20 Years Ago

October 1999

Modern Woodmen of America, through local representative Liz Armer, gave the Friends of the Bowlus a check for $5,006.86 Tuesday, which lifted the drive’s total above $190,000. The drive, which started about a year ago, has a goal of $300,000. 

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Iola Police Sgt. Stanley Cookwright won a Wheat State Crime Prevention Award this week from Attorney General Carla Stovall for starting a three-year program in Iola’s elementary schools in which officers visit the schools once a week to eat lunch with students, ask what’s on their minds, and visit about such things as illegal drugs, violence and safety issues.

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The Iola City Parks Department is preparing a base in Cofachique Park for a M110A2 self-propelled Howitzer which has been donated to Iola by the U.S. Department of the Army. Parks Supt. Berkley Kerr said concrete will be poured for the base early next week and the motorized weapon could be on display as early as December.

Dear editor,

I am not constrained to write this letter but I am prompted to do so especially in this time of what seems to be such a political condition of total disorder and confusion — chaos — a vast abyss or chasm. I share this writing of Nancy Newhall from “Earth Prayers,” to lift hearts and spirits.

“We seek a renewed stirring of life for the earth

We plead that what we are capable of doing is

Not always what we ought to do.

We urge that all people now determine

That a wide untrammeled freedom shall remain 

To testify that this generation has love for the next

If we want to succeed in that, we might show, meanwhile,

A little more love for this one, and for each other.”

I suggest that we insert the word a “lot” in place of the word “little.”

Respectfully,

John Wesley Skillings,

Iola, Kan.