For his 10th birthday, the only thing my son wanted was to go ride horses. His birthday was on Aug. 2, and we scheduled a ride with a local stable in Hillsdale. Unfortunately, it was way too hot to get the horses out that day, so we rescheduled for a week later. On Tuesday, Aug. [...]
I don’t know about folks sitting around drinking coffee in Linn County locations but discussion of the Christine Staten story about the log cabin – she calls “Old Diehm” – went the rounds at Gary Furnish’s donut shop in Paola. This amazingly solid and impressive structure serves as a reminder to what it took to [...]
Thomas Lynn Youman is an unsung Osawatomie hero who was a pioneer in Kansas’s telecommunications industry. Youman owned the Osawatomie Telephone Company and was a stockholder in the Parker Telephone Company in Parker, Kansas. Youman was an astute business owner and was influential in Kansas’s early communications industry. Telephony: The American Telephone Journal, Volume 79, [...]
Last week I visited the St. Philippine Duchesne Memorial Park. One of the signs in the park explained that the artifacts found there were kept at the Swan River Museum in Paola. Because I live just a few blocks from there, I thought I would follow up on last week’s adventure, and go to the [...]
I never know what my Memory To Memoir Workshop will bring me. Last summer, two different women shared tragic family stories. By summer’s end, I left them with a plan, well some direction at least, that they can continue to follow as they research and write. This summer, another woman brought a set of stories [...]
Smith R. Mudge was a railroad engineer whose life had a positive impact on Osawatomie and demonstrates the path many railroad employees took during their careers in the 19th century. Mudge’s railroad career began when he began working for the Lake Erie and Western Railroad as a fireman in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1856 at age [...]
If you are like me, you complicate everything more than necessary. I can take the simplest idea and beat it and mess with it over and over until it is so complicated I don’t recognize it any more. Why can’t I find a simple solution to problems and then be happy? I’m not sure what [...]
EVERYONE is talking about it, but no one is doing anything about it – the weather that is. It was still 98 degrees at 8:45 p.m. Monday when I began to write this column. My eldest son David sent me a road sign sitting in the center of a street in what looks like a [...]
This summer, my entire way of looking at the world is shifting. I’m studying Spanish. The course I’m taking through Johnson County Community College is intense and leaves little room for thinking about anything else, whether in Spanish or English. The issue is, because I studied German when I was in college, my brain is [...]
Little did I realize when I arrived at Philmont Scout Ranch in 1967, but just a few short miles away in Cimarron, N.M., stood a spirited hotel. Not exactly like the Stanley Hotel used in The Shining, but haunted, very haunted “they say” in its own way. Our Gray Lines (the actual company name) bus [...]