An Afternoon in Kansas

June 8, 2011: We headed first to Lawrence where we made a pit stop at The Bourgeois Pig:

We drove across the KU campus: The "Pterodactyl" Jayhawk stands in front of Strong Hall (left); The Daniel Chester French statue of Uncle Jimmy Green (right), "the only full-figure sculpture of a teacher on any university campus," stands in front of Lipponcott Hall.

We went into the lobby of Ellsworth Hall (residential) to see it's view of The Hill:

In West Campus, we stopped by the Robert J. Dole Institute for Politics; the donors clearly were hoping for a presidential library:

There's a stained glass window homage of his Russell, KS hometown; another of the American flag, and, inexplicably, two girder relics from the Twin Towers?

In Topeka, we stopped by the Kansas Capitol to see the art.

Native son John Steuart Curry painted "Tragic Prelude" with the iconic John Brown in Bleeding Kansas.

He also painted "Kansas Pastoral:"

The "controversy" over these murals caused Curry to stop work on eight others planned for the second-floor of the rotunda. In 1976, the legislature hired almost-native-son Lumen Martin Winter to complete the rotunda murals. John C. Fremont is on the left; The Sacking of Lawrence is on the right.

In 1956, native son David H. Overmyer painted eight murals on the walls of the first-floor rotunda. The Coming of the Spaniards is on the left; The Battle of the Arikaree is on the right. David's great-great-uncle John Healy fought in, and survived, the Battle of the Arikaree.

William Allen White (left); Dwight D. Eisenhower (right).














We stopped in Abilene to see Dwight D. Eisenhower's boyhood home (left). Dwight and Mamie are buried in the chapel.





























We met Susan Marshall for a family-style chicken dinner at the relocated Brookville Hotel. The meal wasn't as good as it used to be, but, for central Kansas, it's still pretty good. The restaurant's heyday was during and after World War II. It's claim to fame was that William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody stayed there on June 2, 1899.