Former Attorney General Bob Stephan touched briefly and humorously on politics before settling into a disturbing story about his life as a youth and explaining why SOS is a cause near and dear to his heart.
Stephan was the keynote speaker Saturday evening at a dinner and program at Emporia State University to celebrate the 30th anniversary of SOS in Emporia.
"I really enjoy the ads to find out who's the worst," Stephan said. "We live in the kind of society that is search and destroy" and that society increasingly is growing more violent.
Stephan had been a judge before he decided to resign and enter the race for Kansas Attorney General.
"I just didn't feel the system heard the cry of victims," he said.
He'd felt insulated as a judge; everyone seemed to respect and to like him, and he was surprised to find that was not so when he talked with a woman in Cheney, a short distance from his home at that time in Wichita.
" 'I'd vote for a dirty dog before I'd vote for you,' he quoted the woman; "She told me things about my parents I didn't even know."
Stephan had sentenced her son to a reformatory, he said, and the venom he'd been subjected to had been a result of that incident in court.
Stephan, however, was elected to office and became the longest-serving attorney general in the history of the state. When he left office, he had not expected to be needed again by the state.
In September 2004, Governor Kathleen Sebelius called him to invite him back into public service as chairman the Governor's Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board. Stephan agreed, and hung up the telephone.
"I looked to heaven and I said, 'This is for you, Mom,' " he said.
Stephan said that his mother lived more than 20 years with an extremely abusive husband -- his father.
"Even today, I still dream of what my mother went through," he said. "... A lot of things that happened to Mom, I think I submerged."
Stephan said his father was a nice man when he was sober, "but when he was drunk, he was the meanest person that ever walked the face of the earth. ...I remember so many times she was black and blue from beatings."
During one particularly vicious occasion, Stephan recalled running outside and climbing a tree. He fell and, with the wind knocked from him, he thought he was dying.
"I was glad," he said; "I was glad because I was so tired of living with violence."
Read more of Stephan's story in The Gazette on Monday.