Spring, 2007 Issue

Seeing Kansas By Rail

With literally dozens of ways to tour Kansas, to see and experience all of the diverse beauty the state has to offer, most people go by car or truck, fewer by bus. But for a select, and lucky, few there is the Fairmont Motorcar.                   

View from the middle of RR Bridge East of Blue Rapids Kansas. The rail is 90’ above the surface of the water.

Custer House Brings Fort Riley Past To Life

A simple white picket fence borders one of several limestone houses on Fort Riley’s Sheridan Avenue. Unlike the other historic homes, though, Quarters 24 remains in its 19th century flavor.

While it’s called the Custer House, presumably Brevet Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his wife, Libby, occupied a similar set of quarters while stationed at Fort Riley in 1866.

Musings Outside of Montezuma

From so many miles away, the wind turbines don’t look like anything special.  They’re little dark grey toothpicks with tiny Mercedes-Benz Y’s rotating, rotating, rotating at the same monotonous pace, sluggishly trudging through the thick summer air.  In fact, they look spectacularly inconsequential.  If they weren’t the only departure from cows, telephone poles, flatness, greenness, and more flatness in the last 100 miles, I wonder if I would have noticed them at all.  Mentally, I let out a grand, lip-fluttering sigh. 

“Cecil” is Born In Kansas                  

Imagine that you are the Marketing Director of a local hospital?  Okay, if that does not seem possible, how about being the CEO of a hospital? Or how about Director of Nursing? None of those fit? Okay, how about just working for a hospital that is a fun place to work, where everybody is encouraged to share ideas and work towards a common goal.  Okay so far?

Stan the Man

The little town of Marquette, Kansas, home to 600, know the Curator of The Kansas Motorcycle Museum as such, but after knowing this very friendly, white headed man for over four years, I asked myself the question “Who is the man?” What’s the full story of “Stan the man?”

Carl Stanley Engdahl was born November 23rd, 1928 on a farm 6 miles up river, North West of Marquette, Kansas, to Swedish parents, Carl and Hulda Engdahl. He grew up on the farm and helped his father with all farming duties. He inherited the land, and although he chose not to farm it himself, he still owns it and rents to other local farmers.

Winter Remembered

"O, the snow-footed, ice-armored winds of the prairie,
Rushing out mightily

From cosmic caves of the north,
From glacier forces of earth and air...

Blue Rapids and the Donner Party

Driving back from a meeting in Lincoln, Neb., I encountered the mural that the city of Blue Rapids has captured for us. The image portrays a wagon train on the Oregon Trail, the ruts of which can be seen today near Blue Springs. In the mural are a farmer family and Indians hunting buffalo. The inclusion of a white farmer family pumping a well suggests the settlers' claim to Kansas. The appearance of Indians in the background watching the activity is a theme presented in many Oregon Trail murals.