Big Hopes Circle Ted Turner’s Little Ranch on the Prairie

Welcome to the neighborhood, Ted!

Park your pickup and stay a while. Grab a burger and a cup of coffee. And while you’re at it. . . .

Maybe you’d see fit to write a modest check to lengthen our airport runway. It is, after all, on the skimpy side. Perhaps you could sponsor our local peace pageant too. It could use a little glitz. And then there’s our school. Does the gym ever need work. . . .

Wait! Don’t go! Sorry to pester. You gotta admit, though, we have good reason. It’s not every day a media mogul moves into the Kansas outback.

Not that Ted Turner is actually setting up a homestead in this remote patch of endless sky and endless scrub. But he did buy a ranch here: More than 35,000 acres hard up against the Oklahoma border. He plans to run bison on it. Maybe reclaim some longtime wheat fields as wild native prairie. If there’s a need, he might offer the ranch as a shelter for endangered species.

He’ll do, in short, the same thing he’s done on the other 1.6 million acres he owns across Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico and South Dakota. He’ll ranch. No big deal, insists Russ Miller, general manager of Turner Ranches.

And yet, the mere fact that it’s Turner in charge has locals abuzz.

True, many admit they would not recognize him if he strode into Hubbard’s Health Mart. (Especially now that he and Jane Fonda have split.) Still, they know he’s a big-shot billionaire. And so they wonder--with equal parts hope and fear--whether things will start to change in their hard-scrabble prairie now that the rancher down the road is a celebrity.

“There’s always some apprehension whenever there’s big change,” said Charlie Swayze, a former mayor of Medicine Lodge, population 2,150.

Among the concerns: that Turner’s purchase (rumored to have cost him $9 million) will boost land values--and, thus, jack up property taxes; that he’ll import his ranch supplies from afar, rather than support local merchants; that his bison will spread disease.

Above all, there’s this fear, implausible but nagging, that the culture of this laid-back county will change. That with big money and publicity in town, locals will start locking their doors when they go on vacation or taking the keys out of the car when they park.

“We’re kind of out in the sticks,” explained Mike Platt, president of the local bank, “but that’s the lifestyle we all enjoy. It all might start changing if they get a lot of tourism” on the ranch.

On the other hand, the optimists in town point out that a small lifestyle upgrade might not be so horrible.

They see nothing wrong in attracting a few tourists to the ruddy hills of southern Kansas, where sunsets stretch forever and stars stud the night with mystery. Guided trail rides draw 1,000 visitors a year, but a bison ranch--Turner’s bison ranch--could be just the ticket to reel in more. “We’re very hopeful that would be a positive,” resident Kaye Kuhn said.

The true dreamers also dare to suggest Turner might sprinkle some cash around--not only to buy veterinary supplies or fence posts, but also to help out a community in need.

“He might see fit to put some little part of his empire here, maybe a video repair store or a buffalo processing plant, which could turn out to be a hell of a shot in the arm for us,” said Garry Wright, who runs the truck stop. And should Turner front the funds for a new gym or a pool in the senior center, “we’d be glad to name them after him,” rancher Charlene Larson offered.

Even Platt has to admit he’d “like to be able to do some business with Ted Turner,” although he acknowledges his two-branch bank, with total assets of $24 million, is unlikely to become the billionaire’s depository of choice.

Considering that Turner hasn’t yet visited his ranch, speculation that he’ll transform Medicine Lodge seems a bit premature. And indeed, Miller is doing his best to quiet concerns.

He’s pledged to “do our best to buy locally” if prices are competitive. He promises, too, that Turner has no plans to turn his land into a commercial hunting preserve or a dude ranch.

And the airport runway?

The gym? The pool?

Miller is diplomatic.

He notes that Turner has supported youth activities around his other ranches. Yet he says “it’s premature” to discuss any such program in Kansas.

“We’ve made our investment in the community with our business,” he said, “which is the ranch.”