KS Day 7/ NE Day 0 - Aioli, Aviators, and Ales
My last day in KS started with me waking up at around 1 in the afternoon. This was likely due to me staying up late and hanging out with the great comics from last night (fun), but also a healthy dollop of a minor depressive episode (less fun). I’d actually been doing a relatively good good job keeping my mental health on an even keel, but this had been a relatively long stretch since Washington (five weeks) that I’d gone without really seeing a friend or family member (minus one chance encounter with a friend who happened to be in CO) and I guess it finally caught up to me.. It’s easy to underestimate how much of a difference seeing a friendly face can make, and it’s a big reason why I’m so grateful to the kind funny people I’ve met along the way and kept in touch with because their warmth meant the world to me at a time when I really needed it. All that being said, it wasn’t anything major but I woke up feeling the blues a bit and I had to struggle to get myself up out of bed. It’s also generally harder than I feel should be necessary to get up from air mattresses for those like me who happen to be very weak.
Finally roused from doldrums, I made my way to a hip spot called Henry’s Coffee Shop known for their laid back atmosphere and local honey lattes. I didn’t know about the lattes, so I just got my standard iced coffee but I was still more than happy about it.
After picking up my morning coffee, I got a pretty stupendous brunch from a place called The Burger Stand, a great little burger joint low-key housed in an upscale bar. It was a basically perfect burger with Vermont cheddar and local greens on top adding a beautiful freshness to the whole meal. Things were taken to the next level though by the addition of a garlic parmesan aioli that just upped the flavor tremendously. To drink, I hadn’t planned on starting my day with a beer, but I felt like maybe a little hair of the dog couldn’t hurt since the burger stand was housed in such a cool bar and they had a house a Burger Stand Pale Ale that came pretty highly recommended. It was probably just a bit too hoppy for me personally, but it added to the overall experience and it was a great lunch and a lovely way to say goodbye to Lawrence.
After my brunch, I began my trek north out of Kansas to Nebraska. Along the way, I took a brief historic pit stop to Atchinson, KS to visit a cute little home that also happened to be the birthplace of one of America’s most famous aviators, Amelia Earhart:
Amelia’s birthplace is now also a museum managed by the Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots which she happened to be the very first president of. The Ninety-Nines got their name from the original number of charter members in 1929 when they first assembled, which is actually a really impressively high number given that in popular knowledge Amelia is usually portrayed as the only pioneering female aviator as opposed to just being a highly decorated and deservedly celebrated one among many. Besides a being a lovely testament to all the female pilots in the organizations inaugural class, the Ninety-Nines name is also a vast improvement over some of the other suggestions that were thrown out such as, and this is 100% true, “The Noisy Birdwomen”. Amelia’s first wisely presidential act was shooting that name down.
Once inside the museum, volunteers give guided tours throughout the house explaining the historical context for Amelia’s accomplishments and the history behind what original furniture and heirlooms they were able to collect and salvage. My tour was with a sweet much older couple visiting from NY who got a big kick out of a young fella like me taking a tour of a historic house hundreds of miles from home by himself which I hadn’t processed as strange until I wrote it out like that. Before the tour began however, I got to spend some quality time in the lobby with a life-size wax figure of Amelia that was only mildly bone-chilling.
Almost as if to highlight how creepy the wax figure is, the tour began with a great collection of photos of the actual Amelia Earhart from childhood up to her early days taking the skies after dropping out of medical school. The home in which the museum is housed actually belonged to Amelia’s grandmother, but her father worked for a railroad company causing their family to move around a lot so this house ended up being the most consistent location in young Amelia’s life. Right from the beginning Amelia was fiercely independent and refused to be confined by turn of the century gender expectations, earning a reputation early as a tomboy and a rough-houser. She was always active, inventing games with her younger sister, Muriel, as constant companion and partner in crime. My favorite story about young Amelia, is that when she learned that rats contributed the spread of bubonic plague, she had grabbed the gun she’d been given for Christmas and made it her mission to rid the property of rats to protect everyone from the plague. My other favorite tidbit is that her childhood dog was named James Ferocious, which sounds like a 90s punk band.
It’s hard to imagine how she got into so much mischief with this very stern looking portrait of her grandmother keeping her under constant surveillance from it’s perch front and center of the parlor:
Most of the furniture in the house is period appropriate but not original to Amelia or her family due to the house going through a couple of owners before being reclaimed by the Ninety-Nines. That being said some of the most stunning elements like the ceiling designs, stained glass windows, and a large wooden curio were actually original to the family indicative of Amelia’s grandmother’s style, values, and wealth. Sadly, her father’s alcoholism would eventually squander the majority of that wealth, so before she became an international celebrity Amelia actually almost had to give up aviation struggling to pay for flying time while working as a social worker outside of Boston. Still growing up in a house like that, overseen by such a strong willed, confident, matriarch definitely shaped the woman Amelia would grow up to be.
Interspersed throughout the house was artwork inspired by Amelia, which obviously wouldn’t have been there when she was a child because that would be some creepy prophesy shit but did make for a fun touch to the museum. It is interesting how some people just become so iconic that even in caricatured forms their image is still immediately recognizable:
Out in the yard was a scale replica of a a homemade rollercoaster that muriel and Amelia made with the help of their least responsible uncle. The original rollercoaster was actually twice as long, balancing 8 feet off the ground on a tool shed. The boards were then greased with lard and young Amelia went careening down it into a bush. When she crawled out, she exclaimed, “It’s just like flying!” which was definitely a portent of things to come.
The next few rooms were decked out with photos and memorabilia from Amelia’s rise to celebrity status. She first gained national attention (and met her future husband) as a passenger in 1928 on a plane called The Friendship piloted by Wilmer Stultz, and in doing so became the first woman to ever fly across the Atlantic. Amelia kept the flight log, but she was definitely more than a little frustrated that she gained so much fame for what she felt was someone else’s accomplishment. Rather than complain though, she made it her goal to show everyone just how much she could do on her own. Once she got back to the states, she went on a lecture tour of various colleges, wrote a book about her trans-atlantic flight, and then promptly secured a flying record of her own becoming the first woman to fly solo across the American continent. She then came third in the first ever all female air race, which is where she first met many of the other women who would co-found the Ninenty-Nines. Amelia would then go on to set altitude and speed records for all aviators regardless of gender, became the first women to make a solo flight across the Atlantic, and the first person to fly to Honolulu from California (making her the first person to have flown across both the Pacific and Atlantic), all while being a constant advocate for women and pilots together and separately at a time when neither were fully accepted in society.
A large part of Amelia’s celebrity status was her trailblazing fashion sense. More than pure aesthetics, the stylish feminine active wear that Amelia designed and modeled was actually highly political. She wisely noted that so many supposed limitations that people placed on women were directly caused by the constraints of genteel femininity. How, Amelia reasoned, could women possibly compete with men in any sort of active field, if they were expected to wear dresses, ruffles, and corsets while the fellas got to wear clothes actually designed for human movement. The fact that she made it look sleek and cool helped sneak the feminist ideals of her clothing lines under society’s nose. It’s a testament to how far things have gone in such a short amount of time that there was a point where the fact that she wore pants in public was considered revolutionary, but it’s a bigger testament to her character that she didn’t shy away from being revolutionary when she had the spotlight to do it.
The last exhibit on the first floor was dedicated to her fateful flight in 1937, when she would try to become the first person to fly around the entire equator of the planet. She and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, completed two-thirds of their trip (a whopping 22,000 miles) before completely vanishing somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. To this day, the cause of their disappearance is widely and wildly speculated over. The most likely theory is that they lost their navigational signal, had to try to find their destination, a very small island called Howland Island, manually, and simply ran out of fuel causing them to ditch somewhere in the vast Pacific. It’s not as romantic as them secretly being spies and getting captured by the Japanese military, as some people like to propose but it’s the best supported theory by both scientists and historians. The spy theory briefly gained some traction when the photograph on the right surfaced, and people claimed it was Amelia and Noonan being held on a port of the Japanese occupied Marshall Island, but it was eventually debunked because a Japanese blogger found the original photo in a travel guide from 1935. The resemblance was pretty impressive though.
By the stairwell to the second floor, there was a really lovely oil painting of Amelia and her husband, George P. Putnam. George was a publisher and promoter, who was business partners with Amelia first, publishing her first book and helping her with her first lecture tour. He would propose to her six times before she accepted, because while by all accounts she really loved him, she just wasn’t too keen on the idea of marriage. Some letters she wrote to him included lines like “I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly.” and “I may have to keep some place where I can go to be by myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage.” While to modern ears, these can sound like she was proposing an “open marriage”, which she may have been who knows, but really the radical thing she was proposing was that she maintain her own career, independence, and social life even after they were married. It was a shock to many newspapers when she kept her own last name! George however seemed like he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, and they were equal partners until her disappearance. He would go on spending fortunes and years funding search efforts in the Pacific to no avail, but he did the most he could by publishing a major biography of her to ensure her lasting legacy.
Most of the upstairs houses the museum’s research archives, but you can also visit Amelia’s childhood bedroom filled with sweet mementos and photos from Amelia’s rambunctious early years:
My favorite part of the room though was the sweet and hilarious letters to Amelia Earhart written by local children with this one below being a particular gem:
“please write back”
After I bid farewell to the museum and my elderly tour companions, I took some time to appreciate the natural beauty of the location which had an utterly astounding view out over the wide Missouri River.
After taking in the natural wonder, I drove two hours and change to Omaha, Nebraska where I would set up camp for a good chunk of the next week. Maybe it was my Boston biases or maybe it was all the fields I drove by to get there, but I was pleasantly surprised by what a big city Omaha was and I was excited to explore.
Naturally, I started by getting some more coffee to make up for the long drive. I went to a local favorite spot the cozy and welcoming Hardy Coffee for a nice cold brew that lived up to the name.
For dinner, I went to a brewpup called Upstream Brewing Company. Their food looked great, but I was still pretty full from the giant burger that I had with my late brunch so I just got the house specialty soup, an utterly midwest concoction called the Smoked Gouda and Beer Soup. As strange as it sounded, it was weirdly delicious with a creamy hearty feel and just a hint of spice lifting all the cheesy flavors. For beers, I got a flight of their American wheat, a sesonal Mexican lager called the Brochacho, The Secret Penguin Stout, and the Dundee Scotch. Everything was top notch, but the Secret Penguin was understandably my favorite both in name and flavor. That being said their Scotch ale was particularly good, and it’s not a common beer for a local brewery to make one of their flagships so it was fun to see.
After my relatively unusual (though very tasty) dinner, I went to my air bnb for the night, which featured one of my favorite host families I met through the app. They were a kind young couple with great local suggestions, an adorable young daughter, and perhaps the neediest cats I’ve ever met who whether I liked it or not became my companion for the next couple nights. I set out to do some writing, but unintentionally got completely sucked into the true crime documentary series The Staircase which I can’t recommend enough for it’s insane twisitng story and the unprecedented access the documentary crew had to their subject. While I can’t say I’ve spent many nights watching murder documentaries with strangers’ cats, I can say there are definitely worse ways to start a week in a new place.
Favorite Random Sightings: A sign on an art store proudly proclaiming “ Hey! We make stickers!”; Jock's Nitch Sports Apparel (such a gross name); and a store just called Feet Massage
Regional Observations: I finally got to see my big fields of Kansas sunflowers but sadly couldn’t stop for a picture.
Albums Listened To: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story Original Soundtrack by John C. Reilly (an underratedly pitch perfect parody of music biopics, John C. Reilly is simply phenomenal in this silly movie and it’s music); Warning Shot by the Furios (just 1977); Wasted Days by the Slackers (an amazing double album)
Kansas Superlatives:
Favorite Coffeeshop: Java Break in Lawrence
Favorite Restaurant: Bite me BBQ in Wichita
Favorite Beer: Buffalo Sweat from Tallgrass Brewing in Manhattan (the Little Apple)
Favorite Bar: Lawrence Beer Company in Lawrence
Favorite Attraction: Single Attraction goes to the Museum of World Treasures in Wichita (but if you can double up on multiple attractions in a single site the KU museums might take it)
Favorite Open Mic: The Wichita Loony Bin
General Impression of the KS Comedy Scene: Small but mighty! There are unfortunately not a huge number of venues for comedy and they’re spread out a bit throughout the state, but the community of comedians struck me as incredibly supportive with a lot of talented writers.
Joke Of The Day:
A man is dining in a fancy restaurant and there is a gorgeous redhead sitting at the next table. He has been checking her out since he sat down, but lacks the nerve to talk with her.
Suddenly she sneezes, and her glass eye comes flying out of its socket towards the man. He reflexively reaches out, grabs it out of the air, and hands it back.
Oh my, I am so sorry, "the woman says as she pops her eye back in place. "Let me buy your dinner to make it up to you," she says. They enjoy a wonderful dinner together, and afterwards they go to the theater followed by drinks. They talk, they laugh, she shares her deepest dreams and he shares his. She listens. After paying for everything, she asks him if he would like to come to her place for a nightcap and stay for breakfast. They had a wonderful, wonderful time.
The next morning, she cooks a gourmet meal with all the trimmings. The guy is amazed! Everything had been SO incredible! "You know, "he said, "you are the perfect woman. Are you this nice to every guy you meet? "
"No," she replies. . . . . "
"You just happened to catch my eye."
So stupid, but their commitment is incredible
this isn’t necessarily the greatest song in the world, but the chorus is just so dang catchy
“You know God is a Commie/ Sweet Jesus told me”