Shrinking towns all over Kansas offer a challenge
Richard Wood got interested in small town America because his dad grew up in Minneapolis, population 2,075. Minneapolis, like most small towns in Kansas and elsewhere, is losing population. In an effort to reverse that trend, the town offered free building lots to any young family willing to move there and put down roots.
The free land gambit caught Wood’s attention. He is a Denver writer always on the lookout for a book material. He went to Minneapolis to assess the prospects for dad’s hometown and then expanded his research.
What he found turned into a book, “The Survival of Rural America,” which he reviewed at length Friday night in the Bowlus Fine Arts Center speaker series. The series is sponsored by the Sleeper Family Trust and is held in the Dale Creitz Hall.
(Wood was in Iola for the Iola Family Reading Festival Saturday at Allen Community College and took part in that program as well.)
Limiting himself to towns in Kansas with populations under 2,500, Wood found some that were doing well, others that seemed to be headed for history’s dustbin.
Iola, he assured his audience, seems assured of a good future. It is large enough to offer its residents the fundamentals it takes to maintain a population.
Smaller towns need to have more going for them in order to make it, he said.
It is important, Wood has discovered, for residents and former residents to reinvest in their hometowns.
He cited that Sleeper Family Trust and the Bowlus Fine Arts Center itself as perfect examples.The decisions made by Tom Bowlus and the family of Roy Sleeper, along with dozens of other patrons of the Bowlus Center, have given Iola an enormously attractive cultural center, which offers residents and those of neighboring communities access to drama, music and art found only in much larger cities.
“It is very important for communities to keep at least some of the money that was generated by residents, and former residents, invested locally,” he said, and cited several Kansas cities that have benefited from such reinvestments.
Wood also said factions within a community can do great damage. The people in a community must work together, he said, adding that when factions develop pitting one group against another, little is accomplished.
WOOD SAID small towns in Kansas have safety and security to sell. On a visit to Minneapolis, Wood took pictures of high school kids walking home from school down an otherwise empty street. He took the picture to show city dwellers that life in a small town is safe. Parents don’t have to worry about their children. They can leave their doors and cars unlocked. That’s different from a lot of sections of Denver, he said.
But, he said, that can be hard to sell to young people. They move away from their small hometowns when they graduate from college because they want a different lifestyle. They want more restaurants, more theaters, more ways to be entertained, more things to do, he said.
As a final word of advice, he said communities of every size should plan for what seemed to be their most likely fu-ture. Youngstown, Ohio, for example, is planning for a smaller future. Leaders there have come to terms with the fact that it will never again be the manufacturing center that it was and so should downsize to keep the cost of civic operations commensurate with its shrinking economy.
— Emerson Lynn, Jr.
N.B. Mr. Wood’s lecture drew perhaps the largest crowd ever in the Sleeper series, a silent, but eloquent testimony to how pertinent his studies are to the current concerns of Iolans and, one can safely assume, to the residents of the thousands of communites across the country which anticipate more bad news with each succeeding census. E.L.
