ATCHISON, Kan. - Ghosts, black squirrels, mummified farmers. Kansas has it all.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the interstate highway system, I wanted to take a drive that avoided the interstates - the Wal-Marts of the roadways - and see real, homespun America.
My route would be the back roads where drugstore soda fountains and Mom 'n' Pop diners still thrived, where roadside attractions abounded and where billboards and fast-food joints did not clog the arteries. I wanted big skies and sweeping landscapes where buffalo once roamed and where silos, not skyscrapers, were the tallest buildings.
U.S. 36, an antique two-laner that cuts arrow-straight across the top of Kansas, fit the bill.
Despite the state's reputation as flat, drab and boring, books have been written about the abundance of oddities, both human and geologic, found on the Kansas prairies.
Pam Grout, author of "You Know You're in Kansas When ...", wrote of the state: "It's by far one of the most interesting of the 50, yet it has never, like Rodney Dangerfield, gotten the respect it deserves."
Grout also revealed in the foreward to her book that she omitted this one-liner: "You know you're in Kansas when you've seen people wear bib overalls to funerals and weddings."
Reputation for eccentrics
Over a spaghetti lunch, I asked one resident about his state's reputation for weird-
ness. He pushed back the bill of his cap to ponder, revealing a bone-white forehead over a sun-stained face, and replied, "Well, in Kansas, people have a lot of time on their hands."
Another explanation, this one from the state school board, is that evolution is merely a theory in Kansas.
That might be why one farmer sat in his barn winding string from his hay bales into what has become the world's largest ball of twine.
Or why another built a concrete mausoleum in his backyard, dug up his dead wife from the local cemetery and buried her there, and then had his own body mummified and enshrined in a glass-topped casket with a double-exposed photo nearby of himself admiring himself in the coffin. Pay $6 and you can stare down at the withered face, now 74 years dead.
President for a day
The fun started immediately when I crossed the Missouri River into Atchison, in the northeast corner of Kansas, and found that the town was named for a senator - from Missouri. In fact, David Rice Atchison was acting president of the United States for 24 hours, beginning at noon March 4, 1849. He snoozed for most of his term.
The world's smallest presidential library is housed in the town's restored Santa Fe depot and tells how Atchison became president when James Polk and his vice president stepped down at noon Sunday and Zachary Taylor refused to take the oath of office on the Sabbath, waiting until noon Monday. Atchison, as head of the Senate, was next in line and slept most of Sunday, although he was awakened occasionally by friends asking to be named to his Cabinet.
His presidential library is only slightly larger than another display in the depot that tells the story of William "Deafy" Boular, a deaf and legless man who is credited with paving many of the brick streets throughout town and earned mention in a 1933 "Ripley's Believe It or Not" column for laying 46,000 bricks in eight hours.
Atchison also is Amelia Earhart's birthplace, and a park on the edge of town honors the ill-fated pilot and other famed aviators and astronauts.
A sycamore tree in the park was grown from seeds that went to the moon during an Apollo mission. You can buy packets of seeds from the Moon Tree at the train depot.
"We explain to people that they are not seeds from the moon," said the depot's clerk. "Nothing grows on the moon, you know."
Ghost goings-on
But missing aviators, short-term presidents and speedy bricklayers are not Atchison's real claim to fame - ghosts are. The town has been heralded in books and TV shows as Kansas' most haunted.
John Settich is a seemingly sensible Atchison resident who is head of the political science department at Benedictine College and proprietor of St. Martin's Bed & Breakfast in a stately home. He also narrates a trolley tour and relates the ghoulish goings-on inside some of the town's Victorian mansions.
"This is our most famous ghost - this is Sally's house," Settich said of a modest-looking bungalow.
Sally, it seems, was given an emergency appendectomy by a doctor who didn't wait for the ether to take effect. She died of the pain. Mysterious scratches, apparently payback from Sally, appear on men who sleep in the house.
"It's empty now," Settich said. "The owners offered it for $250,000 on eBay, but nobody would buy it. They're thinking about trying to rent it out for special occasions, maybe on Halloween."
Pies square off
From Atchison, I took Highway 7, also known as the Glacial Hills Scenic Byway, north to catch U.S. 36. But first I made a quick stop in Troy to check out a rumor that the Home Place Restaurant sold only square pieces of pie.
"It's easier to portion - you can cut it faster," said owner Jeannie Ricklefs, who handed over a piece of rhubarb-strawberry. Sure enough, beneath the sprig of mint and scoop of vanilla ice cream was a square piece of pie. It tasted just like a triangular piece, maybe even better.
"This used to be a funeral home," Ricklefs said of the neat-as-a-pin restaurant. "Up there's where the caskets used to be."
It was easier finding Charlie Becker's house at the corner of 6th and E streets in Washington. Becker, who played the mayor of Munchkinland in "The Wizard of Oz," lived in the house with his wife, Jesse. A couple strolled by on their evening walk and I asked if the little stucco house belonged to the Beckers.
"Three little people lived there; I think one was his sister," offered the man. "Look in the window," said his wife. "The kitchen sink is built down real low."
I did, and it was.
Time for twine
The next morning began in Cawker City, where the world's largest ball of twine sat under a pavilion. Frank Stoeber started winding sisal twine from hay bales in his barn in 1953. The ball now is bigger than a Buick and said to contain 7,801,766 feet of twine, weighing 17,886 pounds.
"Frank hadn't been well, it was winter - what else is a farmer going to do?" said Linda Clover, the school librarian and unofficial keeper of the twine. "The third weekend in August, people come from all over and we wrap twine at a Twine-a-Thon. We have a parade and games. Honestly, there's not a whole lot around here for entertainment. If you have lemons, you make lemonade.
"We've had people come from every continent to see it. They come in all ages; it isn't just old people on tour buses. And I know people have climbed it and done things on top. And I mean everything."
Because many of the storefronts in town were vacant, local artist Cher Heller Olson decided to dress things up by painting familiar figures on the windows, each with a ball of twine. There's the Statue of Liberty with a ball of twine on her torch, Mona Lisa holding a ball of twine, and the grim-faced farm couple from the Grant Wood painting, "American Gothic," with twine in the pitchfork.
"We had Michelangelo's David; he was covering his anatomy with a ball of twine," Clover said. "You couldn't see anything, but someone wrote an anonymous letter complaining. So he's stashed in the studio."
Smack dab in center
The ball of twine was going to be hard to beat, but I pressed on, and found the geographic center of the United States at the dead end of a two-lane blacktop just north of Lebanon. The U.S. Geological Survey says the center is the spot where a plane map of the lower 48 states would balance on a pinpoint if it were of uniform thickness.
A marker and an American flag stood at the spot, and there was a tiny white "U.S. Center" chapel with four one-person pews inside. Other than a meadowlark singing and the flagpole clanging in the wind, it was eerily quiet in Middle America.
Downtown Lebanon has seen better times, but Ladow's Market was full of farmers eating lunch. The bill for the special of spaghetti, salad, garlic bread and pumpkin cake was $4.21. I left a buck tip and Debbie, the waitress, came running after me. "We don't take tips," she said. "That way we don't have to pay taxes and we tell everybody we don't have to treat 'em nice."
The previous day, the Kansas sky was full of clouds in the shapes of battleships and nuclear-plant cooling towers. But when I arrived at Brewster Higley's log cabin on a farm north of Athol, the sky was "not cloudy all day."
Yep, Higley was a doctor who retreated to the remote cabin on Beaver Creek and in 1873 wrote the words to "My Western Home," which is known all over the world as "Home on the Range." A plaque on the log cabin said Kansas adopted the tune as its official state song in June 1947. I saw no deer or antelope playing, but a turkey gobbled in the woods by the creek as I drove off.
Heading east on Interstate 70, I couldn't resist a billboard advertising the new Oz Museum at Wamego, which turned out to be a pretty little town that looked like a movie set itself. The museum was nice, too, although the ruby slippers on display are not the ones that graced Judy Garland's feet. A highlight was the life-sized figure of the Wicked Witch, with a warty green nose, next to one of her monkey-faced henchmen.
Comanche's corner
My last appointment was with a dead horse.
"You mean Comanche?" said the clerk at the Super 8. "We used to go see him when I was a kid."
When the smoke cleared after the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the only member of Gen. George Custer's U.S. 7th Cavalry still standing was a big brown horse named Comanche.
Wounded, he was nursed back to health at Fort Riley in Kansas and lived to the age of 29.
When he died, the cavalry at the fort had him stuffed by the taxidermist at the Kansas University Natural History Museum in Lawrence.
But the cavalry stiffed the stuffer, so to speak, and the horse has remained in a glass case in Lawrence ever since. The display recently was closed for a makeover, and reopened with Comanche looking great in his cavalry gear, his mane combed and his coat groomed. "Comanche is back!" said a sign on the exhibit.
You know you're in Kansas when a dead horse is a state celebrity.
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If you go
In Atchison | The Unofficial David Rice Atchison Presidential Library is in the Santa Fe Depot at 200 S. 10th St. Visit www.atchisonhistory.org. The Moon Tree in the International Forest of Friendship is at (913) 367-1419 and www.ifof.org. Haunted Trolley Tours (1-800-234-1854) are $8 per person and offered in the fall. The chamber of commerce is at 1-800-234-1854 and www.atchisonkansas.net. St. Martin's Bed & Breakfast is at 1-877-367-4964 and www.stmartinsbandb.com.
In Cawker City | The Ball of Twine Inn (1-877-266-2963) is across the street from the World's Largest Ball of Twine.
In Wamego | The Oz Museum is at 1-866-458-8686 and www.ozmuseum.com. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $7.
Kansas info | Call the Department of Commerce Travel & Tourism Division at (785) 296-2009, or visit www.travelks.com.
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/my ... ine_living
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