Back to heros

Well, the folk saying contest is over. Time to return to the original theme of this blog — honoring our hometown heros.

Got somebody you'd like to thank, recognize or honor for doing a good deed or for just being the way they are? Post it here. Pictures are welcome, too.


I'm feeling a kind of magnamious at the moment, so I'd like to thank our local elected officials. They take a lot of flack and get blamed for things well beyond their control. Some work long hours on public business and sacrifice their personal lives to represent us.

They take their share of potshots from the public, who often assign sinister motives to things that amount to simple disagreement. God knows I don't always agree with local elected officials, but if more of us would start with the premise that they are trying to serve the public good, we might build more consensus toward positive change in Ark City and Cowley County (for that matter the country!)


An admiration for public servants runs in my family. My dad worked for U.S. Sen. Jim Pearson in the late 60s early 70s, I have a great uncle who served a short stint at U.S. Senator from Nebraska and was President Eisenhower's Secretary of Interior. I interned for Bob Dole in the early 90s. (And decided journalism was better than politics) When my internship was up, I wrote a column in the Winfield Courier saying, basically, that most elected officials work hard, care about their constituents and are innundated with requests that they can't possibly all meet. And, they can always be voted out.

15 years later, that still holds true