John Linville

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Topeka Daily Capital
March 28, 1962

We sat under a big tree in a back yard in Burlingame, sipping drinks and watching the storm fade away in soft flashes of lighting. My father-in-law, Mike Linville, talked about bigger, better storms.

Once, he said, he had saddled a horse and ridden 14 miles from the family farm to check stories he’d heard that a storm had drive wheat straws into trees.

“I actually found some,” he said, “driven about a half-inch into trees.”

Another time, he rode out a storm in a ditch with his younger brother and mother. He told of silence and the vacuum that made it difficult to breathe, and then of the “roar of about 400 freight trains” that snapped trees like matchsticks… Continue reading →

Manfred the Wandering Dog Finds a Home

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Topeka Daily Capital
Feb. 21, 1960

It all started on Monday evening. We had finished dinner and I was going back to the office. The boys reminded me I still owed them a “surprise” for a chore they had done for me. Ann told me she still was waiting for the puzzle and “peer-fume” I had promised, and Amy made her usual pitch for candy. In other words, it started as a very normal departure. Continue reading →

Dean Smith, A Kansan and Always a Leader

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(Editor’s Note: Some readers were surprised to learn the late Dean Smith was a Kansan and a member of the 1952 NCAA-champion Jayhawk basketball team. The North Carolina coaching legend was born and raised in Emporia and apparently was marked early as a leader by those who knew him, according to this excerpt from the Capitalizing on Sports column of December 18, 1959)

Dean Smith of Kansas is a little guy making good in a big way. He was a fine high school basketball player, but at only 5-10 he never made KU’s starting team.

Still, he impressed his coaches with his intelligence and basketball instinct, and his ability to diagnose and grasp quickly any part of the game. He was the squad’s best at running enemy patterns against the varsity, and KU coach Dick Harp says of him: “He was born to coach.” Continue reading →

An Evening With Dean Smith and Other Kansas Superstars

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Topeka Capital-Journal
Feb. 6, 2002

Saturday evening, Gerry Barker and his wife, Lois, picked up my wife and me for a trip to Lawrence to have dinner with the 1952 Kansas basketball team, celebrating the 50th anniversary of its national championship season. The 87-year-old Barker drove like there was nothing to it.

I wasn’t worried. He had plenty of advice, back seat and front, and I know he’s physically sound because in golf he has shot his age 125 times, and is still doing it. I can’t shoot my age, but I can shoot our combined age with a little to spare, and on a good day can shoot my temperature and my 1948 IQ. Continue reading →

Maybe This Will Be the Year

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Topeka Capital-Joural
Jan. 1, 1996

The new year holds some promise, even though the Czars exhibit is gone and there will be no downtown building to blow up. My crystal ball says one big story will be Glen Mason winning the Republican primary for Senate, but then changing his mind and deciding to remain as KU football coach because he just can’s bear to leave all those wonderful folks in Lawrence.

But will those wonderful folks in Lawrence say, “Oh, go ahead, Glen. Don’t let us keep you.” Some day. Maybe.

The early news spotlight also will be focused on another one of your favorite newsmakers. You want to guess who? Fred Phelps will be heard demanding that the police officer who called his gang a “cult” be reprimanded. Continue reading →

Kansas Transplants Roots Run Deep

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Topeka Capital-Journal
Jan 29, 1999

Kansas Native Sons and Daughters are getting together again this weekend, and it reminds me that I have a lot in common with the man generally considered to be greatest Kansan of all.

For one thing, both Dwight D. Eisenhower and I were in uniform during World War II, and for another, neither of us is a native son of Kansas. I was born in western Oklahoma; he was born in Baja Oklahoma. Also, he probably would share my feelings that it’s no big deal to belong to a club when everyone in it qualified by accident.

I came close to being a native son of Kansas. My dad was born in the state, in Miltonvale, and my mother in Nebraska. If they had met sooner, before both of them drifted into Oklahoma, it is likely I would have been a Jayhawker, rather than an Okie. I’m not sure how I should feel about the way things turned out. Continue reading →

They Also Serve…War Years in the Norman (Okla.) Navy

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(From the Memoir posted on this site)

At boot camp, I was named the company mailman, and suddenly everyone looked up to me. The job allowed me to skip a few marching and running drills, and I kept telling our CO, a high school football coach from Texas, that I had to see to it that the mail got through, on time, rain or shine.

And when the eight-week boot camp was over, the Navy was nice enough to send me home to Oklahoma. Comedian George Gobel, stationed at Altus, Okla., Army Air Base, later bragged that not a single Japanese plane got past Amarillo.

He had nothing on me. In my years at the Naval Air Technical Training Command base in Norman, no Japanese vessel ever was sighted on the south Canadian River… Continue reading →

Among those whose dreams drowned in 1951 flood – Topeka Owls

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Topeka Capital-Journal – July 11, 2001

It is not my intent to make light of the events that followed what historians call the worst chapter in Topeka’s history — 50 years ago this week — but there was some humor in that disastrous flood. One piece of it is a story that still makes me laugh, when I probably should weep.

It happened in the old Topeka Daily Capital newsroom at 8th and Jackson, when water 15 to 20 feet deep covered North Topeka, and nobody yet knew how bad it really was.

Some background: When the flood hit here, the Topeka Owls were in first place in the Class C Western Association pennant race and were drawing good crowds. Their ballpark was in North Topeka, near US-24 highway, east of where the China Inn is today.

Owls’ owner Link Norris was a happy man, because he was looking at his best season financially, which would make up for some that hadn’t gone so well. But suddenly, the flood turned his world upside down. Continue reading →

Chicken Fat: A Hit in Schools, Though JFK Hated the Title

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Topeka Capital-Journal – August 25, 2000

There’s a connection between Bud Wilkinson and a song called “Chicken Fat,” but I never expected to be reminded of it this week when I was in Oklahoma being interviewed for a TV biography of the late Sooner football coach. But it was there, in the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman, on the same morning I faced the camera.

Some background is in order. In 1961, soon after President John F. Kennedy took office, he asked one of his aides, Ted Reardon, to figure out what he should do with the fitness program inherited from the Eisenhower administration.

Eisenhower was concerned because American children lagged far behind Europeans in strength and fitness tests, so he created the President’s Council on Youth Fitness.

To lead it, he named an orator, Shane McCarthy, who went around the country extolling the merits of a strong mind in a strong body, and attending a lot of meetings and seminars on what should be done to get American youngsters leaner and tougher.

Reardon studied the problem, then wrote a memo to the president, saying what the program needed first was a sports personality who presented an image of both physical fitness and personal integrity.

Reardon would tell me later that as he dictated the memo, the next sentence just rolled off his tongue without him having to even think about it. “What the program needs,” he said, “is someone like Bud Wilkinson.” Continue reading →

Remembering Ralph Cowell: Solid as a Rock

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Topeka Capital-Journal
August 1999

In the parking lot, before we went into the Penwell-Gabel chapel in Highland Park for Ralph Cowell’s funeral, Tommy Tompkins was saying, “Ralph has a good tee time today, 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning in nice weather.” That was another way of saying he already was on that great golf course in the sky.

Inside, the Rev. Jerry Vaughn, of Berryton, told a story that linked Ralph’s lifelong occupation, professional window cleaning, with his lifelong passion, amateur golf.

There is artistry in using the squeegee, the main tool in window cleaning, just as there is with a golf club, and Ralph once explained the use of them by saying, “The object with both is to finish with the fewest possible strokes.” Not bad for funeral parlor humor.

Ralph was better than just pretty good with both. If he wasn’t the best window cleaner in town, he was close, and it’s a fact I never have heard anyone argue that he wasn’t. It’s also a fact I never have heard anyone argue that, in his day, he wasn’t one of the best golfers in town, too. Or one of the best on the AT&SF main line, for that matter.

When he could play, he really could play. He won some tournaments, and came close to winning some more. At the peak of his career, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was rare that someone hit the ball farther than he did. It was of his competitive faults that he often forgot the match to make the point he could hit the ball farther than you could. Continue reading →