Dear Sen. Moran,
During our childhood, you and I grew up near each other. You in Rooks County, me in Phillips County. Though you are a year older, we may have even lined up on the line of scrimmage across from each other during a junior high football game. As a preacher’s kid, I moved a few times around the state. However, both our homes were guided by teachers, coaches, uncles, aunts and parents of the Greatest Generation.
Like many of the surviving Kansans of that generation, my father is nearing 100 years old. Here in America’s Breadbasket, like the majority of his peers, my father is dedicated to the Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ike, Dole and You. His father and grandfather, like many immigrant families to Kansas, found refuge in T.R.’s commitment to the immigrant dream in America. Their commitment to the GOP never wavered.
Their families survived the “Spanish Flu” (which originated here in Kansas) and suffered through the post-WWI farm economy crash. My grandfather lost the family farm and for the rest of his life tilled the land as a tenant raising my dad and seven other hungry children during the Dust Bowl Depression. Their disdain for the opposition party endures. Like many fellow farm families, they despised New Deal policies that forced farmers to burn their crops and cull their herds and flocks. My dad is the lone survivor of his family from that era.