Photo by Mark Inman Seitz

Economic Development
By Sandra C. Wood

Bill Cosby said, "I don t know what the key to success is, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone." Leadership has costs; one of those is being lonely. This column is going to be a little different than the others I ve written because I will be sharing a bit of who I am, not just what I do.

Several months ago, I attended a seminar in Osborne County where several Kansas authors read from their works and answered questions. One message of those sessions was that Kansans prefer positive press&that is they don t want anything controversial said about them or their neighbors. Therefore, the best stories are often times not retold or told at all. The great Kansas epic is Lonesome Dove. So, the image of Kansas to most everyone around us remains cowboys, Indians, vast wide open, prairie inhabited by abundant buffalo. We re not cultured and certainly not civilized like the folks on the East Coast or our European friends across the great Atlantic Ocean, right? That s said tongue in cheek, but if the world stopped today, that is how it might look.

Before moving to Russell County, I was advised by my mentors that the only friends I would find would be like-minded people, in my field. That no one in my community (or service area) would merit my trust, because once I let my guard down, doing my job could be difficult. So, here I have been for nearly five years attempting to balance the image the Kansas authors portrayed, which is that we re all fine, moral people. With only one exception, given me by a professor, who plainly said trust no one in the community.

Before coming to Russell, I read articles about special interests and definitions describing individuals who sought to create and sustain their own authority. I experienced this phenomenon working in Wichita and I came to the conclusion that such individuals exist everywhere. Only the names change, as do the faces and the places. We are outnumbered. As eventually, the settlers outnumbered the Plains Indians. Prior to interviewing for my position here, I read the Russell Daily News. I will likely continue to read articles in the Russell News after I leave because I have an academic interest in this community.

Community interests must outweigh personal gain in every case. Tom Peters and Nancy Austin, in their book, A Passion for Excellence, say "A passion for excellence means thinking big and starting small; experience happens when high purpose and intense pragmatism meet&courage and self-respect are the lion s share of passion." In the grand scheme of things, Russell is very small. But, I got the opportunity to be part of other peoples dreams and to accomplish some of my own. And, I followed my Dad s advice. All we truly have is our good name. He was right.

Clearly, my job was to meet the needs of the entire governing body that hired me and the appointed body that supervises me. That sharing of power raised the competency level of all concerned. I attempted always to stay out of the limelight, and made sure that the whole team realized all the successes we found. The hired hand should be invisible, something else I have learned in my experience with economic development.

So, I wasn t lonely these past five years in Russell because I kept busy trying to help the people who really want to see Russell County charge into the next decade. So, I kept busy, attempting along the way to work together with people and establish trusting relationships that allowed me to be open, honest, and perhaps even confrontational. The real challenge is learning to overcome discord. I have been asked how I can stand confrontation? My answer to this question was not to lose focus and stick to the facts. Sometimes the facts were ugly, but it is preferable to deal directly with the ugliness than to allow it to fester and later erupt with more severe consequences. Sometimes, it meant working with one person at a time, over a course of years. It was a slow and deliberate process. I was frustrated early on because I didn t think I d ever get anything done. But, looking back, my Dad, the professor, and my mentors were right.

It is my fond hope that I have accomplished some service to this community and the surrounding communities in Russell County.

The green road sign read nine miles to Troy. It was a sign I'd seen 100 times before, and it always provided the same sense of encouragement. The 130-mile trip was almost over.

But this trip was different. It wasn't a holiday or a weekend off from school. There weren't any ballgames or family events. This time, I was going back to take a closer look at the place I called home---to view it as if I d never seen it before; to look at its buildings in a new way; to see its landscape as a passerby; and to think more deeply about each interaction with its citizens.

My challenge was to reflect upon my hometown, explore its resources and write about the experience.

The miles of Kansas highway I had already covered offered a scenic view of northeastern Kansas. The highways leading to Troy cross pastures, fields and small towns. With each passing mile, native grass pastures gave way to fields of harvested corn and beans. The view of the horizon became shorter as the rolling hills rose even steeper. Traces of a recent harvest lingered in the fields. Grain trucks and combines dotted the landscape. The old, faded sign advertising the highlights of Troy came into view. It s doubtful the sign encouraged many travelers to venture off the highway and explore my town. Still, I took the first exit into town, coasted down the hill and took my usual route.

My hometown has approximately 1,100 citizens. Life moves a bit slower here. You can t pay-at-the-pump for your gas and only one of the two banks has an ATM machine. There are no fast food restaurants or chain stores. The businesses and buildings serving the citizens are all homegrown. The Family Medical Center, Engemann Drainage Company and Neumann s Service Station are among the first buildings seen on the drive into town--- all three owned and operated by locals.

I turned off Business Route 36 onto Main Street. Simple, white-washed homes line the street en route to the business district. The town came into full view and the image appearing in my windshield was of a magnificent courthouse building towering over the center block with local businesses wrapping around the town square. The brick building provided a glimpse of historic settlements and offered a unique contrast of old days and modern ways. The few blocks of downtown were busy with cars and locals taking care of daily business. Large flower pots overflowing with garland branches and soft white lights twinkled in the windows of businesses decorating the town for the approaching holiday. Across the street a dozen American flags dotted the Courthouse lawn. Even my small town wasn't removed from the events shaping our nation.

I rumbled down the brick streets a few blocks to the grade school. The principal here, Mr. Donald Harter, is a lifetime member of the community. He s known for his commitment to the town and its children.

I walked through the familiar double doors as Mr. Harter came around the corner to see who was coming to visit. The surprise was evident on his face. I hadn't seen him in a year or two. He greeted me with a warm hug and quickly invited me into his office. As I began to explain my purpose, I could see his curiosity rise. He dropped everything he was doing eager to talk about his school.

For nearly an hour, I challenged him with questions: Why did you feel compelled to stay in Troy? What about your job is so rewarding? What does this community mean to you?

His answers reflected a simple, small town philosophy. He spoke without expressive language or words of devout emotion, but he conveyed strong feelings and beliefs through his stories. The Lord put me here, and I enjoy it, he said plainly. He loved his school, the children, and the community. No one had to teach him---he understood the beauty and quality of life one can experience in a small town.

My dad had this to say about my life in small-town Kansas. Probably one of the greatest days in Sarah s life was the day she left home for college. High school had become frustrating, and K-State put her in a stimulating environment of students, friends and professors.

He was so right, yet so wrong.

I left my hometown in a big hurry four years ago craving something bigger and better. I dove head first into K-State and the university community submerging myself into a new environment and never looking back. Trips home became more infrequent. Manhattan was becoming my home, and I was leaving my past behind.

I have always been proud of my small town heritage---always the first to proclaim the blessing of the good life. Yet, I m the same girl who couldn't wait to get out of town and push Troy out of sight and out of mind. I knew a wonderful town existed there, but I also knew it was going to take a wave of reconciliation with my heart and with my past to find it. The battle to find the good in my rural community laid buried in my mind.

Upon entering the doors of Troy Grade School and feeling the great warmth of Mr. Harter s spirit, the steel doors I d build around my memories of Troy were opened wide. From that moment on, the good prevailed and the negativism subsided. I walked down the halls of the school building and teachers greeted me with homecoming hellos. My once blinded eyes were opening to see this town for the first time all over again.

The day progressed and I saw a spirit in that town I've never seen before. Familiar and unfamiliar faces waved. I noticed well-maintained sidewalks and paved city streets. I saw the swimming pool, city park and the fairgrounds. There were things to do here. I saw people working hard in their jobs. I saw folks committed to preserving their town. I saw citizens clinging on to a precious way of life. The unspoken pride and peace in this simple life were evident everywhere.

I felt warmth. I felt welcome. I felt at home.

My day came to a close as I entered the Troy State Bank and sat down in my dad s office. Patrons came in to do their business. The tellers greeted them and their children by name.

Fred Folsche, a local farmer, dropped in to say hello to my dad. This is a usual exchange between my dad and the farming community that occurred numerous times throughout the day. They talked about the recent harvest and of the challenges ahead for farmers. The shared the latest small-town stories. Their unspoken passion for agriculture and rural life resonated in the small office. It was the perfect ending to an unforgettable trip home.

To say that leaving Troy was the greatest day in my life is only half-true. The opportunity to leave gave me a change to experience many facets of the world and each convinced me that finding a bigger and better something was a never-ending journey. On my return home, I d found something good, something wholesome, something real and something invaluable.

Perhaps this story should continue with the second greatest day in my young life---the day I realized my hometown was a shaping force---one that will continue and contribute to my development as a person and fire my passion for rural Kansas and rural America. The next chapter will tell the tale of how I put this vision into action.

Published in Kansas Living, quarterly publication of the Kansas Farm Bureau.

Spring 2002 edition

Mike Matson, editor

Sarah Grace Geiger was a December 2002 graduate of Kansas State University majoring in Agricultural Economics. She has launched her career that combines her passion for teaching and development within the realm of preserving and sustaining rural Kansas communities. She is living in Ellsworth where she serves as the executive director for both the Chamber of Commerce and Ellsworth County Economic Development.

The preacher was attempting to explain to his congregation the difference between faith and reality.

He offered this as an example: "That I am standing up preaching is a reality. That you are sitting out there in the pews is a reality. That anyone is listening ---is faith!"

Often times when preachers speak of faith it is implied they are only referring to spiritual and other worldly thoughts.

I have faith in the rural aspects of America. That is why I chose to live here.

I have faith in farming as a business.

A business that offers a satisfactory way of earning a living.

A business that offers no great financial rewards, but rewards in family relationships and an understanding of the affiliation between work and play. I have faith in the rural life as a rich contributor to the needful half of our world despite the poor being deprived by the whims of politicians.

Since people always need some type of food, I believe the farm will continue its contribution of foodstuffs.

It will also continue to contribute its sons and daughters with strong bodies and clear minds to give constructive help in the enrichment of city life.

I have faith in the youth of open spaces, that the nature that surrounds them -- the sounds of the birds, the scent of the flowers, the sunrises, sunsets, rivers and ponds for fishing and woods for hunting -- will be translated into a spirit of service as they enter into their adulthood of tomorrow.

I have faith in the philosophy which is developed through contact with the wide open spaces --the skies, the green fields, the great silences.

I have faith that rural life will always have its place in the sun, that it will give opportunity for mental and spiritual growth, for the development of ideas and ideals, that it will erase the line of concern on the face of the father and put a joyous melody on the lips of the mother.

I have faith in those earnest men and women who have a vision and are strongly endeavoring to solve problems and surface the possibilities of rural life.

May their dreams be realistic!

Taken from the Ellsworth County Independent, Thursday, August 12, 1999


Father Morgan is Pastor St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church, Wilson, Kansas.

Photo by Peg Britton

It's time to move from being spectator to participant. Rural Kansas calls to those willing to work hard to make a place for selves, family. Years ago, a friend tried to talk us into moving to Overland Park.

My husband's response was, "I'm married to a woman who thinks Mingo, Kan., is the most beautiful place in the world. There's no way to get her to the city."

I thought of that story earlier this week as my car passed the exits off Interstate Highway 70 to the towns of north-central and northwest Kansas.

Lincoln. Ellsworth. Sylvan Grove. Dorrance. Wilson. Russell. Gorham. Victoria. Ellis. WaKeeney. Ogallah. Quinter. Grinnell. Grainfield. Oakley. Colby. Levant. Goodland. Mingo, with its twin grain silos, endless sky and Willie Engelhardt, the man to call about weather, crop conditions and other issues of importance to the farmers and ranchers of northwest Kansas.

When I first saw this country in the heat of late summer almost 27 years ago, I thought time had stopped somewhere around 1935. There was the wind and the dust. And the isolation. And the huge fields stretching to nowhere. This was a strange land for a girl reared in the rich soil of Indiana. There the towns and villages and farms are maintained with an eye to the neighbor's property. Fill your barnyard with old machinery and you get talked about. Neatness is a sign of prosperity, whether it's true or not.

I was to learn Kansas offered no such luxury. Life is often hard here, especially on the Great Plains west of Salina. A farmer's spare time is better spent in church praying for enough rain to raise the wheat crop than it is mowing a yard that's bigger than the one your neighbor tends.

I learned about endurance and pride in family and community. Dean Banker can be found most days at the Russell department store established more than a century ago by his family. Similar stores in Norton, Concordia and other rural towns are gone, their customers lured to larger communities by giant merchandisers like Wal-Mart. Despite the challenges, Banker's sense of humor is always intact. And his inventory and service top-notch.

The same is true for Jim and Kathryn Cleland. They operate a pharmacy and lunch counter at WaKeeney. This day, Jim Cleland prepared for the town's annual celebration of Scot customs. The lunch hour was filled with laughter and talk of the party.

Across rural Kansas, from Abilene to Atwood, from Lindsborg to Lincoln, from Sharon Springs to Smith Center, citizens have worked for decades to make a place for themselves and their families.

I joined them Friday. That was the day fellow Journal reporter Sharon Montague and I left the Journal to start our own weekly newspaper in Ellsworth. It was time to make the move from spectator to participant. Our paper will be called the Ellsworth County Independent, a tribute to the spirit of this state.

Most of my professional life has been spent covering the small towns along the interstate and other roads of north-central and northwest Kansas. For years, I've written stories about the determination of some communities, the almost self-destructive nature of others. I've interviewed rural sociologists, the New Jersey professors who wanted to turn western Kansas into a home for the buffalo and countless others with more theory than sense.

We don't have the answers any more than they do. Just the other night someone accused me of having more nerve than sense. They might be right.

What we do have is a commitment to rural Kansas and an appreciation of the issues that continue to change the lives of those who live there. We want to be part of a place that I have come to consider special. This is home.

So, to everyone who has helped me over the years - thank you. And don't be surprised if I'm on the telephone in the next week or next month wanting to talk about Kansas.

What I'm planning to do in the future won't be that different from what I've done in the past. Only the name of the newspaper will change.

Great Plains column for March 27, 1999 - Salina Journal


Linda Mowery-Denning was a Journal reporter for 26 years. She is managing editor and, with Morris Publications, is co-owner of the Ellsworth County Independent/Reporter (the only newspaper in the county), the Marquette paper and Kanhistique. If you want an inside view of the county, I suggest you subscribe to their weekly paper by calling 1.877.809.3432 or faxing them at 785.472.5087. You will learn a lot about Ellsworth County, enjoy some of her award winning journalistic talent and your subscription money will circulate around Ellsworth several times and be greatly appreciated by ever so many people. You can make a difference.

Sometimes it gets lonely here on the prairie with no one special to share this big sky, bright sunshine, and sweet fresh air. Even though it is fall, it has just been beautiful and mild here, and it was wind still last evening too, a rarity for this time of year in Kansas, or anytime in Kansas for that matter. I still remember when I moved to Texas how stunned I was at the sight of people eating outdoors. You would need to nail your food to the table to eat outdoors here! The wind is our constant companion, and it blows fiercely, dependably, and relentlessly.

They say some of the pioneer women used to go mad because of the wind. Its relentless howling unnerved those unprepared for its rigors. They also say that underneath that madness was loneliness. In the earliest days, when Kansas was a territory, they went weeks, months, years, without contact with others, and the isolation pushed the limits of sanity for many of the pioneers.

Even today, you have to really like your own company to live on the farm day in and day out. I think that is why many farm wives have "town jobs", muddy roads and demanding families be damned. It is a way of getting out of the crushing solitude and into society again. Of course, there is that financial exigency thing, with wheat prices being what they were 120 years ago and fuel and fertilizer costs running at today s prices. But I don't really think it's always about the money. I think they get lonely and need human contact with people other than their families.

Humans always need that contact, and more importantly, that connection. Here, we are isolated by geography and occasionally muddy roads. In more urban areas, our fears and our unwillingness to connect with strangers isolate us. I was never lonelier than when I lived in the city, surrounded by people who neither understood me nor cared about me.

We bitch a lot in small towns about nosy neighbors and rumors that fly with the speed of light and we sigh at the utter futility of ever having a secret in WaKeeney. And when we are really mad, we even say that we wish no one here knew us, knew our business, knew our families, whatever. We wish for anonymity, and the privacy that it brings, but I don t think that is sincerely meant. I think we are secretly glad that others know who we are.

In a small town, we know everything about each other, both the good and the bad, and we generally drive each other crazy, like siblings confined in a compact car. But in that knowing, with all of its lack of privacy and carelessly applied stereotypes and labels, there is a connection and a bond that can not be replaced. There is nothing like living in a small town, in a place like Cheers , where everybody knows your name.

You know the joke about how you know you live in a small town? The punch line is that you never have to use your turn signals because everyone knows where you always turn. That kind of familiarity can breed contempt, but it also means when I am not at work, I get calls inquiring about how I am, because they know I must be sick. It means that when my father died, we were surrounded by friends and family and food for a week, because we were one of their own. It means when I drive down the street, people wave.

And in those waves of recognition, I find acceptance. I become real, my contributions acknowledged, and I am granted existence by people who are as dependable as the Kansas wind. And who make each other as crazy as the wind did the pioneers. I become part of a greater whole with that acknowledgement, the affirmation that I am a member of a community, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. It is a marriage that sometimes feels like it was made in hell, but in my community, I feel closest to heaven when I stick my arm out my truck window and give a big country wave to a friend. It makes me smile when they wave back, and I remember thinking yesterday, St. Peter hold the pearly gates, I am glad that I live here"!


Sandra Stenzel grew up on a farm in the middle of Kansas. When she was 29, she decided she needed to see what the big outside world was about. So...she moved to Texas for a high powered career in financial consulting and economic development. She never intended to leave the farm for long, but she ended up living in the Lone Star State for 17 years, most of which she spent either living in Austin, Texas, or traveling the nation for business. During those 17 years, she saw a whole lot more of the world than she ever intended, and loved most of it, hated some of it, and laughed and cried over much of it. But she never lost her love for the farm, or Kansas, or the people she left behind. And...in April of 2001 she realized that if she were waiting for a GOOD time to move home, it would never happen. So...she shut down her consulting practice, sold everything that wasn t tied down and left a cosmopolitan life in the city and traded it for the absolute bliss of Kansas. Sandra is the economic development director for Trego County, a dynamic public speaker, advisor and very good friend.

Power...Fragility...Beauty...Life...

These words describe the ecosystem of our unbroken and virgin prairie. That ecosystem is also where many of us come to ground our thoughts and revive our spirit. We offer you the opportunity to come visit our prairie but urge you to get off the main roads to do so. If you and the prairie have an affinity for each other, you will find our quiet back roads to be as majestic as the Rockies, as voluminous as the ocean. The endless sky offers an added attraction and where the prairie and the rising or setting sun meet, is where you just may find a large dose of solace.

Each person will be touched in their own way by the prairie vistas. In an undisturbed time, the prairie provided life support for the Native Americans and the buffalo. Now cattle roam much of our prairie and share it, as the Indians and buffalo did, with birds, butterflies, wildflowers, grasses, and wildlife. Come sit for an hour (or two or six or 24!) and study a two-foot square patch of the prairie. Do nothing else but study your plot and absorb the effect of the sky and space. The diversity of grasses, the variety of wildflowers, the innumerable little bugs and organisms will become more complex with each passing minute. Soon, you ll become aware of subterranean movements and the communal living in that one small plot. When you are gone an animal or bird might stop in the plot for a visit which may attract a diving visit from a hawk.

When people speed by the prairie they may get the false impression that nothing is going on. Take a seat and see how it works! Come back the next year to the same plot and see the changes brought by grazing, moisture, fire, or anything else that Mother Nature can hand out.

Our prairie is like many Kansans -- so subtle you might miss the power.

June, 2002


Marci Penner is the executive director and only employee of the Kansas Sampler Foundation, whose mission is to help preserve and sustain rural culture in Kansas. Her enthusiasm, dedication and focus filter though every facet of the organization: the Kansas Explorers Club (proudly, I'm member #1224); Go Kansas! game shows; Kansas slide shows; guide books; newsletters; articles in Kansas magazines; speeches; statewide retreats; seminars, and other full side plates. She is a national treasure who chooses to live in rural Kansas.

As you drive into town on Highway 50 from the east, the first thing to catch your eye is a large, glossy black billboard directing you to the Cow Palace in Lamar, Colorado, fifty miles to the west.

To passersby, Syracuse, Kansas, is little more than another wide spot in the road on the way to the Colorado Rockies. With an exception or two, it is a typical gritty, dusty, western Kansas small town. Movie types picked the location to shoot the scene in National Lampoon's "Vacation" where Chevy Chase and his family are stranded with a broken down station wagon on a heat-scorched August afternoon.

I came to Syracuse at the invitation of the local chamber of commerce to speak about economic trends and the potential for economic development in Syracuse and Hamilton County. I had heard from professional colleagues that the people of this community were a very independent lot. Their leaders were well educated, aggressive, and somewhat intolerant of outside "experts" who supposedly knew their town better than they did.

My presentation came off without a hitch. After giving a brief situation analysis of the county, I challenged the people to organize a local strategic planning effort aimed at improving their community and bolstering its economy. It would take a lot of time and effort, I said, but if the community and its leadership would make the investment, it would pay off in the long term.

The local bank president, Roger Bergsma, was not impressed. In a rather sarcastic tone, he made it clear that they'd heard this all before. They were not interested in another dog and pony act telling them how to make "their" community work.

Sensing that this was a town not unfamiliar with good, old-fashioned vigilante justice, I hit the trail running and didn't look back.

Over a year and a half passed until I heard from Syracuse again. Sandy, the chamber of commerce executive, was on the line. She had just talked to Bergsma, and together they'd decided maybe it was time to give this strategic planning thing a try. They were committed to the process, she said, and they had local government leaders, business people, and everyday citizens lined up who were willing to give the time and effort necessary to make the venture a success. I was ecstatic.

The year following that phone call was filled with many community meetings, surveys, studies, and evaluation. I came to know the people of that community, and they came to know me. The planning effort became much more than a professional challenge; it became a deeply satisfying personal experience. Positive things began to happen in Syracuse as townspeople rallied around the common cause. A long-term strategic action plan was developed, a substantial grant award was obtained from the State of Kansas, and local economic activity picked up.

As I turned the program over to local leaders at the end of the planning process, I could not help but wonder at how it had all come together. So many things had to fit to make it work. Timing, opportunity, commitment, patience...it took all these and so much more. I look back on the Syracuse experience with much fondness and appreciation, for it taught me so many lessons about people, about life, and about relationships. In short, it taught me about "community".

So rarely in life do things happen just the way we expect them to. When they don't, we can rebel, we can fight, we can run... Or, we can bear patiently with the situation and let God show us the big picture in His time, in His way. As I found out in Syracuse, seeing the big picture means looking beyond ourselves and our own plans. It means taking the time and care to consider the dreams and aspirations of others with whom we share in community.

Good things happen in Syracuse, Kansas.



Kirk Zoellner's appreciation for the prairie and its people began in his childhood, fostered by his father's love of the outdoors, scouting, and time spent at his grandparents' farm. He currently lives in the Chicago area, where he serves a suburban community in local government management.

Photos by Peg Britton

I have an idea. How about we repopulate the rural areas of America with poets and painters and scholars? And oboe players who want to practice in the solitude of the High Plains?

My thinking is that we get a Rich Somebody's Foundation to buy up semi-ghost towns with the idea of repairing the abandoned houses, cleaning the lots, turning on the street lights, and then inviting a sonnet writer from Brooklyn to Petrarch away in peace for a few months with a morning coffee pot perking in the kitchen and coyotes howling at the edge of town at night. It would do both the town and the poet good.

What's so funny?

My wife and I live like this. She's a painter working with glee and oils in a rebuilt chicken shed we had pulled onto our property in Bly, Kansas. There is no Bly, Kansas. I'm not going to tell you where we live. Only that we live in a town like Bly. A lovely, more than half-abandoned town on the High Plains with wild turkeys walking West Dirt Street and dove roosts in the cottonwood trees. We've got fine neighbors. Do they think we're strange because my wife doesn't make paintings of windmills and that I don't write cowboy poetry for Hallmark Cards – much less run cattle for a living? Yup. Do they like us and help us? Our neighbors are the ones who set up my wife's chicken shed. It's been great fun.

By my counting there are half a dozen houses in Bly that could be bought and repaired. Maybe more if you add the ones that aren't for sale but are falling down and might be for sale if you could find the owner. And there might be 10 lots or so onto which you could move in houses from the country.

What the Rich Somebody's Foundation does is buy these properties and hire local contractors to put them in good shape. Then the foundation establishes a trust run by the local banks, and the trust pays for the upkeep of the houses. It wouldn't be much over the years. Oboe players don't do much damage to property.

When it is all settled about the money and the trust, and when the windows of the houses are washed and the floors swept clean, and the squirrels and the pack rats have been run out of the attics, you print a Homestead flyer for the rest of America. Free House in Kansas.

But not free to everybody. And not free forever.

I imagine a scholar who needs six months to finish a book on Carrie Nation that is difficult to write because there's no place in his high rise to walk between paragraphs. Writers need a place to walk between paragraphs. Montaigne says his mind was never busy unless his feet were. We've got paragraph breaks all over Bly.

I imagine a potter who arrives from Denver one spring morning with a load of wheels, a kiln and buckets of clay, and by the next day you can hear the wheel spinning as you walk down Middle Dirt between paragraphs. Then a few days later in the Bly Co-op on the edge of town (where the Committee to Save the World meets over coffee) they are talking:

"Did you see we got ourselves a woman potter this time?"
"My favorite was the bagpipe player."
"Is it true she'd play her bagpipes all by her lonesome down the creek where Cody keeps his goats?"
"It is."
"I liked the poet. He didn't seem to do anything but he didn't brag about it."
"Cody claims the music was good for his goats."

What gives Kansans such an overwhelming feeling of mediocrity? It's not that we don't accomplish things. Truth is, when we get around to doing something, Kansans do a pretty good job. In spite of that, we are always amazed when a Kansan reaches a level of national or international prominence we say in wide wonder, "and he's from Kansas," as if being from Kansas is the ultimate barrier to greatness.

Part of this sense comes from our culture, which teaches us humility to a fault. We are uncomfortable with praise, and we prefer our leaders to be strong silent types. Nobel Prize winner, Jack Kilby is a perfect example. Kilby, who invented the microchip that made the computer, handheld calculator and the rest of the electronic world possible, insists that he just happened to be the guy working when the chip was invented. According to Kilby, he invented the chip while everyone else was on vacation. "I would have been gone too," he says, "but I didn t have any vacation time left." He is a Kansan, living in Texas (he still claims Great Bend as his home town, even though his years in Kansas has been eclipsed by his time in Dallas), with a Kansas sense of humility.

The tone was set early. European exploration of Kansas began in 1541 when Coronado came searching for Quivira, the lost city of gold. It may have been foreboding that Coronado had the guide that brought him to Kansas killed. The characters in Kansas history were about as flamboyant as Coronado: John Brown, Carrie Nation, goat-gland salesman Dr. Brinkley. Our first Presidential candidate was Alf Landon, who set a record for the most lop-sided loss in U. S. history.

Oh sure, there have been notable Kansans. Landon may have been a presidential loser, but he turned out to be a great elder statesman. It should be noted that we did have a Kansas President in Dwight Eisenhower. In the arts, Kansans contributed Gordon Parks and William Inge, and more currently, actor Ed Asner and singer Melissa Ethridge. Opera star Sam Ramey came from, of all unlikely places, Colby. In sports the influence of Kansas on college basketball has been significant. Not only have KU, K-State and WSU produced their share of stars, but also coaches, Adolph Rupp, Dean Smith, Gene Keady and Eddie Sutton. Wichitan Barry Sanders is arguably the greatest running back in the history of the NFL. Jim Ryan, America s last great miler, now Ryan serves in Congress.

America's first female mayor was elected in Kansas. One of the nation's landmark judicial decisions came from "Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education." Kansas chose to be a free state when Missouri elected to legalize slavery.

I'm afraid that as time has gone by, we have lost a little of that sense of free thinking that has characterized our heritage. We expect to be ranked in the middle in every state ranking category other than acres of wheat produced. While I love this state and its people, by and large, we aren't bold enough, we aren't ambitious enough and we aren't inventive enough. We look to see what other state's have done before determining what path we should take.

It is time for Kansas to become that progressive state that our heritage would indicate we are. We have to find answers where we haven't looked. We have to be the state that revitalizes its rural areas while building its cities, and it starts with us. Expect more. Look for inventive means for improvement. Get active. Lead the way.