Too Long in the Wind

A good life, and family

[October 31, part 2]   On this day when so many thoughts dwell on the macabre, it's good to remember a life well lived. Cheryl's particularly lovely column in the Emporia Gazette this afternoon is about Aunt Ella Dirks' funeral this month in Pawnee Rock. Here's a snippet:

"And that's why we were all there -- to enfold Ella Dirks with love, to gently send her on her way.

"In one clear moment, I realized what I was missing for having left the fold of my hometown church."

Read all of the column. Listen to "Blessed Assurance" as you read it (this opens another window so you can read and listen at the same time).

Ghost stories

[October 31]   Does Pawnee Rock have ghosts?

The town has been around for 134 years, filling up the cemetery through sickness, accidents, misdeeds, and old age, and before that, historians tell us, hundreds of lives were lost in skirmishes around the Rock. Any one of those souls might have a grievance.

Perhaps some evil vortex grew out of Pawnee Rock's bloody history and inspired the Halloween nights of mob hooliganism in the 1960s and 1970s, when young men burned combine tires in the main street and hauled the school's jungle gyms downtown at the end of a chain. Or maybe it was just beer that did it. Regardless, I'm glad that's over with.

I suppose we all have our places that we don't talk about or that we talk about only when we're full of bravado. Mine was just a block north of where I grew up.

There used to be some houses on the north side of Bismark Avenue, in the block west of Centre Street. They must have dated from the first years of Pawnee Rock, and in the 1960s they were straight out of a horror story. Weathered, unpainted boards on the outside, creaky floors on the inside, vines and dying trees all around -- each place spoke of abandonment. Even now, when I read Goosebumps fright books to my sons, those are the places that come to mind. I would never walk on that side of the street at night, because if any places in town were haunted, those were. Gene Bowman, I think it was, later let the fire department burn them for practice.

Do you whistle in the graveyard? I love the place, but even I won't do that.

The following Halloweenish story and a photo showed up this week from a reader who didn't want to be identified because she thinks people would make fun of her. Believe it if you want to; it looks plausible and yet maybe not.

This month I stopped at an antique store in Kinsley and browsed for books. I found a pile on a back-room floor that looked like it hadn't been touched for ages.

The second book in the stack was a diary. When the shopkeeper wasn't looking, I used my knife to pick the lock and discovered it had once belonged to a man whose name I knew from Pawnee Rock. I bought the book for $2 and started reading it that night.

The diary was from 1958. His notes concerned the day-to-day travels of his family and how his business went. He mentioned, for example, buying some fence posts and seven gallons of gasoline for his Ford and that his son had to go to Larned to the doctor.

On July 14 of that year, he bought a Kodak Brownie camera and started to carry it with him in his pickup. He wrote about taking pictures of deer and barns, as well as some of his customers. There was one picture tucked inside the pages, a blurry shot that I dismissed as a beginner's effort.

I'm just going to use initials here because I feel like doing more would invade his family's privacy, and F himself used initials as he wrote.

F's August entries went along fine -- a hailstorm damaged some milo, a couple of families moved out of town -- but then he missed four days. His entry on August 21 hinted at why:

"I was coming back from D's house when I passed by the old S farm. There was a light like a fire so I drove up the driveway and got out by the shelter belt. A bare space on the ground was glowing and the light started to swirl around and it rose into the air and that's when I took the picture. I have never been so cold in my life and my fingers barely worked. After I took the picture I hid behind a tree because I was afraid it would see me. It flew around back of me and then it flew over me or through me. I guess I past out because I woke up later on the ground. Forgive me, God. I can't tell anybody about this, but I know it's where them boys got buried."

I did some research on the Web and found that back on Friday, August 16, 1957, two college boys went missing after being seen with their broken-down car on U.S. 56 west of Great Bend. There was a hunt over Barton, Rush, Stafford, and Pawnee counties, and the one suspect that turned up mentioned something about a farm north of Pawnee Rock, the state police said. But nobody was ever tried.

On August 28, F mentioned that he paid 57 cents and got his pictures back at the store.

"I think one of the pictures shows pretty well what it was like that night at the S place. I will not go there again. I have not felt good since then."

F died two months after that, a notice on a genealogical website said, and he was buried on October 31. Apparently he took his secret with him.

Now, I don't know what to think about F's story. Maybe he has a good imagination, and when he got the blurry photo back from the drugstore he decided to play a prank. Maybe the timing of his death was a coincidence. His swirling light could have been anything. It could have been made up. But if I were hunting pheasants next to an old shelter belt and found a place where nothing would grow, or if I were driving north of Pawnee Rock at night and saw a swirling fog that glowed of its own accord, I think I'd stop skipping church.

Atop my computer desk (one of those tall ones with shelves) sits a clock that once belonged to my late Unruh grandparents, Otis and Lena of Pawnee Rock. It has a key for winding, and it's decorated with what I suspect is green Bakelite and some ornaments. It's a nice heirloom with sentimental value.

But it's a spooky clock. It hasn't been wound for more than a decade, yet it still ticks at odd moments every week. Two, three, maybe ten ticks, and the minute hand moves just a little. Over the years, it has picked up a little more than four hours.

Some people might explain away the ticking by saying that there's still tension left in the mainspring or that our earthquakes jolt it along. I've come to think of the ticking, however, as Grandma talking to me.

Maybe it means nothing, but the clock hasn't ticked at all since Grandma's last surviving sister, Ella Dirks, died this month. The clock remains at 9:29.

On the radio: Pawnee Rock native Cheryl Unruh was scheduled to read one of her columns on Kansas Public Radio this morning. If you read this early enough, you can catch her talking about autumn leaves at 6:35 and 8:35 a.m. at http://kpr.ku.edu/listennow.shtml. If you miss her, you should be able to find her recording here.

From ghosts to ghouls

[October 30]   I've been a lot of things in my life: editor, grave digger, farmer, hobo, ghoul.

Pawnee Rock kids in the 1960s rarely had store-bought costumes for Halloween, possibly because there weren't many to buy and who had money for that anyway? So we created our own out of our parents' closets: overalls, hats (the kind with a brim all around), neckties, dresses, and costume jewelry.

Red Skelton's comedy show was big back then, so his hobo character was imitated by a lot of kids without much world experience but with access to clothes that didn't fit well. I was a hobo for two or three years, in fact.

My favorite Halloween costume, however, was my first one, and it was the only one ever made just for me.

For our kindergarten party, Mom turned me into a ghost. She draped a sheet over me and marked where my eyes would go. With me safely out of the way, she cut the eyes out and hemmed the eye holes with strips of sewing tape or adhesive-bandage tape.

No one guessed who I was. No Halloween since then has been so successful.

As the years went by, I'd come home after hoboing around the neighborhood and then get to answer our door and hand out treats to the bigger kids who could stay out later. Mom and Dad told me to try to guess who the kids were, and I took that responsibility seriously. The first year, I kept bored kids standing there with their gaping pillow cases as I ran down the mental lists of kids I knew. It's a wonder our house didn't get egged.

These days, my wife escorts the boys (pirates, sedans, dinosaurs, and sea otters -- all costumes sewn by her hand in various years) on their rounds and I stay home to amuse and feed the neighbor kids. I still paint my face and sometimes try to guess who the little princesses and Harry Potters really are. I've been a greasepaint ghoul several times, but a couple of years of seeing wire photos from the wars -- photos far too gruesome to make it into the paper -- has taken the polish off that idea for me.

This year, I think I'll be something that will really haunt the kids' living days and chill their dreaming nights. I'll be a dentist with a cordless drill.

I grew up in a family that took care of cemeteries. So I'm not surprised that this is my favorite poem, or at least the only one I learned in college that I still try to remember:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life my stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.

The fall of autumn

[October 29]   Recently I asked for help identifying the people and location in a photo taken in 1914 in Pawnee Rock and sent to us by Don Ross. The three boys on bicycles remain unidentified, but the location has been cleared up.

Don mentioned that Nancy Woodrow said Virgil Smith had identified one of the houses (see the red arrow) as the place where he and Joan lived for many years; the Woodrows live there now. That would mean that the squarish house in the right foreground is the one many of us know as Tag and Lawanda Hendricks' house, at the intersection of Rock Street and Cunnife Avenue. The photographer, then, would have been standing north of the old Drake home, perhaps back by where the Pawnee Garage is.

In the inbox: I heard this past week from Bobby Ross, son of Fred and Joann Ross. He went to grade school and junior high in Pawnee Rock and then attended high school in Larned, class of '92.

Another pleasant note came from Janice Romeiser. You may remember that she is the wife of the Gary Romeiser, the last football-basketball-track coach and health and driver's ed teacher at PRHS. She reminisced about Pawnee Rock's great football teams.

Goodbye, autumn: Thursday evening I gathered the boys just before bedtime and had them look out the door at the back yard. The forecast was for a night of snow, and the first flakes were already falling.

It wasn't that I wanted them to see the fallen birch leaves and the gerbils' graves for the last time until March or April. I'd like the boys to learn to celebrate the change of the season from not-winter to winter. It's the one definable moment on our natural calendar.

A photo I like: No. 8

[October 28]   On top of the Pawnee Rock pavilion, you can see forever out to the side but you're a little nervous about looking down. Your parents yell at you to stay behind the pipe, but when they're not looking you crawl out to the edge and stick your head over the side.

Unruh Theory of Hometown Relativity

[October 27]   Urbanites raised in New York City will know roughly where to find Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston, but they won't have any idea where Wichita is.

People raised in Wichita will know roughly where New York and Chicago are, but they won't have much idea about the location of Little River or Meade.

Someone raised in Pawnee Rock will know where New York, Wichita, and Meade are, but pinpointing the location of, say, Penokee may be a problem.

Thus we have the Unruh Theory of Hometown Relativity:

People raised in a town of a given size generally will know of every other town that size and larger.

Maybe the theory works because small-town people travel across so much of the state to get anywhere, so they see so many more towns. Maybe it's because we feel a brother-sister kinship with the Goves, Havilands, Bisons, and Buffalos of our state. I don't mean to put too much emphasis on sports, but it's only natural to learn the towns that are your town's size and that you might meet in the state tournament. Every Wednesday and Saturday morning we read long lists of 1A and 2A scores; each one is a lesson in geography. Fans of the bigger-city schools concentrate on the bigger-city scores.

The larger towns are fewer and thus easier to remember. We know them because they're often the county seats, and if you know Great Bend and Larned you might as well learn Ottawa and Parsons and St. Francis too.

In Pawnee Rock, we'd look to move up to a job in Great Bend or Hutchinson. Ask a Wichitan where he's going to look for a job, and he'll ignore Great Bend and pick Kansas City, Denver, Oklahoma City or Dallas.

I imagine that we're all a little snobbish when it comes to our towns. Even in Pawnee Rock, we might think it a step down to move to Dillwyn or Sanford or even Healy. Perhaps we all get used to thinking and moving to a certain rhythm, and eventually we get excited only by towns that vibrate at our speed or faster.

In the Einstein Theory of Relativity, the speed of light and the passage of time are important. In the Unruh Theory of Hometown Relativity, the speed of traffic and the passage of life are important.

Rocks of ages

A fossil clamshell in Barton County post rock.

[October 26]   I saw a wire story yesterday about a kid out west whose life's path was changed when he discovered a large fossil bird's head in an embankment not far from his home. Well, who hasn't had that dream?

There must have been a time in all our lives when we spent hours on our knees, sifting soil for fossil mollusks or fish or dinosaur bones. The lucky ones among us, the ones who eventually figured out that we should look in limestone beds instead of the family's tomato beds, often found something to brag about.

For a while in my high school and college years, I couldn't pass a limestone embankment without stopping to check for corals and shark teeth. I do pass most of them up now, but I hate myself for it.

Back in the Cretaceous period, when Tyrannosaurus rex stomped the earth, Kansas was up to its armpits in an inland sea. The bodies of kazillions of calcium-packed sea creatures fell to the bottom and over the centuries were turned into the building block of our area -- post rock. (Pawnee Rock is unusual, of course, being an outcrop of stuck-together sand. Maybe in a past life, life here was a day at the beach.)

We see fossil-ridden rock posts all over the hills and in people's yards. Toward Hays, farmhouses and barns are made of quarried yellow rock. Here's the neat part: There's a lot more where that came from. Go north and west of Pawnee Rock, and you'll be standing atop hundreds of square miles of untouched, never-before-seen limestone. It's covered by the current era's layer of sediment. For now.

Can you imagine all the years, the centuries, the millennia of natural history you're standing on? Every cubic foot of topsoil and bedrock limestone holds thousands, maybe millions, of tiny skeletons and exoskeletons.

And the process continues, even though central Kansas has forsaken the sea and is being hung out to dry. Say a rabbit drowns in a stock pond and by winter is coated by silt; maybe in a few thousand years its stony bones will be uncovered again by erosion. A fly is trapped in cedar sap. Human remains are laid in the soil. Perhaps in eternity, they too will become fossils, and so it seems that our creamy limestone holds the earth's memory.

When I was a kid, my first science books said that oceans and mountains come and go, that the sun would blow up, that all the dinosaurs died and so would all the people. It scared me in the way that only kids can be scared.

As I proceed through my blink in time, I still worry about the future. It's one reason that on my desk I keep a bit of the past: a fossil mollusk from Rush County, rock-solid proof that life goes on and on and on . . . and on.

Write a novel in 30 days

[October 25]   I've been promising myself for years that I would write a novel; it's on my list of things to do in my first half-century. Maybe this will be the year, if I become part of the National Novel Writing Month event.

Books have always been my life. Like a few million other kids, I was a bookworm, and I've had the pleasure and agony of being the editor of quite a few books as an adult. I even helped write a travel guide to cemeteries.

But as an adult, I've never written a novel. Newspaper writing and editing -- the energy involved in getting the daily miracle out the door -- has always been my bread and butter.

Maybe I'm closer to a creating a novel than I think, as some people say that newspapers are full of fiction. Granted, what appears in print isn't always the whole story; sometimes all the facts don't come out for a long time and people don't always tell the truth to reporters. But in general, newspaper writing is honest. It's an attempt to find the truth and be entertaining, just as fiction writing is.

My genetic drive to be fruitful is pushing me toward the National Novel Writing Month event, or NaNoWriMo. A few years ago, some folks thought it would be fun to encourage folks all over the world to spend the month of November producing a manuscript of 50,000 words, the length of a short novel.

It's not a contest. The only award is the certificate of completion that the NaNoWriMo organization lets you download.

What you do with your manuscript is up to you. Some people post it on the Web, some try to sell it, and some people print it out for the grandkids or their reading club.

You can sign up with NaNoWriMo as a participant, or you can write on your own. The important thing is to write.

I don't see why we would have to write a novel. It could be an autobiography or a family history, or stories your parents told you. Maybe it would be a book of poems, one a day. One thing I've thought about doing is going through a box of old photos and writing as much as I can remember about each one.

At the end of the month, if you have averaged 1,700 words a day, you'll have a book-length manuscript.

And then in December, as you walk by on the street, folks will whisper: "There goes a writer."

Hutch News writes about Ella Dirks

[October 24, Part 2]   Pawnee Rock's Ella Dirks, who died last week at age 102, has been written up in a feature obituary in the Hutchinson News. Reporter Kathy Hanks talks to Ella's daughter, Beverly Prescott, about Ella's life: family, chicken dinners, and the dark day when she found out her son had been killed in the Korean War.

Sharp-eyed Laramie Unruh, formerly of rural Pawnee Rock, alerted me to this story.

Football heroes

The scoreboard at the south end of the Pawnee Rock football field once told tales of glory.

[October 24]   It won't be too long before the end of Daylight Saving Time slams the door shut on late-afternoon activities. This affects farmers and hunters, of course, and anybody else who works outdoors -- except for roughnecks, who have enough halogen bulbs around their derricks to light up a quarter section.

Sometimes an early nightfall is good. It makes it more likely that the kids will be home in time for supper. It sets the mood better for Halloween hayrides and trick-or-treating. In school, it meant a prompt end to football practice, which was a merciful thing for those of us second-stringers who were on the receiving end of everything.

But football was still fun, especially played as a pickup game on the thick grass of the school's football field. The landings were softer, the yard lines were marked, and the goalposts were real instead of, say, a horizontal elm branch. We kids wanted to play just like our heroes and big brothers, for those of us who had them.

There were times in the late 1960s when the Pawnee Rock Braves had a powerful team. I remember one home game when Gary Kroeker ran back the opening kickoff and the local boys went on to rack up 60 or so points. One of the stars of those teams was Steve Crosby.

Steve went on to Fort Hays State University, where he became marketed as "Mr. Muscles" and was a two-time NAIA All-America player as a running back. He was drafted by the New York Giants in 1974 and played three seasons, and now he is a special teams coach for the San Diego Chargers. If a mugshot could inspire a team to play harder, his certainly would.

While a high schooler, Steve used to play catch and touch football in the street in front of our house with the Tutaks, who were a magnet for athletic kids. His purple car (an Impala?) was often parked under the shade tree across the street or at the Lees', where he lived while he went to our school.

We saw Steve a few times after he graduated from PRHS. He liked to play town team basketball, for example, although his name usually didn't appear in the scorebook.

One gray autumn day he came out to the football field when a bunch of us younger kids -- perhaps including Rob Bowman, DeWayne Davidson, Todd Bright, and Ray Tutak -- were messing around. We lined up in the grass near the end zone; he stood at midfield and threw each of us a pass.

The seconds are caught in historical slow motion: His pass to me arched up; it came directly at me, spinning tightly; and I took it hard in the breadbasket.

After I graduated from high school, I studied journalism at the University of Kansas. I spent all four autumns covering the Jayhawk football team as a photographer or reporter for the school paper, the Larned Tiller & Toiler, or the Topeka Capital-Journal. (Classmate Ken Henderson, now at Barton County Community College, was one of KU's athletic trainers.) One thing was constant from my first days on the gridiron: As KU's seasons ground along, it was nice when the end of Daylight Saving Time shortened the practices.

Several of the players I knew from those teams -- Leroy Irvin and Ransom's Nolan Cromwell among them -- went to the pros. They were pretty nice guys and amazing athletes. I suppose I should have been more awestruck in their presence, but I was battle hardened. Years before, on the green grass of an eight-man field, I had once caught a pass from Steve Crosby.

Chef's surprise

[October 23]   I've written about what a masterful cook I am (here and here). There was one evening, however, when I was nearly thrown into the Arkansas River because of my fireside skills.

Boy Scout Troop 444 was on a campout at the Ash Creek Point. There must have been a dozen of us, along with scoutmaster Ron Stark. Ron was an expert in camp cooking; he had been a Navy SeaBee, after all.

One of Ron's requirements was that somebody had to bring a block of Velveeta cheese for lunch sandwiches. None of us Scouts knew what Velveeta was. I think it's a credit to our parents that we reached junior high before finding out.

Ron broke us into groups of three or four and handed each group a few potatoes and a pound of hamburger to cook for supper. My group consisted of George Unruh (no relation), Rick Batchman, and me. We found a sunny cooking spot on the big island just off the point, across a set of riffles from the bank.

I can make the hamburgers, I assured the others. I knelt in the soft sand and created some beautiful patties, using all the meat. And then I knocked them flat into the sand.

I hope you don't already know from experience that there's no way to remove sand from ground beef. There is also no way to redeem yourself. I fried some potatoes for my pals, but there were no kind words for the cook and I went to sleep that night cautiously.

When we go camping now, my sons know there will be no horseplay when I'm preparing the food. If I teach them nothing else, it'll be to not ruin the hamburgers. On the other hand, I've also taught them that it never hurts to pack a few granola bars in case the burgers take a dive. Be prepared.

Songs of the wayfarer

[October 22]   Over the years I have justified my shuffling around the country by saying I'm like the Mennonite families who left Russia and moved to the flatlands of Kansas. I was trying to convince my family that it was just in my soul to move, and I must have been trying to convince myself as well.

My dad has lived his entire life in the land of the Mennonite settlers. Sister Cheryl moved to Emporia. My mom has lived in a wider circle. Together, Mom and Dad footed the bill in high school so that I could see our country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Since high school, I have lived in a double handful of cities: one in Minnesota, three in Kansas, five in Texas, and one in Alaska.

When I was a teen, wandering was the height of the romantic life, a Kansas boy's version of the artist in a cramped attic room. Lee Marvin, in the gold-rush movie "Paint Your Wagon," sang that he was "born under a wanderin' star." Sheila Sutton Schmidt stood before us in church and sang the lament of the "Wayfaring Stranger."

What to do with our lives once we're kicked out of the nest is a question we all have to answer. Do we go looking for the best job? Do we raise kids close to their grandparents? At what point do geographical curiosity and the need to be independent balance out the need to settle down? I have experience gained from seeing different parts of the continent, but what experience gained by familiarity have I missed by leaving central Kansas?

I'm sure I'm not the only one who wonders about that. Considering the diminishing population of Pawnee Rock, there must be quite a few people who hold on to heirlooms not just because they once belonged to grandparents but also because they're a symbol of a former life in a place we loved.

When I was young, my favorite song in the Mennonite hymnal was a version of "This Is My Father's World." It wasn't so much the title that I liked -- my world was as much my mother's as my father's -- but I remember a line about "the rocks and rills, the streams and hills."

The idea of seeing rocks and rills enchanted me, and now I'm fortunate enough to have stumbled into a piece of country that feels so close to the time of creation that the edges haven't been worn off yet.

So in that way, it feels like home.

Six years after coming to Alaska the first time, My wife and I moved back to the Lower 48. Dad had just been in a nearly fatal accident, and we wanted our new son to live closer to relatives. We tried to fit in, but a couple of years later we again traded north Texas for Alaska; in fact, we bought the house next door to where we used to live.

This is home but it's not. There's always a part of me that belongs in flat windy country.

When I saw my sister's website's photo of Ella Dirks' burial -- mourners huddled under the canvas tent to escape the wind, singing a song of hope -- I thought of home: the closeness of the community and the church and family. It ached a little to have chosen a life away.

Some people find their rocks and rills close to home. Some don't. Those of us who left can always remember how that particular hymn ends:

This is my Father's world, a wanderer I may roam
Whate'er my lot, it matters not,
My heart is still at home.

A photo I like: No. 7

[October 21]   Every state must have a highest point, and this is Kansas'.

Mount Sunflower tops out at 4,039 feet above sea level. That's 0.64 mile (3,360 feet) above Kansas' lowest point, which at 679 feet is where the Verdigris River passes out of Kansas near Coffeyville.

I had always understood from the tourism magazines that Mount Sunflower was the next thing to inaccessible, but it's fairly easy to find. The gravel road south of Kanorado (or north of Weskan) is good, and the last quarter mile is a pasture road to the summit.

This view faces west, with Colorado a few hundred feet away in the background. I made the photo at noon on July 4, and then I shot off a couple of firecrackers in the dust.

Ella Dirks

[October 20]   It would have been back around 1966 when our family drove north of Pawnee Rock to Harvey and Ella Dirks' house. The occasion was an open house, possibly for their 40th anniversary.

As I remember it -- and I haven't been to their home for decades -- it was a blond brick house tucked against a cedar shelterbelt. Like all the farms north of town, it had started out as a treeless, windblown place. The Dirkses had raised a daughter and two sons; one of the boys, Leon, was about my dad's age and had been Dad's best friend until he was killed fighting in Korea a few years before I was born.

The treat during the open house was ice cream. The women in the kitchen sliced half-gallon bricks of neapolitan into slabs and laid them on plates, even for nine-year-old boys. We sat everywhere -- sofas, chairs, folding chairs -- and we celebrated the occasion just by being there.

Ella Dirks was the younger sister of my grandmother, Lena Unruh. They had two brothers, Edward and Lincoln, and two sisters, Clara and Anna, but Anna died shortly after birth. They were the children of Sam and Lizzie Schultz, early residents of the area.

Harvey and Ella were kind people who remembered all the kids' names and who had a smile when you met them at the Mennonite Church. Harvey was sunburned and had a firm handshake. Ella was a member of the Mission Workers, who gathered in the church basement on Wednesdays to make quilts and who were the mothering souls who ran the potlucks after funerals.

What did Ella look like? Elizabeth II, the queen of England, reminds me of Ella. That seems appropriate, because Ella was our family's link to the older times. I wish I knew more stories about her.

Just as my wife and I were proud to give our son Sam his great-great-grandfather's name, I am proud that my parents gave me a name that also comes from the family. It's not hard to imagine Dad watching me as a child and thinking of when he played with his cousin.

Ella and Harvey had another son besides Leon -- Homer, who ran an earthmoving company and put the terraces in many of the hilly wheatfields north of Pawnee Rock. Homer, who died two years ago, was married to Pat, and they had Darla, Dale, and Danine, who attended Pawnee Rock schools. Ella and Harvey's daughter, Beverly Prescott, and son-in-law, Keith, live in Larned and have several children.

Ella, who was born June 14, 1904, died Wednesday at Cherry Village Nursing Home in Great Bend. She was 102 years old. She and Harvey had been married almost 75 years until his death at age 98 five and a half years ago. She died one day after what would have been his birthday. (Obituary.)

Ella Dirks will be buried Saturday in the Mennonite Memorial Cemetery north of Pawnee Rock.

Seeing stars

[October 19]   Here you go, trivia fans. Let's see whether you were paying attention to Mrs. White in fifth grade.

Kansas was the 34th state to join the Union, getting the big handshake on January 29, 1861. Which state was 33rd, and which was 35th? (The answer is at the end.)

Richard Batchman: I got a nice surprise yesterday when Richard Batchman wrote. Richard was in my class at Pawnee Rock, then went to Otis-Bison when PRHS was dissolved. He's in his 29th year working at the State Security Hospital in Larned, and he and his wife, Debbie, raised three sons on their place north of Pawnee Rock.

Richard was the fastest runner I knew in grade and high school, and he went on to set a league record in the 100-yard dash at Otis-Bison. He was also the co-victim of the best tackle I ever made. In a practice drill when we were in eighth grade, I ran into his thighs so hard (or vice versa) that we both flipped over on our backs. That was the first and only time a football coach complimented me. Richard was the team's star runningback; the next year I became the team movie-taker.

Paging Chris Strobel: Does anyone here know Hector Campuzano? He went to school with Chris Strobel at Thomas More Prep in Hays, and he's trying to locate Chris. Chris, who had a brother named Keith, was the friend of some Unruhs.

If you know Chris or Hector, please send an e-mail to PR-hector.campuzano@icsamex.com (but take the "PR-" off first).

Trivia answer: Star No. 33 is Oregon, which entered the Union on Valentine's Day 1859. Star No. 35 is West Virginia, which was carved out of Virginia on June 20, 1863. The only state that became a state in October was No. 36, Nevada, which was allowed into the club on Halloween 1864. (Full list.)

Yearbook of dreams

[October 18]   I was working with Glen Grunwald, the radio voice of Hutch Community College and a member of Pawnee Rock's 1967 state tournament basketball team, to identify the members of an earlier squad. As I dug through an early-'60s Pawnee Chief yearbook, I wandered off the basketball page into the other activities: band, public speaking, yearbook staff.

Sporting crewcuts and bouffants, horn-rim and cat-eye glasses and narrow neckties, these cats were the kings and queens of Pawnee Rock when I was a kindergartner. They looked cocky and self-assured, which was fitting because they were bigger than life to us little kids.

Why wouldn't they be confident? The United States was heading for the moon, the Cuban missile crisis had passed, Kennedy was alive, and so were all the Beatles.

Still, when I look with empathy into the 1960s yearbook faces, I see both students with beaming faces and students who are waiting -- waiting with a smile, but waiting for something.

Looking at those pictures took me back to my own high school years. PRHS got closed and we all had to start fresh somewhere else, the Vietnam War was wrapping up, and there were gas shortages. All of that was in addition to the standard teenage angst over academics, athletics, and love.

Most of us seized the opportunities of our new situations. I did OK in academics and athletics, but romance was an overly important subject I never understood.

Sure, I went on a few dates with nice girls; any high school boy will, and he'll have fun and be grateful. But my romantic life could be summed up by describing one evening I spent sitting along the Arkansas near the O'Rourke Bridge. I so wanted to have a girlfriend that I carved my initials and those of a classmate into a small cottonwood stick just to see what it might feel like to be in love. What the heck, I figured; for luck I flung the stick into the river and watched it float away until it stuck on a sandbar.

There must have been students like me in the 1960s, teenagers carving wistful sketches of their wished-for lives. Even as they smiled happily for the yearbook camera, they must have yearned for more, even if they didn't know what it was.

I wonder whether, sometime after 1975, a grade-schooler sat down with the Macksville High School annual and began flipping through the pages of our achievements. When she got to my class, did she think, "They all look so cheerful . . ."?

Fool's garbage

[October 17]   The light was fading quickly and the sky was sprinkling us with rain. Nik and I pressed on diligently, filling a bag with trash found along the sidewalk. Wal-Mart bags, flattened cans, the pages of a child's hymnal -- the usual leftovers.

With a shout, Nik dashed into the trees toward a big piece of weathered paper. And then, with disappointment written all over his voice, he picked it up and said: "Fool's garbage."

It was a poplar leaf as big as his head; the bad light and fall colors had conspired against Nik's eyesight. We laughed and pressed on, eventually working under streetlights and filling three bags mostly with the fool's gold of plastic packaging.

Doing this was Nik's idea. He thought we should clean up our neighborhood before winter.

Back when you and I were kids in Pawnee Rock, I don't think we cleaned up much. Of course, in the days before Wal-Mart's plastic bags and plastic drink bottles, trash often disintegrated almost before our eyes.

Still, what kid didn't pick up pop bottles to return for a few pennies apiece at the grocery store or gas station? Those Dr Peppers and Nehis and Bubble-Ups were as good as cash at the candy counter. I could often save a half-dozen before temptation got the better of me and I trotted them down to the station.

On a loftier level, our Sunday school teachers at the Mennonite Church used to talk to us about "stewardship of the earth." Such talk went right over my head. It probably was meant for the wheat farmers and cattle ranchers who were doing things that really mattered to the earth.

Some of those lectures seeped down into my consciousness. I find "stewardship of the earth" on the tip of my tongue when Nik talks about picking up trash. But I don't say it.

Eight-year-old Nik is finding his own way, and it's no doubt more practical than anything I would think of. He sees the problem, and he goes after it.

Last night, when Nik and I were starting our mission, we ran into a pair of women walking their dogs. One of them complimented Nik on his work. A half-hour later, we crossed paths with her again. She showed us a plastic bag full of cans and wrappers she had been inspired to pick up near her home.

No lectures from Dad, no obtuse messages about "stewardship" are going to top that as positive reinforcement. Maybe the earth has a chance after all.

Closer to the land

[October 16]   I drove the boys on a minivacation to Seward (the Alaska town) on Sunday. The 140-mile trip is exceptionally scenic: much of the highway stretches down a narrow path between snow-topped mountains and the saltwater, ending in a port town of about 3,000 on a fjord.

The downside of this trip is that there's only one road we can take to get there. We've made this trip about 20 times in the past five years, and we know the scenery along the road well.

But unless we get out of the car and hike back into the roadless area, we don't learn much about the country itself.

People living in central Kansas have a big advantage.

By driving the section-road grid to visit friends or go hunting or just take a Sunday drive, Pawnee Rockers can get within a half mile of any spot in the township. Variations in crops, landscape, weeds, and wildlife are seen easily.

Those folks, whether they intend to or not, get more familiar with the countryside than does anybody in scenic -- but relatively unseeable -- areas.

Perhaps that's why Kansans feel so much closer to the land. In Alaska, we see some of the land. In Pawnee Rock Township, Kansans live with all of it.

Larry Smith's Pawnee Rock

[October 15]   Larry W. Smith has graciously sent all of us a CD packed with images of old Pawnee Rock.

There are quite a few views of downtown, some of residential streets, a big handful of the Rock, and even some samples of the messages written in pencil on the backs of postcards. I bet there are some photos you've never seen before.

The first of his photos is on the home page today: the old Christian Church. As with our other shots, Larry's images will move to the Gallery afterward.

Larry keeps his eyes open for Pawnee Rock memorabilia, as you'll see as the days and weeks progress, and he has sharp eyes. It's my pleasure to pass along his images to you -- that's what PawneeRock.org is for.

Larry, who lives in Wichita now, grew up in Pawnee Rock and is one of the sons of Joan and Virgil Smith. His wife is Cora (formerly Cora Deckert). They graduated from Pawnee Rock High, I think in 1969 and 1970, respectively.

Thanks, Larry.

A photo I like: No. 6

[October 14]   Ice clings to the moss that clings to the paint that clings to the wall of Pawnee Rock's old fire station, which seems to barely cling together.

As a kid growing up next door to the fire station and city hall, I spent a lot of winter days playing in the lot behind this building. The best icicles in town dangled from the building's roof, and even a 10-year-old could easily knock them off with a rock. I suppose it was unhealthful to lick that ice like a lollipop, but the idea was too exciting to pass up in a town where substantial icicles were rare.

This part of the wall is directly behind the city hall portion of the building. Just inside these bricks was the jail.

"A dreaded spot"

A view of Pawnee Rock in the late 1800s before large sections were quarried.

[October 13]   It's human nature to exaggerate our conditions to make our lives sound more exciting to the folks back home.

We overstate the cold, the heat, the wind, and the traffic on the way to the store. We could be laid low by any of those things, but, really, how often does that happen?

Perhaps it was the same way 175 years ago on the Santa Fe Trail, with plenty of folks back in Kentucky and Illinois anxiously awaiting news by letter. They read plenty of harrowing tales.

We should, however, give those wagoneers the benefit of the doubt. Travel was hard and dangerous, and they didn't have weather radios, gas-station restrooms, or blue tarps. It might have even been scarier than sharing the highway with 18-wheelers at dusk.

Let's look at the 1831 experiences of Josiah Gregg, who is written up in "A History of Kansas," a state textbook published in 1916. Over his career, he made eight trips back and forth between Missouri and New Mexico. We pick up the story as Gregg and his fellow travelers enter central Kansas:

"Soon after leaving Council Grove the traders began watching for buffaloes, and when a small herd was sighted it created much excitement. About half the men had never seen these animals before. All the horsemen rushed toward the herd, and some of the drivers even left their teams and followed on foot.

"After a few more days of travel, during which nothing more serious happened than a few false alarms of Indians, they reached the Arkansas River. Another day's travel over a level plain brought them in sight of Pawnee Rock, a great rock standing on the plains near the Big Bend of the Arkansas, and a landmark known from one end of the Trail to the other.

"The surrounding country was not occupied by any tribe of Indians, but was claimed by all of them as a hunting ground, for it was a fine pasture for buffaloes. For many years it had been the scene of bloody battles between different tribes.

"The Rock afforded an excellent hiding place and retreat. Since the old Trail passed within a few yards of it, this became a dreaded spot for the traders, for at this point they seldom escaped a skirmish with the Indians. The Rock probably received its name from some of the bloody deeds of the Pawnees, who were especially connected with these scenes.

"When the caravan camped at Ash Creek the traders found a few old moccasins scattered around and some camp fires still burning, which seemed to indicate the near presence of Indians. They had, up to this point, marched in two columns, but after crossing Pawnee Fork they formed four lines for better protection in case of attack.

"In camp the wagons were arranged in the form of a hollow square, each line forming a side. This provided an enclosure for the animals when needed, and a fortification against the Indians. Ordinarily the camp fires were lighted outside the square, the men slept on the ground there, and the animals were picketed near."

There was scant military protection for wagon trains in the 1830s in this open country. Fort Larned was created in 1859 on the Pawnee Fork; Fort Zarah, on Walnut Creek east of then-nonexistent Great Bend, and Fort Hays didn't come into being until the mid-1860s.

It wasn't until the railroad pushed through in 1872 that white people began settling in the Pawnee Rock area.

Ruth Deckert in the news

[October 12]   Ruth Deckert, who taught a few of us how to draw and use pastels, is featured in today's Great Bend Tribune.

The headline: Being Crafty.

The story begins:

Embroidery, crochet, painting and pen and ink drawing. Ruth Deckert of Pawnee Rock does them all.

"I just have to do something. There's just no way I'm going to sit and do nothing," Deckert said.

The true fencepost

[October 12]   I don't know whether any pieces of the True Cross exist. To my sensibility, carbon-based religious relics seem a little shaky. Having seen houses come and go, and trees come and go, I'm not convinced that any piece of wood can last two millennia.

Unless, of course, that wood is a good old Barton County fencepost. It's a wood so strong, so everlasting, that it needs three names: osage orange, hedge apple, and bois d'arc.

The fence around the pasture where my Unruh grandparents lived may have been put up in the first decade of the 20th century, or maybe later. But by anybody's standards for unprotected wood exposed to the Kansas sun and wind, it's doing fine.

With the True Cross, you have faith. With osage orange, you stick it in the ground, tie some barbed wire to it, and you're set for a century.

Laughter and luck

[October 11]   As I entered the post office yesterday, I held the doors open for a retired gentleman in a wheelchair.

"Thank you," he said expansively. "You're a gentleman and a scholar . . ."

I opened my mouth to say, "At least a gentleman . . ." but he continued: "And a connoisseur of fine broads."

If his pleasure was to leave me laughing, he succeeded. I don't care whether he says that to everyone; I loved it.

While I walked down the sidewalk on my next errand, it occurred to me that I should prepare better for my later years. I have a 401k. What I need is a schtick -- a standby joke, a remark to be known by.

My overalls-loving dad, for example, accosts similarly dressed strangers at The Wall in Great Bend, pointing a finger at their chests and saying: "You're a well-dressed man!" It takes the strangers a moment to figure it out, but they seem to enjoy the recognition.

I've been thinking a lot about Dad this past week. It was 10 years 3 days ago that he was struck by a pickup as he crossed the street on his way to shoot the breeze at the Pawnee Rock elevator. Within a couple of heartbeats, he went from being a feisty 70-year-old to a comatose shadow of a man. He awoke two weeks later, and over the following months he recovered because of his and Betty's determination.

To say it was a life-changing experience would be to shortchange the event. But Dad is chipper these days. Every day for him is a "free" day after nearly being dead, so why not be happy?

That thought always puts me in a good mood. As I walked past a doctor's office parking lot, I smiled at a young cyclist coming toward me -- and then I was splayed across the hood of an SUV.

The driver had stopped to let the cyclist go by but apparently didn't look to see whether anybody else was coming before he headed across the sidewalk. It was my good fortune that my left leg, the one closest to his bumper, was already in the air when the Lexus arrived. That let me fall safely across the hood in the driver's face; had that not been possible, I'd be . . . different today.

So, this is a free day for me, and tomorrow will be one, too. Please join me in feeling happy to be alive and walking.

I guess I'll need to forgive the SUV's driver for his negligence. I'm working on it.

One thing is for certain. I hope that in 20 years I won't be known for repeating what the SUV's driver leaned out of his door to shout: "I'm sorry! I didn't see you."

Kansas in Alaska

[October 10]   Cold enough for you yesterday? You'll be pleased to know that Monday was warmer in Anchorage (69 degrees, or 28 above normal ) than it was in Great Bend (52).

The jet stream is doing funny things this week, bringing semitropical air north off the Pacific. It has made for some Kansas weather at latitude 61.

The rain yesterday came down sideways, Kansas-style, because of the wind (gusts to 39 mph; Great Bend managed 28). Sunday night I heard the wind roar against the mountainsides, just as it does against the barns.

Monday afternoon I took the boys to Beach Lake, between the mountains and the inlet. As we walked out of the woods I faced the most amazing sight: Kansas clouds. Instead of the usual gray deck, there were clouds with imagination: Swooping, menacing, hide-the-kids-the-tornado's-coming clouds.

An old fellow fishing from a dock pointed up. Six thousand feet above us, a glider swept through the clouds, riding the updraft off the mountains. And there's the difference between Beach Lake and Pawnee Rock (mountains aside). Anybody flying in a Kansas storm cell would be on tomorrow's obituary list; here, they're just crazy.

Need a photo ID

[October 9]   Too often I see photos of old Pawnee Rock with incomplete information: who's in the photo, where was it taken, when was it taken, who took it.

Most of the time it's because all I or others have is a print or a postcard or a negative, and we do the best we can with identification by looking at clues within the photo and by asking around.

The interesting photo of the three cyclists, which was on the home page Sunday and which is now in the Gallery, is a good example. Don Ross printed the photo from a negative handed to him, but there was no available information other than that it was taken in 1914 in Pawnee Rock.

I'd really like to know who the boys are and whose houses are in the photo.

This is a plea to PawneeRock.org's readers: If you can identify somebody or something in a photo, please let me know. I'll update the caption and give you credit for your knowledge.

Of course, there's always room for photos you send, too. It makes my day when a new shot arrives -- and I'm not just talking about old shots. If it's related to Pawnee Rock, share it with PawneeRock.org's readers! Even if you don't have much info, maybe someone else does -- and we'll all learn together.

Send your photos and caption information (as much as you can) to me at leon@pawneerock.org. I'll let you know it arrived.

Fun with cats: I worked up a lot of bad karma as a kid by throwing water on my sister's whiny kitty when it climbed the screen door beside my chair at the lunch table. Just by being a dog person, I stand apart from the feline world.

But my name is the Spanish word for lion, the noblest cat of all. And in my decades of working nights, I became like a cat in the sense that I would roam the neighborhood fearlessly after work, as happy without sunlight as with it.

I admit to being superstitious about black cats, however. That brings us to Halloween.

My sister, Cheryl, is a cat person but has many redeeming qualities. One of them is a sense of humor. She sent me a link to a computer game that quickly became my seasonal favorite: Cat Bowling.

The game takes a minute to come to your screen but then you're free to waste your day.

Roadkill

[October 8]   Marla Schultz was nobody's fool. She was confident, model pretty, and homecoming-queen popular. She had smarts, sass, and common sense. She was a high school senior. I was a sophomore and intimidated although I had known her since grade school.

Marla drove a big car, probably a hand-me-down from her family. I think it was a Plymouth Fury, or something like it that was practical and popular in the 1960s and '70s.

With the Davidson boys, Greg and DeWayne, and me, she split the driving duties during our first year of going to Macksville High. Our route crossed the Pawnee Rock Bridge, turned south on the dirt road, jogged west for a mile to the old country school, and then followed the blacktop south 17 miles to Macksville.

A lot of wildlife lived in wet areas along the road, so there was roadkill: raccoons, skunks, deer, opossums, rabbits, meadowlarks, and mourning doves. I never had much empathy for the creatures, living or dead, but that would change.

On one late-spring morning, we had crossed the bridge and were motoring south. To the right spread a wheat field, and to the left a barbed-wire fence marched behind a grassy ditch.

Too quickly for Marla to avoid it, a fawn rose out of the ditch. We heard it tumble under the car, a surprisingly loud and long series of thumps. Marla backed up and we got out to look at the deer, but there was nothing we could do except talk about it and after a moment we looked without talking.

The only sound was the tick-tick-tick of the car's exhaust system cooling off. And then another sound came, as gentle as a kiss: Marla was crying.

It could have been the shock of the quick mishap, I suppose, or it could have been sadness for the morning's loss of innocence. Anything I say is only a guess.

Well, we left the mangled deer there, one more piece of roadkill. Marla went on to show that she was still nobody's fool, and she and Greg later married.

In the end, maybe nothing changed but my perceptions.

A photo I like: No. 5

[October 7]   The Farmers Grain elevator stands over 130 feet high, making it the tallest point between Larned and Great Bend.

Pawnee Rock has had at least a half-dozen elevators and mills since the 1880s, and this is the only one made of concrete. The former Farmers Grain and Livestock co-op is now owned by Great Bend Co-Op.

I've ridden the "man lift" up the middle of the elevator twice, once as a teenager and once as an adult. You can find photos from the top in the various PawneeRock.org gallery pages.

I took this photo one afternoon when our sons got their first good look at the elevator.

Griff's and Peter Pan

[October 6]   My wife sent me out for hamburgers last night when I got home from work. McDonald's was the only place open.

The McDonald's here looks just like the McDonald's where you live. Same food, same yellow ambiance.

Man, I miss Griff's.

Remember Griff's A-frame restaurant, across from Dillon's on North Main in Great Bend? Burgers were 15 cents, as advertised on the big sign out front, and the store's mascot was a happy cook. You knew your parents were in a good mood when you got to eat at Griff's.

The burgers and shakes and fries were probably just like the ones at the Midget Malt Shop in Pawnee Rock. I suppose the difference was that in Pawnee Rock you could walk downtown and get burgers grilled by someone you knew, but eating at Griff's required enough effort to make it An Occasion.

Later, there was Peter Pan. In Great Bend, the two stores were by Brit Spaugh Park, around the corner from the old Griff's site, and along 10th Street near Washington. In Larned, Peter Pan was on North Broadway uphill from downtown. In the 1970s, when I was a summer reporter for the Tiller and Toiler, my $75 a week paycheck went a lot further there than at any other restaurant. Larned's Burgerteria, with its carhops, was good but relatively expensive. Speaking of carhops, the A&W in each county seat was already fading in the mid-1970s; Larned's went first.

The nearest McDonald's for a long time was in Hutchinson, sixty miles away. The first time our family went there, we ate under the big golden arches, which started in the ground and topped out at twenty feet or so.

McDonald's landed on Great Bend in the mid-1970s, and after all these years it is still at that awkward corner with the railroad tracks. As we teenagers dragged 10th, McDonald's was the meeting place. It's where our dates taught some of us that ordering burgers with onions is a bad idea.

I guess I was lucky that my formative years coincided with the end of the pre-McDonald's years. The arrival of McDonald's was exciting -- front-page news in the Tribune -- but that was before the chain saturated our lives with commercials.

It's not all bad. In fact, I know a couple of young boys who think it's an adventure to eat restaurant food at home.

Reminding myself of that makes it a little easier to walk away from the McDonald's counter with a bag of double hamburgers -- paying $1.50 apiece for the pleasure.

Listen this morning for a Pawnee Rock-inspired radio segment by Cheryl Unruh. She is scheduled to read one of her Emporia Gazette columns, "Autumn Is in the Air," on Kansas Public Radio. You can catch her at 6:35 and 8:35, either on the radio or online. An archived file is available here.

The fallen leaves

[October 5]   A few leaves turned color, and you barely noticed. Then one day you were riding your bike through Pawnee Rock, and a yellow swarm rustled across the street in front of you. The wind soon picked up, pushing leaves out of trees like bubbles off a soapy wand.

At dinner tables all around town, dads said: You'd better get out there and rake.

Cheryl and I raked and raked, trying to work up cartoonish mounds under our elms, coffee bean trees and the lone maple. The leaves found a flatter angle of repose, however, and we settled for piles reaching our knees. We ran and jumped in, crashing hard and sometimes sliding. We tossed the leaves up and tried to catch them as they fell again. And again.

Once in a while we played football in the October yard, dragging our feet through the leaves to mark a goal line. When we missed a tackle, we hurled a handful of leaves like the little tempests we were.

Mom was kind enough not to squawk about the fragments that stuck in our hair and came inside on our clothes. She was a kid once too, you know.

In old Pawnee Rock, leaf smoke from a dozen fires filled the evening air in that time between supper and too-dark twilight when you decided that you should have worn a jacket. In every block, laughing kids ran close with arms full and threw on more leaves and watched the flames burn down until the only embers were those of twigs caught up by accident.

Finally the north wind and cold rain came and the rest of the leaves disappeared, ground to dust in the streets or blown into the fields. Red and yellow autumn became brown winter, and the earth began saving up for the next go-round.

And eventually you, like the leaves, left.

But let's say that one evening, maybe last weekend, you were looking through a box of books you loved when you lived in Pawnee Rock. Teenager books, from that time you'd like to forget a lot of.

One book opened too quickly, and an elm leaf fell into your lap. Its yellow was faded, the leaf itself parched and flat. You lifted it by the stem and held it to the light, and you wondered what made you so smart back then that you'd save a leaf from your yard.

The first families

[October 4]   It was 1872. The tribes that hunted around Pawnee Rock had been recently beaten away by soldiers from Fort Larned. Moving from the east, workers laid the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad a half-mile south of the sandstone bluff known as Pawnee Rock.

A new swath of the Great American Desert was being opened for settlement.

Two white people lived in Barton County in 1870, the census showed, but more came with the railroad in 1871. Bison still roamed the region, and Julius Both in Clarence Township (north of Pawnee Rock) was known as the best bison hunter around.

And then, in 1872, settlers set their eyes on Pawnee Rock Township. The following material is an excerpt from the "Biographical History of Barton County, Kansas," published in 1912, forty years after the rails arrived. (Originally, this was one paragraph, but I broke it up for easier reading. Also, you may recognize Dennis Logan's name; he was one of our first storekeepers.)

Pawnee Rock Township

The first settlement was made in this township when the Kentucky colony, consisting of twenty persons, arrived. In the party were T. C. Polk, John W. Smith and George M. Jackson, who was the leader of the colony. Mr. Jackson first located near Ellinwood but at a meeting which was attended by all the members of the colony it was decided that the land in Pawnee Rock township was the best to be found in the county. Accordingly it was decided that they would take up their land there.

On March 23, 1872, a celebration was held in honor of their arrival at the historic pile of stone known as Pawnee Rock.

In addition to those already named the following were among the first settlers in this township: Will. C. Hatter, Dennis Logan, S. P. Leitner and D. M. Sutherland. In 1874 the following were added to the township's population: W. M. Jenks, F. J. Jason, Charles C. Lewis, Eli, Wm. H. and Hiram Bowman, Robert J. Smith, Aaron F. Miller, Joseph Hanon, John W. Graves, John Ren, Isaiah Pelsor and J. F. Pearce.

This township now [1912] has a population of 356.

The house of friends

[October 3]   Olin and Wynona Unruh were generous with their time in the Mennonite Church and 4-H. Of course they knew everybody for miles around, and that was before Wynona became a lunch cook at the school.

Steve, Lois, Benita, and Dale were their kids, spaced out to cover eight years. Wynona did some baby sitting (me and maybe others) and was such a good family friend that my folks had me sit with her during my grandpa's funeral. Dale, a year younger than I, was my best friend.

The Unruhs had a steady flow of kids onto their big front porch, out the back door, and into the yard. There was a basketball hoop on the garage, and a lot of us just walked up the driveway. Someone was always outside.

One day Dale took me into the garage and introduced me to the wonder of wonders: an electric railroad, laid out on a table high enough that it came to our shoulders.

I saw the train only once when it was running. A heavy black steam locomotive pulled several cars. Dale and I were young enough that we could be ignored, so we stayed invisible while Steve and some crew-cut friends his age talked about the tablets that made smoke when they were dropped into the stack. Thinking as boys do, Steve figured that the only way to see whether they were safe to eat was to swallow one.

I think of Steve whenever there's talk that somebody's blowing smoke.

It was in the late 1960s, I think, that the family moved to the farm just southeast of Dundee. We all stayed close friends, but Cunnife Avenue was never the same after that.

Farm legends

[October 2]   Our cousin Mary grew up in Great Bend and was exposed to a variety of spooky stories that we Pawnee Rockers would never have imagined. They were urban legends, and Great Bend was considerably more urban than Pawnee Rock.

So I half believed what Mary, who is about four years older than I, told us as we walked down Grandma's quarter-mile driveway to get the mail. The woman who reached over the side of her chair and petted her dog and then found out that the dog had been killed days earlier. The ax murderer hiding in a car's back seat at the gas station. The fellow who learned that his potato chips were actually someone's scabs.

No, childhood wasn't always pretty, and it was often disgusting. That's why we liked it so much.

As we got a little older, we continued to take our walks but generally abandonded the supernatural stories for ventures into a more natural world. We discovered a vein of clay exposed in a draw in the pasture. In reality, Grandma or one of the parents who grew up there probably mentioned it and we "discovered" it by walking out there.

It seemed like a lengthy walk back then. When I retraced the route last summer it wasn't long at all. Down the hill from the house, cross the three strands of barbed wire and follow the draw.

The clay pit, as we called it, was secluded, tucked almost invisibly into the short grass and wildflowers. The three-foot-high bank protected us from the breeze and prying eyes, if there were any. It was our world, where we could dig and scrape, chat and invent.

With our fingers we scratched the gray clay out of its limestone bed and picked out slivers of rock. We carried the clay to the farmhouse, where we dampened, rolled, and molded it into our treasures. We left them in the sun to dry, took them home, and eventually misplaced them.

Our creations were never what anybody else would call art. "Early primitive" would describe these ashtrays, statues, and miniature vases. As a symbol of our hands-in-the-earth connection with the farm, however, they were unbeatable.

This summer, I tried to work a chunk of clay out of the side of the draw, and it was like pulling stone with my fingernails. The droughty soil kept its clay. The digging time had passed.

Still, I remember.

It's amazing what sticks with a guy. More than three decades after we walked down Grandma's driveway, I check the car's back seat at the gas station and give potato chips a close look. I peer over the edge of the couch to make sure that's really my dog at the end of my arm.

Those early days were made of almost pure sensation; they were a time when we cousins bonded ourselves tightly to one another. It is our rural legend, and because I felt it so cleanly I will believe in it always.

Hello, October

[October 1]   October's off and running! The soybeans are in the bin and it's full-blown football season, and fall colors mean winter's coming but they're still nicer than the three dozens shades of brown left over from late summer.

In search of Irvines: Suzi Terrell has written in search of information about two of Pawnee Rock's earliest citizens: William and Anna Irvine.

She writes: "I am searching for info on my gg-grandparents -- here is what was published in Anna Irvine's obituary:

"Col William Irvine was a confederate solder who was an officer in Morgan's famous cavalry corps. He and Anna were among the first settlers at Pawnee Rock in Pawnee County, Kansas. For many months Anna was the only white woman there."

If you readers of PawneeRock.org have any information, please send it to Suzi at PR-szterrell@comcast.net. (Take the "PR-" off the address of your e-mail first.)

Suzi has a fun family-history site: tomanddelphia.com. Click on the Photos link to see family photographs and read the family history in a poem called "The Hunt."

School: The price of the school building has been cut by $25,000 to a bargain $325,000. That's a savings of 7 percent to anybody who pays the asking price.

The building, which houses the city offices and the city's childhood, has been on the market since June.

Quarters: Why are Kansas quarters so hard to come by? My sister, Cheryl, says it's because many of them were burned up in a truck accident. I go through a lot of change and have found only three bison quarters amid the dozens of Old Man in the Mountains, Indy racing cars, and palmettos.

Field of itches: I came across my old corn knife in a tool chest this week. My sister's Emporia Gazette column about topping milo had brought it to mind. I used that long knife to whack overgrown milo in fields in Septembers past. The job involved mud, heat, backbreaking bending, and dust, and if you didn't wear long sleeves and jeans through those rows of milo leaves, you'd regret it for hours. The leaves left millions of tiny scratches on bare skin, and sweat and chiggers made everything itch. I am glad I did it, and I don't miss topping milo.