by RICK DANLEY // December 2, 2015 Santa Claus is inviting area children to Iola’s courthouse square Thursday between 5 and 7 p.m. Old Saint Nick, currently on the road promoting Christmas, met with the Register in a back booth at the A&W on Tuesday. He spoke expectantly about the kids he’ll meet this week … Continue reading Lunch with Santa
by RICK DANLEY // January 14, 2019 Once upon a time — let’s call it the early 1950s — three colossi of the American theater overshadowed all the other playwrights in the land. Award-winning scripts tumbled from their desks and were picked up by Broadway and performed for packed houses and praised to the skies … Continue reading On Inge
by RICK DANLEY // March 10, 2018 You’re in the cockpit of a B-1 bomber. It’s the middle of the night. You’re somewhere over northern New Mexico, slicing through the black sky at about 600 knots. There are four of you in the plane. The copilot to your right, his face made ghoulish by the green … Continue reading The View from Above
by RICK DANLEY // April 24, 2018 There was a moment sometime after the close of the 2014 election when independent candidate Greg Orman, having just conceded a high-profile, tightly fought U.S. Senate race to longtime Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, fell into conversation with another of Kansas’ political veterans, Bob Dole. Orman recalled the exchange. “You … Continue reading Orman for Gov.
by RICK DANLEY // December 23, 2017 At least according to the 1959 tome “Swedish Christmas” — now, sadly, out of print — Christmas wasn’t Christmas without the yuletide pig: “It was not easy to slaughter the Christmas pig in the correct manner. It must be done in the first light of early dawn. One … Continue reading Swedish Christmas: Little Hus on the Prairie
by RICK DANLEY // November 18, 2016 Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn, a professor of music at Wichita State University and an amiable evangelist for the importance of the arts in public education, appeared before a small crowd in the recital hall at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center on Wednesday to make, as the title of his lecture … Continue reading Arts Ed
by RICK DANLEY // October 21, 2016 Death proved no hurdle to the man, Mark Twain, who made a special appearance at the Iola Public Library Tuesday night. Shuffling up to the stage, wearing an all-white Stacy Adams suit and a satin cravat bundled under his chin, clutching a pipe, and casting a quizzical look … Continue reading Twain Brain
by RICK DANLEY // July 15, 2016 In 2003, Shauna Berntsen entered Allen Community College on a softball scholarship. Not long after Valentine’s Day of that year, her enrollment was annulled and the 19-year-old was deployed to Iraq. She had completed basic training the previous year, but had hoped to postpone active duty service until … Continue reading Shauna
by RICK DANLEY // August 16, 2016 Just as we recently lost the last of the living World War I vets, time will remove, perhaps in the turn of another generation, the last of the women who taught in one-room schools. But for an hour last Thursday, three of the most charming such specimens from … Continue reading One-Room Schools
by RICK DANLEY // February 17, 2015 NEOSHO FALLS — Sitting at a long table beneath the fluorescent lights of the Senior Center in Neosho Falls, Thelma Bedenbender, 84, searches for something amid a pile of papers. While she does that, the Rev. Russell Anderson, the soft-spoken, genial pastor of the town’s United Methodist Church, … Continue reading God in Neosho Falls
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