I’m a Kansas girl. Born here. Educated here. Married here. Raising a family here. Even in the year of college that I studied and lived in France, Kansas has been home.
As a kid, this didn’t exactly feel like bragging rights. Rectangle state with a little jagged corner. A teacher once suggested to me and my classmates that we could find Kansas on a U.S. map by looking in the middle of the country for the cracker with a bite out of it. Kansas has largely been function over form, to be sure.
But Kansas is much more than fly-over country. And although I know my regular blog audience hails from mostly other places, today I’m celebrating Kansas Day. Because if you’ve watched the news (or the Daily Show) over the past few years, Kansas is bleeding. Our state is in crisis. The state budget is in ruin. A scary majority of our elected officials are focused on their own careers, their own pride, or their own pocketbooks. The ultra wealthy have bought the highest offices in the land, driving policy with impunity. Our leaders double down on fear, blame and division. Kansas public schools, long among the nation’s very best, have been discredited, are being defunded and are actively targeted to be dismantled. The poor and vulnerable of our state are now shamed and, in too many cases, farmed out to the highest bidder.
But today, Kansas’ 155th birthday, I’m focused on our state motto: Ad Astra Per Aspera. To the stars through difficulties. And I refuse to give up. Today, I’m focused on why I fight for this state. 
It’s the state of my dad, his dad, and his dad the generation before. German settlers who homesteaded in the middle of the state and believed in the common good. Strong people who worked hard and helped each other. And smart people who understood that public education is essential to the future of democracy. I’ve heard stories about small, scattered Kansas prairie towns where families scraped together what little they had to hire a teacher. This is Kansas.
My grandfather grew up on the family farm, and my grandmother lived there with her new in-laws when Grandad was stationed in Japan for World War II. After the war there was college, hard work on the farm and enterprising business decisions. Grandad, who built two of his family’s homes, opened a variety store in one small Kansas town and later operated a Ben Franklin and department store in another. And Grandma, born and raised in Oklahoma, worked right alongside, his equal. She raised three boys and Eagle Scouts, helped run the stores and single-handedly chased down custom cutting crews when crops were ready to be harvested. They were a team of two intelligent, hard-working, enterprising people. They are Kansas.
Fast-forward to my life, with all the advantages offered by an extraordinary public education. My school district was admired nationally for excellence, and I had every opportunity to create whatever future I wanted. Classmates went off to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, NYU and elsewhere. I decided to stay in Kansas and squeeze every ounce of goodness out of my five years at Kansas State University, the nation’s first land-grant university. I played in the symphony, recorded a CD with a string quartet, wrote for the award-winning daily newspaper, studied abroad and enjoyed access to world-class performers and lecturers. (I also enjoyed the benefits of a university that has a dairy science program. Hello, ice cream!) This is Kansas.
After graduating, I had professional and personal opportunities to be part of two Guinness record-setting flights piloted by Steve Fossett in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, play backup for Collin Raye and write a book. All while living and working — in Kansas.
When I was a teenager, Grandma would tell me about leaving her family when she was my age and enrolling in business college in Wichita. She wanted to make sure I knew, she chose Kansas. “All people are respected here, even women.” “Kansas wasn’t a slave state — it was a Free State.” And the one I can still hear her saying, “Kansans aren’t rednecks, hicks or bandits.” I wish I could say I appreciated her perspective at 16, but I certainly do today. And the more I know about Kansas, the deeper my appreciation and love.
Kansas was built by populists. It was the first in America to ban the Ku Klux Klan and the first to elect women to public office, one as mayor and another as sheriff. Our state capital — now the center of so much scandal and destruction — is home to the pioneering civil rights decision integrating public schools, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, the first of its kind in the nation. The first state to elect a woman to the U.S. Senate on her own merits, without following a term that her husband had served. The native home of Dwight Eisenhower, Erin Brockovich, Langston Hughes, Amelia Earhart, William Allen White and Charlie Parker. This is Kansas.
The Hutchinson News editorial board wrote an obituary of our state nearly three years ago, documenting the painful highlights of losses we’ve suffered, ground we’ve lost. It’s worth reading again, sobering though it is. But Kansans are fighters. And we don’t give up. Not before, and not now. The sky may be very dark, but the Kansas stars are still out there — and they’re worth fighting for.
Ad Astra Per Aspera. And happy birthday, Kansas.
My parents were born and raised in other states. My Dad received a job teaching at KU just before my parents got married. He taught in the School of Engineering for over 40 years before retiring. My sister and I are first generation Kansans. Like most kids leaving high school, you look around to see if the grass is greener somewhere else. I stayed local and went to KU for my undergrad but did my internship with a school district in Atlanta, GA. This is where my Kansas story really begins.
My year in the schools in Atlanta taught me that I was beyond fortunate growing up in school districts that are local and not spread out. I learned that the envrionment I took for granted in Kansas, was the environment I wanted to return to in order to start my own family.
The years have passed, I got married to an out-of-stater, we had 4 kids, and Kansas leadership has changed. I never regretted coming home, but there have been many times in the past few years, we have honestly contemplated leaving. Each time, we come back to the knowledge that although the leadership has changed, the people haven’t.
I am a proud Kansan and I will never give up. Ad Astra Per Aspera.
Thank you, Jessica. Your story is proof that a deep love for Kansas doesn’t require a long history here. It’s a special place, and I’m proud to fight for it with you.
I am a Kansan. I will admit that my twin and I were born in a hospital on the other side of the Missouri state line for reasons that were beyond my control at the time. It was not long before they let us go home to Kansas. We were, for twins, quite robust. Home was a house in Desoto that our father had built with his own two hands. We had a couple of Shetland ponies. One of them was a master at getting out of it’s pen and would come knock on the back door in the morning when it was ready for breakfast.
My father was a civil engineer, and his parents had been Kansans. His mother is 99 and loves to tell stories about growing up in Kansas. She went to Kansas State University on a 4-H scholarship and lived in Clovia House, the 4-H sorority. She worked in the K-State book store and played the baritone saxophone in several bands in the area and on the radio n Manhattan. Her great-granddaughter, my oldest daughter plays the same instrument now. My daughter is allowed an opportunity that my grandmother always wished for, but was never given. Women were not allowed in marching bands back then.
By the time I was in kindergarten we had moved to the town of Roeland Park, in to a house that had a backyard that had a little gate that passed through to the backyard of the house that my mother had grown up in, and where her mother still lived. My mother was a teacher. She had taught at the school where the children who lived next door to us went, who were now grown up. Their mother had been my maternal grandmother’s best friend for decades and still lived there. She was one of the many stops on my mother’s neighborhood breakfast tour every Saturday morning as a small child.
It was much the same by the time that I lived there. It is perhaps for that and the very small school that I attended, that I always thought we lived in a small town. I knew everyone there, and my dad sat on the city council. It was not until much later that I realized we lived in a city.
I went to Shawnee Mission North, where my parents had fallen in love decades before, and where my paternal grandmother had gone when it was Shawnee Mission High School, the only one. Everything south was farmland then.
I made the mistake of trying out Seattle for a couple of my early adult years, and could not wait to get back. By the time I returned, my parents had settled in an actual small town called Eudora. A country doctor there, approaching retirement gave me a job as a receptionist. That changed my whole life. I worked for him while going to nursing school, got my RN, and have been working in health care in Douglas County Kansas ever since. My children have grown up in Eudora, Kansas, attending some of the best schools in the state.
I met my husband in Manhattan, Kansas where he was teaching flight students. He had become a pilot at K-State, and grew up in Overland Park. He moved to Eudora and is still a pilot in Kansas. My twin is about to graduate from Kansas University and does conservation work there. My older sister is a teacher at Woodrow Wilson Elementary in Manhattan and mentors student teachers from K-State.
We are nurses and pilots. We are students and teachers. We are conservationists and engineers. We are parents and children. We are advocates and activists. We are Kansans. We are proud.
My grandma in this post (paternal grandmother) was the principal’s secretary at North, though I’m not quite sure of the years.
Thanks for sharing your story, your love and your passion for this great state. We are taking her back.
I think this pertains to all states in this day and age. We all need to fight for
our beautiful state and people. Thank you for such a wonderful loving
article.
Thank you for taking the time to comment – and you are exactly right. Each state has a unique and beautiful story, and good people who deserve every opportunity!
I tried to sign up for your blog but it does not go thru. Thanks.
I’m sorry to hear this! I will need to look into it, but feel free to go to my Contact Me page and send me a message that includes your email address. I’ll try to make it work!:)
Thank you, for being a “WRITER, LISTENER, COLLABORATOR, DOER,” and for “claiming” Kansas. . . I, too, am a “Kansas girl.”
(Is Melody your mother-in-law?)
She is! I’m the lucky Kansas girl who married her oldest Kansas boy. Grateful for the chance to continue a central Kansas legacy in our family, shared between the both of us. 🙂
Kristin,
I too am part of your Kansas family…literally. My great grandmother, Fanny Ammeter was your husband’s great great grandmother. My grandmother, Ruby Ammeter Knaussman and your husband’s grandfather, Sherwin Ammeter were brother and sister. I’m so happy that my cousin, Karla connected me to your blog. It so eloquently expresses the love and pride for Kansas I want to tell my friends in Istanbul of, while also sharing my concern for the corrupt leadership in the state now Thank you for a beautifully written January 29th tribute. I look forward to reading more of your blogs.
Amazing! Thank you for sharing this connection – the Internet makes a small world that much smaller!
Correction: Your husband’s great grandfather, Crig Ammeter and my grandmother, Ruby Ammeter Knaussman were brother and sister. ; )
Wonderful inspiration to help us look and live AD ASTRA!