Summer of 1965. I drove this truck down to southern Kansas the summer after I’d completed my first year of teaching. It was a rickety old truck with a Gleaner combine and fourteen foot header loaded on the bed. For me it was mostly white knuckle driving. When we arrived in Medicine Lodge, Kansas and parked in a large lot behind a truck stop I noticed a sign very near in front of an adjacent house that proclaimed “Home of Carry Nation.”
Who is Carry Nation? I suppose we’d read about her in our U. S. History class, but it must have passed over me without any retention. Since that time I’ve learned that she viewed liquor with an evil eye and set out to demolish as much of it as she could. In 1890 she used rocks, a sledgehammer, even a billiard ball to smash bottles in five saloons. A bit later she chose as a weapon of choice the hatchet that became her trademark and destroyed a Wichita, Kansas saloon.
Even though hard to stop once she started wreaking havoc, the law caught up to her and jailed her many times. To fund her efforts and pay her fines she gave lectures and sold souvenir hatchets. Her influence helped pass the 18th Amendment in 1919 which prohibited the sale of liquor.
Regarding the combine, an older gentleman from Lake City, KS came looking for an outfit to harvest his wheat crop. He’d been having trouble hiring one because an adjacent river flooded and flattened his wheat. To add to his woes, a good deal of drift wood cluttered the field. We went in setting the headers as low to the ground as possible and started grinding away. We salvaged a great crop and made him a happy man.
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