Growing Up Kansas: Why Little Boys Should Never Practice Medicine
Little kids should never be left alone to practice medicine on themselves, their friends, or their pets. They tend to ignore the do no harm part of the Hippocratic Oath; most of the treatments they prescribe are based on witchcraft and voodoo rather than science. A...
Growing Up Kansas: What I Learned in Second Grade About the Weaker Sex
(Names are changed to protect the guilty) Whomever said that females are the weaker sex did not learn the same lessons I did in second grade at my rural grade school; country girls are tough. My first encounter with the weaker sex happened on the playground. Looking...
Growing Up Kansas: World Peace and a Good Ol’ Kansas Swimming Hole
Part 9 of the Growing Up Kansas Series The best way to foster world peace is to get all the kings, queens, presidents, dictators and their hench-people together at a good ol’ Kansas swimmin’ hole. Putin could strut bare-chested in his Speedo; Merkel could hold the NSA...
Growing Up Kansas: How I Learned to Detest the Marimba
Part 8 in the Growing Up Kansas series I didn’t always detest the marimba; it happened by accident. I blame it all on a traveling evangelist and his marimba-playing wife. My Dad worked in the oilfields but his real passion was to minister to a small country church he...
Passin’ Gas in Church: the Night I Understood God Has a Sense of Humor
Part 8 of the Growing Up Kansas Series One dare not laugh in the little country church I grew up in or some little old lady would accuse you of sinning. Church was a somber place where the virtues of God competed with the vices of the devil and the devil seemed to be...
Growing Up Kansas: Fear-The Fastest Form of Transportation
Part 7 in the Growing Up Kansas Series: Mostly True Stories of my Youth The first time I got in trouble for exploring, I threw the family dog under the bus. Wanderlust took over my little four-year-old mind and I grabbed the dog, Boo-Boo, and headed out across the...
Growing Up Kansas: The Day We Burned Old Man Leonard’s Pasture
To get the flavor of growing up as country kid from Kansas, you should add sauntering down a country road in the back of a pickup truck to your bucket list. It should not matter to you that it is illegal. And, at some point, you need to add pick-em-up truck to your...
Growing Up Kansas: The Little Old Ladies of the Partyline Society
Part 5 of the Growing Up Kansas series We country kids invented LOLOPS long before LOL(laugh out loud). LOLOPS: Little Old Ladies of the Partyline Society. We called them the Lollipops. Unlike city folks that live so close they can hear each other pass gas, rural...
Growing Up Kansas: Crawdaddin’ in Bird Creek
Note: This is Part 4 in the series, Growing Up Kansas. The best part of growing up Kansas are the creeks, ponds, and swimming holes, all of which posed serious threats to our mortality. We didn’t need violent video games; we defied death in real life. In addition to...
Growing Up Kansas: The Night The UFO Came to Get Us
Note: This is Part 3 in the series of Growing Up Kansas It’s not every day that six little country kids in Kansas have UFOs show up in their backyard and scare the bejesus out of them. During the late sixties, there was an uptick in UFO sightings across the U.S. There...