Kansas Snapshots by Gloria Freeland - April 4, 2025

A trip home

A couple of weeks ago, I returned to Burns. It's my hometown, but not my home. Home was a nearby farm.

Among those I saw were Roy and Velma Jackson. Roy was the long-time druggist. I loved the old drugstore, and I remember walking there one summer day from my grandparents' farm, on the edge of Burns. Sister Gaila and distant cousin Sheryl Flo were with me. I ordered a "vanilla Coke" - such an exotic drink for us farm kids accustomed to milk!

Velma was my sixth-grade Sunday-school teacher who somehow made learning Bible verses fun. Perhaps the fact that she took us to the Joyland amusement park in Wichita had something to do with that. It was my first time on a roller-coaster, and I was thrilled. She also invited us to hers and Roy's home for suppers and parties.

After Roy died, Velma and her friend May Dooley traveled to many foreign countries. Velma had a lot of photos from those adventures. One in particular that stuck with me was of her riding a camel.

I also saw Henry Hammann, the local cobbler. Whenever I entered his store, I was struck by the smell of old leather and fascinated by seeing the saddles, shoes, and tools of his trade.

Edith Barker and her mother Mrs. Schimpf were also there. They gave all of us trick-or-treaters homemade popcorn balls at Halloween. I always considered them a special treat. I wonder why my grandparents always referred to the pair as Edith Barker and Mrs. Schimpf. It was never Edith and Nellie or Mrs. Barker and Mrs. Schimpf.

I also saw my great-grandmother Mary (Hillyer) Freeland with a group of friends and relatives. Among them were Mary's sister Eleanor and their niece May.

Great-grandpa William Freeland, grandpa Robert Freeland and grandma Ethel (Stewart) Freeland were also there. Grandpa and grandma were with a group of friends at a 25th anniversary celebration.

By "there," I mean all were in my hands. They have been gone for many years, and my great-grandparents died before I was born. But I did "see" them - a product of procrastination, forgetting, and chance.

Some years ago, I offered to scan a pile of photos that were in the Burns Historical Museum. The plan was to identify the people and then return the pictures. But they were forgotten as life intervened. It intervened again in January when sister Gaila and I unearthed the photos while we were - dare I characterize it as - organizing my house.

When Burns friend Tom, wife Nedy, and son Christopher visited in February, we asked Tom to lend a hand with the identification process. Tom's mom, our mom, and others had volunteered countless hours at the museum organizing photos and artifacts. I recognized mom's handwriting on a number of them.

On a cold March day in Wisconsin, husband Art scanned the pictures while I made a list. There was no rhyme or reason to the collection of 51 pictures. The earliest was from 1899 of C.M. Lyons' blacksmith shop. There were also photos of Barker Mercantile, ranchers bringing wool to market by steam-powered tractor, and farmers hauling limestone blocks on a wagon pulled by horses.

A photo from 1959 was of Roy and Velma looking at a Saturday Evening Post magazine during the village's brief moment of fame. It had received a distinguished service award from the Institute of International Education for its international visitors program. That program, started by Tom's mother Betty and a friend, was one in which Burns families hosted international students during holidays.

In one of the newer photos, some friends and I were pictured at a wiener roast. I would have been about 8 or 10. Classmate and friend Bruce was in another with his junior high basketball team, probably taken around 1966.

The most recent was of the 1973 fire that heavily damaged the Barker home - the home where in the 1940s mom had an apartment as a single teacher.

Journeys to the past seem inevitably to raise questions. Did Roy and Velma live above the drugstore or in the back? Who owned the dry goods store?

I texted Tom and Bruce. Bruce enlisted the help of his dad’s cousin Cordell.

Cordell said there was no second floor to the drugstore. He remembered because another boy would go up on the roof on July 4 and throw firecrackers on the street in front of the drugstore while Cordell used his bike to see if the city marshal was coming. He also recalled that the dry goods store was run by Esther Davis.

When our daughters Mariya and Katie were little, they would sometimes wonder aloud what kids did in small towns like Burns. Katie would sometimes append, “such a sad little town.”

Burns was - and is - small. The current population is about 250. But somehow, my friends and I always found plenty to do and rarely felt deprived. And if we had lived in Kansas City or Chicago or New York, the historical society would be filled with pictures of famous people and not the ordinary folks who were our friends and neighbors. Anyone will find a visit to their hometown to be fun, but I have a hunch the trip to my "sad little town" touched my heart more than if I had grown up in one of those other places.