Too Long in the Wind

May 2006

PR alumnus and smarter for it

[May 29]   Are we ever sure we went into the right career?

Should I have been a farmer? The first summer job I was offered after high school was to help tend an orchard south of Pawnee Rock. I took a newspaper job instead.

Should I have been a rocket scientist? That was my passion in fifth grade.

A firefighter? Second and third grades.

A photographer? My heart still goes that way.

A cook at a restaurant? My boys tell me I enjoy cooking so much I should have done that.

There's something about May and June -- the end of the school year, the natural break into a new season -- that puts my shoulda-woulda-coulda mind in gear.

Maybe I should have been a carpenter, like Dad. Or someone who helps people, like Mom. Or someone who produced food or taught schoolkids, like my grandparents.

I've often thought that growing up in Pawnee Rock provided good training for many careers. It's not that we had specific training for rocket science, say, but we had parents and teachers and neighbors who encouraged us to want to learn, and they taught us how to learn.

Willard Wilson answered our questions about welding. Bill Levingston talked about lumber. Howard Bowman would tell you as much as you wanted to know about gas stations. Reford White talked about checking oil and gas wells. Any farmer would talk your ear off about crops and machinery. Randy Staggs will tell you about the elevator now. All we have had to do, ever, was ask.

Living in a small town and going to a small school gave each of us a chance to try many things. We sampled life in combinations that big-city people never get to.

You're listening to one kid who played trumpet and bucked bales and dug graves and put out his own newspaper and picked supper corn from a farmer's field and helped with wheat harvest and was in Scouts and 4-H and shot carp in the river and mowed a state park and was bad at junior high football but got to film high school football and had a darkroom in half his bedroom and spent his 18th birthday helping his best friend build a hog pen at the end of December.

Whether that turned me into a model citizen is debatable. But it prepared me for . . . stuff.

When we graduated from high school in Pawnee Rock or after the diaspora, we were all getting good at something: welding, fixing an engine, teaching, managing a household, shoveling numbers, running cattle, arranging words, singing. What we did with ourselves at that point was due to luck, family fortunes, and our personal drive.

As Pawnee Rock's alumni gather today for the annual reunion (in a school building that's for sale and may soon start a new career of its own), we have one thing in common:

There's always one more thing we think we'd be good at.

The view from right field

[May 28]  Our bunch of kids played a lot of baseball in Pawnee Rock. Not the kind of game you would see on watered fields in Larned or Great Bend, but the kind you play on land that's only a step or two removed from pasture. Lumps of dirt, clumps of grass, trees just past third base.

We played after school and on Saturdays during the spring and just about anytime during the summer. Some of us were natural athletes, the ones who would be the starting quarterback or on the A-team in basketball, and some of us were just glad if we weren't the last one picked when teams were chosen.

I was often the kid out in right field, which meant I stood in the alley near the Brights' house, and the last one to bat. But one grade-school afternoon through some luck I got on base, made my way to third and was batted in to score my first run. When I got home at twilight, I regaled Mom with my heroism; she said Vivian Bright had already told her by phone about her extremely happy son.

The rosters of our time featured longtime Pawnee Rock names -- the Brights, the Tutaks, the Bowmans, the Smiths, the Flicks, the Unruhs, the Ritchies, the Shieldses, and the Meads. Sometimes the bigger kids would descend on us, and the outfield would spread way out for the Crosbys, the Wilsons, and the Wilhites.

There was always one girl who played: Toni Bright.

Everybody wanted Toni on his team.

Toni was the toughest competitor in town. She hit the ball hard, she ran hard, she said bad words very effectively. She was the oldest of the seven or eight Bright kids (all starting with a T-), and some of us thought she was the most desirable girl in town, but you'd never catch us saying that in front of her.

One afternoon we were playing baseball on the lot just west of the New Jerusalem Church when a foul ball arched down the first-base line and into a sanctuary window. It made a beautiful hole.

The only thing faster than the ball was we players scattering up and down the street.

We all came back soon, pulled by our consciences and, at least in my case, curiosity to see how this would be fixed. Some of the guys wanted to pretend it never happened. Some wanted the batter to pay for the window.

Toni, as I remember it, took charge. She told us we would have to split the cost because it was the only fair way. She convinced us to 'fess up. I think we all agreed quickly because we didn't want the church and Toni angry at us.

In the end, we did the right thing. I was as proud of helping pay off that window as I was of anything I did with a bat or glove.

Except for that first run.

Yardful of nature

A mother moose and two calves in a neighborÍs yard, photographed by my wife.

[May 26]     Claflin native and two-time Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel once told "60 Minutes" that you "can't let nature just run wild."

Well, that's what has been going on.

My sister, Cheryl, wrote that a deer ran past her in her yard this week in Emporia. And twice this week in Eagle River, my big dog and I were chased or stared down by a mother moose with two new calves. Once was in our back yard.

Spring is cool.

These happy days make me think of one childhood morning in Pawnee Rock when I found a nest of baby rabbits in our backyard strawberry patch. Even to my little hands, they were small. We watched them for several days; once they were hopping, Mrs. Bunny moved them to a safer area.

You live in Kansas, you're going to have critters. Coyotes have always been a staple of the prairie, even at the edges of our town. More than one farmer carries a rifle in his truck and a revolver on his tractor to address the coyote issue.

One time I saw a red fox run down the alley behind the Schmidts' place at Bismark and Rock. Raccoons and opossums come in for a bite of garbage now and then, and everybody and their dog knows when a skunk wanders into town.

It's not surprising that animals make it into Pawnee Rock. No place in town is more than three blocks from the "country."

Birds count, too. Does any sound say "summer evening" more than the one made by a mourning dove?

I suppose that in the windy country we have always felt a kinship with wildlife. Like the rabbits, we know the relief of finding an oasis after a long day on the flatland highway. Like the songbirds at a feeder, we know the joy of good food and clean water given gladly.

Maybe you and I were just raised well -- it's easy for us to get along with nature. Still, I always feel blessed when a member of the wild world feels trusting enough to set foot in my yard.

The war we live with

[May 25]   It was a warm May morning -- 1974, I think -- as I stood inconspicuously in the double row of cedars at the north end of the Pawnee Rock Township Cemetery. A hundred feet to the south, members of the American Legion and several families were gathered around the white-painted obelisk.

Dorothy Bowman had invited me to play taps on my trumpet for the town's Memorial Day ceremony. I was to listen to the speakers and be ready after the honor guard fired their .30-caliber carbines into the sky.

Though it was late in the morning, the air was still, and the scents of the cemetery were full and familiar: the buffalo grass, the cedars, the cut flowers decorating dozens of graves, and the peonies. The peonies were my favorites; families planted them and roses between the gravestones.

Small cloth flags had been slipped into metal holders the night before at each veteran's grave, and even in Mennonite-dense Pawnee Rock there were plenty of flags. The red, white and blue stood sharply against the spring-green grass and somber gray and red marble.

Pawnee Rock's oldest identified veteran in the cemetery fought in the Spanish-American War at the end of the previous century. There were vets from World Wars I and II and Korea in our ground, none yet from the dying war in Vietnam.

It seems odd now that on that perfect morning, Pawnee Rock's biggest war went unmentioned.

For decades, through the 1860s, the war against the Indians played out around the Santa Fe Trail landmark known as Pawnee Rock. Soldiers posted at Fort Zarah and at Fort Larned went into battle to protect the settlers' westward push. Indians -- the Warriors and Braves who became our school's mascots -- fought to protect their land and life.

The prairie on which our town is built was a battlefield. Men and women died for their cause in the few hundred yards between the cemetery and the Rock, between the Rock and town.

Our town will take this Memorial Day to honor those who fought for us in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the great and lesser wars of the 20th century. But as we drive down the hill from the cemetery on Monday morning, let us remember also those who fought on our -- our -- soil and who lie buried around us.

When we climb the sandstone pavilion atop the Rock or look at the sandstone buildings in town, I hope we will be reminded of our landmark's history by the dried-blood color of that inherited stone. The shouts and the gunfire were over before any of our families arrived, but the struggle is ours to honor.

On that pretty morning in the mid-1970s, I waited for the snap of the carbines. I raised my silver trumpet and played 27 solemn tones.

The final note faded into the air, and on command the honor guard brought their weapons to rest.

Sunday driving

The kids, ages 2 and 4, and our Impala in 1961.

[May 24]   "See the USA in your Chevrolet," the jingle urged, and we did.

Our Sunday-afternoon drives took us to the far reaches of Barton, Stafford and Pawnee counties, USA. Home from church, satisfied with lunch, we loaded ourselves into our red Impala at midafternoon and set off across the gravel-road empire surrounding Pawnee Rock.

Mom and daughter on the right, Dad and son on the left. I think the trips lasted until Cheryl and I became teens and always had something else to do.

Perhaps the parents had an idea of where we would go, but for me (and I hope for Cheryl) the drives were an open-ended adventure of simple pleasures and daydreams.

We stopped to admire spiderwort plants and rainwater ponds loaded with mallards. We parked along the road to eat sandhill plums. We picked up hedge apples for fun and pop bottles for the refund. We passed a lot of places where things used to be.

Our trips weren't always rural. Sometimes we drove around Larned, car-window shopping for houses. We'd never move out of Pawnee Rock, but it was fun for me to hear the folks gossip about real estate and city families. Mom went to high school in Larned, so she always had a story to tell.

In Larned, there was also the chance we'd get a Dilly Bar or cherry slush at the Dairy Queen. But nothing beat a trip around the park on the miniature train.

The Sunday drives sketched out the lines of our extended hometown. Maybe the neatest thing was that Dad and Mom showed us what they valued about our Kansas.

I don't know whether many other families took these drives, because I rarely talked about it with my classmates. It was a private time for two kids and their parents, one singular family motoring across the sandhills of a sunny era.

Forbidden fruit

[May 23]   On the corner of our block sat the Germans' home: gray-shingled siding, screened front porch, and a yard full of trees. Juniper trees and apple trees, pear trees, cherry trees.

The Germans were good and enthusiastic gardeners. Their unfenced side and back yards were lush with rhubarb, carrots, lettuce, and all other sorts of rabbit food.

Many Pawnee Rock families filled their tables with homegrown vegetables and fruit back then. For example, we had strawberries, corn, zucchini, peas, potatoes and the rest. Plus peach and cherry trees and an arbor of Concord grapes. (Jelly grapes. There was no talk of wine in our town then; buy and drink in secret.)

Because the Germans' fruit trees stood right along the sidewalk, they mercilessly tempted schoolkids. The trees must have quivered when the Tutak boys slammed out of the house in the morning, and I admit tasting an apple or two. You know, forbidden fruit.

The Germans are long gone now, and the lot retains an unkempt hint of the Garden of Eden. I don't know whether the trees were planted by the Germans; a family that lived there earlier may have had the original green thumbs.

The Germans were preceded on that corner by the Wycoffs, who lived there until sometime in the 1940s. Two boys in the family, Billy and Bobby, had played basketball at the high school (see the team photo) and then moved away and ended up in California.

California.

Land of movie stars, hippies, and the Beverly Hillbillies. Apparently the Wycoffs were the first on our block to discover that you could drive all the way into the sunset.

Don Ross, who also was on the basketball team and now lives in Dodge City, wrote:

"They moved to California, went into the Navy, moved back to California and became schoolteachers. They bought a little piece of land and now raise grapes for wine."

Wine grapes -- the really forbidden fruit.

"They have done very well for themselves," Don wrote. "The Wycoffs were a large family and very poor. I am glad for them."

It would be nice to think that 65 years ago, those two boys developed their love for agriculture in a yard at the intersection of Santa Fe Avenue and Rock Street.

Let's raise a glass to their success.

Pictures of the past

[May 22]   As I have built PawneeRock.org, I've wandered deeper and deeper into the town's history. What I'm finding is much more interesting than I had expected.

I'm seeing the city from other families' perspectives, and from the perspective of times besides my own. It's getting to be real fun now.

Older Pawnee Rockers remember a bustling Pawnee Rock: two banks, a newspaper, a drug store, restaurants, several downtown gas stations, a hotel. All those are gone, and what we have left are photos and memories.

Don Ross mentioned in an e-mail that the Gano office sat on the eastern side of the street, across from where the depot is now. Chas Gano -- remember the name painted on the elevator? -- started his grain-handling empire in Pawnee Rock. A photo from the late 19th century shows a Gano office across the street from the Rock Hotel, so Gano (if it's the same one) must have expanded as business improved.

Dad and I spoke Sunday about some of the changes in downtown Pawnee Rock over the years. He worked as a carpenter along Centre Street -- usually known as Main Street -- for decades, first at D & B Truck Beds and then at his own place, Elgie's Craft Shop.

I was asking about where some long-gone stores and offices had stood. Dad's brain opened up and and out poured the details.

The depot's current site on the west side of Main used to be occupied by the J.L. Morris grocery store. North of that was the D & B shop, where Dad got his start as a carpenter. Then came the 1908 livery building, which still stands, and the American Legion hall, which used to be the Carris grocery store, which used to be the Hixon grocery store, which used to be J.D. Carpenter's grocery store. And I may be leaving out some "which used to be" steps, too.

As you see in the 1915-era postcard photo looking west from near where the Farmers Grain office is now, there are at least seven buildings in that block.

On the east (near) side of the street, the vacant lot is where the building that became Dad's cabinet-building shop was erected. The brown brick building with GARAGE written in the concrete facade originally was just that: a gas station and garage. You may recall the curved, covered drive-through lanes. As a kid I used to play in the holes in the concrete divider where the gas pumps once sat.

The garage/shop building was owned in Dad's working time by the elevator company. Eventually Dad retired, and the building collapsed in the wind as he was moving out.

At some point, a bandstand may also have stood in that lot shown in the postcard. What looks like a lumberyard fills the space in the foreground. I don't know yet how long it lasted; the Clutter-Lindas lumberyard that we all remember was in the next block to the north.

Also visible in the postcard on the east side of Main Street was the Rock Hotel, a two-story barracks-looking building that departed early in the 20th century. It sat north of the current antique store, close to the highway. At one time, the antique store's site was occupied by Stella's, a gas station and restaurant run by Stella Morris.

(Find images of Stella's, the Morris grocery [look for Red Wright's photo], the livery stable, and the current downtown in the gallery section of Pawnee Rock.org.)

And that's just one downtown block, two sides of the street.

I wish I had paid better attention long ago when Dad was laying everything out for me, but passed-down knowledge never reveals its true value the first time we hear it.

So now I'm doing what I should have been doing 30 years ago -- asking and listening and taking notes.

To the Graduates of 2006

[May 19]   When our son Nik was 2, I took him and his brother to visit my Dad and Betty in Pawnee Rock. We walked around town as a pack, visiting the post office, the playground seesaw and finally the Farmers Grain office.

As we walked back to the house where I grew up, we passed a mulberry tree near Willard Wilson's old welding shop. As it was June, the berries were ripe and purple. Thinking of how much I liked mulberries, I offered some to Nik.

Always up for adventure and as trusting as could be, Nik took a bite.

"Bleaah," he said. He spat blue.

And so, Class of 2006, there's your lesson.

1. Trust your parents a little. They've been there, and experience counts.

2. Try new stuff.

3. Hand out the truth. At least once in a while, make it the unadorned truth. Do it even if the truth goes against someone else's cherished truth.

4. Become a parent and discover why you should do items 1, 2 and 3.

Good luck and have fun.

Lost Lovers' Lane

[May 19]   A half-mile west of Pawnee Rock on the correction line, a dirt road starts its long run north.

Identified now by the pedestrian name SW 120 Avenue and reduced to a weedy track between fields, the road rises out of the soft dust of the valley and a mile later crosses the east-west road that passes the cemetery and old salt plant. It quickly becomes hardpan and heads off across a dozen miles of wheat country to Albert.

For practical purposes, this road marks 99 degrees west longitude. For impractical purposes, the first 200 yards are worth considering.

That area, embraced by shelter belts, is Lovers' Lane. It was (and maybe still is) the closest easy-access, low-visibility parking place for evening trysts. Or for illicit drinking. Check the ditches.

But for me -- someone who yearned to try out Lovers' Lane but never did -- this little stretch instead was an oasis.

Huge cottonwoods lined the west side of the road, and smaller trees were on the east. Lazy clumps of seeds drifted through the air in season. Summer's heat and wind were moderated; winter's chill was lessened. In the autumn, the trees made a bower of amber. And it was private, except for the occasional farmer and meadowlark driving through.

This park of sorts was a secretive and short bike ride from town. When I needed to just get away to the natural world, Lovers' Lane was a safe bet. I loved that lane.

Now this haven is passing into farmland, so rarely does anyone use it.

It's hard to declare what Lovers' Lane said about Pawnee Rock. It's even more difficult to figure out what not having it means.

Signs we were there

[May 18]   If you know the street names in Pawnee Rock, you should thank the Boy Scouts.

OK, you should thank a lot of people. But around 1970, the boys of Troop 444 grabbed post-hole diggers and bags of cement and over a two-day weekend planted a bunch of corner signposts.

The city, possibly using a federal grant, paid for the work, and it probably paid people besides the Scouts to handle the work.

The Scouts used the money to buy several tents and cooking gear, which we used quite a bit. (Thanks.)

Over the years, I've had fond feelings for the intersection of Houck and Cunnife streets. That's where George Unruh (no relation), Doug Carmichael and I fought a tenacious battle with the soil and eventually won -- after we got Joan Smith's permission to run her garden hose out there to soften the soil.

Scoutmaster Ron Stark, a former Navy SeaBee (job description: builders who could fight), thought we took too long and were a little thin in the arms. We probably were.

Nevertheless, the sign still stands.

The romantic age of fine dining

[May 17]   A set of wedding photos viewed online this week triggered some mental process that made me think of going out to fine restaurants.

Sometimes after church in the 1960s and 1970s, we took Grandma to Larned's Blue Goose Cafe on Fourth Street. The Blue Goose was a sit-down, order-from-the-menu restaurant, and the pace was friendly. You know -- the kind of place where nobody really minded if the weekday Lions Club meeting got a little loud.

One of the best things about the Blue Goose was the name: a fanciful appellation in central Kansas. It shared the name of one of the Santa Fe Railroad's streamlined locomotives.

At the time, there seemed to be only two real restaurants in Larned. The other was the Don Do diner, back when it was on the north side of the highway, across from where it is now.

In our family, we were eating high on the hog when we spent Sunday afternoon at the Ralph Wallace Buffet and Restaurant in Great Bend. Fried chicken, roast beef, slices of ham -- a month of choices all at once. Throw in the carrot salad, bean salad, green salad and Jell-O salad, the cornbread and rolls, the olives and corn and celery sticks, and the cakes and pies, and our feast was as good as wallowing in a 4-H potluck.

Ralph Wallace's always seemed to have a "brown" look and felt crowded, but maybe that was our overstuffed bellies talking. The Blue Goose felt more airy, more small-town . . . more Larned.

Of course, these are just my personal memories. Other people had their own highlights. For example, one spring evening I was standing at the Midget Malt Shop in Pawnee Rock waiting for my burgers to carry home. Mr. Jones, the owner, was chatting with a high school senior, who reported with some pride that the prom that weekend would start with steak and shrimp at the Holiday Inn in Great Bend.

Ah, the romantic age of fine dining. Or maybe it was the fine age of romantic dining.

The recent wedding photos I mentioned earlier were of the daughter of one of my cousins, Cynthia. Once upon a time, all of our family attended the wedding rehearsal dinner of her sister, Mary, and Mary's husband to be, Lynn, at Ralph Wallace's.

It was a good meal before a happy wedding, and it was the appropriate setting for a couple sitting down to the feast of life.

Pawnee Rockhounds

[May 16]   Late Monday afternoon I went up the valley with my 8-year-old son, Nik, and we spent an hour skipping rocks across the river and constructing moats and canals in a sandbar.

Is there a finer activity for fathers and sons (or any family combination)? I thought not.

As we dug our fingers into the dark glacial silt and lifted out cold monotonous chunks of greywacke and greenstone, I thought back to the golden days when my dad took me to the Arkansas River to find rocks.

Most of you know that Dad collected a lot of things -- car tags, tools, historical papers -- but one of his greatest passions was rocks. He added to his backyard collection for as long as he lived in Pawnee Rock. My wife would like to strangle me when she finds rocks in my pockets after I visit Dad or take the boys camping, but gathering an unusual rock or two or nine is just the way our family operates.

Dad and I found lots of nice rocks in that sandy Arkansas River bed. Granite, rolled downhill from Colorado and polished all the way. Petrified wood. Feldspar, calcite, jasper. Quartz -- rose, yellow, smoky, milky, and that most desired variety, the clear Kansas diamond. My favorite hunting area was along the edge of the running water, because a wet rock also shows its beauty the best.

Dad sometimes put the harder rocks in his rock tumbler to smooth them out and polish them. Some were just too pretty or delicate to mess with, and they ended up in our yard or in a little cabinet by my bed, where I admired them night after night and attributed special powers to the ones with mixed colors.

While Dad was showing me the wonders of the geological world, he also taught me how to skip rocks across the shallow river.

You can't keep them all, he said.

Answering the siren call

[May 15]   As a young reporter for the Larned Tiller & Toiler in the mid-1970s, I did my share of chasing ambulances and fire trucks.

Yes, it was fun to go fast with sirens in front of me. Yes, it was exciting to be among the first to know what happened. Yes, I knew there were real-life consequences being paid by some poor soul or family.

Chasing agony wasn't the brightest moment in my career. But it was what the editor, Jack Zygmond, wanted, and I was glad enough to go along.

If it was good for Jack -- a chain-smoking, coffee-guzzling Ichabod Crane who could type one story while interviewing someone over the phone for another story -- it was all right with me. I was paid $75 a week for doing it.

I had gotten my start with the Tiller and the Great Bend Tribune as a high-schooler in 1972 by selling photos of barn fires and lightning-struck trees. Because I lived next door to the Pawnee Rock fire station, it seemed like a natural thing to do. And I had been a journalist of sorts since the late 1960s, when I published the typewritten Pawnee Rock Informer newspaper for three years.

In essence, being a journalist gave me the license to do what I wanted when anything interesting happened. Sometimes those events were 4-H fairs, but too often they were calamities.

House fires were worse than fatal car wrecks, because the homeowners often would yell for me to help fight the fire and my job didn't let me. With a car wreck, all the bad stuff was already done when I got there.

There were the lesser events: stubble fires that engulfed a wheat truck, a broken arm at the Larned pool, the opening of my naive world when I toured several wards at Larned State Hospital with Gov. Bob Bennett. The hospital chief admonished me not to photograph any of the patients. The governor's only stipulation was that I not publish a photo of him smoking; on most days I let that episode block out the sad cases in the green-painted ward rooms. Except for the one of the proud 11- or 12-year-old patient who wanted to show off to the governor his blanket full of holes.

Sometimes the paycheck just wasn't enough. One late morning I followed an ambulance to a worksite south of Pawnee Rock for what appeared to be a heart attack. The man's daughter, a classmate, was there and came running to be hugged. "What will I do?" she cried.

What she did was stay with her dad, who turned out okay.

But the question for me remained: What will I do?

Journalists usually can cite a certain crisis as a turning point toward hardness. That morning, I knew that I could be tough but that I couldn't be a vulture.

It was a career decision that's easy to live with.

Ride on, Mom

[May 14]   Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

You've been my mom for 49 years and a few months.

I used to think you had a pretty tight grip on my life. There you were, never giving me a moment's rest.

When I wanted to watch a Gemini blast off on TV and you drove us to Grandma's, you stayed and made sure Cheryl and I were on our best behavior. When I was learning the counties and county seats in sixth grade, there you were, checking on me and telling me such things as how you remembered Doniphan County's seat is Troy because it was like some old actor named Troy Donahue. When I was in the hospital with the flu in eighth grade, you were in my room every day. Mom, I thought, go away!

When I was 5, you taught me how to ride my heavy green bike. There you were, one hand steering, one hand pushing. Not long after that, when I tagged along with you and Pat Countryman for a bike ride on the correction line, you told me to keep moving my legs and be careful.

Now I realize what you were really teaching me: Once you let go of me, I should keep moving my legs and be careful.

Thank you, Mom. I'm trying.

I love you.

The scent of summer

[May 12]   For my money, there's no better backyard scent than the one that comes from the unpretentious honeysuckle.

Sure, roses are nice. Hollyhocks do OK. Lilacs are worth getting out of bed for. Irises are pretty good.

But the surest way for me to drift off to the Land of Contentment is to sit next to a trellis dripping with honeysuckle. There's a reason bees hang around it -- they're still trying to perfect the smell of their own honey.

Along the Santa Fe Trail

U.S. 56 follows the Santa Fe Trail.

[May 11]   Imagine back 175 years or so to when the Santa Fe Trail was being carved through Indian country, right between Pawnee Rock and the river. Imagine driving a team and wagon 600 miles over rough terrain, most of it in Kansas weather.

And you're on your own. Make your own wagon repairs. Find your own water. Avoid disease. Make sure you don't get caught in prairie fires or shot by Kiowas or bandits. The trail-going people -- at least the ones who got to Independence or Santa Fe -- were tough and competent.

The Santa Fe Trail, except for a few untrammeled places like the Ash Creek crossing, has become a memory drawn on maps. The land itself has been tilled and drilled and homogenized and fertilized and irrigated until it hardly resembles the legendary Great American Desert.

Yet, even if all we have today is a memory of the trail, it's still our heritage, our learned-from-birth history. It's our excuse -- our reason -- to hit the road, to test our mettle, to reach the stars through difficulties.

Pawnee Rock and its people, and towns like ours, contain what's left of the spirit of the Santa Fe Trail. And we take that with us no matter how far we stray from home.

Speaking of competent: Cheryl Unruh was on statewide radio again yesterday to read one of her newspaper columns. This piece, "Drama Queen," contains a few of her thoughts about the "big blue box" above Kansas. Check it out, especially the second version listed just under the first.

The Kansas Public Radio page that comes up also lists her other reports. Check them out too.

The art and music of life

[May 10]   Red Wright's picture appeared on PawneeRock.org's home page -- a fine photo of a hard-working man I had never heard of even though he may have still been working when I was born. (See it now in the Gallery.)

That got me to wondering about how many other people had been invisible to me.

And that got me to thinking about the people who had jobs that drew little attention but that you and I still treasure in memory.

Ruth Deckert is one. She taught art classes at her kitchen table in her big farmhouse north of town. They were simple lessons, as basic as using highlights and shadow to make a drawing of an apple look like an apple.

"I was just babysitting you," she told me a few years ago.

Maybe that's true, but I learned theories and practices in those Wednesday after-school classes that have illuminated the way I have looked at art ever since. In effect, she taught me to see -- better said, she taught me how to see.

Mrs. Stansbury (Mrs. George Stansbury; was her name spelled Berdine?) taught piano lessons in the living room of her brick home south of the historical marker. I wasn't the most dedicated student she had, but what I learned there helped me become a better trumpet player and eventually get into the Argonne Rebels Drum and Bugle Corps and see the country. In my idle moments as a grownup, I still play the simple melodies from Mrs. Stansbury's first lesson book.

I'm not alone in this, I suspect. When she had her students give a recital, there were perhaps a dozen of us thumping away.

Willard Wilson ran the welding shop, the red building on Centre Street between the post office and the Christian Church. He put stuff together, an indispensable part of any town's economy. His house -- four-square -- was like his work: strong and straightforward.

But it was his smaller acts that were the invisible "oil" that helped keep Pawnee Rock running smoothly. For example, he and his four-wheel-drive Power Wagon pulled dozens of us out of muddy ditches and snowdrifts. And he did it with an understanding smile.

What these folks -- and Red Wright -- did was almost always out of the public eye. But when you think about it, it's easy to see the big role they played in making our town a hometown.

Why the toad crosses the road

[May 9]   Back in the days when my dad ran Elgie's Craft Shop and water was allowed to stand in ditches for a couple of weeks, one of the highlights of spring happened right there on the main street.

My sister and I spent a lot of time with Dad, who watched over us after school. The shop was in a brown brick building across from the current American Legion hall; the shop and the big elm tree out front have been gone for quite a few years.

But under the elm, after a big rain, water stood in the ditch. And where there is water in Kansas, there are toads.

Eggs, attached to mossy plants, appeared to sharp-eyed kids who were playing around the puddles anyway. Soon all-tail tadpoles hatched, quickly becoming four-legged half-tail mutants. By the end of the week, it seemed, those slippery squirts were strong enough to jump out of my little hand.

As nature intended, the toads' puddle was also the mosquitoes' puddle. The larvae became toad food.

The puddles eventually dried up and the tadpoles wandered off into gardens, vacant lots and other damp ditches, reappearing in the evenings as they hopped across lawns and our gravel streets.

Is there a kid who didn't chase toads -- despite all the warnings against picking them up and getting warts?

The toads' circle of life: They rise out of the swamp; learn to snag bugs; are chased by dogs, cats and kids; and, if they survive, disappear into the soil as winter arrives.

Toads do it all by instinct. We human parents have it better. We get to enjoy the moment when we help our own kids grab a bit of the circle.

Last summer I was driving my sons, 8 and 6 at the time, around Pawnee Rock as dusk faded into darkness. They had had a busy day visiting relatives and swimming and were about to pass out but wanted to see the town at night. As we passed the high school, a toad hopped out of the thick lawn and hesitantly made its way across the road in our headlights.

The father's circle of life: I swooped out of the Jeep and a moment later handed the toad over to my own tadpoles.

Out at the sandpit

[May 8]   Earl Allen Schmidt's sandpit was heaven on earth.

This small -- by big-city standards -- oasis is just east of the Pawnee Rock bridge over the Arkansas River, about two and a half miles from downtown.

The sandpit had machinery that sucked a sand slurry out of the extended riverbed and pumped it into a pile. A tipple enabled Earl to pour a quick cubic yard of sand, gravel or rocks into our dads' pickups, more into a dump truck -- sand that was used to build our town and county.

Occasionally Earl would dredge up a mammoth tooth that had rolled down the river from Colorado or western Kansas. He'd bring them in to school and let us touch prehistory.

Earl, who was a farmer and school-bus driver, had stocked the sandpit with crappie and generously let kids fish there. I suppose he might have had a soft spot for some of us who were about the age of his daughter Brenda. We'd ride our bikes out, walk down the slope to the floats that carried the hose and slip into the corrugated-tin pumphouse.

Our bait usually was minnows we had seined from the Arkansas on our way over and loaded into a bucket. When we ran out, we used jigs and spinners, which were less reliable. One day, the fish were biting so well that they used up all the bait. Rob Bowman and I, desperate for bait, caught crappies on hooks dressed up with cigarette butts we found in the sand among the sunflowers.

Sometimes, when our Boy Scout troop was camped along the river during the school year, we would hear the shouts and whoops of high schoolers having keg parties at the pit. The highlight came the night when a cool dude (last name Rice, I think) played the Pink Panther theme on his saxophone, the syncopation floating down the river for us and the coyotes.

It was good to have this little hole of clear green water. We used it in different ways, and we loved it.

Thanks, Earl.

Food worth cooking

[May 6]   Today the mailman brought a catalog from Home Bistro. This company sells "chef-prepared" meals that can be delivered to your front door and heated on your stove. And they're bargains, I guess: Filet mignon for $17, cranberry stuffed chicken breast for $12 and escargot in creamy garlic sauce for $7.

How we ever got on that company's mailing list, I don't know. But looking at it made me hungry for a real meal from the home stove in Pawnee Rock:

A slice of fried bologna topped with mashed potatoes and melted cheese.

Please, use your napkin. You're drooling.

I apologize for acting pretentious. The fancy catalog would spell that mixture of mechanically separated and spiced meat "bologna." When you and I eat it, it's "baloney."

Oddly enough, there's a town in Ohio -- Waldo, a Pawnee Rock-size town halfway between President Rutherfold Hayes' birthplace in Columbus and President Warren Harding's tomb in Marion -- where the popular food seems to be fried baloney sandwiches. The Chicago Tribune ran a story about this town. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood.

But, seriously, Pawnee Rock once did (and maybe still does) have fine cuisine, and I'm not talking about the jars of pickled eggs and violently red hot sausages on the counter at Betty's.

Inspired by my Boy Scout training and my love of small fires, I talked my parents into letting me cook a lot of my meals in the back yard. The first step was collecting elm twigs and sticks, arranging them in a tepee and burning them down to a bed of coals.

Into the coals went my masterpiece: a hamburger patty with slices of onions, carrots and potatoes, all wrapped in two or three layers of aluminum foil. The vegetables sometimes were sacrificed to the heat, but the meat was always perfect.

The best part was the anticipation created by listening to the sizzle and drawing up the scent of cooking meat.

Have you forgotten the thrill? Take a kid to the back yard, demonstrate how to build a fire and toss in some meat. Or be that kid.

Of course, if you're into gourmet dining, there's always fried bologna.

See you at the table.

Games we played

[May 5]   My cousin Laramie Unruh wrote last night after the photo of the men at Farmers Grain (now in the gallery) appeared on the PawneeRock.org home page. It brought back childhood memories of going into Farmers' basement, where men played five-point pitch. Among them was his dad, also named Laramie.

Laramie wrote: "I went down there all the time with dad and I remember your dad being there a good part of the time. As a boy I learned much about the game, analyzing your opponent, playing a bluff. The men would gather about 3:30 and play 'til 5 or 5:30, when they would be expected home for supper. Mom could always tell when dad had been there from the smell of cigarette smoke on his clothes."

Great Bend had the Elks and Eagles lodges as a men's hideaway; Pawnee Rock had Farmers Grain. It was matches- and toothpicks-stakes gambling right there in plain sight.

Cards were played in a lot of homes. Our grandma, Lena, was a pretty sharp pitch player herself -- after the chickens and dog were fed and the dishes washed. She got a lot of hours out of her cards playing solitaire, too, after Grandpa died.

In Pawnee Rock, the focus of public games was Bob's Place, or the Pawnee Inn, or whatever name the bar happened to be using at the time. This is the white building along the highway, where the Santa Fe Mercantile antique shop is now.

You may remember 3.2 beer. Bob's was where you bought it, and you could sit at the bar and drink and read the sign saying: "You're in Kansas. Set your watch back 25 years."

Then, after the gentle folk went home to supper or TV, you'd play bar shuffleboard. Or pool, 25 cents a game; good luck getting a straight cue. In the 1970s, Pong came to town, and we poured our quarters into this original digital game -- imagine, playing a game on a TV screen.

This is a story my dad once told me. Although I assume it's true I must say it doesn't matter one way or the other. It's a perfect Pawnee Rock story, and I'll continue to believe it:

Back in the 1930s or '40s, two guys in one of the town's bars came to blows. The loser was beaten to death with a pool cue.

So the city did the only responsible thing -- it banned pool for 30 years.

And those are the games we played.

Good for the wheat

[May 4]   There are a couple of things I like about talking to Kansans.

1. Kansans know how to pronounce "Unruh."

2. You don't have to explain to Kansans what it means when you say "It's good for the wheat."

I've long thought that "it's good for the wheat" is one of life's best all-purpose remarks, right up there with aphorisms about boxes of chocolates and tomorrow being another day.

It rains? Good for the wheat. Snow? Good for the wheat, especially if the snow doesn't blow off into the ditch. No matter the inconvenience in our life, somehow it's still good for our wheat.

So maybe I should stop snarling at the people who can't handle a simple Germanic name. In one way or another, they're good for my wheat.

The hills are alive

[May 3]   A couple of days ago, while describing a long-ago trip to Hutchinson to see "The Sound of Music," I mentioned that my sister might have been left with a babysitter in Pawnee Rock.

Well, I was wrong. Cheryl has informed me that not only did she go, but also that she wore a dress ("that's when I was still a girl"), found the ramp frightfully steep and needed Dad's help in holding the seat down so it wouldn't fold her in half.

I'm glad she was there. It's nice to know that our family was all together, with friends, for an event that was both pleasant and an influence on two young lives.

This is something I would have liked to talk to Cheryl about before, perhaps when we were standing in her kitchen testing each other's knowledge of counties and county seats and letting our minds wander across our childhoods.

What is it that pushes happy times into our mental recesses? Do we treasure it so much that we don't want to spoil it by talking about it? Do we think we'd look silly? Do we honestly forget?

I say: Explore memories. Ask others.

I'd like to think this journal has a good reason for existing even if it does nothing more than help my sister and me -- and your sister and you -- get our stories straight.

Shadows of past and present

[May 2]   Clear evenings bring that delightful time known as the golden hour, when the low sun makes long shadows with reddish light. It's the best moment to add up all you've done, before the day slips into twilight.

A year ago when I was visiting Dad and Betty, I spent many hours on the streets of Pawnee Rock, photographing every foot of every block. It was surprisingly easy to dwell on what I loved and hated, why I had left and why I keep coming back.

Sooner or later, and I hope within a couple of months, I'll have those photos posted on PawneeRock.org. It took me a while to figure out what to do with my digital treasure, and now it's fitting together.

I wrapped up my hometown immersion with a golden-hour tour of the state park. My sentiment about the place was so strong that I wished I could have been absorbed once again into Pawnee Rock.

Movie magic

[May 1]   Movie magic in Pawnee Rock before cable TV -- practically before color TV -- was enjoyed in Larned and Great Bend.

Larned's State Theater, in the block south of the square, always felt homey. Kids and families going there knew the other kids and families.

The freshest shows were on the screen at the Crest, just off the square in Great Bend. If you could wait for "Electra Glide in Blue" or "Billy Jack," second- and third-run movies were an open-air treat at the drive-in on 10th Street across from the REA plant.

But the really, really good movies appeared first in the Big City.

And so it was in 1965 that when "The Sound of Music" arrived in Kansas, it came closest to Pawnee Rock when it opened at the Fox Theater in Hutchinson.

Our family wasn't a regular movie-going family, but Mom and Dad were invited by Pawnee Rock postmaster Roger Unruh and his wife, Love, to drive with them to Hutch one Sunday and see the show.

Hutchinson is about an hour's drive from Pawnee Rock. You can imagine that it seemed to take a little longer in a car packed with Roger and Love and their high school son, R.L., in the front seat and my folks and me, a second- or third-grader, in the back. My sister may have been left at a babysitter.

The Fox was a grand theater; for years afterward when I read about a movie balcony, I imagined it in the Fox's setting. "The Sound of Music" has remained one of my favorite shows; it even had an intermission. It was, after all, a three-hour show.

Sometimes I wonder about why I remember certain items. Of that big afternoon, the other tidbit that sticks in my head is watching R.L. open the Hutch News, fold it back on itself, in half and then in half again so he could read a quarter-page of comic strips.

Now, to a kid, that's magic.