Good Day!

Paul Harvey on Kansas and Kansas State from his Landon Lecture, September 19, 2003:

"Kansas State, in this particular equation you are something else.

I'd rather talk to you with the world eavesdropping, when I start to say something that sounds like it might just be flattery for the home folks, but those 95 esteemed scholarships just in the wee fall of years, my goodness, what have you done to us in Chicago and Cornell and MIT? What have we been doing wrong? Well, 10 minutes from this minute one secret of your excellence will not be a secret anymore. It has to do with geography.

In Paul Harvey's career there were many WKRPs between Tulsa, Okla., and now. My first tentative steps away from home were to Kansas. A Dr. Brinkley had used his radio station in Abilene to sell young goat glands to old men and he was evicted from the United States. He fled to Mexico and his station with studios in Abilene and Salina and Milford was bought by Farmers and Bankers Life Insurance Company, redesignated KFBI, Farmers Bankers Life Insurance. The negotiation moved the station to the company's home base, Wichita, or wanted to, but the FCC was not going to let them make that move. They had to demonstrate that the station couldn't otherwise survive out there in the plains of Kansas. So what they did was to hire the least experienced teenage applicant they could possibly find to help them lose money and that was me. And when I made the station profitable I became disposable, but not before I had become a flag-waving Kansan.

Those were desperate depression days. Pop Conard, the fellow who wrote the greeting cards for a living, he offered me his Hays, Kan., radio station free if I'd move it to Fort Riley. I couldn't. Traveling to Kansas corners with the Norse Gospel Trio from our radio station to Many Mennonite churches in the state, I learned to love God and country and Kansas. Before you were born I was born again in Kansas. It was years later in Gov. Landon's gracious Topeka home on that beautiful screened-in porch that we discussed why he had never abandoned his roots. Then I learned from the author of the Gazette, William Alan White, how he had embraced a whole world with his wisdom without ever leaving Emporia, Kan. And from those examples I never abandoned my own Midwest roots. My broadcasts to this day are home-based in Chicago.

There is a historic parallel in the inspiring founding of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. There the Doctors Mayo inherited traditions generations deep, traditions of hard work, cleanliness, yes, godliness, and to this day Mayo of Rochester benefits from the environment, as do you. So your secret's no secret anymore. I wish I could promise you that other educational institutions would emulate yours, but I have watched Mayo Clinic proliferate elsewhere, Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale, and those were never quite the same.

So the common denominator in these historically fruitful lives, the brothers Mayo, the country editor from Emporia, the gifted statesman from Topeka, they converged genetically on the grass roots of this great nation and then they bloomed where they were planted, and so, Lord willing, shall you.

I want you to think on something, if you forget everything else I've had to say today. If by the dawn's early light tomorrow the American flag were flying over every minaret in the Middle East, if all of that were under our command, oil as fuel would still be doomed. The tomorrows are eight months pregnant. With wind power and assorted alternate energies, who else in the world is growing enough fuel for most of us and growing enough bread for all of us? In this new century, in this middle most of the Middle West, you are where the action is about to be. Kansans have been windblown and weathered, yet stubborn and tenacious. They have inherited and acquired qualities of character presently in desperately short supply. Kansas State is a rare lighthouse. Keep that light lit, please."