It's time for Positively Kansas.

Coming up, an interview with the daughter of aviation pioneer Bill Lear as production of the iconic Learjet comes to an end.

Find out what she has to say about that and about life with her brilliant and eccentric father.

Also, we'll visit the oldest, still functioning courthouse in Kansas.

It's as much a museum as it is a place of business, and it's full of fascinating stories.

And in our Wild Edge report, we get an up close look at how the Wild creatures of Kansas react to the first snowfall of the season.

I'm Sierra Scott.

A half hour of information and inspiration is cued up and ready to roll in this edition of Positively Kansas.

Positively Kansas is brought to you in part by.

Before investing your hard earned money.

Make sure your financial advisor understands your objectives.

Mark Douglass CFP Serving our community for over 20 years, providing customized financial solutions that focus on the individual.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas serves more than 930,000 Kansans in various programs.

Independent member of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas.

An independent licensee of Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, supports keeping these.

Programs.

Support provided by the EF Price Kosman Memorial Trust and Trust Bank Trustee.

Bringing you the Kansas Wild Edge segments on Positively Kansas.

The end of an era is coming to the air.

Capital Bombardier Aerospace is ceasing production of the iconic Learjet.

The Learjet was born in Wichita nearly 60 years ago.

The idea of its founder, Bill Lear.

In an exclusive PBS Kansas interview, Chris Frank speaks with Shanda Lear-Baylor, the daughter of Bill and Moya Lear.

She, by no means, is happy to see the plane with her father's name on it going away.

Was still a. Shanda Lear-Baylor doesn't hide her displeasure with Bombardier, its decision to end production of the Lear jet in Wichita.

I'm not happy.

The daughter of Learjet founder Bill Lear says she asked Bombardier to give the brand name and early Jets certificate stations to the Wichita employees and let those employees do what they want with them.

And the response I got from CEO Bombardier was, we don't want to do that because we want the people of Wichita to be working in our service department, and we don't want them to have a distraction.

Bombardier Aerospace, announced early in 2021 the company would end Learjet production.

The company will constantly wait on its more profitable challenger and global lines of corporate jets.

Wichita will remain a Bombardier service center and the company's primary flight test center.

This ending of production could be seen coming for years.

Learjet sales and production were on a long downward trend to the point of one plane being built a month in recent years.

But 60 years ago, there was both excitement and skepticism in Wichita when Bill Lear announced he would build a business jet in the air capital.

In the PBS Kansas documentary Wichita the Air Capital.

We talked about Lear challenging Wichita plane makers to build a legitimate corporate jet, or he would do it himself.

Cessna started building a business jet and then entered the program.

We were building our business at Cessna back in 1958.

A lot of people may not have known, and those who did know may have easily forgotten that Cessna was close to building its own business jet.

Based on what they learned from the Cessna TI 37 military jet and who knows, Wichita's history may have turned out differently.

At the time, Don Bromwich was a young Cessna engineer working on the prototype Cessna Jet.

When Cessna CEO Duane Wallace pulled the plug on the program.

Because he thought nobody could ever afford that, if he can sell it to the military, nobody can buy.

It.

Beech also tried to market a French made business jet in the U.S. in the 1950s, but without success.

But it was a very small plane, and it was difficult to get into.

It was a it wasn't a passenger.

Plane, so to speak.

Shanda Lear says her father didn't have confidence Wichita Planemakers would build a jet.

But the problem was that he had a very low self-esteem from Beechcraft and Cessna, and he knew that they couldn't do it.

And we knew that Boeing was not going to do it because it was making the bigger jets.

And so he realized that he was the only one that was going to do it, that was going to be able to do it.

Now, Lear had the money.

He also had the confidence in his own creative abilities and the willingness to risk all to build his jet.

But long before there was a Lear jet, there were other Lear inventions.

Best thing that I can tell you about being around the air was that you did think outside the box.

Lear's outside the box.

Thinking served him well over his lifetime.

We can thank Bill Lear, for example, for inventing a practical car radio informing the Motorola company he invented the car radio.

Cars didn't have radios until the late twenties, and Bill Lear and his partner figured out a way to eliminate the static and so forth.

It was it was a problem.

Then put the first radios in cars.

He took up flying with the money he made from the radio.

And while flying, he realized how easy it was for pilots to get lost in the air.

So he developed navigation instruments.

Lear was awarded the Calder Trophy for his work on the auto pilot.

William Lear was credited with 150 patents.

And oh, by the way, he was a high school dropout and didn't go to college.

But he did study diligently on his own to learn what he needed to know his inventions and the companies he founded made millions.

It opened up doors for Bill to associate with celebrities.

So I got to meet a lot of amazing people.

Lear was married four times.

Shanda doesn't shy away from talking about her dad's extramarital affairs back then.

In those days, it's a of rich wo thinking that through sex they could get you away from wife number three or four.

But then he married Moya Olsen.

Olsen grew up in show business.

She was the daughter of famed vaudeville comedian actor Ollie Olsen.

The comedic duo of Olsen and Chick.

Johnson starred on Broadway films and early television.

Mom was his fourth wife, and she had grown up in show business for Showgirls, who were beautiful.

They were around all the time and she was my grandfather's backstage assistant, so she saw the craziness, all the sex.

Moya Lear described her relationship with Bill in her book, An Unforgettable Flight.

She says, I was his wife, his mistress, his mother and his best friend.

Bill Lear grew up in poverty with a teenage alcoholic mother, Gertrude Elizabeth Lear, who herself had been orphaned at age four.

He never learned social skills others might take for granted.

And Shanda says he didn't know how to raise his own children.

She says he never laid a hand on them, but he had to win every argument, she says.

I grew up not liking my dad.

He wanted to win every argument and I had opinions and he would just, you know, just crush any opinion.

He was proud of me.

He loved the fact that I was cigaret lighter.

There was that side of Bill Lear, but there was another side reflected in a letter Shanda received from her father.

Shanda was in a play in Geneva and her dad was in Japan on business.

Bill wrote an apologetic letter for not being there at her performance, but also of praise with fatherly doting over his daughter.

He addresses her, quote, My precious Shan, darling, you make me so, so, so proud of you.

I could bust because when I want to tell anyone and everyone about you, I can see them.

Look at me like I was a loving, adoring, blinded but worshipful father of probably just an ordinary little girl, but whom I probably forgivable, I think is just great.

End of quote.

Her mother, Moya, often had to play the role of peacemaker or in the Lear household with the four children.

Moya also had to smooth ruffled feathers in the Learjet factory there.

She wasn't the mom that stayed home with the kids.

She was the buffer.

There were times when Bill would fire and then employee Moya would hear about it and tell the employee to return to work and she would make it all right with Bill.

And so that's why she would say, you're fired if, you know, if somebody didn't do what you wanted them to do.

And they'd go home.

But on the way out the door, Mom would catch them and say, Come back tomorrow, I'll make it.

Okay.

So before Lear set up shop in Wichita, he tried to build his plane in Geneva, Switzerland.

And when I got a call from from Bel Air in Switzerland, I said, I'm going to sell it.

Miller, as you know, came here in 1962 from Switzerland, where the Swiss government kept throwing roadblocks, roadblocks in front to build the airplane.

So when the Lear family came to Wichita, Shanda came with them.

But she acknowledges she spent as little time in Wichita as possible.

There was really no place for me as a teenager in the jet world.

And so I was happy to move back to her home in Switzerland.

And with a name that sounds like an expensive lighting fixture.

The question she's been asked throughout her life is how and who came up with the name Shanda Lear.

She grew up being teased about it.

It was tough.

It was very tough.

Kindergarten was a disaster.

Everybody was teasing me, coming up with stupid jokes.

Remember, her mother's side of the family was in the entertainment business.

So many years later, she was in Hollywood.

And at the opening of a movie about Broadway, she went backstage, introduced herself as the granddaughter of only Olsen.

Actress Betty Garrett spoke up and told Shanda how she got that name.

And a lady who was on the stage stood up and she said, Sweetheart, we named you.

So it turns out comedians and other actors were coming up with names for Bill and Moya's baby, including some wanting to name her gondolier.

She said that she went to bat for me.

She said all these comedians were trying to figure out whether to name this newborn baby doll.

The weird, cavalier, lovelier or chandelier.

Garrett insisted it had to be Shanda Lear because it sounded like a stage name.

So I took it worse.

Shanda says in the early years of Lear jet, she recognized there was too much partying with celebrities going on in the home.

And as a young woman, she says she didn't want to be around it back then, which is always referred to as Hollywood East because of the celebrity who's coming to see the Learjet.

Chandor says Bill would ask her to help entertain those guests.

Wake me up in the middle of the night to entertain his friends.

That's why you don't see Chandor as being involved with the project.

I realized that in order to be me, in order to have my voice, I need to get out of Dodge.

And by Dodge, she means Wichita.

She returned to Switzerland, where the family lived before.

She later returned to the U.S. and for decades has entertained often at Airshows.

Yes, my.

Name really is Shanda Lear.

If you believe.

It.

She would sing while telling the story of Lear jet in motivational messages for her audiences.

Now she's involved with the Lear Electric Boat Company in Southern California, started by her husband, Terry Baylor.

Now, she insisted the Lear name would be better because Baylor Well, it sounded like bailing water out of a boat.

So the Lear name continues on the water, on Lear electric boats and in the skies with more than 3000 Lear jets produced.

It just saddens Shanda to know the iconic jet her father built in Wichita will no longer be in production.

This is Chris Frank for Positively Kansas.

Fortunately, the Wichita Lear jet factory is not completely closing.

And Bombardier spokesperson says the Wichita side is transitioning from production to maintenance and support of Lear jets.

In most towns, a trip to the courthouse is nothing to look forward to.

But in the quaint Kansas town of Cottonwood Falls, the courthouse is the number one tourist destination.

Jim Grawe shows us why.

In Cottonwood Falls, all eyes are drawn to the end of Broadway Street.

There stands a stately edifice that towers over the community as if to stand watch.

When I took that conference of architects there in 1996, we had three busloads from all over the country.

When we made that turn and Cottonwood Falls and looked down that the bus that I was leaving broke out in applause.

They were just astonished by it.

Out here in Cottonwood Falls, completed in 1873, this architectural showpiece is the oldest, still functioning courthouse in Kansas.

It is a Flint Hills landmark in one of the state's great portals to the past.

You ask people, So where are you from?

And I say, Cottonwood Falls.

Oh, isn't that where that magnificent courthouse is?

Yes, it is.

And we'd like for you to come and visit.

The courthouse is hard to miss.

Standing high and mighty at the south of downtown.

I'm part of it was just good luck that it turned out to be so wonderful because when this was built in the 1870s, there was nothing.

There were no trees.

There's reports of after the courthouse was built.

They needed to build a fence to keep the cattle from coming up and getting into things.

The first courthouse in Chase County was this cabin built in 1860.

This also served as the local school.

It proved adequate as the area was just being settled.

But by 1871, it was obvious this growing county needed something bigger and better.

The United States in the 19th century is obsessed with status.

It's seen as this second tier country.

It sees itself this way, and Europe definitely sees it this way, trying to establish a sense of propriety.

We would call it street cred.

They would say respectability.

And so the way you do that is you imitate the sophisticated topics of Europe.

Voters approved a $40,000 bond issue.

County Commissioner Isaac Alexander donated the land.

And Lawrence architect to John Haskell, who was also chief architect of the Kansas State Capitol Building, was hired to design the courthouse.

This project went up for bids in October 1871, and construction soon got underway.

The limestone itself was quarried less than a mile and a half from here, and the man who did it donated the land, also owned the quarry.

So he got a good deal.

And from the use of that limestone, people all over the United States heard about how wonderful it was and what high quality was.

And it ended up also being used in the Topeka State Building in the capital, Topeka, as well as one of the buildings in Washington, D.C.. 60 men worked every day for two years to turn stone and walnut into a grand structure, unlike this area had ever seen.

Shortly after opening, the editor of the Kansas Daily Tribune called it the finest building of the kind in the state.

The architectural style is called French Renaissance, noted for its unique roof style.

Use of this design is somewhat ironic for a government building, since its practical purpose was to help the building's owner skirt paying taxes.

That steep pitched roof on the top floor is angled out to have the maximum amount of space, and it's designed in a lot of ways to alleviate taxes.

Your text based on the floors of your building.

An attic wasn't considered a floor.

It's classical.

It's.

Well ordered.

It's symmetrical on the exterior.

It is modest, but it is classical.

It is variable.

So it distinguishes itself from regular buildings, although not completely.

And it works for 150 years.

The original design, both on the outside and in, has proven so desirable and functional.

Very little has been changed.

When you walk through the door, the first thing you're going to notice is, of course, the staircase.

It winds all the way to the third floor.

There's 53 steps.

It's made of black walnut from trees that were cut along the Cottonwood River, which is just at the end of the block down from the street.

The doors, you'll notice, are eight foot tall.

It is said the purpose of that was to keep the goings on inside private.

So people couldn't look over the top.

Most of the doors had the glass windows that would open out to allow for ventilation.

Of course, there was no air conditioning at that time.

Over the years, electricity, plumbing, air conditioning and other modern necessities have been added.

Things have worn out and been replaced, but the building never saw major changes until a renovation in 2008 replaced what didn't fit the original 1870s style.

Meanwhile, on the second floor, history comes to life in the hardcore functionality of the jail.

These original 1874 cells are as authentic as it gets.

There was a prisoner here one time that one of the way to keep track of the days that he was here, other than the usual hash marks, most people do.

And so the sheriff being generous, said here, here's a small bottle of red paint.

And the inmate painted one dot for every day he was here.

The cell walls are an almanac of names, dates and days frittered away in these grim, dark pages of steel.

They've only been two escapes from the jail, and one of them was through this tiny door.

It was designed to be used to feed the prisoners.

And when the deputy brought the food to one of the prisoners, he wasn't a very big guy.

When the deputy wasn't looking, he skinny through the door and escaped, but was caught shortly thereafter.

This served as the Chase County Jail for 100 years until 1975, when a judge ruled it to be cruel and unusual punishment.

Now it is preserved as a historical exhibit within a larger place of the past that continues to serve as a functional place of the present and a truly distinct landmark in Chase County.

The Chase County Courthouse is one of many places featured in the PBS Kansas documentary Historic Buildings of Kansas.

You can order a DVD at CPT.

Storage or by contacting the station during regular business hours.

There's a magic in the seasons for snowfall, especially if the White House piles onto the remaining fall color.

In this week's Kansas Wild Edge report, Mike Blair shows us how everything can change in one day when the white flakes start falling.

You cross your fingers on the first snowflakes, wondering if this will make rare but beautiful scenery in southern Kansas.

We don't get much snow here, and the flakes are often too dry to stick much on the vertical landscape.

I set up late afternoon hoping for magic, and in the hours before dusk I got 90 mystical seconds of huge and heavy snow flakes before they turned to flurries and descended into darkness.

Overnight, though, the storm laid in and morning brought my hope for wonderland and gloomy light.

28 degrees with light winds.

It was perfect for a day long sortie.

I took my cameras and went outdoors.

Disconnected stages, various performances.

Later, the sun emerged and a rapid dog began.

Snowy clumps dissolved and fell and wildlife went moving.

It was a one day claim for winter yet to come and the chill and white of early seasons.

Greetings.

I raised a hand to our Creator, the ancient of days, amazed, as always, for the kaleidoscope of life.

I'm Mike Blair, four Positively Kansas.

Well, that's a wrap for this week positivelykansas@kpts.org is our email address.

If you have a story idea, we always need them on Sierra Scott.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you again soon.

Positively Kansas is brought to you in part by program support provided by the F price Kosman Memorial Trust and Trust Bank Trustee bringing you the Kansas Wild Edge segments on Positively Kansas.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas serves more than 930,000 Kansans in various programs.

Independent member owned Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, an independent licensee of Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, supports KPTS.

Before investing your hard earned money, make sure your financial advisor understands your objectives.

Mark Douglass CFP Serving our community for over 20 years, providing customized financial solutions that focus on the individual.