Over a decade ago, I lucked into a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar titled The Great Plains: Texas to Saskatchewan. For five weeks, Tom Isern led 19 other teachers and I to read and analyze literary and historical texts, discuss conclusions, and visit iconic sites to better understand what it means to live on the plains.
Sometime back I talked about our return to dryland farming. One of the things I will miss with this change is being surrounded by fields of gold. Some days, I would journey into the fields to be surrounded by eye-level orbs of sunlight. I would stand quietly waiting for the sound of munchkins following the yellow brick road. At the end of the growing season, I have been known to emerge with an arm full of heavy heads to hang in the evergreens to provide a feast for winter residents.
Let’s give the mailman something to laugh about and send one of those exaggerated postcards of giant insects or oversized rabbits. You can find them at the Finney County Historical Museum, along with information on their creator, a photographer named Frank ‘Pop’ Conard who found a way to make lemons into lemonade during the dark days of the Great Depression.
Kansas Bureau of Investigation documents suggest that the events described in two crucial chapters of Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel", In Cold Blood, differ significantly from what actually happened. Writer Kevin Helliker explores this new evidence and other findings in a recent Wall Street Journal article.
GARDEN CITY, Kan.-Truman Capote's masterwork of murder, "In Cold Blood," cemented two reputations when first published almost five decades ago: his own, as a literary innovator, and detective Alvin Dewey Jr.'s as the most famous Kansas lawman since Wyatt Earp.
