At mile 9, Brian looked over and winked, “Happy anniversary, hon.”
It was a welcome pick-me-up. By then the fun of the half-marathon was beginning to wear thin.
Still, we did it, along with 4,600 others who ran in a variety of races around downtown Wichita, including the 26.2-mile marathon.
And yes, it was fun. Rock n’ roll bands were stationed along the course. Neighbors still in their robes nursing hot coffee came out to cheer the steady stream of early morning runners.  
In one neighborhood two little girls had a lemonade stand and worked every bit as hard as those manning the fuel stations along the course. Other kids would line along the streets holding out their hands to give you a slap-slap-slap of high fives.
“You’re looking good!” “Great pace!” “Keep up the good work!” were welcome words of encouragement as the miles wore on.
Others had wry senses of humor as they held signs that read, “Toenails are for sissies.” or “Run like UR naked.”
The sheer volume of the crowd provided constant entertainment and welcome distractions.  Two women wore shocking pink wigs. A man ran in striped leotards equipped with a tail. Many had T-shirts that bore inspirational sayings. At our pace, you had plenty of time to read the fine print.
It also felt good to know somewhere in that vast crowd – we never spotted each other   were fellow Iolans Nicolle Hoepker and Jason Franklin pounding the pavement.

IT WASN’T UNTIL this spring that I considered getting back into running. Joyce Heismeyer, now of Wichita, was my inspiration to try a 10K in June. I barely had a chance to feel satisfied with crossing the finish line before Joyce said the half-marathon was next. “Maybe for you,” I thought.
Before long, Brian and I were out on the rail trail Saturday mornings building up our distances from that six-mile foundation.
Training for the longer distance was the first time Brian and I had run together. Usually, we do our own thing. He has seven marathons under his belt; I had two half-marathons from more than 20 years ago. Needless to say, he could leave me in the dust at any point.
But that wasn’t the point, as his companionship of now six years has so aptly proved.

At Monday night’s Humboldt council meeting, the future of Walter Johnson Park came up when members agreed to extend water lines to the east edge of town to accommodate the new USD 258 sports complex.
When the complex opens, Walter Johnson Field, named after the Hall of Fame pitcher born north of Humboldt, will be abandoned by the district. Other uses will be found, likely by the local recreation group.
The older field, ringed by a laid-up rock wall and with a stadium also made of local limestone, has a historical presence: It was a Works Progress Administration project. The original swimming pool, stadium, north shelter house and levee at Riverside Park also were WPA projects.
Several people at the council meeting were unaware of the WPA.
Simply put, it was a stimulus program not unlike what President Obama encouraged during the recent recession. It was part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal to fend off financial difficulties of the Great Depression.
In 1935, $4.9 billion was appropriated to the WPA. That represented 6.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Millions of unskilled workers carried out public works projects, such as those in Iola and Humboldt. The WPA also employed artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media and literacy projects.

IOLAN Jim Gilpin called up Friday morning after listening to a National Public Radio report about the release this week of confidential files kept by Boy Scouts of America on men suspected of child sex abuse.
Gilpin said the commentary made it appear the abuses had occurred recently. In fact, he said, the organization changed the way it operated in the 1980s to assure, as much as humanly possible, that no future abuse would occur.
An abuse lawsuit mentioned in the report was filed 30 years ago, Gilpin noted, when he was a leader.
Changes since then require at least two adults to attend meetings, campouts and any other Boy Scout activities. Also, potential leaders undergo extensive background checks to ensure that they pose no threat, a process that has become more thorough with evolution of technology.
Gilpin remembers the changes because they were accompanied by increases in individual and troop registration fees to deal with the lawsuit.
“We have a small but very good  troop in Iola,” Gilpin observed, one that involves itself in many activities to the good of the community.
He doesn’t want it or the many other troops that give boys opportunities to learn leadership and a multitude of other skills to be tainted by misunderstanding.

Joe Aistrup was asked to talk about government, politics and the Kansas economy at KU Thursday.
“All I would have to do to alienate everyone in the room would be to add religion to that list,” he said.
Aistrup is professor of political science at Kansas State University. He was the lead speaker at the 37th annual Kansas Economic Policy Conference at the University of Kansas on Wednesday.
“First, the good news. Commodity prices are strong, the crop insurance program works well and the oil and gas industries have been profitable for years,” he said. Rural Kansas is doing well, despite the drought. On the flip side, the aircraft industry which used to be a pillar of the state’s economy is weak. Boeing is leaving Wichita. The worldwide demand for corporate jets has dropped because of the recession.
But unemployment in Kansas is just a little over 6 percent, while the national rate is 7.8 percent. The state wasn’t hit hard when the housing bubble burst in other states because there never was a housing boom here.
The Kansas economy is growing and disposable income per capita is about $38,000, which is almost exactly the national level.
The outlook, Prof. Aistrup said, is worrisome because of the uncertainty. First, the nation faces the so-called fiscal cliff. Unless Congress acts before the first of the year, government spending will be slashed deeply and tax rates will go back to Clinton-era levels. Nationally, economists say the combination will shrink the U.S. economy by about 5 percent and toss the country back into recession.
“I also look at the price of gasoline as a forecaster. When the price of gas approaches $4 a gallon, the economy slows down. It is about at that level now. High gas prices suck money away from other purchases. Retail sales slump. Unemployment rises,” he said, illustrating the correlation with a chart.

TURNING TO politics, Aistrup noted that Kansas government had shifted sharply to the right. He contrasted the administrations of Bill Graves and Kathleen Sebelius to that of Sam Brownback and said the difference can be seen in the effect of the latest tax cuts.
Aistrup noted that for many years Kansas policy makers had maintained a tax structure in which roughly equal amounts of government revenue were raised from the sales tax, the income tax and the property tax.
Today that three-legged revenue stool is more like a two and one-half legged stool, he said, because income taxes had been reduced so much. The effect of tax reductions made since 1995 has been to reduce state income by more than $8 trillion dollars.
Some of those reductions were made by increasing the number and magnitude of exemptions and credits.
“If all of the sales of goods and services were taxed, the state could lower the sales tax to two cents without losing revenue,” he said, and added that eliminating all of the deductions, exemptions and credits on all taxes — sales, income and property taxes — “might be a good place to start on restructuring.”
Aistrup projected Kansas will be forced to reduce state spending significantly unless new revenues are found because the tax cuts now in place would reduce income below this year’s spending level.
He said the shift to the right has changed the way the administration thinks.
“It used to be that our governor and legislators would decide what the state should do to meet the needs of the people and then decide how best to raise the money needed to accomplish those things. Today the approach is the opposite. The lawmakers decide what the level of taxation should be and then see what needs can be met with the money raised. The contrast between those approaches is profound,” he observed.

AISTRUP TOLD a questioner that cutting taxes does stimulate the economy because it puts more money in the hands of the public. The question is whose economy is stimulated. When a Kansan gets an extra dollar he or she isn’t required to spend it in Kansas. It can be spent anywhere in the world. Or it can be socked away and a bank may invest it in New York, Paris or Hong Kong, he intimated.
“Cutting taxes to stimulate a particular economy is like pouring gasoline on the top of your car and hoping that at least some of it will end up in your gas tank,” he said.

— Emerson Lynn, jr.
N.B. Reports on other presentations will follow.

Malala Yousafzai lies in a London hospital where skilled surgeons who learned about traumatic head wounds from a terrorist action give her a 50-50 chance of recovery. Ms. Yousafzai is the 14-year-old Pakistani who was shot in the head because she fought for educational equality for girls in Pakistan. Her assailants were Talaban fanatics who say they will try again to kill her if she lives.
Malala is slight for her age. But her courage is lion-size. She had been warned to stop her agitation two years ago, but only stepped up her campaign.
A spokesman for the Taliban, a person called Ehsanullah Ehsan, said her crusade for education for girls was  “an obscenity . . . let this be a lesson.”
Indeed, let it be a lesson to the world. She was shot by masked gunmen who boarded her school bus, learned her identity among the children and shot her point blank. It is hard to imagine a more cowardly act. A national newspaper in Pakistan headlined the story, “Hate targets hope.” The Taliban responded by warning other young students that following Malala’s example will lead to a similar fate.

MY SON EMERSON, who edits a newspaper in Vermont and has three daughters, one about Malala’s age, made these comments about the crime:
“ . . . As repugnant as the shooting is, it crystallizes the position that Taliban extremists represent and the threat they pose to basic world order. Shame on us if we ignore it.
“They didn’t shoot an American soldier. They shot one of their own, and a child at that. They hid behind masks. And they shot to kill because of a child’s thirst to learn, to be educated in the ways of the world.
“And they have promised more violence, more subjugation. With the firing of several shots they have declared who they are and who they will remain, as if we’d forgotten.
“Perhaps they didn’t anticipate the immediate and profoundly clear response the attempted slaying has generated. Even the Pakistani leadership — which has sought to forge an uneasy truce with the extremists — understood the shooting was an affront to its ability to govern its people and that its fate as a country would be sealed if half its population were silenced.
“In fact, there is little the Taliban could have done to engender more hostility to its cause than to shoot a tiny, defenseless 14-year-old schoolgirl. Classes around the world are reading today about Ms. Yousafzai’s mission and reflecting on how it is that in the year 2012 we still have people among us who threaten the rights of others in such a brutal fashion.
“ . . . Maybe that’s the lesson that Ms. Yousafzai will teach the vast majority of her Islamic brethren: that Islamic moderates cannot allow the extremists to define them, their religion and their futures.”

— Emerson Lynn, jr.