Interview of Dale Goter, January 6, 2026

Jim McLean: Hello, I’m Jim McLean, a member of the Kansas Oral History Project Board and a former reporter for Kansas newspapers and public radio stations. Today is January 6, 2026, and I’m at the Kansas Capitol to interview Dale Goter, a former Statehouse reporter for the Harris News Service and host of the Public Television program, Kansas Week. Our videographer today, as always, is former Kansas State Representative David Heinemann.

This interview is part of a series the Kansas Oral History Project is doing to explore the contributions of reporters, editors, press secretaries, and others to policy making in Kansas. Susie Murphy is the project coordinator. The Kansas Oral History Project is a nonprofit corporation supported by donations from generous individuals and occasional grants.

I first met Dale in the 1980s when both of us were members of the Statehouse press corps. Dale was the Capitol correspondent, as I mentioned, for the Harris News Service, which served several of the state’s leading newspapers. I was the Statehouse reporter for Kansas Public Radio.

Dale left Topeka in 1989 to become the host of Kansas Week, which, as the name indicates, was a weekly public affairs show that originated from KTPS, the public television station in Wichita. It was modeled after the PBS program, Washington Week [In Review], in that it featured a panel of reporters and editors talking about the week’s top stories.

In 2006, Dale became the government relations manager for the City of Wichita, a position that brought him back to the Statehouse as the city’s lobbyist.

Welcome, Dale. It’s great to see you again. Thanks for doing this.

Dale Goter: This is an old-time reunion.

JM: Old time, a key word. Let’s start by flushing out your bio just a little bit more. You were born and raised in North Dakota.

DG: North Dakota, the coldest place on the planet. I had to go in the Army because I was flunking out of college. It was just time to move on, so I enlisted in the Army. I got sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, lied my way into getting into the Army band program by claiming to be an oboe player. It’s one of those things where a single event changes your life completely. You go back to the single event that changed my whole life was the band director in Carrington, North Dakota, Olaf Ringerud. I said as a freshman, “I’ve got to be into music because my family is all into music,” and he hands me an oboe. I’m the worst oboe player in high school, second chair in a class of seventy people.

JM: How many chairs for second chair?

DG: Two. But I could play a little bit. So, I get in the Army, and I’m in basic training, and it’s time to look at where I’m going to—I was going to be a clerk.

JM: This was ’67. Vietnam was still—

DG: It was ’69. Yes, we’re all looking at the jungle. At that time, I’m pro-war—I was going to go kill some Vietnamese. A guy walks down the line in basic training. At that time, I learned I was going to be a clerk. I thought, “That’s good. I won’t go to the jungle.” Well, that’s not true. Every infantry platoon has a clerk. That wasn’t going to work. The guy walks by and says, “Does anybody want to be in the band?” I said, “Hell, yes.” I auditioned on oboe. It was a post band, which is a small band, as opposed to a division band. They didn’t have oboes for me to audition on. He said, “Read those notes.” I could read the notes. They needed oboe players so bad. It was one of those endangered MOS—that’s the name for a job title in the Army.

He said, “Okay, we’ll send you to the school of music in Norfolk, Virginia, at the Naval Base there.” I had an incoming audition of .5 on a 4-point scale. I could barely make a sound [laughter]. But I knew it was either the jungle or survive. So, I practiced forty hours a week, literally forty hours a week of practicing the oboe. It wore me out. I was proficient enough to pass the midterm, and I got sent to Ft. Riley. That got me to K-State [Kansas State University].

When I got out of the Army, I could have gone to any college in the country on in-state tuition when you come out of the Army. So, I did the right thing. I walked across the street and enrolled at K-State, which I was very happy to have done. I was married at the time. My son was born there. That got me then into journalism through that transition.

JM: I was going to ask you about that. You’re freight-training through this. Some of this is very interesting stuff. You spent the Vietnam years playing the oboe on the Ft. Riley post?

DG: Yes, we went to Germany a couple of times on something called Reforger. That’s the only time we left the country. I was really happy to have avoided doing anything else. I had great admiration for those who did. That was a bad time. We hated the military. We were in the band, and at that time, everybody got drafted. So, the most incredible musicians were in the Army band. You met just talented people, but I was I guess today you’d call it radicalized. I was drinking beer at Mel’s Tavern with other band members in that era, and they showed me the light – that Vietnam was a bad thing. It wasn’t something to be supportive of.

So, I turned completely. All we tried to do was survive. One of the happiest moments of my life to this day was driving off Ft. Riley, being shed of the Army, and went on to K-State.

JM: Did that radicalization, is that what triggered your interest in journalism?

DG: Actually, it’s a very direct connection. My best friend in the Army at that time was a guy named Steve Kelly, very radical in that regard, in the band. He was a French horn player. But we also had a choir. They made us form a choir. We sang for Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense, when he came there. One of the songs we had to sing was the Army song, and the lyrics to the Army song are, one of them, “Faith in God, then you’re right.” I’m standing next to my buddy, Steve Kelly, and he just stopped singing. The band master at the time saw that, and he said, “Why aren’t you singing?” He said, “I can’t say that.” He objected. Well, they court-martialed him.

JM: For that?

DG: For that. It was a national case. You can look it up. There were a couple of guys from the Ft. Riley band that were conscientious objectors like that. So, I’m watching that trial every day, and I thought, “This should be covered.” So, I called the K-State journalism department and talked to people at The [Kansas State] Collegian. “There’s a great story here.”

Well, they didn’t respond. But at that moment, I realized that’s what the role of the press can be. That’s where there’s an opportunity to influence people in a way like that. So, that triggered me. I enrolled at K-State. I was a terrible writer at the time. Roberta Applegate, the professor at that time, told me she didn’t think I’d ever survive. I learned how to write.

JM: Just like the oboe.

DG: Just like the oboe. But that’s what triggered my interest. Watergate was going on at the time. I became for The Collegian the McGovern columnist. David Chartrand, you may remember him from that time—

JM: I do remember him, sure.

DG: He was the Nixon columnist at the time. He went on to Kansas City, a big soccer fan at that time. I think he may have passed on by now. [Interviewer note: Mr. Chartrand died in 2022.]  That was my start. I wrote a story for The Collegian about the ROTC program there. I was so biased at the time. We were free to say whatever we wanted at that time and pretty loose with our opinions.

JM: You wrote a column though.

DG: Yes. I was editorializing. It was kind of a quasi-column, a quasi-opinion. That got me interested in that kind of social justice approach. The whole thing about government was a big deal at that time. That triggered my entry into the profession.

JM: It’s interesting. In my notes, I had this conversation pegged for a little bit later in the conversation, but you just gave me a good segue into it in the sense that what triggered your interest in journalism was this notion of social justice. You’d been radicalized in the Army, blah, blah, blah. And so that kind of lends credence to this notion that there’s a progressive liberal bias to the media. What do you think about that?

DG: It’s true. It’s the old line of the New York Times, “We comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” So, you’re always going after the power structure because that’s where the power is, and that’s where the abuse of power is. You could dedicate your life to doing good stories, feel-good stories—NBC News at the end of every program now, “There’s good news tonight.” There’s some touchy-feely, make somebody feel good about it.

But you’re conditioned to look for controversy. You’re looking for conflict, controversy, and corruption. That puts you at odds with government all of the time. You’re perceived as liberal because you’re going against government.

JM: But even when the government is occupied by liberals, you’re still looking for the same kinds of stories.

DG: Yeah, you’re still looking for that.

JM: So, you’re at K-State, working at The Collegian, and we talked a little bit about your—this really is your origin story. To this day, I don’t know how many times I’ve been with you when you’re trying to talk somebody into—you see a story that other people don’t. You’re very persistent about trying to make them understand what the news is there. That story rings true to me.

So, you’re at The Collegian, and then you graduate from K-State.

DG: Cum laude because my 1.2 grade point average from my two years at a college in North Dakota didn’t transfer. The credits transferred but not the grades. So, I did really great the last two years. I got a diploma from K-State. I graduated cum laude. It’s rather interesting in itself.

From there, I was married. I had a child. I needed a job. I got a job at the Beatrice Daily Sun, my first job.

JM: Beatrice, Nebraska.

DG: Beatrice, Nebraska. I think my salary was like $102 week, but, you know, they were good times. I spent a year and a half there. Jim Suber, who we both know, was a journalist in Kansas.

JM: The Topeka Capital-Journal.

DG: And I met him.

JM: I sat across the desk from Jim Suber.

DG: That’s right. We both had that in common We were at K-State together. We were both veterans, and veterans just were separate from the student body. That two-year difference was such a big deal. We didn’t socialize with anybody.

But he remembered me. So, the job opened up at the Salina Journal, and he contacted me, and I got that job there, replacing John Marshall.

JM: Oh, sure.

DG: Who was my editor at the time, went on to be a great journalist, and he went on to be the Statehouse reporter, and I followed him to that job later on. So, it was just kind of this seam of connection that made it work.

JM: Earlier in this series, we talked to John Marshall, Dave Ranney, and Mike Shields all at the same time, all veteran Harris correspondents. We heard the story from John about how he was going to be the Statehouse reporter and was going up to work with Leroy Towns, and Leroy Towns unbeknownst to anybody else had agreed to be Governor Bennett’s press secretary, and John didn’t know it until he got here. We talked about that.

You talked about the Harris newspapers. You worked at the Salina Journal itself for quite a few years. Before you came to the Statehouse in 1982, something like that?

DG: Yes, ’82.

JM: We both got here about the same time.

DG: Yes. I remember you walking across the Statehouse Rotunda to greet me, one of the first people I met. I appreciated your reaching out to welcome a new reporter.

JM: I remember offering you to do commentary on the public radio stations. The one I remember the most, do you remember this one?

DG: Oh, yes. I’m sure the K-State—

JM: Before Bill Snyder, you shoot the cow. You did a story about how K-State should just give up football. You did a commentary for us on public radio.

DG: I did the column the year before. They finally beat North Texas State, broke their years-long losing streak. It was one of my moments I wish I could take back.

JM: So, 1982, you got here to the Statehouse, and you’re reporting for these Harris papers. Let’s talk about that for just a second. We’ve had—in previous interviews we’ve done this, but those were really good newspapers. We’re talking about the Hays newspaper, the Hutch newspaper, the Salina paper, Chanute, Parsons, Olathe for a time, Garden City, really important newspapers.

DG: They were. A point I make, and I get this from David Awbrey, who was the editorial page editor of the [Wichita] Eagle, retired. I see him now and again. We have long conversations about the past. He was on my show, Kansas Week, to start with, but he makes the point that we were in the golden era of journalism.

JM: Post-Watergate.

DG: Those papers were thriving. They were making so much money; they couldn’t count it all and we had powers as journalists that nobody had before. We had a free hand to do things much more. Now they’re just decimated. Newsrooms are decimated. There’s hardly anybody there. The press corps here is just a fraction of what it used to be. I thought it was a good point to be made. You’re right. That was an era where newspapers were king. People here in the Statehouse listened to them. People like Bill Meyer, Emerson Lynn, legendary publishers in our state, were sought out by senators, congressmen, they had their fingers on the pulse. And then it just kind of—things changed.

JM: Well, things changed. We could talk a little bit about what did change. But you mentioned some names there that I want to make sure people understand because Bill Meyer was the editor-publisher of the Marion Record, which is much in the news recently. It’s his son now who’s running the paper. But Bill was a veteran who came back to the small town in Kansas. He established that newspaper. He was a pillar in the community. The paper was a weekly newspaper, but it was an important publication.

Emerson Lynn, of course, The Iola Register, his daughter Susan now runs the paper. But you’re right. Every political figure coming on the scene who wanted to run for governor or congress, they went down to have a chat with Emerson Lynn in Iola because what he put into the paper mattered. Clyde Reed in Parsons, Bill Meyer in Manhattan [Interviewer note: Bill Meyer was in Marion, not Manhattan.]. Dave Seaton in Winfield—there were others around the state, but those papers for the most part, they’re a lot of family-owned papers, but the chain—even the Harris chain, they put resources into journalism.

DG: They did.

JM: And they were making money.

DG: They made so much money, the last year was the year I left to go to Topeka, they had a profit-sharing plan, a great thing for the employees. They made so much money, they had to go back and distribute twice to them. There was just so much money involved in that.

I guess that was one of the triggers for me leaving and going to public TV. There was a change coming. They were getting ready to sell all of those papers. They were all going to cash in, and that was kind of tragic. It marked the end of an era, I think, for the most part.

Going back even before that, people like Whitley Austin at the Salina Journal, when they wrote something, it was up here. Everybody read it. Everybody paid attention. They didn’t want to mess with them. Stu Awbrey, David’s father at the [Hutchinson] News, was that way. It was a great era. We’re just glad to be a part of it, I guess.

JM: Yes, I would agree with you. That time that we were here at the Statehouse, the early eighties through the mid-nineties and so forth was a very different time than it is today. You mentioned the Statehouse press corps was very robust there. Every Wichita television station had a dedicated Statehouse reporter. Both Topeka stations did the same. Kansas City was here. The stations were here regularly. The Kansas City Star, The Kansas City Times had two or three people. The AP [Associated Press] Bureau was three people, four during the session. The UPI [United Press International] Bureau, your wife Lori Linenberger was a mainstay there. Even WREN Radio had a dedicated Statehouse reporter.

DG: That’s right.

JM: The Statehouse press corps at the time was large because there was a perceived interest in everything that was going on here.

DG: Yes. More importantly, there were so many of us that I take credit for organizing the Statehouse softball team, which was the highlight of our week usually. That was a talent pool you could draw from. You couldn’t do that today. You couldn’t have a tennis team.

JM: Mary Horsch, now Mary Tritsch, who was the reporter for Channel 27 was a very good pitcher. I remember that. I think that plays into what we’re talking about here about the atmosphere of the Statehouse. We had a softball team made up of the reporters of the press corps, and we played the governor’s office. We played the secretary of state. We played the attorney general’s office. The governor, Governor Carlin at the time, would stack his team with highway patrolmen. Do you remember that? We’d go up to Cedar Crest, and we’d play softball on the lawn at Cedar Crest. It was a great atmosphere here then.

DG: But there was a relationship between—what stands out is Bill Hoch, Mike Swenson, press secretary and chief of staff for Governor Carlin—every morning, we’re here as reporters. We go up to his office. All the reporters are there. There’s this banter going on. There’s this sharing of information. A lot of trust, the social element that was there that kind of went away. When Mike Hayden got elected he was a different kind of cat. He had different people, and they weren’t as receptive to the press as it was then. That kind of changed the way—maybe that was the inception of this kind of pushback against media that we live today where the right wing hates us, hates the media, and there’s a lot of mistrust. But before that, you’re right. There was a social element that was big.

JM: But even with Governor Hayden, it was certainly milder then.

DG: Oh, yes.

JM: I remember, he invited the whole press corps out to watch the Super Bowl in the basement of Cedar Crest.

DG: I remember going to that party. You’d go to the front door. Carlin’s gone. [Hayden’s] there, holding the front door is this big shaggy yellow dog. “Yep, things have changed a little bit here.”

JM: And Cedar Crest before, when Governor Graves came along, he and his wife Linda completely remodeled Cedar Crest. But, in those days, it needed a little refurbishing.

DG: It was rough.

JM: Remember when we were in that basement? It wasn’t too opulent for sure.

DG: No.

JM: I would agree with you. Things were different. It was very much less partisan. There was a lot of socializing. There were lots of parties. People of all political persuasions would gather and have a good time together. As such I think partly because of that, I think this place worked pretty well at the time.

DG: It seemed to. I think you’re right. There were things that were accomplished then that you couldn’t do today, given the polarization and the—it was a different time. There was a—it struck us that when the abortion movement took place, the Summer of Mercy, and then all those people showed up here. It’s kind of like they lost their sense of humor in some ways. You couldn’t laugh about things like that. You couldn’t joke with them. They were not party people. It was just a different environment.

It may be different now. I don’t know. I’ve been gone for too long to know what goes on here, but that’s exactly right.

JM: In the podcast we did, we pegged the Summer of Mercy protests in Wichita, the abortion protests as kind of the beginning of some change because what happened is social conservatives took over the Sedgwick County Republican Party, and then later the state party. That led to Sam Brownback’s election [as governor] in 2010. So, there was a sea change along there. Like anything else, it was probably gradually growing and then all of a sudden, it seemed much different.

But I still remember those days. We really did—I thought of this place as its own kind of Kansas small town. Everybody represented here. The rural-urban divide was pronounced, but it wasn’t so much conservative versus—progressive versus moderate in those days.

DG: No, and there seemed to be great stature. We’ve talked about this, the level of oratory that took place on the Senate floor, people like Ed Reilly who would get his hair done the day before a big debate on capital punishment.

JM: Frank Gaines, Mike Johnston, and Tom Rehorn.

DG: They could get up. They were stem winders. They could speak. I remember the transition to Audrey Langworthy and a couple of those, and there’s an abortion debate going on on the floor, and they just didn’t have the chops for it. It wasn’t that drama of oratory that was unique to their—there have been folks since then, but it just seemed like those were different.

JM: I’m curious. What do you remember about the time you were at the Statehouse in terms of the people and issues, stories that you did?

DG: The thing that you mentioned about Harris News Service, Dave Ranney, our good friend and a member of the press corps at the time always talked about the Harris model. You do stories that other people wouldn’t necessarily look at. I had that freedom. I didn’t do the day-to-day grist of the mill thing.

JM: They had the wire service for that.

DG: Yes, we were supposed to do unique stuff. I thought the best opportunity usually was after the session. You looked at what they passed. You looked at how it was implemented. You looked for controversy. You looked for contradictions. You passed a bill, and you’re doing something else different. Those were the kinds of stories—I was deeply involved in covering nursing home—Petey Cerf, the great legendary woman from Lawrence who was a champion—she was part of the Hershey—

JM: Kansans for [the Improvement of] Nursing Homes.

DG: KINH, a great lady. So, I followed a lot of it. Ruben Krisztal was an attorney who carried that banner. I focused on that, a lot of water issues. I remember chasing the state—Carlin and his staff around the state to the various water meetings. They were developing the water plan. It was going to be a big deal. They always said, “This water is going to be the next oil.” They never quite got that far. We’re still talking about it.

JM: But he created the—we’ll have to check this, but the Water Office.

DG: Yes, Joe Harkins.

JM: That was also a big issue with Mike Hayden.

DG: That was and Mike was a tremendous environmentalist behind that kind of gruff, tough, right-wing thing. He really had a solid foundation in the environment and in human issues. He kind of missed his opportunity I think to do more at that time. If he had been more the person then that he is now.

JM: I think he suffered some political misfortune since he had to implement all of those constitutional amendments, which gave rise to some controversy about property taxes, etc. He didn’t have a chance to have a second term to do some of those things. He had a big plan, I think, going into office. Our friend, the gentleman who was involved in Governor Bennett’s administration who was then with Mike Hayden—Ed Flentje, of course. They had a whole plan ready to go, and they just didn’t have the time to implement it.

DG: Ed’s a good example of the transition that took place. He was chief of staff for Hayden, or something similar to that, very notable, hated the press. We hated him. He hated the women particularly. My wife was a reporter for the UPI. Liz Leech, Betty Lumens, and Barbara Rosewicz. As that era comes and goes, Ed moves to Wichita, and I meet up with him later on. Now he’s the king of commentary on more of the liberal persuasion of politics, very critical of people like Brownback particularly in that era. So, things changed that much. People didn’t change; the issues just changed so much up here.

JM: The issues of focus. As we know, the Kansas tradition, Kansas has always been for the most part a Republican state. But it was moderate Republicans for the most part who held sway here for many, many years, and that did change, of course.

I remember this very well—I remember helping you move. In 1989, you got this opportunity to go to Wichita and to start a new television program on the public television station there. We talked about how—the origin story there. What happened?

DG: The reason I had that opportunity was because of our Harris agenda. We covered public television because public television was big out in western Kansas, and Topeka, the Kansas City area. Public TV was a big deal.

So, I covered those meetings. I covered those hearings about funding it. I got to know the manager of KPTS, Zoel Parenteau. He had a real vision about there was going to be this program that was going to be like Washington Week in Review, but it was going to be dealing with the fundamental issues of Kansas with the journalists at the table. They decided—they didn’t have a lot of money. It was a gamble for them to do it, but I applied for it. I got the job. I went to Wichita, got settled up. I had to recruit people first. I had to have journalists.

You know, journalists aren’t very Socialist—they’re very Socialist actually, but sociable sometimes. I had to meet people I hadn’t met before. And John Marshall directed me to people like Emerson Lynn, David Seaton. So, first I had to get that cadre together. These folks were—you couldn’t participate because you were in radio.

JM: I remember that. It was public radio, Dale.

DG: So, Zoel and the program director, Jim Lewis at the time said, “No broadcast media will be allowed the show.”

JM: Only print media.

DG: Only print media. I thought that was a really stupid idea. But that was my job. So, I started out with those folks. We went six months in rehearsal from January until June or July we started the show. These folks would come from—I remember Jim Bloom driving from Garden City, Kansas for rehearsal.

JM: Jim Bloom was at the Garden City Telegraph.

DG: He was the Hutch News editor at the end. He was the publisher of the Hutch News, the publisher of the Garden City Telegram. Then he was at Garden City. The effort they put in was just mind-boggling to me. These people were so interested not just for their own self-aggrandizement. I think they wanted to be a part of this sharing of information with the public in a different media, and it was remarkable what they did.

We had basically very little resources. One of the things we’ll talk about is how the change in media when I took that job, my routine was I took every newspaper in the state I could. They were delivered, the hardcore newspaper, I would clip articles out, created a library. I picked the topics. I pasted them together, photocopy them, sent out a packet to the journalists so they knew what they were talking about. That was the routine.

I would have loved to have had video at that time to illustrate the stories which now is just commonplace. Back then, it wasn’t possible. Do you remember Bernie Koch, the reporter for Wichita Eagle—no, for KAKE, for Channel 10, and their methodology at the time was  he’d shoot video up here and go to the turnpike, hand the tape to somebody with a Sedgwick County tag, say drop it off in Wichita, and that worked. We didn’t have that opportunity.

JM: I was talking to somebody the other day. I can’t remember, maybe only one or two instances where the tape didn’t arrive in Wichita.

DG: It was remarkable.

JM: They literally had to ask people as they came to the terminal, “Will you drive this to Wichita and drop it off?” For the most part, it got there.

DG: When you talk about change though, that is one of the most dramatic things in that era, the digital era. When it showed up, if I wanted to get a piece of tape from Topeka, from one of the stations, the technology was there to do it, but it would have taken all night to transmit like a three-minute piece. Now, you pick up the phone, and there’s video all over the place.

JM: It would be a microwave or something.

DG: That was one of the notable accomplishments of that era. I’ll just take a minute and talk about public television at that time in Kansas. It really was a bad model. We had stations in Topeka, Wichita, radio stations in Pittsburg—

JM: That was later though. It was basically KPR in Lawrence, and KMUW in Wichita.

DG: Then they started Smoky Hills Public Television in western Kansas, all independent stations. And the missed opportunity was to have combined that at some point. They should still do it today for that matter. Nebraska and Oklahoma have wonderful statewide networks, but here there was that independent—I had the idea of what we were going to do. We were going to create a microwave network, get the legislature to pay for it, that will connect all three stations in Kansas. Kansas City would not participate because they had their own little world there in Missouri.

It was a big battle over money. Bill Graves was governor at the time. But I thought, “If we could get this microwave network, my show Kansas Week would be on live all across the state. We were the only network that could do that.

Bill Graves was a hero back then. I really crossed a lot of lines getting the money for that. We had to have a grant—I forget what it was, $80,000 to put the network in. The managers were fighting us on it. They didn’t really want us to have that. They were resentful of the status we had with Kansas Week being a player up here in this Statehouse. That really rubbed them raw, but we pushed ahead. Bill Graves, I went to meet with him, he said, “I’ll put it in the budget.” When I went to the floor of the House—as a journalist, I could go on the floor—Eddie McKechnie—

JM: From Pittsburg.

DG: A legislator, a good guy, a Democrat, but I’m down there on the floor, and he comes screaming down, “You can’t be here. You’re a lobbyist. You’re lobbying for money.” I said, “Yeah, I am,” but I just kind of ignored him, and everybody else ignored him. We got the money.

Graves approved the money. It went to the Public Broadcast Council, and they refused to spend it as we wanted. They were going to take the money and do something else with it. So, Graves’s press secretary—

JM: Mike Matson.

DG: Mike Matson called me at Channel 8, and he said, “The governor wants to know if you like this.” I said, “No, veto it because it’s not what we wanted.” So, he vetoed it. We go back to the veto session, sit down with Dave Kerr, the senator from Hutchinson, the chairman of Senate Ways and Means, and I said, “Kansas City is screwing us.” Under the formula of public broadcasting, grants were awarded to the stations. I think 50 percent of your costs would be paid by the state, and Kansas City because they were in Missouri could only get 25 percent.

Well, the digital era was coming. Everybody was converting to digital, very expensive. At that time, Bill Reed, the director of the Kansas City station, changed the rules. He said, “We’re taking 50 percent.” They were the first station to go digital in Missouri.

I sat down with Dave Kerr and said, “Here’s what’s going on. They’re screwing us. They’re taking our money,” and he said, “I’m going to call Bill Reed.” I had to walk out. He called Bill Reed and said, “Is it true you’re taking 50 percent of the money? He said, “Yes.” He said, “We’ll never do it again.”

So, the bill came back up. The money was approved the way we wanted it. We put the microwave network in. That started a really interesting era of public TV for me then. Now we were statewide.

JM: What year would that have been? How far was your tenure?

DG: Well, Graves was governor. So, ’90-something.

JM: So, your show started to air then live on KTWU in Topeka.

DG: From the beginning when we started, we got—Topeka agreed to run the show, but we had a VHS tape or whatever format it was. They would show it like on the following Sunday maybe, but they agreed to do it.  Dale Anderson–

JM: I remember Dale.

DG: He was sympathetic to our cause. Bill Reed was not, the Public Western Kansas folks weren’t. So, we had Topeka and Wichita carrying that show. Topeka, that station picked up most of Johnson County and Wyandotte County. So, we pretty much had that whole area of the state.

But when we got the microwave, then we could put it on all three stations at the same time. They went along with that. That was some tough moments starting out because the technology was really weak. Poor Anthony Hensley, Senator Hensley from—

JM: Topeka.

DG: The Senate minority leader.

JM: Correct.

DG: The first two times—

JM: In those days, he was in the House.

DG: We had a little studio in the Statehouse where they’d go sit in that little room there.

JM: I remember.

DG: Both times, the technology just failed. He’s sitting there, talking. We can’t hear him. He can’t hear us. But slowly, it got better. It became a real model. What it led to was our ability to do a program called Ask Your Legislator, which I wasn’t really crazy about doing, but our new director at the time, Don Checots, wanted to do it, a call-in show. The public gets to call in. I said, “Okay, we’ll do it.”

I was amazed at how that became so popular with legislators. They crave attention so much.

JM: That’s a change, too, because they wanted to be on your program.

DG: Absolutely.

JM: You didn’t screen the calls. They didn’t know what was coming. Yet they wanted to be on the show.

DG: There was an element of trust there. I take some credit for creating—it was during the Graves’s era. The abortion movement was exploding.

JM: Just starting.

DG: Graves was going to run against David Miller in the primary from Eudora, a House member. That was the split, the pro-choice and pro-life.

So, I got the proponents together, Jack Ranson was a—

JM: We’re throwing out a lot of names in here. Jack Ranson was a very influential Republican in Wichita.

DG: Pro-choice.

JM: That’s right. His wife was a state senator.

DG: Yes, Pat Ranson. And I had Cindy Duckett who was a local activist, a good lady, very anti-abortion. So, I said, “You come to the station. We’re going to sit down and talk about how we’re going to carry—I want both sides represented.” They were very amenable to that. They sat in that room. They looked at each other, just glowering like these were people who hated each other. They kept talking. When I walked out, they were still talking, and they realized they had more in common—they were on the same page on education. I think that helped create an environment where they trusted us. When they came on the show, they had a free hand to talk the way they wanted to and didn’t mind being on with the other side, which was a constructive moment.

I don’t see that much now. We don’t see the two sides engaged in constructive dialogue.

JM: Real conversation. It’s funny because thank goodness, I eventually made my way to the newspaper business. Then I got on your show.

DG: No, I think actually we had a change of regime at Channel 8. You were still in radio. I thought, “Thank god.” The most talented people to be on the air are people who are on air. That was a godsend to have someone of your talent come in.

JM: Listen, I loved coming down there. Absent the ability to be on that show, I never would have known people like Emerson Lynn, Dave Seaton, Bill Felber. Those people—I learned a lot from them. We would go out after the show—and David Aubrey, I include in that group as well. That was a real godsend for me. I enjoyed every minute of it. None of us were paid, but we all clamored to be on the program. Do you remember the time, I hate to insert this, but you did the show on Friday nights. When I was at the Topeka paper, I’d have to finish my daily story and then finish my Sunday story. I got on the road, and I knew I was getting on the road late to come down and do your show, which was live. What time did the show air?

DG: 8:00.

JM: I knew I’d be late. I got stuck behind a train just coming into Wichita. The show started, and I’m not there yet. I still remember walking on the set about ten minutes into the show.

DG: That was a common problem. David Haley, Senator Haley from Wyandotte County, running for secretary of state. We were going to do a show with him. He comes down. He couldn’t find the station. He was driving all over. He missed the show. I’m calling him, and he couldn’t—Sherriene Jones, a good reporter for KSNT, I think.

JM: And become Governor Brownback’s press secretary.

DG: Yes. I wanted female reporters. I couldn’t get enough women to come on the show. I didn’t want to be that undisciplined in our roster, but she would drive down from Topeka. This was a commentary about electronic media. She was going to come down after “The State of the State.” She was going to come down and do the show and talk about “The State of the State.”

It snowed that morning in Topeka, and the station said, “You can’t go. You have to cover this snowfall.” That put things at risk a lot. But she had trouble finding the station any number of times, too. It’s what we lived with at the time.

Then once we had the interconnection, I could put people on in Topeka with the microwave. They could be on remotely, and that was a big step forward.

JM: I don’t think I did this for very long, but I did a daily update from that little blue room.

DG: Yes.

JM: Do you remember, about two or three minutes, that they would insert into—

DG: Into the program. We tried to—

JM: That was the nightly PBS news broadcast. You had a little adjacency or something.

DG: I think we did have a little blurb.

JM: I did like a minute and a half thing.

DG: That was our effort to try to be more timely and topical

JM: I didn’t have a teleprompter. So, I had to memorize the copy.

DG: Well, you had the talent to do that. There were some great people we had on there. There were some folks that should have never been near a TV camera that were on. They couldn’t sustain a conversation for ten minutes.

I wanted to branch out and start a weekly show. I told the program director, “I want to start an interview program.” He said, “Okay, we’ll start an interview program. We’ll call it Kansas Week Focus.” I brought in a lot of notable folks: Pat Roberts, Brownback was on, and two of the worst shows I ever did though, one was with Ron Todd.  Ron Todd succeeded Fletcher Bell as insurance commissioner. Ron was a tall—

JM: A lanky guy.

DG: Lanky is a good way to describe it. He wanted desperately to do that show. There was something about validation in doing that. So, he comes on. I interview him. It was like pulling teeth. He couldn’t put two sentences together, and he had nothing really to say, but he wanted to be there so bad.  I saw Buzz Merritt, the editor of the Wichita Eagle the next week. He looked at me and said, “That’s the worst half-hour of TV I’ve ever seen.” I had to agree.

The other bad one was the hog farmer from Manhattan that my good friend, Paul Johnson, a great lobbyist up here for housing and social issues.

JM: Oh, yes.

DG: A great fellow and environmental stuff. He said, “This guy has got a lot of innovations in hog farming. He’d be a great interview about environmental stuff.” I said okay. This was worse. He could not speak about anything. If you’re facing thirty minutes interviewing somebody who cannot sustain any conversation, it’s a long time.

JM: I have nightmares about stuff like that, like being on the air with no copy and nothing to say.

DG: We share that.

JM: That was a great program, Dale, and I think it really was influential. It was groundbreaking in its own way.

DG: It’s too bad it didn’t evolve into more, into that statewide network thing. The shows you see in Oklahoma and in Nebraska, that high-level journalism—actually, I shouldn’t—everybody has fallen on hard times in public broadcasting with the political climate but there was such a need for some unbiased, comprehensive reporting, something a little beyond just the sensational, and it could have been more, but I think it was constructive up to that point.

JM: One of the arguments that was made in the face of the recent cuts to public broadcasting was how they serve rural areas. Bunker Hill is a good example of that, a little tiny hamlet in Kansas out there by Hays. Jerry Moran would regularly go on the air there when he was the House representative. The public stations serve areas where there is no commercial television.

DG: And I have to give a shout-out to a lady named Kathy Holt.

JM: Oh, sure.

DG: Who is in Cimarron, Kansas, runs the Cimarron Hotel. She’s been in public broadcasting, governance, and the boards forever and ever, a great lady. She raised more money. She got that going. She got that station going. She sustained the funding for it. She’s just a remarkable person.

JM: As luck would have it, she’s on the Kansas Oral History Project Board as well.

DG: We go out there to play golf, and I’ll stop in to see her. But people like that made it happen. They were such heroes going above and beyond, just for the sake of doing the right thing.

JM: Wasn’t one of the best things about being a journalist at the time that we were is 1) just the people you met along the way.

DG: Yes.

JM: We’re throwing out name after name after name here, but you got to know people all over the state. The political environment, the social environment of Kansas was such that I always said there were maybe two degrees of separation. If you meet somebody anywhere in Kansas, you’re going to know somebody in common.

DG: In two minutes, you’re going to find that.

JM: I just love that about the state.

DG: That’s true. The other element of program that we developed in that period of time was documentaries, mini documentaries. You could find basic funding, AARP and Mary Horsch  helped give us a grant that did a program on grandparents raising grandchildren. It was a very rewarding thing to do. We did some music programs for music education. There was a need for that, and there really isn’t that. There isn’t that component of electronic journalism that goes into depth, not like a 60 Minutes thing, and that’s too bad. Those stories are there. You know they’re there. You do a great job with the news service. The philanthropic news coverage now has become a great contributor to that, but there’s just a whole lot more need for that.

JM: I think long-form journalism, whether it be print or documentary or long-form reporting on public radio, that’s gone by the wayside. We can talk a lot about the reasons for it: social media, attention spans getting shorter, that kind of thing, and competition for people, clicks and all that kind of thing. It has made a difference. The media environment is so much different now than it was when you and I got our start. But the point of this is you evolved to some degree by starting that program. That was a pioneering effort.

DG: I give credit to Zoel and Jim Lewis for having that vision, taking a chance on starting something like that. There was a lot of status for them politically to do that in that environment, but you’re right. There was a moment where it may have—and that program still survives. Pilar Pedraza at Channel 10 took it over and ran it for a long time, greatly improved it with video packages, more coverage.

Unfortunately, when I left, the microwave network went away because there wasn’t anybody to sustain it. I made a deal the year before with Lee Tafanelli who was the head of the National Guard—

JM: Who was later adjutant general.

DG: Adjutant general, that was his title. I went to him and said, “Here’s the deal. We have this network. We’ll let you take the network in a time of crisis.”

JM: Emergency.

DG: And if you envision COVID, that came really close. “What you’ll have is the opportunity to be on every TV in the state” because that microwave network through Smoky Hills and western Kansas, Topeka, and Wichita virtually covered the whole state. And he said, “Okay.” So, they paid the network. In exchange if something happened, they would take over the network as the communications— means of communicating to the public.

Well, that disappeared when I left the station, which is kind of sad. That could have been a really solid foundation for an ongoing mechanism to do news.

JM: Which creates a segue—you left the station in roughly 2006, something like that?

DG: Yes, I think so.

JM: And you went to work for the City of Wichita as their government affairs director, which meant you essentially were the city’s lobbyist, too.

DG: Right.

JM: Why’d you do that?

DG: Well, I’d been there seventeen years, and it wasn’t going to really go further than that. When I left the Statehouse to become the TV person, newspapers were declining. It just seemed like a good time to move on. It was kind of the same thing. I was getting near the end of my career. I would make a lot more money as a lobbyist for the City of Wichita than I was for doing public TV. And in a way, there was a commonality to the positions. You had to be bipartisan. If the city had a legislative agenda, you had to be courting Republicans and Democrats. You had to stay pretty pure in that regard. You couldn’t be opinionated, not unlike when you’re a journalist.

JM: You’re nonpartisan when you’re a journalist, bipartisan when you’re a lobbyist, but the same thing.

DG: But you had mentioned about the difference—I was in the Statehouse for all those years, first as a reporter, and then in the era of public TV, and in the first two weeks as a lobbyist, I learned more about the legislative session—the things that go on, the things you have to do to get things passed, that old thing about how a bill becomes a law.

JM: I was going to ask you about that—what you did learn as a lobbyist about the policy-making process.

DG: There was a time when I was working for the Kansas World Trade Center in Wichita—this great lady named Karyn Page ran it—promoted trade as a way to expand the economy. She wanted to get a grant from the state so they could really expand, do this in a big time. I worked with Gene Suellentrop at the time. He was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee from Wichita. I sat down with him and Karyn. He bought into the idea. The chairman of the Ways and Means at the time was Ty Masterson from Wichita in the Senate. At the end of the session, you know how it works, there’s two guys who sit down and pretty much decide who’s going to get funded.

So, we had gone to both of them. We’re sitting up there, and they came out, and we got $200,000 for her project. That’s how a bill becomes law. Two people sit down and say, “You’ve got the money.”

JM: The right people.

DG: The right people.

JM: You get them to buy in. But as a lobbyist for the City of Wichita, there are lobbyists in this building who work for big corporations who have a lot of money to throw around. You didn’t have that.

DG: No, but I was supported really well by the manager who eventually laid me off because he didn’t like me very much, but we did the wining and dining thing to some extent. It was more of a social—you had to have relationships. The big deal was you have to have relationships with legislators and trust, but that sometimes comes by a social environment.

Every Wednesday here at that time, the Senate Suites would have a reception. We all sponsored it.

JM: We all—do you mean—

DG: Lobbyists.

JM: A group of lobbyists.

DG: I bought into it. I bought into it. They let me do that. And Melvin Neufeld from Ingalls who used to be speaker of the House, now he was just a legislator, but he was on the Tax Committee, chairman I think of the Tax Committee. I wanted this bill passed that had some tax credit that affected the city. It was a good thing. It was going nowhere. It was just gummed down at the end. I sat down with Melvin, and we had a few drinks in the Senate Suites. The next morning, go see Melvin, “It’s good to go.” That smoothed the path, but that’s how you got things done. You had to develop that kind of personal trust.

JM: That’s funny. As a reporter, you have a sense that that’s how things get done. You’re always trying to figure it out so you can do that big expose about the lobbyist who throws a little money around, knows the right guy, gets something done that’s against the public interest.

DG: No, my issues were—I thought very altruistic: the city’s agenda is the public agenda. It’s things done on behalf of the general public. That same influence peddling going on with issues that aren’t so touchy-feely good. There are things that line people’s pockets or create power.

JM: As a member of the lobbyist community, you saw a lot of that, too, probably.

DG: More than you really want. I was not as much—there was a certain separation. Mike Taylor who had my job at the city beforehand, went to Wyandotte County. He could speak out more on some of these issues. The legislature was at odds with the League of Municipalities at that time. Before that, there was the one-armed guy that ran the League of Municipalities. I bet Dave remembers his name. He had a great relationship with the legislators.

JM: I very much remember him.

DG: He would come over here, and he’d talk to legislators and the cities got their agenda. When the right wing came in more, they weren’t so friendly.

Ernie Mosher.

JM: Yeah. OK.

DG: And he left and the guy that took over was not a popular guy in the legislature. The attitude about local government I just thought was so strange. You go to City Council. They’re all the same Republicans. They have an agenda. Then you bring it to Topeka, and they hate you. They’re resentful of local government, and they’re pretty much always going to dig their heels in and not give you—there was just that dynamic that I never really understood why that was the case.

JM: Many, many years ago, a lot of the guys who ended up, a lot of the people, men and women, who ended up here as legislators served either on school boards or city commissions or county commissions, and maybe that’s not so much the case anymore.

DG: I think that’s a very valid point. I don’t think that background lives there—back in those days when I was in Salina, people, there were prominent lawyers that would be representing the community. That kind of changed. There were more of the great unwashed.

JM: I’m going to throw another name in, a guy by the name of Bob Harder, Robert Harder. He was the longest-running cabinet secretary in the state for social rehabilitation services. He was a legislator then a cabinet secretary under Docking right on through. He used to say that. He used to tell stories about law firms in the state. When you became a junior partner and a member of a law firm, there was an expectation that you do some sort of public service. You ran for the legislature. You did this and that. He would say what happened in those days is that you would make your reputation locally, and you were rewarded by being sent to the legislature. I think that did change. People came here to establish their political identities and didn’t do the local service as much.

DG: I think that’s true. Bob Harder was a great man. When he was the secretary of health and human—

JM: Social rehabilitation services.

DG: You couldn’t get a word out of him as a reporter. He was as tightlipped as he could be. He said, “I’ll tell you what you need to know.” Then he moved on.

JM: Taciturn.

DG: Taciturn, okay, good word. Then he became a lobbyist on behalf of those causes, and then you couldn’t get enough of him

JM: He became a lobbyist for the League of Women Voters. Do you remember when he was secretary of social and rehabilitation services khaki pants and a blue blazer. That’s all he wore, and he rode a bike to work. A very interesting man.

DG: The lobbying corps, there was a division, the folks who were chasing social issues, Sister—

JM: Sister Therese.

DG: What a tremendous lady. We had different religious perspectives, but we could talk forever. She was so well grounded.

JM: She’s still around.

DG: She’s still around? Isn’t it Bangert? Isn’t that her name?

JM: Bangert, yeah.  And Paul Johnson you mentioned.

DG: Paul Johnson, people like them, they were just doing it for the good of the people.

JM: Dan Nagengast, the Rural Center.

DG: Yes.

DG: Those kind of people, one thing that’s happened as far as the lobbying side for the city—the city decided to privatize lobbying. That’s when I was laid off. So, they contracted. What I learned about contract lobbyists in that era is there’s often not a greater waste of money than to spend money on contract lobbyists who come up here, and they kind of portray back home that they’re movers and shakers. They call it boots on the ground and they’re up here just schmoozing people.

DG: When I took the job at Channel 8, [Interviewer note: Goter meant to say “city of Wichita”, not Channel 8.] the first time I went out with two or three other local lobbyists—I’m not going to say their names. I don’t want to get in trouble, but we played golf, and the one guy, my predecessor said, “Here’s what you do. You go up there. Don’t say a word. Don’t do anything. Just let things happen.” I’m not that kind of guy.

JM: No, you’re not.

DG: We got cross ways in a lot of ways, but there was that kind of mentality that the people back home really don’t know what they’re missing. It was unfair to the public.

JM: People who watch these videos, I think many of them are pretty well schooled in the policy-making, in the political process. But the difference between—as the City of Wichita lobbyist, you worked for the City of Wichita. You represented the city’s interests here.

DG: Right.

JM: If you’re a contract lobbyist, you have multiple clients. Sometimes those clients, there’s conflicts of interest and all that because you have clients that are on both sides of a particular issue.

DG: And they’re always looking to get new clients, too.

JM: It’s a very different type of relationship.

DG: It is.

JM: You’re consulting your notes. Is there something—

DG: No. There is some of the anecdotal stuff that—

JM: We love anecdotes.

DG: In that era of public television and covering the Statehouse and elections, interactions with governor candidates I always thought, one of my favorite stories, David Miller is running against—

JM: Bill Graves in the Republican primary.

DG: The Republican primary. Bill is a guy who runs every day. He’s in tremendous shape. David’s a little bit pudgy, not quite as in shape. We’re going to do this August primary hour-long show on Channel 8. We didn’t think this through very well because our studio didn’t have air-conditioning in the studio itself. We could run air-conditioning from the building, but it was too loud. When you went on air, you had to turn it off.

JM: I remember that actually.

DG: I thought, “Good Lord, this is going to be troublesome here.” Okay. We’ll run one duct over the studio. Graves is standing here. Miller is standing here. We’ll put it right between them. The cold air will come down there.

We start the show. I look up. The vent is right on top of David Miller. He’s got all the cold air. And Bill Graves is just sitting there.

JM: Sweltering.

DG: He didn’t break a sweat. David Miller is drenched. We’re handing him Kleenexes, saying, “Wipe yourself off.” That just showed that being in good shape is a good thing. Graves captured that moment pretty much. After the show, David Miller came up to me and said, “How did I do?” I didn’t want to tell him, “You’re Richard Nixon.”

JM: I was going to say that’s the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, when Nixon is sweating up a storm.

DG: A couple of other anecdotes of that note: when Graves ran the second time, there was no Democrat to run except one guy had filed, Fred Phelps, the legendary homophobic terrible person. He would run for offices like that because he knew that you would get time on TV. You would get your time. So, the last day, Tom Sawyer, just recently the House minority leader, he’s been in the legislature—

JM: He’s been Minority Leader more than once.  House member from Wichita.

DG: Yes, from Wichita. He took a bullet. He went down there and filed for governor. So, we had a primary with him and Fred Phelps. Of course, he beat Fred Phelps. So, he’s running then in the general against Bill Graves. He had no shot. They’re good friends. We sat down at that debate; it was like two old buddies just talking about—he knew he had no chance.

JM: It wasn’t a debate.

DG: No, it wasn’t a debate. That often happened. Fred Phelps Jr. ran for—was it treasurer? One of those offices, and he ran against another guy from Topeka. They drove down together and then went on TV. That doesn’t happen in these days.

JM: I remember moderating debates with you. I remember one when Paul Feleciano, the state senator from Wichita and Brownback were running against one another for US Senate.

DG: At K State, from the great media center there. And Paul Feliciano telling us before, “I’m going to get him.” And the show started, and he was not saying a word.

JM: He wasn’t getting him.

DG: But he was a stem winder himself. He went up to Concordia during that great nuclear waste issue. There was a big controversy in north central Kansas, and he went up and talked to the crowd.

JM: This was Senator Feliciano?

DG: Yes. He was a great speaker, a great talent.

JM: The nuclear waste issue, there were several states involved in a compact, and they were trying to figure out where the low-level waste was going to be stored.

DG: That one and corporate hog farming was a big issue back in that era. Curt Schneider was the attorney general at the time. He came to Salina promoting that. Then he got caught in some compromising positions and kind of went away.

JM: Curt Schneider, the Democratic attorney, right. We covered a wide swath of Kansas history, Dale, in our careers starting in the seventies, right to the eighties and nineties.

DG: Yes. It was, as David Awbrey said, a golden era. I wouldn’t have traded that for anything. I was just fortunate to have that opportunity, meet people like you, and that kind of shapes your life going forward. I don’t know. I’m more liberal now, I think, than I was then. Now I’ve got the freedom to be a thorn in the side of the city and write columns every now and then. It’s much more of a pleasant environment.

JM: You say you’re more liberal now. I think this is an important topic whenever you’re talking to any reporter. We all have our personal views, but I remember you. I wasn’t sure if I could have figured out what your politics were when we first knew each other back then. You did a pretty good job not broadcasting that, no pun intended. You just did your job as a reporter. With some people, it was obvious, but with you, I don’t think it was.

DG: As a reporter here working for John Marshall who was my editor at the time, the best editor ever, at that time, the big story was Bob Stephan and the sexual harassment suit by Marcia Tomson against him. We worked that to death. I had a four-paragraph introduction for every story. We had the background. This happened, and then—

JM: A boilerplate that you would plug in every story.

DG: The big source was Marge Phelps, Fred’s daughter. They were suing him. He was the attorney for Marcia Tomson. It was kind of a strange time. We were much more—I wouldn’t call it opinionated. By virtue of what we chose to cover, we were seen as biased. We were going to cover this lawsuit.

Now, when I went to the city, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t pick and choose. You had to be much more—or on public television also. I couldn’t be a cheerleader for one side or the other. I think I became more balanced in that environment than in that period of time.

JM: That also had to do with the fact that you worked with Harris News. You didn’t want to duplicate the wire service.

DG: Right.

JM: You had to dig in and become more in-depth on certain things. You’re right. There was some license then to pick and choose the stories you covered.

DG: My highlight of that era was doing the story about Bob Dole’s—he was running for president, and his general finance chairman—no, actually he was his campaign manager, Dave Owen, the former—

JM: The former lieutenant governor.

DG: The former lieutenant governor. I ran that story. It was in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He spent a year in jail as a consequence of that.

JM: What was the story?

DG: It was about Bob Dole’s assets and a blind trust. David Owen, in the course of that, was manipulating that to a great extent. He got convicted of tax fraud in the end because he didn’t pay taxes on the little arrangements he made to make money. What I learned from that is the pack mentality of journalism. Here I am in a Hutchinson, Kansas newspaper, running the story, and I was getting calls from The New York Times, the Washington Post, about the story. They were just so desperate to be chasing the same thing. It was an interesting phenomenon that you see play out now—every big story starts with somebody.

JM: I had that personal experience later on when a story like that would pop up. I would be covering it locally. I got a lot of opportunity to do pieces for National Public Radio for that very same reason. There’s always been an interest in the political environment, in things that are happening in Kansas. People on both coasts see it as somehow representative of a certain slice of America, the stuff that’s happening.

DG: I’d like to think that’s still true. Sometimes, it’s kind of gone in the other direction. But I think there’s a respect for that work ethic of Kansas, the farmer. We’re an agricultural state in spite of what Johnson County might be. Now we’re going to be the Kansas City Chiefs’ state.

JM: You can look back at William Allen White who really got that started. He proclaimed that—

DG: Right.

JM: That things happened here first. Kansas had a very progressive reputation in those days.

DG: Yes, they were good times.

JM: Dale, it’s a delight every time I get a chance to talk to you. This has been a lot of fun for me. I really appreciate you spending time with me.

DG: I appreciate your interest in it. I hope this does some good somewhere, somehow.

JM: Me, too. Thank you.

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