Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, who took the executive reins from Sam Brownback just three months ago, made a brief appearance at the Iola Public Library Saturday evening, where he held a friendly 40-minute conversation with a dozen interested Allen County residents.
Billed as a getting-to-know-you event, the conversation was necessarily light on policy and was instead a chance for local citizens to meet their new governor before deciding, in the upcoming primary, whether or not they want to keep him.
Originally from Hays, Colyer received his undergraduate education in economics at Georgetown University and completed his medical training at the University of Kansas. He forged a successful career as a plastic surgeon in the Kansas City area and is known, to this day, to depart Cedar Crest on occasion to perform the odd craniofacial surgery because I think, in politics, you can lose your soul, Colyer told the Iola group. So, for me, I like staying part of the real world. Colyer is also a long-serving volunteer in the International Medical Corps, conducting wholly admirable work in various war-torn pockets of the world for the last 30-plus years. He and his wife, Ruth, have three college-age daughters, and Colyer joins a number of the other nearly 20 candidates in this years race for governor in declaring that his whole goal in government is to [create a situation] so that my kids can envision their futures in Kansas.
