When I grew up in Kansas, it seemed a decent enough place to live despite its bloody history and blatant racial discrimination. It was solid Republican, home of Dodge City’s Boot Hill, and birthplace of Ike, who had a two term Vice President named Richard Nixon. It was monotony except for the massacre of the Clutter family, the foundation for In Cold Blood, and Wichita’s BTK killer. It was the setting for a few movies. I don’t think The Wizard of Oz was actually filmed there, though the terrain and fantasy would certainly apply. I remember Wait Til The Sun Shines Nellie in which Jean Peter’s character deserts her husband and runs away with her adulterous lover. The film I best remember is Picnic. Its scenes of grain storage elevators; the waterfall, which Holden ran through in escaping the cops; and the setting and action of the actual picnic were all fimed in my hometown. According to one of the town’s telephone operators, Holden told a friend that we were all a bunch of hicks. By west and east coast standards we most likely were.
The summer before last, I made a solo cross country trip to Missouri to visit a dying relative. In Nebraska, when I left the Oregon Trail, these days called Interstate 80, I dropped down through Kansas and its flat prairie lands. Herds of cattle and fields of corn brought no moments of nostalgia. Had I not been determined to reach Missouri by nightfall, I still would have by-passed my birthplace and the opportunity for Auld Lang Syne. Years earlier Kansas’s news maker was Senator Robert Dole. Despite his reputation for political viciousness he did have a sense of humor as partly demonstrated by his marriage to a poof sleeved southern belle who had her own eye on making the White House home. These days the state’s news makers are a group of nuts: the religious sect that rejoiced at the death of a young gay, named Matthew, who was severely beaten and spent his last hours of life entwined in a barbed wire fence in Wyoming. Lately they have been demonstrating their hate at the funerals of our soldiers lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. This hatred and lack of conscience and decency do none of us credit.
Beyond Marching Songs 