Fe and the Kansas City area, which in the early and mid-1800s was at the western edge of the eastern civilization.

Starting late in the morning, trail riders making their way east from an overnight stop in Larned will make a required stop north of Pawnee Rock State Park so a veterinarian can check each horse for trailworthiness.

Football fun: Pawnee Rock's gift to professional football -- assistant coach Steve Crosby -- and his NFL Chargers are off to a solid start. They beat the Chicago Bears in the first game of the season yesterday.

Steve, as many of you remember, played high school ball in Pawnee Rock and went on to fame and glory at Fort Hays and later in three seasons as a bull-necked running back with the New York Giants. He has coached since 1979.

Our poor Chiefs weren't impressive at all. Still, if the Chiefs can just beat Oakland and Denver once each, maybe we can declare it a successful season.

As for the Jayhawks, they have looked pretty good against minor-school teams with directions in their names. I hope the tougher Wildcats don't pop KU's bubble on October 6 in Manhattan, but I won't have any money on that game.

The Smith brothers

[September 9]   Over the months, Virgil Smith has sent us quite a few interesting photos of rural scenery, his wife and sons playing hockey on the river, and animals around his house in Pawnee Rock. The image he e-mailed yesterday, though, is entertaining in a different way. It's five brothers -- his dad and four uncles -- photographed in the winter on their farm.

Virgil mentions Elrick's farm. It was 1.5 miles north and 1.5 west of Pawnee Rock, in the section north of Durward Smith's place and northwest of Otis Unruh's.

The brick house he mentions was later lived in by Reford and Beulah White, who was the fifth-grade teacher for many years.

Here's Virgil:

This is a picture of my father, Elrick, and his four brothers. He had four sisters, also. They were the children of Samuel P. and Maria Smith -- born and raised on the family farm about seven miles NW of Pawnee Rock.

When the brothers left home, they all lived on farms in the area and their families spent a lot of time together. I had lots of cousins to play with.

After their children grew up, two moved to town to allow the younger generation to live on the farm. Max moved to Pawnee Rock and lived in the brick house on Centre, south of the highway. He served on the Pawnee Rock school board for several years and was the father of Maxlyn Schmidt, who taught in the Pawnee Rock and Larned high schools for many years. My sister, Marjorie, taught for a time in the Pawnee Rock grade school.

My father's farm was quite hilly and, seeing the soil erosion and dust storms, he was conservation-minded and was among the first of the farmers in the area to take advantage of the government-assisted conservation programs of the '30s and '40s.

He had a dam put in the pasture that collected and held the water run-off. It was a great place for boys to go skinny-dipping. He had a shelterbelt put in along the field edge and around the farmstead. I liked to explore it and check the progress in the birds' nests. He had all of the farmable hillsides terraced with grass runways for the drainage and even before they were terraced, we tried to farm on the contour to lessen the erosion.

Photo of the Rock: The caption under the homepage photo yesterday at first said the photo of the state park was from the northwest, but Larry Mix of St. John pointed out how it was from the south. He was kind enough to call it a senior moment, but it was simply my mistake in writing a caption for Larry Smith's photo and I corrected it around noon. Thanks for sending the photo, Larry Smith, and thanks for reading carefully, Larry Mix.

A photo I like: No. 51

[September 7]   We drive by stubblefields all the time -- wheat, soybeans, corn, milo -- but we never give them a second look unless we're out looking for pheasants or jackrabbits.

I certainly trod through a lot of stubble at my Unruh grandparents' farm. It wasn't particularly pleasant; an early incident in which a long sliver of bamboo slid into my calf made me permanently wary of Kansas punji sticks and their grassy cousins.

But one late-autumn afternoon as I drove to Pawnee Rock I thought of seeing the stubble at its own level. Flat on my belt buckle, I found a fallen forest inhabited by ants and a mousy looking mammal. Insignificant cracks in the soil now gaped before my nose, and the shade provided by a singular clump of grass was an oasis in the desert of loess. In another frame of mind, it looks like tornado damage.

Maybe taking a picture was just an excuse to play in the dirt. It certainly was an excuse to see our Kansas from a different angle.

Trail riders in the Tribune

[September 7]   The Great Bend Tribune's website on today and Saturday has a brief article about the Trail Riders coming to central Kansas.

The coverage doesn't mention Pawnee Rock, but that's where the riders will be on Monday morning after they spend the night in Larned.

Pawnee Rock plans to greet the trail riders in style.

The tooth fairy's coins

[September 7]   The tooth fairy leaves our sons a gold dollar coin when the occasion arises. Sam, who favors provable facts over romantic tales, keeps the coins but nevertheless says the fairy doesn't exist.

Recently Sam lost his fourth tooth in quick succession. The tooth fairy must have thought this called for a special reward, because she delivered a 1974 Eisenhower silver dollar.

I used to have an impressive silver dollar like that, given to me about 30 years ago in Pawnee Rock by my dad. A noble dollar like Ike's has three times the heft of the current dollars, which trade on the popularity of Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea and now have lapsed into the gimmicky "presidents club."

"Dad," Sam tells me on nights when he has lost a chopper, "I want you to agree on one thing -- there's no tooth fairy."

I tell him that just because we don't see the fairy doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I can't tell whether he believes me or just puts up with me; maybe he wants only to play out the routine before he drifts off.

On the morning that Sam lifted his pillow and found the silver dollar, I happened to be in his room. He picked up the big coin, his eyes widened, and he yelled for his brother. As he ran to show Mom, I asked him whether he still thought the fairy didn't exist.

He stopped. His mouth opened, and he struggled for the right words.

"Maybe," he said, and then he grinned and scurried down the stairs.

Correction: Ruth Ann French Sessions' daughter Megan Sessions Favre wrote yesterday evening and politely pointed out that I had given her mother the wrong last name on a couple of occasions. I've fixed the mistakes. To be clear: It's Ruth Ann French Sessions.

Please, everyone, if you notice goofs, tell me. Thanks.

Buried treasure

[September 6]   I've never been especially good at finding historical artifacts. In all my life, I've found only one arrowhead that I'm certain really is an arrowhead. For all I know, I see lots of things but just don't recognize them for what they are.

However, there was one time when history fell into my hands.

One day long ago while fishing in gentle Pawnee Creek in Larned, I got bored and started digging into the bank in search of shoe-size clamshells. I scraped against something odd and soon had unearthed a horse's skull and jaw with most of its teeth.

Being in junior high, I instantly suspected that I had done something wrong.

Did the skull have a disease? Was it an Indian horse? Did it come from Fort Larned soldiers? Did a flood put the head into the bank? Where was the rest of the horse, and was its rider going to come out of the soil next?

I should have left the skull where it was or taken it to Fort Larned -- I know that now. But at the time, I wanted only to sneak my prize home.

The skull sat outside on top of our air conditioner for years. It wasn't the noblest end for a horse's head, and I'm pretty certain that it later suffered indignities I'd rather not know about.

The questions inside my own head have gotten more pointed. Really, how did the skull get there? Did I ruin an archaeological supersite? Was it a clue to a buried village, finally revealed by the high water of spring?

Regardless of my possible transgression, I feel blessed to have found the skull. It may have had absolutely no value to scientists, but it has meant a lot to me. Rather than haunting me as a memento mori -- a reminder of mortality -- it inspires me to think of life -- of the cowboy or soldier or Indian or wagoneer or kid my age who cared for the horse, brushing it and feeding it and going for rides along the creek I loved to fish in.

That skull was history in real life, history I could imagine and history I could touch.

Clues to Bismark and Houck streets

[September 5]   Larry Smith of Wichita suggests that Bismark Avenue and Houck Street could have been named for a soldier named Bismark and Solomon Houck, a wagon trail captain in 1847.

Here's a link to Houck, on Larry Mix's Santa Fe Trails Research site.

Here's a link to the soldier identified only as Bismark, who was photographed while posted to Fort Union in 1888.

This page on a Pawnee County website mentions a Bismark School, No. 22 in Pleasant Valley Township, which would be the Zook area. Does anyone know who that school is named for? Maybe it's the soldier or someone else with Pawnee Rock in his background.

Those would be men who had at least passing knowledge of Pawnee Rock. But do they have a tie to the people who founded the town? I wonder whether the folks who laid out the town in the early 1870s knew of these men unless the men were there at the creation.

I looked over the registry at the cemetery, and there are no Bismarks, Cunnifes, or Houcks listed. I'll go back and look for a Flora and Janell who might be buried in the older sections, but the chances are fair that whoever the folks were, they're buried somewhere else.

Map of our lives: Cheryl Unruh has a thought-provoking piece about the maps of our lives in yesterday's column in the Emporia Gazette.

Names and places: Leon Miller adds to our community knowledge of families with this view from South Centre Street in the 1940s and 1950s:

"Tto help on your search of the earlier inhabitants of Pawnee Rock, and I'll have to admit, I never knew the streets had names until I started reading your column. I can give you a little bit of history on South Centre Street.

Stan Brady and his daughter, Doris Wilson, and grandaughter, Geraldine Jo Wilson, lived on the corner of Center Street and the County Line Road. Our house was next to theirs.

The house on the north side of ours belonged to a couple named Goatley and their son-in-law, Cliff Quincy. Cliff's wife died before they moved into the house, which was sometime in the late 1930s. Cliff had three boys. The first was much older than I and I never knew him; the second was Bill, or Billy, as he was called when he lived there (he died in the last few years and is buried in PR Cemetery); and Rodney, who was a year younger than me and I understand lives in Alaska.

Across the street from their house was the home of Roy Blackwell. Roy was a carpenter [and later a school custodian] and he and his wife, Irene, had 4 children: Dean, who lives in Western Kansas; Dwayne, who used to live either in Topeka or Kansas City; Barbara, who I understand is dead; and their youngest, Gary, who I have no knowledge of his whereabouts.

There was one other family who lived on the east side of the street, nearer the railroad tracks, who had two daughters, one older and the other younger than me. They moved away from there in the late '40s.

The first day of school

[September 4]   Do you remember your first day of school? Dressed in a new dress, or a new shirt and jeans, you looked like a model straight out of the Montgomery Ward catalog.

I think we all brought one of our parents to that first day in Mrs. Loving's kindergarten; most likely it was our moms who walked away with a heart-tug.

Yesterday I came across a photo of son Sam that I took on a July morning in 2001. He was a 5-year-old leaving for his first day of summer preschool.

He stood by the potted flowers on the front porch, red-and-black cloth-covered lunchbox in his right hand and his green sippy cup with the yellow lid in his left. His face was earnest and eager.

It was early on the second day of kindergarten here when the attacks came and the government bred fear in every corner. In the ensuing six years, the winds of war have swirled around us -- some of our neighbors are gone for long months and some from our area have gone forever.

I'm proud of Sam for all he's learned in the six years; what parent wouldn't be? In my heart, Sam is still that boy on the porch, photographed in a moment made more poignant by the present knowledge that he would never grow up in the open world we all knew when we first went to school.

Street names: Thank you all for your interest in PawneeRock.org's pursuit of the five street names: Bismark, Cunnife, Flora, Houck, and Janell.

Despite yesterday's e-mail problems -- it seemed to be cleared up when a day's worth of mail arrived about 11 p.m. -- several of you sent in clues to the origins of Bismark and Houck.

I wonder whether Flora and Janell were wives or daughters of the town's early businessmen.

You might also wonder about the cup I'm dangling as a prize to whomever comes up with the sources of three names. You have a choice of either the Pawnee Rock Mills cup or the one with the ladies standing with the state park's pavilion.

My wife (Mrs. Unruh, if you prefer) designed the cups (and shirts, cap, bag, and pillow) using photos in the public domain -- meaning that they're so old that the copyright expired. Don Ross provided the photo of the boys on the bikes in 1914 Pawnee Rock.

If you buy any of them through Cafe Press, PawneeRock.org gets a buck or two to help cover the costs of keeping the site running.

PawneeRock.org's e-mail is down

[September 3]   I imagine several of you have sent e-mails today, perhaps in search of the cup offered as a prize for identifying street names. If you sent your e-mail after 8 a.m. Central time, I didn't receive it -- the e-mail service I use went down.

The problem lies in the digital bowels of my service provider, Bluehost.com.

I apologize to all our readers -- but not to spammers. I hope you'll try again later to send your e-mail.

Who are Bismark, Cunnife, Flora,

Houck, and Janell?

[September 3]   One of the oddities of Pawnee Rock is that apparently a lot of us grew up there without knowing that the streets had names.

When our Scout troop put up the street signs around 1970, none of us had any idea which signs went where or which direction they should face.

And no building had a known number. Why bother? We all knew where everybody lived, and all the mail was and still is put in boxes at the post office.

If flowers or a telegram had to be delivered in those hazy days, the postmaster, gas station pump jockey, or a kid on the street could give directions to the stumped delivery man. Now anybody can use Mapquest's Pawnee Rock map.

(Of course, the lots were numbered for tax, insurance, and legal purposes. It's just that no one in real life used them.)

It's understandable that we all grew up thinking of Centre Street as Main Street, which it obviously was. And when each of us was eventually introduced to "Centre Street," I'm sure we all scoffed at its silly spelling.

Now Centre bears an additional name: the Ehrlich Highway. Roy Ehrlich, born across the county in Susank, was a longtime legislator from Hoisington who produced money for Pawnee Rock State Park and the "highway" leading to it.

It's easy to figure out where some of our other street names come from: Pawnee Avenue, Santa Fe Avenue, Rock Street, Walnut Street, Barton Street, Lindas Avenue, Railroad Avenue. (Answers: The Indians or Pawnee County; the trail and railroad; the Rock itself at the north end of the street if it were extended; Walnut Creek, north of town; Barton County; John Lindas the businessman; and what is now U.S. 56, which parallels the Santa Fe tracks.)

In addition, there are the relatively bland Township Road (Mennonite Church Road) and County Line Road (south side of town, where Barton and Pawnee Counties abut). Now we're also looking at the countywide system of numbered roads.

But who was the inspiration for our five other named streets -- Bismark Avenue, Cunnife Avenue, Flora Avenue, Houck Street, and Janell Street?

Bismark could have been named after Chancellor Bismarck of Germany, a country close to our town's heavily German heritage. He unified Germany in 1871, a year before Pawnee Rock was founded.

Here's the deal: I'll buy a Pawnee Rock ceramic mug for the first reader who can tell us (convincingly) who at least three of those five streets were named for.

If the winner lives in Pawnee Rock, I won't need a street address to deliver the cup. But I'd like to see it anyway. E-mail me.

Happy Labor Day: If you're out and about, say a kind word to the people working today to make your life more pleasant. Remember that this is a day set aside to honor the labor we all perform.

Elsewhere: Cheryl Unruh has a nice photo of Pawnee Rock's teepee.

The long walk

This is my list of things to take on a camping trip in 1969. I made the notes in what I called my "Blue Book," an outdated pocket notebook given out by the Central Kansas Electric Cooperative, with Willie Wiredhand smiling from the cover.

[September 2]   I was unpacking books yesterday to fill our new floor-to-ceiling bookcase and came across "The Complete Walker." It was an old friend I hadn't seen since boxing it up eight years ago before we moved back to Alaska.

My friendship with Colin Fletcher's book about backpacking goes back even further, to the late 1960s when the book was in its first edition. I borrowed it repeatedly from the Pawnee Rock library and absorbed Fletcher's writing, paragraph by descriptive paragraph.

He took joy in seeing the countryside -- the flowers, the variety of rocks, the babbling brook. It was a sensation I knew from being out at the farm and along the Arkansas River. Moving at 2 miles per hour and usually alone, Fletcher saw everything.

Fletcher lived to backpack. His credentials came from a thousand-mile walk and months-long hikes across the scenic parts of America. He wrote about the "stuff" of being on a long walk: camp stoves, candles, toilet paper, inexpensive food -- all pared down to the lightest possible weight.

The book was full of lists, and even then I lived by lists. I made lists of what I'd need to carry while earning my Boy Scout camping and hiking merit badges; it may have been the best-documented series of 5-, 10-, and 20-mile hikes ever. Backpack, canteen, spare canteen, shorts, underwear, shirt, belt, pocketknife, cup, socks, shoes, Beanie-Weenies, fork, candle, matches, can opener -- I was the well-ordered outdoorsman.

Eventually I got too involved in high school and then college and finally in cycling and in getting my career started in Austin to do much hiking. After I returned to Kansas to work in Wichita, I came across the third edition of "The Complete Walker" and snapped it up. By then, however, I was buying a house and realistically lost any chance to take a thousand-mile hike -- to be independent.

I still dream of making those long walks, and I still compile my lists. I have a nice backpack, sleeping bag, tent, and all the other goodies, but I use them for overnight trips instead of fortnight trips. It's just hard to get away.

But what if I decided to fulfill my childhood dream? At 15 miles a day, I could walk from Oklahoma to Nebraska in two weeks. Think of the towns I'd visit, the flowers I'd smell, the rivers I'd cross, the stars I'd lie under.

I'd better start making a list.

A photo I like: No. 50

[September 1]   I met Walter Young when the two of us visited the University of Kansas as high school seniors. He was from Larned, and we ran into each other the following summer when he was a lifeguard at the Larned city pool.

Walter was always up for fun. He let me help him run a fireworks stand at Rankin's butcher shop, and he showed me how he used Sun-In to lighten his hair. He was a smart guy.

This photo was made one afternoon when I had an idea of what might work well on film. Walter made several dives for me until I had him launching just the way I wanted.

The photo won a purple ribbon at the Pawnee County 4-H fair and then a blue or purple at the state fair in Hutchinson. The Kansas 4-H Journal called from Manhattan and asked to use the photo on its cover -- high praise for a guy from Pawnee Rock.

The photo came to be more than a trophy. My friend Walter took his own life before the next summer.

Sell it

Advertise here to an audience that's already interested in Pawnee Rock:

Or tell someone happy birthday.