It's time for Positively Kansas.

Coming up, a remarkable project is completed in a rather unlikely place, all because of the tragic and historic sacrifice of a tiny Kansas community.

Also, if you're one of those people who complains you're too old to be active, well, maybe this old timer can teach you a thing or two.

And we all know there's a lot to explore across Kansas, but our state also holds some secrets that well uncover right here in just a few minutes.

Hello, I'm Sierra Scott.

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

As General William Tecumseh Sherman said, War is hell.

This tragic truth continues to befall generation after generation.

The wartime deaths suffered by one tiny Kansas town are almost hard to believe and will not be forgotten thanks to a compassionate and patriotic couple.

Chris Frank shows us why.

On about any given day, you could find Gary and Diane Smith here working on their Labor of Love project.

The Smiths have been working on this project for several years.

These are for the Memorial Wall.

Representing Bushong, all the soldiers that were lost in World War Two.

Here's what makes this Veterans Memorial stand out from others.

The North Lyon County Veterans Memorial Wall Garden honors the sacrifices made by these ten soldiers from the town of Bushong, located in northern Lyon County.

In the 1940 census just before the U.S. entered World War II, there were 135 residents listed in Bushong.

Now, consider that ten of this town's young men were killed in action in World War II, and four of them were killed on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.

I don't want them forgotten, ever.

Diane Bedner-Smith says per capita Bushong lost the most men in Kansas and perhaps the U.S. during the war.

Now, the town of Bushong is a ghostly semblance of what it once was.

The 2020 census lists 27 residents here, compared to 193 in 1930.

In the late 1800s, Bushong was a whistle stop even for the Missouri Pacific Railroad.

Old photos of Main Street show the bank on the corner and next to it, the hotel with its very visible stone walls.

There was a hotel that was built in the 1800s.

It burnt down in the thirties, and it's been a pile of rocks ever since.

And he says that pile of rock was so high, it hid the wall that is now a main part of the memorial.

The people that lived here didn't even know the wall was back here.

The Smiths took before, during and after the work photos.

This before the work began.

Photo shows the trees growing in and around the rubble, which hid the lone remaining hotel wall.

As soon as I saw the wall, I kne This isn't the Smith's first Veterans Memorial to be involved with.

Just to the north of the memorial wall is the north Lyon County Veterans Memorial.

This memorial represents all the veterans of North Lyon County for every war since the war of 1812.

Individual granite memorial structures have the names of veterans listed with the war or military conflict that they served in.

The work on that memorial started in 2015 and was completed in 2020.

Diane says it was while doing her research on this memorial that she became aware of the loss of the ten Bushong soldiers during World War II.

I had always planned to honor these ten veterans after we got that done and when I saw the Wall, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

And this is this is more than I thought, more than I dreamed of.

One feature that stands out on the wall is the window opening.

To the Smiths, it inspired what became the perfect location for the centerpiece of the memorial.

This is what it's all about right there.

Jeff Tennant, a veteran living in Kansas City, built the window structure featuring the laser etched photos.

The Smiths had the vision for this and put their sweat and efforts into constructing them, but they quickly acknowledge this work wouldn't have happened without the generous monetary donations from others to pay for the needed materials.

And the Smiths say there were several volunteers who pitched in when they could with their labor and equipment to make this happen.

It's a lot of fun.

We really enjoyed doing what we're doing and kind of bringing Bushong back to life.

The work brings out a range of emotions.

It makes me sad when I look at them because they're so young.

There's whole lives ahead of them.

It makes you wonder what they would have done with their lives and... D-Day, June 6, 1944 The Allied nations stormed the five French beaches to establish a foothold in northwest Europe.

This would begin the later march to Berlin, Germany.

Thousands of soldiers died in the D-Day battles.

Amongst those killed in action that day were four sons from Bushong area families.

They were all killed together when their landing craft, similar to these struck a mine while the craft approached Omaha Beach.

They were all members of the same Army engineering division.

Those Bushong casualties, Sergeant Jay Moreland, his brother, Staff Sergeant William Moreland, Sergeant John Herrick and Private Rex Gore.

Diane describes how this work makes her feel a close connection with these fallen heroes.

While doing the work, she says she will occasionally find herself talking with a soldier like John Herrick.

And I sit there and talk to them.

You know, I'm like, I hope you like this.

And, you know, I talk to myself.

And it's just amazing that that's actually going to happen.

One of our guys is coming home.

The bodies of the four Bushong soldiers killed on D-Day were listed as never found.

But then, two months before this interview, Diane learned the Defense Department identified Herricks remains.

I got a phone call saying that he was identified.

And it's like I couldn't stop crying.

It was just, like, amazing.

If they found one, they could find the other three.

And it was just eerie that we had gotten done with the wall at this time.

They found him, identified him.

It was, like, really special.

To her, It's like a miracle that Herricks remains were identified by the Defense Department at the time this work was being done.

It was like a miracle hit us because I feel like I know them boys because they're the ones that started it for me.

It started all this.

If it weren't for them, there probably wouldn't be this.

Diane doesn't know when Herricks remains will come home to Kansas.

We're hoping he comes home on D-Day next year.

Hell either be buried here at the memorial, or I offered a plot for him at the cemetery.

On a cold autumn day.

Family, friends and veterans came to Bushong for the fifth annual Home of the Brave Celebration.

The daylong event included military displays, living history and World War II battle reenactments and a ribbon cutting, dedicating the memorial, all of it is to honor the ten soldiers memorialized here so their individual sacrifice and by extension, the sacrifice of the families in such a small Kansas town is never forgotten.

I don't want them forgotten ever.

This is Chris Frank, in Bushong, for Positively Kansas.

The couple's next project is to restore the former Bushong Bank building next to the hotel and make it a veterans museum.

On the flip side, the man in this next story is from that same World War II generation only he survived the war and is still living an active, fulfilling life at age 97.

Anthony Powell shows us what makes a Super Senior such an inspiration.

The downtown Wichita YMCA is 97 year old Ralph Hall's home away from home.

He's here seven days a week and doesn't let a walker needed from breaking a femur slow him down one bit.

Hell, no.

I push.

I push myself.

Ralph pedals a stationary bike for an hour each day.

I had a little asthma as a child, and I still have a little asthma.

And it keeps my lungs free.

He also enjoys the mental benefits.

You know, when you get done, you have-- youre charged up, you know, and you're ready to figure out what goes next.

Ralph thinks exercise contributes to his ability to not take life too seriously.

We lost count of his laughs during the interview, but Ralph is pretty serious about his life philosophy.

You got to let the beauty of this universe shine out through your eyes.

If you can.

Back to exercising.

Ralph says he did a bit growing up, but it wasn't until his thirties that he began to make it routine.

Back in 1962, Ralph went to see his doctor about some breathing problems.

His doctor told him he needed to lose weight and get some exercise, and he suggested joining the Y.

Well, Ralph's been a Y member ever since and tells us he's only missed a handful of days of working out over the last six decades.

Ralph took the orders so seriously, his doctor was envious.

I wish to hell I could follow my orders as well as you do.

Taking orders is something Ralph also did at age 17, when he joined the Navy to fight in World War II and was put on a gunboat.

We used to shoot at kamikaze pilots, but they weren't after us.

They were after the big-- They were trying to hit the aircraft carriers, the battleships.

He still carries his Navy identification.

Ralph had various careers after the war and raised a family in Colorado.

But where ever he's been and whatever he's done, Ralph has always exercised, laughed and enjoyed making others crack up.

He told us about moving in with his ex-wife here in Wichita.

Ten years ago.

We get along fine.

She needed somebody to cook for.

I need somebody to cook for me.

But no plans to get married again.

No!

But he certainly plans to keep exercising and extends an invitation to anybody needing some workout inspiration.

Join me at the downtown Wichita Y, I'm Anthony Powell for Positively Kansas.

In addition to breaking his femur, Ralph also battled COVID back in 2020.

But as you just saw, broken bones and illness are no match for him.

Anybody who says Kansas is boring isn't looking very hard.

There are all sorts of interesting places that are well-known across the state, and there are also some hidden gems that were exciting discoveries for the author of this new book.

As Chris Frank shows us.

A drive across the state can lead us to more Kansas stories, than there is time to tell them.

But one Kansan has compiled dozens of those stories and put them in the 2023 published book Secret Kansas A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure.

I was going to write about the goat gland doctor.

You can't make up this stuff.

More on that story titled The Ultimate Quack.

Coming up.

I thought about the Bloody Benders and I kind of cut them off the list because everybody knows about the Bloody Benders.

But then she had a second thought that perhaps not everyone knows about the Bloody Benders.

A century before, Dennis Rader, known as BTK, started his killing in Wichita.

The Bender crime family killed in southeast Kansas between 1870 and 1873, the Bloody Benders, as they were known, killed an estimated 9 to 20 victims at their store near Cherry Valley in Montgomery County.

The Vanishing Serial Killer's Story on page 116.

The Pledge of Allegiance.

A plagiarized pledge is the story of how a Kansas youth didn't get proper credit for writing the Pledge of Allegiance.

And a 13 year old boy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance.

His name was Frank Bellamy from Cherry Valley, wrote it as a school assignment.

Send it off to the Youths Companion, which was a huge, huge magazine back then.

And Francis Bellamy, no relation decided, oh, I'm going to change one word in this pledge.

I'm going to say it's mine.

And so he went on to have all kinds of recognition as the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, which was a lie.

So for a century, the Kansas youth got robbed of proper recognition for writing the Pledge of Allegiance.

Yonkey, who lives in Goodland, says often she would research one obscure story, which then led to information about another weird and wonderful story.

Several of her collections have to do with health and medical stories, which may seem quite incredible by today's health standards.

Now, almost all Kansans are familiar with the legendary TV show Gunsmoke.

Well, the character Doc Adams was inspired from Dr. Samuel J. Crumbine who began his practice in Dodge City.

Author Yonkey describes how Dr. Crumbine was horrified to see a mother using a common cup to serve her child right after a man with tuberculosis drank from the same cup.

So that was that is so gross.

But they didn't think of it as gross and they didn't really have an understanding of germ theory.

No one ever heard of anything like fomites that we wish we had never heard of either.

So, Dr. Crumbine went on a marketing campaign to ban the practice of drinking from common cups as a way to slow the spread of germs.

He stopped the Common Cup.

He would have all these horrific posters about what happened to you if you drank out of common cups.

He pioneered and pushed flyswatters.

Crumbine promoted, swatting flies to curb the spread of disease.

Yankee says Crumbine also induced brickmakers to make bricks with the slogan “Don't spit on the sidewalk.

” A statue of Dr. Crumbine stands across from the state capitol building in Topeka.

Another of Yonkeys stories can be a day trip exploration for most Kansans.

She writes about the Drugstore Museum in Lincoln, northwest of Salina.

Jack Crispin, a retired pharmacist, turned this former Lincoln Drugstore into a museum showcasing the drugs, prescriptions, elixirs and other potions common to the four decades between 1880 and 1920.

One of the ones that still bothers me, it was called Kilacold, and it was kind of this teardrop shaped chlorine bomb.

And you would break off the tip of the chlorine bomb and it would you would be gassed and it would kill your cold.

At least killing a cold is what the company back then said their device would do.

The Lincoln, Kansas, retired pharmacist says Kilacold was just another unproven medical practice from a century ago.

The way you were to use this is when you felt a cold coming on, you would take one of these into your bathroom, which was generally a very small room, stuff newspapers under the door to get a gas seal, then snap this open and breathe chlorine gas.

The idea was that you would inhale the chlorine gas.

It would kill the bacteria that was causing the cold and you would stop the cold right away.

So why have we been suffering from colds all these years?

Because it didn't work.

I mentioned the goat gland doctor earlier, which Yonkey in her book calls the ultimate quack.

Yonkey says Dr. John Romulus Brinkley got a bogus medical degree and started his practice in Milford in Geary County.

Brinkley, she says, surgically inserted goat glands in male patients to allegedly cure impotence.

When he did all these surgeries and made all kinds of money and he had a radio show, so his radio station was a media pioneer.

KFKB.

Kansas first, Kansas best.

Brinkley, she says, pioneered talk radio, allowing listeners to call in and ask medical questions on the air.

So you call in and you would describe your symptoms to him and he would say, okay, you need love potion number nine.

And you would go see Madam Ruth.

Brinkley lost his medical license after an investigation by the American Medical Association.

He also lost his radio license and his fortune.

J.R. Brinkley ran as a third party candidate for Kansas governor, but lost.

Yonkey writes about the ultimate tax protest about old Ulysses in far southwest Kansas.

I featured the Grant County community in Kansas Ghost Towns Part Two documentary.

Yonkey describes how Ulysses town residents moved the town to avoid paying off bonds the town sold.

So they left the pathetic courthouse, pathetic school that those bonds had built, left the land that those bonds had paid for.

Put everything on rollers and hitched horses up to them and hauled it all down the road until they escaped that school district.

Bye bye, bonds.

Hello.

Debt free living.

Yonkey includes stories like how Albert Alexander Hyde produced and marketed Mentholatum from Wichita and writes about the Kansas role in spreading the Spanish flu pandemic.

The book includes the story of the planet hunter.

Clyde Tombaugh grew up on a Pawnee County farm near Burdette, where he built homemade telescopes to study the night sky.

The amateur astronomer later worked at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he discovered the planet Pluto with the Lowell Telescope.

Yonkey writes of the discoveries of other Kansans like Jack Kilby of Great Bend, who developed the first microchip at Texas Instruments.

That led to a technological revolution.

Kilby was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work.

She writes about Kansans who broke barriers like light economy.

Lyda Conley was the first indigenous woman to argue in front of the Supreme Court.

Yonkey tells of how Conley and her sisters fought off developers who wanted to take the Huron Cemetery in downtown Kansas City.

And the sisters ancestors are buried there.

Their parents are buried there.

And the developers were going to take away their land.

The sisters built a shack on their parents plot and lived there for decades, resisting developers efforts to take the cemetery.

And as Yonkey writes, the Conleys threatened death to anyone who would disturb them.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Conley v. Ballinger.

Yonkey had to resist the notion that everyone in Kansas knows certain historical stories.

The author also had to resist the temptation to not include some stories thinking every Kansan knows their history.

She realized some stories are known locally, but not by those in other parts of the state.

The author includes locations to guide readers where they can visit and learn more about the subjects.

So you might find a story or two in the book you know quite well.

But there are enough stories, 84 in all, that you will likely learn more of the secrets of Kansas.

With this guide to the weird, wonderful and obscure state stories.

This is Chris Frank for Positively Kansas.

Next week, Chris tells us all about another book which focuses on the secrets of Wichita.

Be sure to tune in.

Now to the great outdoors and some of the smallest animals out there.

They can also be annoying if they sting you or crawl up your leg.

However, Mike Blair shows us how bugs are essential to the beauty of the Kansas countryside.

Wildflowers are the glory of each growing season.

Colorful and fruitful, they fill the land with beauty and food.

They're always ready to occupy open niches with bountiful growth.

They get important help from pollinators, various insects and birds that feed on flowers are an important part of flower reproduction.

Flowers have sweet nectar attractive to these feeders.

Some visitors come solely for this high energy drink full of carbohydrates.

Others, like these, gather flower pollen for food.

Pollen has essential proteins that are mixed into honey to help feed the hive.

These have specialized hairs on their hind legs where pollen is stored and transported.

When full, these are quite noticeable containing the yellow or orange pollen grains.

Busy as a bee has meaning since these and other feeders work tirelessly throughout their lives.

Moving from flower to flower and this unwittingly helps wild flowers create healthy seeds.

As insects feed and gather, pollen grains stick to their bodies.

Pollen is the male gamete needed to fertilize the female flower structure.

When a visitor moves to a similar flower, some pollen is brushed off where it helps the receiver plant reproduce.

Genetically, this makes strong and vibrant seeds ready to grow for the next season.

Butterflies and moths, though they don't actively gather pollen, are common accidental couriers in this process.

Pollen dust rides on their bodies as they go.

Here you can see pollen grains stuck to the butterflys feeding tube.

Butterflies and moths can travel and pollinate flowers over long distances in the day.

Bees, wasps, beetles, even hummingbirds help wildflowers produce strong and healthy seed crops.

It's another fascinating process that marks the Kansas outdoors.

I'm Mike Blair, for Positively Kansas.

Well, that's a wrap for this week.

Im Sierra Scott.

We'll see you again soon.