It's time for Positively Kansas.

Coming up, a well-known and controversial folk artist is memorialized in a new visitor center, an outdoor art museum.

We'll show you his work and tell you about the colorful life of M.T.

Liggett.

Also, memories of the Vietnam War resurface in Valley Center as a traveling exhibit pays tribute to the heroes who died.

Plus, learn about the effort in Wichita to reduce food waste and feed the hungry at the same time.

And see how Kansans of Asian descent celebrate their heritage and share it with the rest of us.

Then we get an up close look at how the wild Kansas creatures deal with a brutal cold snap in the true Kansas style.

They are survivors.

Hello, I'm Sierra Scott.

A half hour of information and inspiration is coming your way on 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 and independent licensee of Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association supports its programs.

Support provided by the EF price Kosman.

Memorial Trust and Trust Bank Trustee.

Bringing you the.

Kansas Wild Edge segments on Positively.

Kansas.

Kansas is a national leader in folk and grassroots art.

Its creators are often self-taught artists who craft their large pieces for public display that serve a purpose beyond mere esthetics.

Perhaps the most famous and controversial of these was M.T.

Liggett.

If you've never heard of him, you're about to right now.

Jim Grawe shows us how Liggett's legacy of acerbic political commentary and stirring the pot is now poised to live on for generations.

The vast Kansas countryside is a work of art in itself, but these acres on the west edge of Glenville serve as an open air studio for the creations of empty legged.

If people are driving by on the highway and they don't take notice of empty art, they're taking a nap in the car.

It stands out on the prairie.

And that was his intent.

He said, In a sea of grass, you have to have things that move that catch people's attention.

And he did his best to portray that.

Movement comes at the mercy of the Kansas wind spinning vanes of steel and aluminum, which compliment colorful caricatures, whose messages speak the mind of their intrepid creator.

I'm trying to get the American people wise up to what our political system was doing to us.

It wasn't so much about Republican or Democrat.

For Liggett, every public figure was fair game and a target for scrutiny.

What you see now here, what I'm trying to say, this is this is Gore and and Clinton dump the Hicks 96 and I've got a commode upside down.

I mean, I don't need to say anything else.

Do do I think he was trying to make a statement about the world around him about local issues, about politics.

He would always take the opposite side of a conversation.

And it wasn't just to be poking the bear and to be negative.

He wanted people to think.

And sometimes he ventured beyond metal and paint and to perform.

And so I don't like anybody coming in.

I'm going to take something away from me and not even ask.

In 2012, Liggett claimed ownership of this section of Elm Street that went past his property.

He put up barricades.

From that corner down.

There.

To that blacktop up there, that vacated property for over a week.

This stunt was the talk of Mullen ville and beyond.

I'll tell you what.

They want it back.

They know where the courthouse is.

It's ten miles east.

Finally, Liggett decided he had made whatever appointed set out to make and reopened the street.

Life went back to normal.

That is what ever normal is in a town with a character like M.T.

Liggett.

Everybody had their own opinion of AM-T and sometimes it changed from day today and sometimes it changed in the same day.

It depended he could go to the coffee shop and spur conversation and he would get people all jazzed up about whatever he was talking about.

You could love him and you could hate him.

And it was always an interesting interaction with him.

Then in 2017, the controversies and the wondering and maybe worrying what Liggett might come up with next came to an end when he died at age 86.

This bigger than life character was gone.

Or was he?

Certainly his presence is still felt in all this that he left behind.

This 100 plus acre is along Highway 54 now comprises the newly opened empty Liggett Art Enviro Ament and Visitor Center.

M.T.s art is very well known around the United States.

He was featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post prior to his death and then again when he passed.

And so the word is out about the M.T.

Liggett art.

Liggett left his art and his land to a trust.

Its charge is to preserve these works and keep them on display in perpetuity.

While many of the names you'll see here are from the past, there are messages in all this that are timeless.

Some bold teaching gets up and it held one to crap and people heat it up like an old hog goes after a bucket of corn or slop alienated straw put up.

And unquestionably there is everything the politicians tell them.

And this crap.

Liggett was born in 1930.

He grew up on a farm near Montville, then served in the Navy and then the Air Force.

After retired from the service in 1973, he earned degrees in political science and history and criminal justice.

Then he returned to his hometown in his late fifties.

By then, Liggett started creating and displaying his metal folk art.

His work is his own creation.

He was a skilled machinist and welder prior to coming to build the site here as he developed as an artist.

His pieces grew in number as well as size.

By the time he passed away, liggett's display of art here at exceeded 600 pieces.

This new visitor's center is built where his workshop stood.

Inside are exhibits that tell the story of this colorful and unusual character who was married six times and kept an inventory of his wedding rings.

I don't think you can separate the man and the many facets of his life experience from the art he created.

He had many travels during his time in the military all over the world and some of his romances and some of his experience with people are portrayed in some of the subjects that he created pieces for.

And then there's things about local life, about public commentary, things going on here.

The Koehler Foundation provided funding to build the center and preserve each piece of Leggett's art, with a protective coating in his will, Mt named a board of trustees to oversee everything and ensure that his art continues to speak to future generations, whether they want to hear it or not.

And if I * * * * * * you off, boom I got done what I started to do.

You can make millions and millions and millions and millions and do all be a big ranch and do all this other stuff.

You did ten years.

Everybody forgot about you.

This stuff will be here.

It'll be in a hundred years.

So I've left the legacy in Mullen ville for Positively Kansas.

I'm Jim Grawe.

The M.T.

Liggett Art Environment and Visitor Center includes a workshop, an upstairs apartment for a future artist in residence.

The center is free to visit.

You can't miss it.

Just north of Highway 400, on the west edge of Glenville.

The Vietnam moving wall has come and gone from Valley Center, but in its five day stop, an estimated 7000 visitors viewed it.

Chris Frank shows us how meaningful the wall is to so many veterans of that war.

The sound of the Valley Center High School's Drum Corps marching towards Lions Park and Valley Center means the Vietnam moving wall is nearing.

Thank God it's finally here and.

We merely start displaying them all.

It was a cool, crisp fall morning, a perfect morning for the volunteers coming here to pitch in to erect the wall.

Hi, everybody.

Why?

I'm unpacking and stuff.

I'm going to have everybody start laying everything out.

Dozens of volunteers, many of them Vietnam vets, showed up to help with the walls set up.

They wouldn't miss it.

One of them, Richard Castiel, drove up from Tulsa to him.

This isn't work.

It's a duty.

And this is what we had to do.

We have to help these young folks that don't understand what Vietnam was about.

And we're doing this for a reason.

Castiel was in Vietnam in 1967.

The moving wall gives veterans like him an opportunity to share their knowledge with the generations that came after the war.

This wall means a lot.

This wall means so much to all these veterans.

Many of them have special stories connected to the names on the wall.

Castiel always makes a point of looking up his cousin's name on panel 15 West.

James Dennis Castiel.

There's only one of us.

He's my cousin.

The moving wall is a half scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

It has been traveling the country all 50 states and beyond, since 1984.

There are more than 58,000 names of service members killed in the war on it.

One of the common practices always seen at the wall is the rubbing of names.

Visitors locate a name and place a paper over it, then rub with charcoal to get a sketch of younger visitors, have a chance of learning from others about a war they've only known from history.

At the wall, they may hear the experiences of veterans like John Herman.

Herman grew up in liberal and has lived in Wichita for the past 30 years.

He served multiple tours in Vietnam in 6869, and then in 1971 and 72.

I lost several friends over there and I was lucky.

Herman has found names of those he served with.

It's a sacred time to remember them.

I think it is a very honor for the Vietnam veterans the way it's done.

I don't know.

It brings back memories that maybe a guy doesn't want to see or want to remember, but it's it's an honor.

Herman was a crew chief and door gunner on a helicopter.

He was wounded and received a Purple Heart.

I was lucky for those that crew chief and door gunner there and then about 30 days before I come home, when we got shot up the last time.

47 holes in my helicopter and one in me.

So I was lucky.

The wall provides opportunities for vets to reunite.

Remember those lost and their own service?

We we did our what?

We stood our watch.

We did it proudly.

We did our job.

You know, we didn't duck it.

We did it.

And some of these folks here, they they didn't make it out.

And we did.

And it's you know, when you think about when you see this thing, just how lucky we were to get out of there.

You never forget them.

One thing, now more than ever do you just try to put them in the back of your mind and go on.

Go on.

As he says, it's what they have to do.

Keep going on.

Standing still momentarily and remembering.

Yes, but continue moving.

Like the wall before them.

This is Chris Frank for Positively Kansas.

By some estimates, the number of visitors to the moving wall this time was nearly twice as many as the last time it was in Valley Center.

That was in 2012.

A Wichita nonprofit is working to solve the problem of food waste and feed the hungry at the same time.

Anna Spencer caught up with food rescue and a team of volunteers to give us a firsthand look at food rescue in Wichita.

With the sweet smell of baked goods and coffee lingering in the air, Paradise Donuts prepares to close up shop for the day.

But this isn't the end of the line for the fresh donuts and pastries in the display window.

Instead, these tasty treats will be packed up and donated thanks to volunteers and the efforts of ice Food Rescue, a nonprofit that works to curb food waste while feeding those in need.

Stephanie Merritt founded the group and has grown it into a network of restaurants.

Volunteers and nonprofit agencies across Wichita.

I founded Active Food Rescue kind of after I went back to college.

I just started studying homelessness and food insecurity in larger cities such as Washington, D.C., New York City, and then saw what they were doing actually there on their scale.

And in the meantime, I worked here in Wichita at a place where we threw a lot of food away.

And then really just kind of took my blinders off after those classes and that study and saw what was happening in our in our city and the hunger and the homelessness and how did I just put those together?

We're throwing this food away.

Nobody wants to really throw it away.

And there are individuals that need it.

So how did we become that middle, middle organization to make that happen?

What Stephanie started is now maintained through the efforts of technology and the tremendous hearts of volunteers like Jim Hall.

You set your own hours.

You get to kind of do what you want to do, and it's just rewarding.

Every shelter that I go to.

I've done it enough now that a lot of the kids know me or a lot of the I should say a lot of the folks that work there.

Funny story I pick up at another place called Peace, Love and Pie, another location and at humankind, because there are kids there.

They recognize my car when I turn into the side of the building and the pie guy is here.

Yeah, and I hear that a lot, which is really rewarding.

I mean, they're they're looking forward to something and they're getting something, and we're not wasting stuff that would be thrown away.

Through the app and website.

Volunteers like Jim make approximately 63 pickups throughout the week.

Volunteers come from all walks of life and include individuals, couples and families.

The food donation pickup is just one part of the equation.

On the other end, we have several Wichita nonprofits who received the food donations to help those in need.

One such recipient is the Tree House, a local agency that helps economically challenged moms and children with basic necessities and programs.

The Tree House has been partnering with Eyesight Food Rescue since its beginning.

Client services coordinator Jolene Claussen loves the response from children and moms when they see the donated food.

It seems like the food is here at just the right time.

You know, we'll have a mom that comes in and is is not having a good day or maybe she has children with her and it's whatever is up there is just whatever they needed or it really just brings a smile to their face.

And you can tell when they leave, they just are uplifted in a way that, you know, wouldn't have happened unless that was here.

I asked.

Food Rescue received over 160,000 pounds of rescued food from Wichita eateries in 2020.

Today, the group continues to make a difference and has now added a condiment drive to its donation services.

All in its efforts to feed people and not landfills.

In downtown Wichita, I'm Anna Spencer for Positively Kansas.

I see food rescue is in its fifth year, and while the organization continues to grow, volunteers are always needed.

More information is available on the group's website and social media.

Asian culture took center stage at Century two, as Wichita's Asian Association hosted its annual festival.

It's a great opportunity for people of different races and ethnicities to come together and learn what makes Asian culture unique and special.

Anthony Powell was there.

What a turnout for the 40th annual Wichita Asian Association Festival.

Organizers put the crowd at 14,000.

Not surprisingly, the vast array of mouthwatering food attracted lots of attention.

Food is everyone's favorite.

We come for quite a few things.

Really.

The food is number one.

Arts and crafts booths along with kids games.

Also very popular.

Just the perfect way for a family to spend a night out.

I think a lot.

Of people in 2021 kind of lose, you know, family a bit, you know, just with the hustle and bustle of everything.

And it's kind of nice to stop and reset and just to be able to go out with your family.

There's something else, though, that makes this event so very special.

Folks say they've learned so much.

Many, including me, I admitted, had no idea.

There are 48 Asian countries.

Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, Vietnam.

And the list goes on.

Here's one I bet you didn't think of.

You see, people don't know.

Syria is one of the Asian countries.

The festival is indeed an enlightening experience for people of all ages.

I learned about New cultures and how peace and like religion re-assure.

Henna tattoo artist says she learned something new every year at her booth.

My favorite part is meeting different people and hearing their stories and how they came here.

A lot of immigrants have are here today representing their countries.

And I think it just beautiful learning about all these different cultures here.

The festivals, many live performances are another way for attendees to get a glimpse into Asian culture.

They are all cultural dancers with cultural attires, and they showcase either the traditional or the Korean pop culture of Asian performers.

Meanwhile, as you walk around, didn't learn about Asian culture, diversity, you also notice how diverse the crowd is.

People of all different races and ethnicities under one roof, enjoying a unique night out, one free of the divisiveness that seems to continually plague our world.

You know, I always take my son to the playground and everybody there gets along because they're having fun.

You know, they don't know any different.

And I think, you know, you look here and you see the same thing, you know.

There's no time to have not fun and remember any differences.

And that, says Matthew Headley, is the main reason he'll continue to bring his family here for years to come.

For Positively Kansas.

I'm Anthony Powell.

Another important part of the festival is the Miss Asia pageant.

It's become very well known and popular, receiving recognition from the Midwest Travel Writers Association.

When the deep freeze of winter strikes, you and I bundle up inside to stay warm.

But what do you do if your home is the wilderness?

In this week's Kansas Wild Edge report.

Mike Blair shows us how Kansas critters make do.

When it's nine below zero at 10:00 in the morning.

The outdoors presents in a different way.

A super cold pattern gripped Kansas for two weeks, penetrating even the snug list of shelters.

Wind chills of nearly 50 below tested the breadth of every living thing.

It's amazing how wild animals continued.

Most had nowhere to go.

Simply seeking the slightest breaks from a polar hurricane, the night must have seemed forever.

But each dawn and blowing snow brought another chance, another need to find food and water.

And sure enough, wildlife came out in force.

Wariness gone to bide in survival.

I filmed it all day after day, fingers at the brink of frostbite, even when bundled in modern protections.

And I saw firsthand the brute force and the will of this thing called life.

What an amazing world.

When finally it passed, he scarcely knew it happened.

Oh, there was a day or two of the aftermath, but mostly calm returned.

And now we spend on an hour trip around the sun.

Looking forward is always.

I'm Mike Blair.

For Positively Kansas.

Well, that's a wrap for this week.

positivelykansas@kpts.org is our e-mail address.

If you have a story idea.

Until next time, Im Sierra Scott, please take care of yourself and each other.

See you back here soon.

Positively.

Kansas is brought to you in part by program support provided by the F price Cossman 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 of 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.