The town next door
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Larned was closer, but Great Bend was larger.
As a kid growing up in Pawnee Rock, we knew U.S. Highway 56 well, or at least the eight miles west to Larned and the 12 miles east to Great Bend.
We Pawnee Rock residents were like ants on a trail. People who live in small towns drive to nearby cities to lug home new shoes, lawnmowers, pork chops, and toilet paper.
During the 1960s when I was a young girl, Pawnee Rock had a population of about 400; Larned, around 4,500; and Great Bend, 16,000.
In those days, my parents both worked in Pawnee Rock. Leon and I went to school there and our church was a few miles out in the country. So we stayed around Pawnee Rock all week and Saturday was about the only day that we would “go to town.”
Larned was our primary destination. It was where Mom usually bought groceries, where I checked out Nancy Drew mysteries from the public library, and where I plunked down one thin dime for admission to the swimming pool.
Great Bend was the opposite direction on U.S. 56. Because we went there less frequently, a trip to Great Bend was a special treat.
And Great Bend had a roller skating rink, Ralph Wallace’s Buffet and a kid-eating escalator in the J.C. Penney store.
I often wonder whether small children from say, Allen or Neosho Rapids, experience a sense of amazement when they come to Emporia.
I hope they do. But, as we grow up, the magic of newness and wonder tends to fade. After we see something a hundred times, we lose that sense of fascination.
Last week, while visiting my Dad and step-mom in Great Bend, I recalled some of those magical things that made that town seem so dazzling to me when I was young.
So the other day, I even went into Great Bend’s J.C. Penney store just to ride the escalator. It no longer had the menacing teeth that I once feared would snag a child just for the fun of it.
And I drove down Broadway. Lined with stately homes, it’s still one of my favorite streets. With a grassy center median and a row of redbuds between the lanes, it sure seemed exotic to a 5-year-old kid from a dirt-street town.
If you take Broadway enough times, you can memorize the names of early U.S. Presidents. But you have to realize that they skip John Quincy Adams because a street was already named for his father. And after you reach Polk Street, many names were skipped and the Presidential sequence falls apart.
Neighboring cities offer experiences and opportunities that a small town lacks.
Brit Spaugh Park in Great Bend provided acres of Sunday afternoon fun: the zoo, a playground, horseshoes, tennis, a ball diamond. After church picnics, my friends and I fed leftover bread to the ducks in the duck pond.
And for a few years, when I was just a midget, my parents bought season tickets to the Community Concerts. Duke Ellington appeared one night. The air in the lobby of the Great Bend auditorium filled with pipe smoke. Some women wore fur coats and heavy perfume.
The concerts ended after my bedtime, but I wouldn’t close my eyes until we left Great Bend. Because — it was only after dark that I could see the best thing in town — an animated sign on the lumberyard. Alternating sections of blue neon made it appear that a man was sawing a board.
Then we left the city lights behind. As our car slipped through the black night, I fell asleep in the backseat, knowing that I’d be carried to bed when we got home.
And I’ll bet some of those kids from Allen and Neosho Rapids, Strong City and Madison, get that same safe feeling while riding home in the dark from Emporia.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
• Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.