Toto, We Are Still in Kansas

It’s easy to get depressed in small-town America.

The one-block Main Streets slump abandoned, store after store boarded up. There may be a tiny grocery, but there won’t be many shoppers. There may be a cafe, but the aging owner, scrambling eggs, will say she’s losing too much money to keep the fool place open long.

But a one-woman crusade to turn such towns around is gaining momentum here in Kansas--by encouraging tourists to see beyond the decay and find the gems that even locals may have long since ceased noticing.

It all started a decade ago, when travel writer Marci Penner was researching guidebooks on her native Kansas. She would pull into a dot-on-the-map town and ask folks: “What do you have that we could write about?” They would invariably reply: “We have nothing.” She chose not to believe them.

“Every town has a story to tell,” she would insist. Then she would find it.

The story might be an old footbridge built to keep ladies’ skirts from the mud of unpaved streets. Or a diner still serving real cream in silver pitchers with its 50-cents-a-mug coffee. It might be a dusty back-of-the-garage antique shop. Or a hot spring guaranteed to produce miracle cures. Anything that gave a town some flavor was a story. And every story was worth a visit.

Now Penner is sharing those stories--and promoting those visits--through an unusual, nonprofit venture aimed at saving rural Kansas from its own despair.

The Kansas Explorers Club has signed up 1,200 members who pledge to uncover--and savor--the charms of every faded farm town they can find. For annual membership dues of $18.61 (to commemorate the year Kansas gained statehood), they receive a bimonthly newsletter filled with advice on how to while away the weekend in a town of 300. Penner knows her explorers can’t save rural Kansas by themselves, but they do give a boost to these communities, most of them with populations under 1,000. And the explorers have a blast.

“I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember--just pick a spot, go and find out what’s there,” said Larry Woydziak, a firefighter from Lawrence. “It was quite refreshing to find out I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed it.”

In their quest to find something special in every town, explorers might sip a strawberry malt on a swivel stool at the old-fashioned soda fountain in Hamilton. Or peer down Westmoreland’s huge hand-dug well, the second-largest in the nation. They might tour the museum dedicated to barbed wire in LaCrosse, taste the cinnamon rolls at Annetta’s bakery in Fredonia, picnic to the twang of the Mound Valley fiddlers playing in the park on a summer night.

Wherever they venture, they make it a point to spend a few bucks.

Last year, Penner challenged her explorers to spend $5 each at the Lizard Lips Grill and Deli in tiny Toronto. The town has only 300 residents, but more than 1,000 explorers came through, providing a financial boost to the struggling cafe--and, more important, bolstering the owner’s morale.

“The people who came had the most positive outlook,” Linda Geffert says, marveling still.

They didn’t care that Frito-Lay had stopped delivering to Lizard Lips because the account was too small. They weren’t there for Doritos. They were there for the atmosphere, the mom-and-pop charm, the helter-skelter selection of merchandise (bait worms, borscht, glow-in-the-dark magnets).

Their appreciation made Geffert realize her store was special in this era of look-alike chains. And their support strengthened her resolve to stick with the business, however tough. “It was just an incredible experience,” she says.

The Lizard Lips campaign was such a hit that Penner issued a new challenge last month: She is urging explorers to visit the obscure attractions of eight Kansas towns, from a community-owned grocery store in Gove to the 120-year-old stone church in Greenbush to the old-fashioned movie theater that shows classic films here in Pretty Prairie, a spunky town of 584 set in the gold-green expanse of central Kansas.

The theater dates to 1936 and still sports the original--uncomfortable--wood seats. There’s a roll-down curtain covered with hand-painted ads for local businesses with two-digit phone numbers. The projection booth is lined with steel, a throwback to the days when nitrate film was prone to flame. And proprietors Darrell and Joyce Albright, who run the theater as a nonprofit, show nothing but cornball oldies: Ma and Pa Kettle, Francis the Talking Mule, Alfalfa and the “Our Gang” rascals. “It’s a feeling of stepping back in time,” Joyce Albright promises.

The explorers are raring to go.

“Every town has something to be proud of,” said Woydziak, 47, who prowls the forgotten byways of Kansas with his wife, Connie. Taking up Penner’s challenges, he adds, “you see things you’re not going to read about in any travel log.”

Penner, 45, coordinates the explorer club through the Kansas Sampler Foundation, the nonprofit she set up in 1993 to promote rural culture. With an annual budget of $70,000 that comes mostly from donations, the foundation helps small-time business owners network so they don’t feel so isolated. There’s a Web site, https://www.kansassampler.org, and an annual “We Kan!” retreat for rural leaders.

As the foundation’s sole employee (she pays herself $25,000 a year), Penner travels the state presenting slide shows to stir up interest in out-of-the-way attractions. She organizes explorer outings. And she produces a newsletter six times a year packed with tips about visiting what she calls “the nooks and crannies” of her state: where to hike through wildflowers, where to ride a vintage carousel, where to find the best coconut cream pie in Kansas (try the Green Door restaurant in Sedan).

Her readers chip in with tips of their own. And with updates on the nutty goals they set to spur their explorations--such as counting every green-painted water tower in the state or bowling in every county.

Seeing Kansas With New Eyes

As they travel, explorers say they learn to slow down, to chat with locals to unearth the tidbits that make a place come alive. They might find out that families used to gather every Saturday night to watch movies projected on the brick pharmacy wall. They might discover a great hill for sunset-watching, or a yard crammed with handmade sculptures the local eccentric has crafted out of junk. They learn to treasure such finds.

“The explorer club motto is ‘see Kansas with new eyes,’ and you do,” said Martha Slater, 48, a video producer from Hutchinson who has found herself fascinated by learning how a cattle rancher puts up a fence.

“You really do begin to view these towns differently as you drive into them,” agreed Jim Gray, a Kansas history buff who sells 19th century cowboy gear from his store in Ellsworth. “It is absolutely amazing the way things will just open up to you, if you only let them.” And it’s not just the tourists who gain a fresh perspective.

The foundation “has helped those of us in rural communities see that we are worthy of having people stop by,” said Susie Haver, the curator of a restored turn-of-the-century opera house in Concordia.

It Takes Work to Keep Small Towns Alive

Here in Pretty Prairie, the Albrights are unabashedly looking forward to the extra income they expect from explorers. One of the club’s mottoes is “explorers always pay full price”--indeed, sometimes they pay double--and the Albrights are hoping to sell enough $5 movie tickets to fund some renovations, such as building dressing rooms behind the theater’s stage to accommodate live productions.

Yet even as they talk of what they hope to gain, the couple consider what they hope to give in return.

They want to show their visitors the cozy warmth of a community where folks spend as much time chatting in the lobby as they do watching the show. More than that, though, they want to make the explorers understand that it’s a true labor of love to keep a town like Pretty Prairie from sinking into decline.

The cafe owner has to keep scrambling those eggs even though she can’t turn a profit. The grocery store owner has to keep the lights on even though shoppers are sparse. To keep the theater running all these years has taken an enormous volunteer effort that’s swept up the whole Albright family--down to the grandkids--and several neighbors besides.

“When we moved here from Topeka, our friends all asked us, ‘What are you going to do in a small town?’ but the truth is, we’re much busier here than we ever were in the big city,” said Joyce Albright, 59. “You have to be involved to keep the town going. It takes a lot of work to keep a town alive.”

That same determined spirit animates many of the towns that made Penner’s must-explore list.

It took years of bingo fund-raisers for Gove’s 100 townspeople to raise enough money to set up a grocery. When the first shipment of goods came in, everyone turned out to unload the truck. The historic church in Greenbush closed years ago for lack of a priest, but citizens are restoring the cemetery, stone by stone. Locals have formed nonprofits to fix up the century-old Weaver Hotel in Waterville and to turn a quirky collection of carnival memorabilia into a museum in Kinsley.

Each of these towns has found its story. And will tell it to all who stop to explore.

“We all hear the doom-and-gloom forecasts” about the withering of rural America, Penner said. “Those forecasts don’t take our heart into account.”