by RICK DANLEY // September 22, 2016 There’s a certain type of American male for whom the Hollywood Western acts upon his system like a comfort food. It’s consolingly basic, composed of the same ingredients every time, and is — aside from a handful of artful exceptions — relatively easy to digest. Looking across the Atlantic … Continue reading Keaton & the West
by RICK DANLEY // October 12, 2016 Muffy Fehr’s sixth-grade social studies class brought the elaborate rituals of the Egyptian funeral to the third floor of Iola Middle School on Tuesday. Employing a teddy bear as corpse, the students reenacted, from mummification to burial, the funerary rites of the ancient civilization. Each of Fehr’s students had … Continue reading Egyptian ‘Bearial’
by RICK DANLEY // April 21, 2018 Decades of shoe-leather reporting taught the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell that, as sure as the key to a good movie lies in the casting, the secret to any great story depends on the subject at its center. But great characters don’t fall from the sky. You have to … Continue reading Another Round
by RICK DANLEY // January 20, 2018 In 1890, fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg — a little man with a high forehead and kind, close-set eyes — knelt alone atop a chalk outcrop in Western Kansas, and, with his pick and his brush and with the fervor of a man who’d been fossil-crazy since he’d arrived … Continue reading Shark Week
by RICK DANLEY // September 27, 2017 To the list of classic movie quotes — “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” (“Gone With the Wind”); “We’ll always have Paris” (“Casablanca”); “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” (“The Godfather”); “You’re going to need a bigger boat” (“Jaws”) — I’d nominate another. … Continue reading The Bloody Benders
by RICK DANLEY // January 4, 2019 In the few months since their slow rollout, the guys at Red Beard Barbecue have put together what must be the most ambitious, locally sourced, well-made menu in southeast Kansas. Pulled pork with ancho barbecue sauce and homemade pickles. Fry-bread tacos with smoked chicken and house chorizo. A beef and … Continue reading The Beard & the BBQ
by RICK DANLEY // February 3, 2018 Forty years ago, a small boy in the remote hills of western Nepal waited with the men in his village to welcome the first motorized vehicle to ever enter their town. The approach was a slow one, the vehicle a tractor. When it arrived, the boy’s father and uncles … Continue reading Big Bang, Small Beginnings
by RICK DANLEY // May 7, 2018 Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, who took the executive reins from Sam Brownback just three months ago, made a brief appearance at the Iola Public Library Saturday evening, where he held a friendly 40-minute conversation with a dozen interested Allen County residents. Billed as a getting-to-know-you event, the conversation was … Continue reading Colyer for Gov.
by RICK DANLEY // November 10, 2016 The stage direction for Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” are simple: “No curtain. No scenery.” Wilder believed that the theater of his day had become too obsessed with spectacle. Directors loaded the stage with period furniture and elaborate costumes and realistic set design — what Wilder called the … Continue reading ‘Our Town’
by RICK DANLEY // September 21, 2016 One local gentleman, having shuffled off his mortal coil about a week ago, is doing more to influence county policy from the Great Beyond than he was ever likely to manage in his lifetime. Iola’s Feuerborn Family Funeral Service is in possession of a deceased individual whose sister is … Continue reading Bring Out Your Dead
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