World's Largest Concrete Freshwater Free Municipal Swimming Pool is Right Here In Garden City

                    It is one of the 8 wonders of Kansas.  And it was dug by hand, by volunteers with shovels.

  Garden City Kansas, where my father, Clarence, grew up,has a zoo with elephants and giraffes (the seventh most popular tourist attraction in Kansas) and the world’s largest municipal, outdoor, concrete, free, freshwater swimming pool. It's half a city block in size and holds 2.5 million gallons of water.

             In 1921, Mayor Trinkle decided that what this dusty town needed (so dusty, my father said, you could see where the fish were in the Arkansas River by the cloud of dust they kicked up) was a swimming pool.  Everybody was willing, of course -- even enthusiastic, but -- and several "buts" were interposed, chief of which was, "but where will be get the money?"

"Suppose we build it with our own hands," said the mayor. 

Subscription papers were circulated. "How many day's labor will you give to the pool?" How many teams will you furnish?"

"If you can't work and haven't any horses, how much money will you give?" were the questions put to the citizens of Garden City, high and low, rich and poor. And Garden City's citizens...each set down some sort of pledge to the pool and signed on the dotted line.

Almost before the ink was dry...the work commenced and by the end of the first week the new pool began to take on form and shape…the dirt was flying and men were shovelling dirt, the horses were hauling.

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 Then came the problem of the cement. Garden City had the sand. In the enthusiasm of the workers and the planners, the pool had taken on such tremendous proportions it would take train load of cement for the concrete. How Mayor Trinkle and the commissioners got the cement nobody knows, and nobody is asking foolish questions...

At its dedication on July 18, 1922, a band played as hundreds of people hit the water in unison to inaugurate Garden City's first summer swim season. 

 The pool has had homemade boat races, doggy swims, dive in movies but the most popular was when the zoo's elephants took a dip in the pool after it was closed for the summer. The elephants were guided over by the trainers from their nearby exhibit at Lee Richardson Zoo. Thousands lined the perimeter of the fence to watch the elephants, Moki & Chana, splash and play. 

 Garden City calls it The Big Dipper these days. Clarence and his friends called it the mud hole. 

"It just goes to show," my Grandmother Clara said, "if you really want something, dig it yourself."

(large portions of this blog were lifted from an undated issue of the Garden City Herald, a newspaper that appears to be, alas, defunct.)

Monaco, Spa, LeMans, Indy, and Belleville. Yes, Belleville, Kansas is one of the world's greatest race tracks

 

                  Saturday night, the sun is sinking into the prairie and a full moon is coming up behind the trees around Rocky Pond. Race time. Belleville, a sleepy Kansas farm town of 3,000 has grown to 30,000 for the Belleville Midget Nationals. (click on link for video)

          The cars circle slowly around the track and park in front of the stands, leaving the engines running, thumping on idle like drum beats, raising the pulse and the expectation of racing.  All these guys, their owners and crews are all doing it for the love of racing.  Nobody makes any money at it.  “Maybe some new guy thinks he can make money doin’ this,” an old-timer says. “You better get to him quick before he learns better.”

This is not about money, this is about racing.  Pay attention.

Belleville Cuisine 2004

              Mario Andretti drove Midgets.  So did AJ.  Tony Stewart drives Midgets. Jeff Gordon was the 1990 USAC Midget champ.  Ryan Newman, Bobby Unser, Roger Ward, Jimmy Vasser, Parnelli Jones, Kasey Kahne, they all drove Midgets

              53 Cars show up for Saturday night, the best Midget racers in the country. And they all tell you this is the track; the fastest, the trickiest and the best to win

               The fans have come from all over the country, but most are from the middle of America, states like Indiana, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Kansas, Oklahoma and the Dakotas.  Around 30 Australians came over with Ozzie Midget drivers, Adam Clarke and Nathan Smee. 

Adam Clarke (couldn't find a pic of his pit crew in Spandex)

                          

The crowd awards Clarke best looking driver because Adam lines up with four gorgeous Australian blondes in skimpy orange spandex. The drivers toss autographed Frisbees into the crowd and the fans dive for them.

                     Speaking of fans, here’s a tip.  Hang onto the lid of your cup of soda or beer; it’s handy for keeping out the flying mud and grit.  (Drink your beer, sweetie, before it gets dirty.) Here’s another tip I picked up in the stands when a cell phone went off.  “I got a remedy for that,” a Kansas farmer said, “just a couple drops of Bud and that phone won’t rang (sic) again tonight.”
  
                The Belleville Jazz Ensemble (aka The Belleville high school band) cranks up a weird and wonderful combo of rah rah football music mixed with saxophone jazz, and you know good stuff is about to happen.

                   What you do when you race a midget (you can win this one)is wrap your knees around 350 horsepower and stomp the throttle.  While all around you a whole bunch of other crazy, fearless racers with their knees wrapped around 350 horsepower stomp on their throttles. This is pure, raw, butt to the wall, grass roots racing

                    Belleville is the world’s oldest and fastest banked half mile dirt oval. 

The clay is so sticky it’ll pull your shoes off. Except for a 30 yard straight, it’s a perfect circle. Midgets, with no wings and the aerodynamics of a buffalo can take the high 5/8s of a mile flat and they are almost always sliding, back end hanging out, pedal squashed to the metal.
 
                 Here’s how pure the racing is. There are no pit stops. No test drivers.  No mirrors. No media centers. No Press Officers. No fins.  No wings. No clutch. No Transmission. No starter motor. No marketing plan. No independent suspensions.  No carbon fiber chassis or brakes. No push to pass buttons. No on-board computers. No turbos. No pit to car radios. No traction control.  No aerodynamic devices. If these cars were pared down any more they wouldn’t have wheels

               You sit bolt upright.  And mostly you look down the track over your right shoulder. The right pedal is go, the left is stop.  The strategy is pass everybody and don’t hit anything.  

                 The cars weigh a minimum 900 lbs. without the driver.  The chassis is tubular aircraft steel and the driver sits inside a roll cage.  Most engines are 166 cu in. 4 cylinder,  325 to 350 horsepower.  The cars are about ten feet long with the wheelbase running from a wee 66 to 76 inches and width limited to 65 inches.  Which is how they fit three and four wide in the banked turns
           
              Longevity counts.  Two crew guys, looking old as crocodiles, watch qualifying from inside turn two.  About halfway into the session they jump back from the fence, pick up wrenches with 5 foot long handles and swap the rear tires on their Midget. Something they saw out there made them go for a harder compound, but they won’t say what.  Because the cars haven’t changed much for the past 80 years there are several Grandfather, father and son teams, passing down the secrets from generation to generation. 

                                  

                               

   Ask Mario Andretti about his Midget days, and he just grins like the kid he was.  “I was so fortunate.  I learned everything I needed to know in Midgets to launch me in my career." 

"I mean everybody who was anybody was at Belleville, and they had their best cars ready to go there. It was a great race for me to win. I was on a tear there, running wide open and jumping the cushion and never lifting. I never stopped racing like that until the checkered flag flew." - Jeff Gordon


(to be continued tomorrow)

Truth in Grass, a Kansas Adventure

        Our previous blog, drew a nice mash note from Cheryl Unruh in Kansas.  (Cheryl and her brother used to work on the Larned, Kansas Tiller & Toiler. Now she writes a blog Flyover People, Life on the Ground in a Rectangular State.)

       Her note brought back a glorious afternoon in the tall grass. 
       I'd done a piece on the Belleville Midget Nationals  for Road & Track ("The Edge of the Track is in the Sky"), and we thought, let's see what there is to see in Kansas.  My parents grew up in Kansas and I've always felt at home under those spacious skies. Let's see what's left of the tallgrass prairie. (click on pictures to enlarge)

click to enlarge to see the form of the prairie.  The landscape is very dark, but also,very beautiful.

"Tallgrass prairie once covered 140 million acres of North America. Within a generation the vast majority was developed and plowed under. Today less than 4% remains, mostly here in the Kansas Flint Hills. The preserve protects a nationally significant remnant of the once vast tallgrass prairie and its cultural resources. Here the tallgrass prairie takes its last stand." 

We stayed in Cottowood Falls, at the Grand Central Hotel where they served martinis the size of goldfish bowls.

Kathryn talked to Jane Kroger who runs a 4,000 acre ranch off the grid.  Jane calls her ranch The Republic of Grass.


Not all adventures are about speed and risk.  Go stand in that remnant of the prairie that was an ocean of grass from Texas to Sasketchuan. Watch the wind roll across the prairie in waves, the swallows skitter through the sky, and feel time slow down bit by bit until you can feel the centuries that have come before.  This is time travel.  You can go forward or back.  You can feel the grandeur of the curve of the earth and the passage of your moment in time.  Fasten your seatbelt.  You could lose your sense of importance.


We'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story. (click on pictures to enlarge)

The Larned Eagle Optic Flies Again.

               My Dad's first job was as an intern for a Republican Senator from Kansas in Washington, D.C.

               When Clarence came back to Kansas his first paying job was the editor of the Larned, Kansas Eagle Optic newspaper.  A newspaper known for it's eagle eye, that view from the sky under a Kansas sun.  Where you could depict the scurrying of political rodents in detail.  That cold, distant, ferocioius view.  Truth above all. 

               Larned is the county seat of Pawnee County.  The town of 4,000 sits on the banks of the Arkansas River, pronounced "Our Kansas" in Kansas.  Fort Larned was one of the forts built to protect the settlers travelling along the Santa Fe trail.  Great Bend, Cheyenne and Dodge all had forts.

                Some of that fortress mentality survives in Kansas.  Those oceans of grass could make you weep with wind and heat and cold.

  That merciless open space where unlimited hail, wind, buffalo and Indians could all of a sudden,  emerge out of nowhere.  That thought would haunt you day and night. Union soldiers built tall flagpoles for the settlers to see from miles away and know there was a safe place to sleep behind the fort's walls, water the oxen and get a fix on where they were headed.

              Their fears were exaggerated.  No Indian ever attacked any of the forts or the settlers along the Arkansas River. But when you see one of those old Connestoga Wagons, how small and frail a vessel to cross the endless unknown with all your family, food and belongings, you can't help but admire the settlers courage.

               A few stayed in Kansas.  Most moved on.

               That migration, from Missouri to California was the Great American Adventure.  Going into the unknown. Leaving security behind.

                 If this blog is about anything it is about adventure.  And leaving security behind. Like my Uncle John Logan, 26  years old, all set to be the CEO of his family's business.  Jobs were tough to find in 1939.  Unemployment close to 20%. His name was on a 9 story granite building in downtown Pittsburgh.  All he had to do was say yes and he'd be set for a life of country clubs and a pile of money in the bank.

                  He said,  "I have to ride a motorcycle from Fairbanks to Seatlle."

                  His parents were appalled.  "There's no road," they cried.

                  "That's the point," he said.