A Kansas Profile

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

Ron Wilson stands next to the photo of Huck Boyd which hangs in Wilson’s office at K-State.

 

A KANSAS PROFILE

Every week for the past 20 years, Ron Wilson has written a Kansas Profile, a positive story about Kansas and Kansans.

As director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University, Wilson’s aim is to recognize and highlight good things that people with rural connections are doing in this state.

After all, that’s what Huck would want. Huck Boyd (1907-1987) was a man who believed in the ability of people to affect change. A small-town newspaperman, Boyd himself worked at fostering leadership and economic development in rural Kansas.

Raised in Phillipsburg, Boyd was attending K-State when his hometown bank failed. His savings were lost and he returned home to work for the family paper. He became active and influential in his community and in politics.

Wilson described Boyd to me this way: “He’d be on the phone with a farmer one minute and a senator the next. He was a delegate to a United Nations Conference in Geneva – and he’d help lead the fund drive for the local high school band.”

After Boyd’s death, a foundation was set up to continue his life’s work of encouraging public leadership and community development.

Enter Ron Wilson. When the Huck Boyd Institute began in 1990, Wilson was named its director.

Wilson was raised on a farm near Manhattan. After graduating from K-State, he got involved in politics himself, first working for Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum as a legislative aide, and then as a staff member for the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture. He served as vice-president for both the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives and the Farm Credit Bank in Wichita before returning to Manhattan.

Over the years, I have listened to some of his Kansas Profiles, stumbling across them online. In May, I happened to meet Wilson at an event in Manhattan and so I set up a time to visit with him at K-State to learn more about him and the Kansans that he profiles.

Wilson is very personable and has a ready sense of humor, which are good qualities, especially if you happen to be a cowboy poet. In 2003, Gov. Graves recognized Wilson as “Poet Lariat.” He lives on the Lazy T Ranch with his wife and children. On October weekends, the Wilsons host a fall festival on their ranch which, in addition to activities involving pumpkins and ponies, guests are able to fling hedge balls with a slingshot.

He is continually alert to potential subjects for his Kansas Profiles, is always looking for someone who is “making a difference.”

“In the broadest sense, we’re looking for people doing something good in small-town Kansas,” he said. “The object of the program is to share examples of entrepreneurs and community leaders, to recognize and encourage those people themselves, to share ideas of what’s possible in small-town Kansas, and to build pride in Kansas generally.”

“And if someone says, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Kansas has X, Y, Z,’ that’s a win for us. We love to find innovative, homegrown Kansas people. You love to find those successful Kansas businesses, community leaders or volunteers.”

For example, Wilson recently profiled Skip Yowell who grew up in Grainfield, moved to Seattle after college, and became one of the founders of JanSport, which makes backpacks and other outdoor equipment. Yowell retired and moved to St. Peter, Kansas, population 8. And, as Wilson quips in each of his pieces, “Now, that’s rural.”

In 1999, Wilson wrote about Linda Katz who lives in southwest Kansas. In the process of learning to build a website, she created one that was just for fun, a joke basically. On her Prairie Tumbleweed Farm site, she included photographs of young nieces and nephews, naming them as company officers. When people around the world began ordering tumbleweeds, she filled those orders and started a business.

A company in Tipton, Old School Seals, was the topic of a 2009 Kansas Profile. The business makes metal stamps used to create an imprint in sealing wax. Their stamps have been ordered by the People’s Choice Awards and used on Buccella Wine bottles from a California vineyard.

Wilson’s weekly profiles are broadcast via the K-State Radio network. They can be found online here:
http://www.ksre.ksu.edu/news/p.aspx?tabid=19

Like the people he profiles, Ron Wilson, too, is making a difference by tracking down unusual and fascinating things that rural Kansans are doing. By sharing these uplifting stories, Wilson motivates us to consider our own possibilities and what we ourselves have to contribute to our communities.

Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh