It's time for Positively Kansas.

Coming up.

Nothing has shaped civilization more than the written word.

And now books are changing lives in a whole new way.

You'll see what makes this Wichita bookstore so special.

Also, we traveled to Lyons, where the town museum is an international attraction.

It boasts a collection of artifacts that's unmatched anywhere else in the world.

And then we drop in on this very special softball game.

These boys of summer have a 75 year legacy to uphold.

Find out all about it.

And a Wichita dance company seeks to entertain and educate at the same time.

You'll see how it's motion with meaning.

I'm Sierra Scott.

Those stories and Kansas Wild Edge are cued up and ready to roll on this edition of Positively Kansas.

Computer and inventory skills, working with others, and most importantly, providing a sense of purpose by having a job.

A unique bookstore on the campus of Wichita's Union Rescue Mission is providing all that and more to men working hard to turn over a new leaf.

Anthony Powell has the story.

Restoration, recovery.

Re-Engagement and rescue.

The 4 Rs are at the center of everything the Union Rescue Mission provides its residents.

And nowhere is that more evident than at the New Leaf Book Mercantile, one of the mission's work therapy programs.

Here, men gain structure and discipline, learn various skills and the confidence they'll be able to succeed after leaving the program.

At the store, once books are donated, the men note each title, sort and value them.

The books are then placed online and either shipped to the public or made available at stores the mission partners with.

The name New Leaf Book Mercantile symbolizes turning over a new leaf in life.

And while the program plays a significant role in that, neither residents nor the mission believe anything is possible without faith.

The greatest thing is to just see how God continues to empower them in order to step into those challenges and just to embrace the unknown.

Because then you have this beauty of self-discovery that comes in on the other side of it.

You don't have to spend much time here at all at the New Leaf Book Mercantile to find countless stories of inspiration and hope.

Men who are working so hard to turn their lives around.

Anthony Irby says running the streets caught up with him.

So he turned to the mission.

That's up of every received.

Working in the new leaf book, Mercantile has provided the perfect recipe to start a new life.

It's got me back.

To where I needed to be.

When it comes to working and helping and build relationships with people.

Because I lost it all and stuff like that.

So it's just giving me a togetherness back again in my life.

For the first time in a long time.

Irby believes he can achieve something that once seemed impossible.

A responsible adult.

You know, with the responsibilities, working, maintaining a house.

For Jerry High, meanwhile, this is his second time at the mission.

After I fell on my face because I didn't make total commitment.

You can have the knowledge in your head but you got to put in your heart and you got to act on it.

And I got away from my Bibles and my prayers and the church.

But High says this time around, working in the bookstore has provided him renewed determination and focus.

It's rewarding to try to do things, you know, and to be responsible.

That's what we learn, to learn to be responsible.

We learn to be accountability.

We learned to be enabled to get back in society.

We see little wins all the time.

Working in the New Leaf Book Mercantile has enabled several residents to obtain full time jobs like warehouse work and parts distribution.

But employment is not the only benefit.

This is like a new family for me, you know, outside of my immediate family.

This is my family right now.

As for a message to those struggling in life, the men say the rescue mission works miracles.

But there's another decision that must be made before coming here.

If we choose God, we'll see that everything is much, much easier.

In Wichita, I'm Anthony Powell for Positively Kansas.

The Union Rescue Mission has been helping men in need every day since 1950.

It's the largest emergency and life changing center for men in Kansas.

Local historical museums dot the Kansas countryside and offer fascinating glimpses of the way life used to be.

But in Lyons, the history goes back almost a thousand years.

Jim Grawe shows us how relics of an ancient civilization are preserved in the largest collection of its kind that you can find anywhere.

In Lyons, Kansas, the grand stately 1910 courthouse stands as a lasting symbol of the European settlement of Rice County.

Just a block away at the County Museum, displays on the bottom floor reflect what are traditionally considered the early days of civilization here in Kansas.

That's the late 1800s and early 1900s.

But walk up a few steps to the main floor and you'll learn about an advanced civilization that occupied this area hundreds of years before the Europeans ever arrived.

They were remarkable because they lived in small villages, villages maybe containing 20 to 50 huts like you see here in the museum.

They dug their huts down in the ground.

So it would be warm in winter and cool in summer.

They were very efficient group of Native Americans.

What is now identified as Quivira, was the province or territory of the ancestral Wichita Indians.

It included three areas of settlement in what is now Rice County in McPherson County and in Cowley and Butler Counties.

They had a complex culture.

Charlene Akers, who is executive director of the Coronado Quivira Museum, has a good way of putting the size and success of Quivira in perspective.

There were probably.

20 thousand plus Quvirans here.

Today in Rice County, there's less than 10,000 people.

Much of what's known about these people has been pieced together here over the past 150 years, long after Quivira vanished.

As they were plowing their fields, homesteaders would find the artifacts and they would collect them once again, putting them in boxes, not knowing much about them.

Along with the Native American items that were turning up here, there were artifacts that appeared to come from Spanish conquistadors.

Archeologist Don Blakeslee says these discoveries helped solve an age old mystery surrounding the route taken by Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez del Coronado, who led the first European expedition ever through what is now the southwestern U.S..

The understanding of where Coronado went really started in Rice County.

There were two brothers.

They ran the newspaper, the Jones Brothers, back in the 1920s who got interested in the archeology and pretty quickly figured out this must be where Coronado went.

And they were they were right.

And their work grew in the Smithsonian beginning in the 1940s.

And led to some major excavations there.

And people have continued the interest all along.

Blakeslee has inventoried the museum's entire collection of 50,000 Quiviran objects.

That's the largest such collection in the world.

Now, my favorite one would be the small case that we have just inside the door.

It contains a bone.

And you ask people, what do you think the bone is used for?

And that bone has notches on it.

Well, it took Dr. Blakeslee to explain what that was.

And it is a musical instrument.

Other fascinating finds include tattoo needles.

The Wichita were known for the men for their tattoos that went from their eyes back to their ears and may have surrounded the eyes.

That's not clear.

But it was a distinctive marking of their group.

Some of the artifacts are native to other tribes in other regions of the continent.

This led to the discovery that these people were traders.

They would walk hundreds of miles to exchange goods.

Quiviras primary industry was buffalo.

They were producing bison products for the southern United States is what it boils down to.

It is believed that residents of Quivira produced the buffalo horns that ended up in what is now Florida.

Blakeslee says they also altered their environment, somehow replacing the lands tall grass with short grass to better feed their buffalo herds.

The tall grass started growing again only after the Quivirans were run off by the Europeans.

They were curious.

They talked to their neighbors.

That they traveled.

That they, some of them, not all of them, gathered empirical information about their environment and tried to figure out what the heck was going on.

They were equivalent of our scientists.

They were far more like us in many, many ways than than people imagine.

There is so much more you can learn about Quivira and the Wichita people.

An actual visit to the Coronado Quivira Museum in Lyons is a great place to start.

In Lyons for Positively Kansas, I'm Jim Grawe.

The Coronado Quivira Museum in Lyons is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 to 4 and Saturday from 10 to 1.

Kansas has a rich baseball and softball history going back more than 150 years.

The city of Newton stands out in this history.

It's been hosting the Mexican American Men's Fastpitch Tournament for 75 years.

Chris Frank reports on the tournament that's such a family affair.

The crack of the bat sending softballs flying, heard at this tournament in Newton for 75 years.

The Mexican-American men's Fastpitch Tournament, billed as the oldest such tournament in the country.

A lot of tradition here.

It's a big, big event for our local community.

A lot of families involved, generations.

So it's a big deal here in Newton.

A big deal in Newton and the region with teams coming from several states.

My father was one of the founding fathers of this tournament in 1946 after they got back from World War II.

Come down.

Come down.

Here.

Go.

Here we go.

Manuel Jaso, born and raised in Newton and also raised with this tournament as well.

For us, it's a rite of passage, tradition.

My father, like I said, helped start this tournament.

And so I have four brothers other than myself that play.

I have numerous nephews, cousins.

I've even had a few nieces now playing in this tournament.

So it's a family affair for us.

That family affair he speaks of is seen in the stands, on the teams and certainly outside the fences in the shade.

It's tradition, my uncles played in this tournament, and so it's just tradition that we come up every year and we enjoy the whole entire weekend being with family and watching the games.

Monica Gonzales Wilson drives up from Fort Worth, Texas, to attend.

The fans who sit and watch from the stands or the shade will tell you coming here year after year is about more than just fastpitch softball.

It's the heritage part of it, the Mexican-American heritage and that and everybody that has ever come to play or been a part of the players has just been a fascination with everybody that comes in out of town.

Get one, get one!

Wilson grew up a Gonzalez in Newton.

Her dad, being in the Air Force, had the family moving around the country.

But Newton?

This is always home.

And this annual tradition keeps her coming back.

It's home.

It's family, it's tradition.

It's like it's still laid back here.

Wilson says those traditions keep players and fans coming back also.

She's not surprised it's lasted 75 years.

I feel comfortable here.

My family is here.

So, yeah, it's always an enjoyable time to see the games.

To eat the food.

To meet people.

There are ties between baseball and railroad work.

Railroad companies recruited Mexican nationals to immigrate to build tracks in the U.S..

Baseball became a favorite pastime in off work hours.

Jaso says this tournament got its start at a time when there was racial and ethnic separation.

He says Mexican Americans weren't being welcomed onto Anglo teams.

It was more probably because a separation from Anglos to Mexicans, you couldn't play the same league together.

We couldn't play the same tournaments together.

So we had to form our own tournaments and our own leagues.

And so that grew from there.

Jaso started playing in 1971 and finished his playing career in 2013.

He was tournament director for 18 years.

Now he's a Hall of Fame director and helps out where needed.

Jaso says many of the first Mexican-Americans coming to Newton for railroad work played baseball.

He says the tournament evolved to the fast pitch softball that is now played.

The tournament started on just one field.

Now the games are on three fields.

There are 15 teams in this, the 75th tournament year.

Hopefully it means as much to everybody else as it does me.

My biggest goal when I took over was just to keep it alive.

Todd Zenners path started with shagging balls as a youth to playing, managing the team and then to tournament director the past four years.

Now such an event brings in visitors dollars to Newton with motel occupancies sold out two weeks before the first pitch.

Jaso says over the decades, there has been a growing, inclusive acceptance of this tournament.

He says in the beginning there were only one or two non Mexican-American sponsors.

That's changed, he says.

A plethora of sponsors now and and it's just a whole new ballgame as far as donations.

And it's great.

There is a lot of pride among the teams.

The players are competitive and take their play on the diamond seriously.

A lot of people, they keep telling me, this is our World Series.

We want to win this tournament because we think so much of the Newton tournament.

And so it's just a tradition like our fathers started, that we want to continue.

And so far, they are keeping the tournament alive with the pitches coming in fast and the balls flying out fast.

In Newton, this is Chris Frank for Positively Kansas.

The director says the tournament has a lot of life in it and the expectation is runners will be rounding those bases for decades to come.

Now, to our weekly nature segment featuring some feathered visitors who are always either coming or going.

Mike Blair shows us why ospreys are Kansas's most interesting migrants.

They ride in on the September wind, and if you're lucky, they might stay for a month.

The males come alone.

The females, sometimes with young teaching them the ropes and the routes of migration.

Adult birds live 20 years or more and they establish favorite stopovers.

You'll see them year to year sitting on favorite trees and purchase.

They're exciting to watch and many birders await the coming of Ospreys.

These raptors are unique.

Sometimes called Seahawks or Fish Eagles.

They are fully dependent on live fish.

99% of their diet is fish taken from the surface to three feet deep.

They are white with dark wings and head stripes and their long wings are usually held while flying in a noticeable bend, knuckles forward.

Osprey migration is spurred mainly by temperature rather than photoperiodism, which drives much of nature.

Many living things are hardwired to behave according to the amount of daylight and changing seasons.

But for Ospreys, it's a matter of food.

Fish move from shallows to deeper water as temperatures cool.

This makes them harder to hunt.

So Ospreys go where fish are easier to catch.

A hunting osprey is a thing of beauty.

These birds normally hunt on the wing rather than watching from tree limbs.

Though this consumes far more energy, it provides best opportunity to dive on a fleeting surface target, which might appear for only seconds.

Osprey see about five times better than humans, and they can spot the flash of a fish from hundreds of yards away.

Hunting is best in smooth water where waves don't confuse the view.

But ospreys are capable hunters in all weather conditions.

While hunting, an osprey flies in circles over the water.

And it may stop to hover when it spots a potential meal.

Once locked on target, it rolls and dives, correcting course as it goes.

Just before striking, it throws its feet forward with sharp talons spread wide.

The talons snap shut on contact in only two one hundredths of a second, faster than you can blink an eye.

The ospreys spiny foot pads help to hold a slippery fish.

Like bald eagles, an osprey may snatch a fish from the surface without getting wet.

But most of the time it plunges directly in, sometimes at 80 miles per hour.

It may go completely under for a moment.

Then it flaps its powerful wings and lifts from the water.

Even with fish that may double its weight.

Experienced adult ospreys may check their dive several times if the catch is fairly certain.

Success rate for adults is usually about 75%.

But nothing is for sure.

And sometimes the fish escapes.

Watch in slow motion as one fish is knocked from the water, splashing back in to live another day.

Conversely, watch this amazing catch as an osprey grabs a double, a fish with each foot on one dive.

Fall is the best time to observe Ospreys in the Midwest.

If they stop where you live, watch for these amazing birds.

Nature's best aerial fishing specialists.

I'm Mike Blair, for Positively Kansas.

Next time, Mike reports on one of Kansas's most aggressive and dangerous creatures, which is also a threatened species.

Modern dance with a powerful message takes center stage as part of unique collaboration with Midwest Ties.

Tristian Griffin and Regina Klenjoski operate the only two professional contemporary dance companies in the state.

Anna Spencer takes us to rehearsals, as the dance companies join forces to tackle big issues through dance and converge.

For these dancers, each movement tells a powerful story.

Every step conveys a message and through exceptional choreography, they work together to amaze and inspire.

The Regina Klenjoski dance company is in the midst of rehearsals for a summer performance titled Converge, a distinctive collaboration that brings together the work of two Kansas studios with choreographers from across the country.

The project debuted right here in Wichita.

It's all part of the director's vision as she moved her studio to the Wichita area after leaving Los Angeles seven years ago.

There was a wonderful, burgeoning young dance community here, and so I was very excited to bring what I had already kind of grew and developed here in Wichita.

And then so excited to meet Tristian Griffin, who also is doing the same thing up in Kansas City area.

So the two of us, after talking, really realize, well, we have these wonderful resources, we have this work that we're doing that we've been doing for a long time.

Let's come together and do do this in the state and try to expose more audiences to what we're doing and that this is out there.

This is an option for entertainment.

It's an option for art.

We're part of the artistic landscape and grow the awareness for contemporary dance.

The planning for Converge began a year and a half ago, RKDC teamed up with the Tristian Griffin Dance Company in Kansas City.

The only other professional contemporary dance studio in the state.

Thanks to grants and funding, the two studios began working with additional choreographers in L.A., Chicago, Kansas City and Wichita to craft a thoughtful work rooted in identity, race, gender and social justice.

We were really interested in people who were really doing work, thoughtful work, rooted in identity and social justice, in themes, current themes, and really had different influences and different aesthetics, different types of contemporary work and backgrounds, so that our dancers could come together and experience different styles.

Wichita State University School of Performing Arts is a sponsor and offered space for the rehearsals where performers from the Midwest worked long hours to prepare for the piece.

The contemporary dance is both demanding and technical, requiring the dancers to train as high level performing athletes.

Washington native Rile Reavis has been dancing his whole life.

Three years ago, he moved from Los Angeles to Wichita.

He says working with different choreographers has helped him to grow as a dancer.

Preparing for this has been very different for myself personally.

Again, getting to work with the company all year.

We really get some time to create and modify and then this is a very condensed and fast process where we're learning about a piece a week or maybe even in a weekend, and these are fairly long pieces, anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes long that we're learning in 5 to 6 days.

So you really have to come in just open to receiving all of the information, working with other people, being flexible because again, things are always changing and modifying as the choreographers are working with new people and setting new things and wanting to try something maybe that they did in the piece before that that now they're wanting to do.

Or again, it's a whole new work like Regina's doing in the show.

So again, it's being created somewhat in the moment.

So again, you just have to really be able to take all that information in and try to apply it to your body as quickly as you can.

Rile says the work goes beyond the studio as dancers must take time to recover physically from the demanding rehearsal process.

The work premiered in Wichita and traveled to Kansas City and wrapped up in Lawrence.

The creators say one purpose of the piece was to expose audiences across the state to their message and art form.

Kansas City dancer Simone Davis says working with this collaboration has been both demanding and rewarding.

It's a super fast paced environment.

I rehearse all day.

We have a warm up class in the morning and then the evenings are really meant to recover and then the next day is like right back at it.

So it's super intense.

But as a dancer, that's what we like.

We like to be like challenged.

Creators say the final work is equal parts moving, beautiful, relevant and interesting.

The kind of work that leaves an impression on an audience.

The RKDC is already working on their next performance.

The dance company offers classes at Andover Dance Company Studios and anticipates other creative opportunities through community partnerships across the metro area.

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

Well, that's a wrap for this week.

We always like to hear from you.

Until next time, Im Sierra Scott.

Be well.

Ill see you again soon.