Interview of Eber Phelps, July 26, 2024

Chris Courtwright: Good afternoon. Today is July 26th, 2024, and we’re here in the historic House Chamber of the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka, Kansas. I’m Chris Courtwright, who served for thirty-four years working as an economist in the Kansas Legislature in its nonpartisan research department before retiring in 2020. For full disclosure, Governor Kelly appointed me shortly thereafter to her bipartisan Council on Tax Reform.

Today, I am privileged to interview former Representative Eber Phelps, who served as a Democrat in the Kansas Legislature representing Ellis County and his beloved city of Hays for a total of eighteen years in two different stints, serving the 111th District, and has enjoyed a long, distinguished, and very fascinating career in the public sector. He was first elected in 1996 and served through 2012 and subsequently returned for another two-year term during an especially critical time that we will get to here in a few minutes, the 2017-2018 biennium.

Prior to being elected to his House seat the first time, he had served as mayor of Hays and on the city council. A graduate of St. Joseph’s Military Academy and Fort Hays State University, Ebert also proudly served as an ambassador for the US Army Reserve Corps for six years. A former House Minority Whip, he was known during his legislative career as a tireless advocate for all things education including K-12, higher education, and vocation and technical.

A longstanding community asset for Hays and the surrounding area, Eber has been heavily involved over the years with the Fort Hays State Alumni Association, the Ellis County Historical Society, and the Knights of Columbus. The city of Hays in fact honored him in 2000 with its Citizen of the Year Award.

Outside of his legislative duties, he served for many years in sales and marketing for the Glassman Corporation, an important regional mechanical contractor located in Hays. Did I get most of that right?

Eber Phelps: Absolutely. Very good.

CC: This interview with Mr. Phelps is conducted on behalf of the Kansas Oral History Project, a not-for-profit corporation created for the purpose of interviewing former legislators and significant leaders in state government, particularly those who served during the 1960s and subsequent decades. The interviews will be accessible to researchers, educators, historians, and the public through the KOHP website, ksoralhistory.org, and also the Kansas Historical Society and the State Library. Transcriptions are made possible as a result of the generosity of KOHP donors.

During your time in the legislature, you served on quite a number of committees, including the Education, Appropriations, Transportation, Taxation, Higher Education Budget, Local Government, and Aging and Long-Term Care Committees to name just a few, and you were a former ranking member on LEPC, the Health Care Stabilization and Overnight Committee, and the House Insurance Committee, the latter of which we’re going to delve into here in just a minute if that works for you. Did I cherry-pick most of the highlights there?

EP: Absolutely. I remember thinking back over the years. It’s kind of hard to remember all those committees, but every two years, a lot of times, you’d pick up a new committee. Just last night, I had forgotten all about the fact that I was on Agriculture, Tourism, and the Environment, and that was in my first session. Those were really good committees to be on at that particular time.

CC: Definitely a jack of all trades. Before we jump into your legislative career and committee work and big issues and whatnot, let’s briefly go back in time and fill in some of the prior history we mentioned and get some additional background. You are a native Kansan who in fact was born in Hays. Is that correct? Were you parents from the area?

EP: Actually, an interesting thing there is that my father was actually from England and came over to the United States when he was about twenty-five years old, I believe. And my mother was local. She was a Volga German. She was born and grew up in a little town south of Hays called Schoenchen, or as the Volga Germans said, Schoenstatt.

So it was kind of an interesting thing with my dad being British and ending up in that German community. He was born in 1901. When he was twenty-seven years old or whatever, that was when, it was post-World War I, and I think a lot of the young men from England came over to the United States seeking a better life. He came over with four other gentlemen.

Unfortunately, when I was young – he died when I was nine years old – there were a lot of questions I didn’t think about asking him. And then when I became high school age and all that, I was really curious. As I got into college, I was even more curious. I ended up going to England and looking up relatives and all that, who I’ve kept in contact with to this day.

CC: Fascinating. Tell us a little bit more about your time at the military academy and also Fort Hays. What were you majoring in? What kind of career were you interested in pursuing?

EP: Well, of course, the military school was established in Hays back in I think like 1938. They actually even had a junior college there, a two-year college. My mother was definitely fascinated with the school because of the military program. She was a single mother, widowed with four kids, and the youngest was myself. I think she thought, “This military school will really be good.” Not that I was out of control or anything.

At any rate, I went there. That was a great experience, lifelong friends because they had a resident program there. I was a day student, a day dog, and we had people from all over the United States and Central and South America. So it was a real eye-opening thing as far as meeting people from different cultures and so forth.

And then at Fort Hays, I started there right after high school and was pursuing a major in psychology. I really enjoyed that and wasn’t sure exactly what direction I was going to go with that, but as I mentioned, I was curious about where my dad was from and so forth. So I took a break from college, at least after one spring semester, I had gone over to Europe and did the whole backpacking trip around Europe and went to England and traced from old letters that I had from my dad from his sister, I found out where all my relatives were that were surviving at least.

I think it might have been on that trip where I suddenly realized, I said, “I’m not sure I want to be a psychologist.” And subsequently, I did come back to school, and the wanderlust was still there, and I ended up going back overseas for a real long time, about ten months, and traveled.  When I got done with that, I came back and ended up getting into private business and then subsequently sold that business and went overseas to work in the Middle East.

CC: Where did you work in the Middle East?

EP: My main duty station, I guess you could call it was where I was working was in a little country called Qatar. I worked there and did training there and also went to school and trained in Bahrain. Then along the way, I mainly worked there in the desert. I did a little offshore work, off the coast there of Bahrain.

Then I ended up later on doing a little stint on the west coast of Africa off the coast of Angola. That was out of my region. So it was kind of a special assignment. I went down there and worked. When I was done with that, I went back to the Middle East.

CC: And you worked for one of the big oil companies, is that correct?

EP: Actually, an oil field service company called Halliburton. They were huge. In those days, they were in about eighty-eight countries. They had a camp in Hays. I never did work for any company like that in the United States. My first foray into working in that kind of work was over in the Middle East, a little bit of baptism by fire.

CC: How long were you working for Halliburton in these different countries abroad?

EP: Oh, probably about six or seven—I think a little over six years.

CC: When you came back to the US, you apparently not too long thereafter got into public service. So I guess I would ask, did you have a favorite professor or mentor or anyone who encouraged you to get into public service, and had anyone in your family been in the political arena or public sector before you?

EP: I can answer that in several different ways. For one thing, if you can believe this, my father being British settled in Hays, and he eventually became a policeman, and then he was encouraged to run for sheriff of Ellis County. So he was elected—this was pretty amazing—elected sheriff on a write-in ballot and won in a landslide over an incumbent.

CC: Wow.

EP: I had the articles where I read that. It was pretty amazing. I always thought about that because I grew up—back in the day, I don’t know if it happens anymore, but they used to have the sheriff’s living quarters right in the courthouse. So when I grew up, I lived in the Ellis County Courthouse on the lower level. It was just an incredible experience to live there and going out and going to all the offices and just kind of hanging out in the Sheriff’s Office with my dad.

So that kind of was a—I don’t know if that encouraged me to run for politics, but my mother was always involved in the election ward and always stressed how important it was to vote and so forth. And then as time went on, I really didn’t have any college professor or anything that encouraged me to run for office, but there was a, interestingly enough, a gentleman that was an instructor at Fort Hays that was on the city commission. One day he mentioned to me that I ought to consider running for the city commission. And then you kind of mention that to one person, and it just kind of snowballs. So I ended up running for city commission in Hays.

CC: What year was this?

EP: 1990.

CC: 1990. How many years did you serve on the Hays City Council before you became Mayor Phelps?

EP: Well, our form of government there was a commission city manager. So the mayor was not elected at large from within the commission, and it’s based on your vote total. So every two years, there was an election, and three people would get elected, two to a four-year term and one to a two-year term. So that first election, I got elected to a four-year term. I was a commissioner for two years, and then that third year in 1993, I became the mayor.

CC: When you were mayor: water, streets, infrastructure, what were some of the big issues?

EP: Well, you hit on it there. Obviously, water was paramount. I always tell this story that as I was running for city commission, we had the other people running that ended up getting elected. We were always talking about the importance of water and maintaining that resource and looking at ways to increase our source of water. We had a very complicated water delivery system because we had wells on the Smoky Hill River and also on the Big Creek alluvium, and then we also had drilled some Dakota wells. We were talking about the importance of water, increasing our population, economic development, a lot of the usual hot-button issues I guess you could say for somebody running for office.

And lo and behold, we get elected, and I think it was at our first meeting, we’re all sitting there. We’re excited about being elected, and lo and behold, our city service director, I think that was his title, informed us that two of the wells on the Smoky Hill River were literally sucking air.

CC: Oh, my gosh.

EP: And so that kind of—oh, yeah, I know, when we were all around, we were all talking about being proactive. So this thing comes up with the water, with the wells there. But one of the things they did was reconfigure the wells because they were too close together, and when they pumped real hard,  that caused issues.

But then we transitioned right into water conservation mode, and we brought a gentleman in. I know he’s from California, and he was from an area that was land—I want to say “landlocked”—but they had big places around them. Any time you hear about water shortage in west Kansas, right away, a community will ban outside watering. Well, he came to us and said, “That’s fine for three months out of the year.” He said, “We use water every day?”

So his thing was to stress water conservation inside the home. We embarked on a program where we distributed 6,000 low-flow showerheads to anybody who came in and brought their old showerhead in. We restructured our water payment system and gave away aerators for the kitchen sinks and all that.

And then we did an educational process whereby the theory was you go teach the kids, and they’ll go home and teach their parents. So each commissioner was assigned a couple of schools, and we would go to the schools and do a visual where we had gallon jugs tied together to show what a cubic foot of water looked like, and we went around and talked about conservation and said how much water you’d save by having a low-flow showerhead and all that. And the kids would go home and tell their parents. I had parents come to me who said, “My son sits outside the shower with his watch telling me, ‘Dad, it’s time to get out of the shower’”

So it worked. The city of Hays reduced its water consumption by half.

CC: Wow.

EP: And that was unheard of. At the very beginning, communities around us were laughing at us. “Flush your toilet twice. Hays needs the water” or “Save water. Drink beer,” things like that. And then this gentleman from California told us, he said, “If you do all this and you’re successful,” he said, “you better have somebody on staff that just answers the phone and answers questions because everybody is going to be calling up and saying, ‘How did you do that?’”

And that goes on to this day where they say, “How did you do that water structure thing? How did you do the giveaway and all that?” And you say, “Get a good deal on low-flow showerheads and tell people to come in and bring their old showerhead in and trade it.”

CC: Really interesting. I have to tell you that I went to school at KU with a guy from Hays who always got a kick out of calling his hometown Hays, America. My impression was that that was something that the locals had come up with from a travel and tourism standpoint after someone had discovered there was no other city in the US named Hays and spelled exactly the same way. Is this ringing any bells for you? Was this clever branding attempt part of the local civic pride?

EP: Well, I kind of researched that a little bit, and I don’t know if this is true or not, but I was told that during World War II, a lot of young men from the Hays area answered the call, and they said there were several of the men who wrote home and they would just address their letter, “Hays, USA” and mail it and somehow it would get to the parents or whatever. Maybe some of them actually put “Hays, America,” I don’t know.

What really got it going was there was a rather energetic entrepreneurial gentleman in Hays that had a big furniture store and probably some other businesses. But he would always do his advertisements, he’d go, “Shop at my store,” and his byline was, the tagline was, “the big store in Hays, America.” His name was Wyler, and it was Wyler Furniture Store, and he’d go, “Wyler, it’s the big store in Hays, America,” and that just caught on. He was doing that I think back in the fifties.

Now locally it’s Hays, America, but the locals will say Hays. It sounds like H-a-c-e. You still hear it to this day. I always send birthday notices online, and I’ll go, “Wishing you a happy birthday from Hays, America.”

CC: So you’re part of the local civic pride in this regard then.

EP: I believe so.

CC: What made you decide to run for the legislature initially in 1996? Your predecessor, of course, had been Delbert Gross, also a Democrat. Were you approached by him or the party as he was opting to leave the stage, or were you just more generally getting concerned with the way state government was treating your fair city such that you decided mostly on your own ticket it was time to run for the House?

EP: There really wasn’t a single state issue that brought me into wanting me to run. I actually enjoyed being on the city commission very much. I’ll even look back to this day and have fond memories of being in city government. Anybody who’s ever served on city government knows that a lot of times when you do something, you can see the immediate result.  You have a discussion at a meeting and pass that ordinance or whatever. You’ll see it going into effect and so forth. We saw that with our water conservation efforts.

CC: Sure.

EP: But also I really hadn’t thought about the state government, but I did hear, and it was confirmed that Delbert had planned not to run again. So I kind of gave it some thought, and a couple of people mentioned it to me. So I just went down to the courthouse and filed.

I filed real early. I remember Martin Hawver called me. I didn’t know who he was, but he called me up, identified himself, and he goes, “So what’s the deal?” and I said, “Excuse me? What’s the deal?” He goes, “The election is not until way off.” He said, “You’ve already filed.” I said, “Well, I just figured I’d better get me name out there. So I went ahead and filed.” And that was to run in the ’96 election.

CC: So this might have been late ’95 when you filed?

EP: I believe it was, yes.

CC: Tell us a little bit about your first House campaign. I’m guessing it was different from what you had experienced running for election as a city official just within Hays. Was there a lot more door-to-door public forums, media questionnaires, and interest group surveys to complete? And certainly I’m guessing that there must have been a larger set of voters to interact with, presumably within much of the broader Ellis County. Did you run radio ads? Were yard signs a big thing? Without naming names, do you  have any amusing stories about eccentric people you may have met on front porches the first time around? Front porch campaign stories, many of them involving dogs by the way, are always some of my favorite things to ask about.

EP: Well, the short answer is yes. The fact of the matter is back in those days, I believe, it was always stressed for me by people in elective office that preceded me and it was the importance of going door to door. That was a necessary thing to do in those days was to put out a few yard signs, go door to door extensively. Back then, you didn’t have any kind of voter—you’d just get a voter list, and then you just went down the street and knocked on—I would knock on every door.

Back then, the radio and newspaper was fairly affordable. You didn’t have to really raise a lot of  money. So you’d put a couple of ads in the Hays newspaper and then on a couple of local radio stations, and then you’d put your yard signs out and went around and had your phone cards and handed those out. That was running for city government.

When I ran for the state legislature for a couple of campaigns it was just like that, where you just got key locations for your yard signs and just went out. I always said it was really hard to get started going door to door, but once I got started, it became part of your routine. You get off work and go knock on a few doors, stop when it started to get a little bit dark, and then get out there on the weekend as well.

Now, an interesting story. I don’t think I really got chased by a dog, but one of my fond memories of campaigning was driving down a street, Allen Street in Hays, and it was raining. I went by this house and did a doubletake. There was an elderly lady that had one of my yard signs, and it was raining, and she was out there, and you know, the cleaner bags you get when you take your clothes to the cleaners? She was out there in the rain, putting that over one of my yard signs. And I pulled around the corner. I said, “Mrs. So and So, you really don’t have to do that.” She was worried that my sign was going to get wet and ruined. So a good story there.

I had another one time when I was out running for the legislature, and all those years of going door to door, I never really had anybody get nasty with me, but I was walking away from a house, and a guy came out on the porch after I’d given him the card, and he just started yelling at me about what a terrible job I was doing and all that. I can’t even remember exactly what he was complaining about, but the interesting thing was, a couple of years later, I went back to that house, and the guy came out and was telling me what a wonderful job I had done as a state legislator, and he was really hoping I’d get elected again. I walked away from there, and I said, “Thank you.” I didn’t want to say, “I’m the guy that you were screaming at two years ago. What’s the deal here?” I just let it go.

CC: You must have had a very effective term that time.

EP: Evidently.

CC: When you entered the legislature for your first session in 1997, this was an era where there was some strong internal disagreements within the Republic legislative majority across the aisle from you. With Democrats on occasion being able to work more closely with moderate Republican Governor Bill Graves and some of his similarly moderate allies, especially across the rotunda from us over in the Senate. The state and national economies for much of the mid-through-late nineties were doing quite well, as you will recall, and tax collections were strong. Tax relief was a priority for policymakers, especially for many of the conservative Republicans, as you may recall.

During your first term, there were several reductions ultimately enacted in the statewide mill levy for public schools as well as a smorgasbord of other tax cuts. Before we get into some of your work on the Insurance Committee, what can you tell us about some of the overall legislative dynamics and key personalities of your first few years here in Topeka? What do you recall about Graves, about Speaker Tim Shallenburger, Senate President Dick Bond and some of the other major players? Did Graves and his staff maintain a good working relationship with the minority party in the House, for example?

EP: I would say yes. I think as you talk to a lot of legislators that came in before me back in the seventies and eighties and early nineties, they will all tell you kind of a similar story about just working to get things done, and it didn’t really make any difference who got credit for it or anything like that. So that was the way it was when I first entered the legislature in 1997. I always tell the story that when they had the freshman orientation, they used to tell us to go in and get a seat anywhere in there, and I sat next to a gentleman from Johnson County, the late David Huff. He was a real jovial, humorous guy.

CC: Yes, he was.

EP: I think we had an orientation for about two days or whatever. We sat there, and then when the session started, and you’re assigned seats, I’m sitting there, and I’m trying to figure out where David Huff was, and he was on the other side of the aisle. Honest to God, we had never even discussed anything about—

CC:  Democrat or Republican.

EP: Affiliation. We were kind of looking forward to the end of the legislature and going through all of the orientation stuff like that that happened that week.

Well, then as the session started, and you kind of get through those first couple of weeks of committee hearings and all, and you start getting bills on the floor, there was a nice coalition that developed between the Democrat Caucus and the moderate Republicans.

In the first couple of years I was here, I think we had forty-eight Democrats, and there was always about seventeen or eighteen moderate Republicans. I think you’ve interviewed several of them. Especially on the education issues, back then, education funding was an issue every session because you had to keep up with the finance formula, and there was always a pushback about some people wanting to cut taxes and not continue the funding for special ed or for K-12 education. So we’d get together with that moderate coalition that was formed and would do different things.

I’ll never forget whereby we’d be doing the budget, and somebody would have an amendment to add $50 base state aid funding. And somebody that didn’t like that would get a calculator out and figure out how much money that was, and they would say, “That’s a lot of money.” And I said—well, back then, we had nearly—I think we had 400,000 K-12 students. As a debate right here, I remember going to the well there. I said, “You know, of course, it’s a lot of money. We have a half a million students. You put a dollar in the base. That’s a half a million dollars. So naturally if you put $50”—and I remember in those debates, they’d start with $100 in the base, $75 down. So it was a real effort to try to get funding on the base state aid.

But needless to say, that coalition that we talked about, and I got a little bit off the track here, I think it made a good working relationship, and we got a lot of good policy down. I mentioned the camaraderie there I had with a few like Dave Huff. There were others. We parked outside here around the Capitol in those days. So you’d go to lunch, and everybody would run out to their cars and said, “You can go with this,” and you might get in a car, and there’d be three Republicans and two Democrats and whatever. All you were trying to do was go over to the Ramada Inn for a reception.

That’s just the way it was. I don’t think there was much bitterness in the debates and all that. Everybody seemed to kind of come in here, debate, and leave it in the chamber and go out and wait for another day to come about.

That’s what I always liked when I was in city government. You’d have a debate, take the vote. If it came out you’re in favor of the way you were, fine. If not, that’s the way it goes. You move on to the next issue. And just like in state government, that next issue comes up about an hour later.

CC: Yes. I want to ask you, you made I think an important observation. As someone who served on a city council myself, it was like you can see when you’re at that level in government when you take an action as a governing body, you can see it implemented over the next week or two before your next city council meeting. How frustrating must it have been for you to get here to this body when things are more amorphous, and you’ve got broader policy concepts. If you’re trying to enact public policy, it may take many, many years. You may not see the direct results. Was that at all frustrating for you, having been such an effective—and led the showerhead initiative for example in Hays. Was it a different deal once you got up here?

EP: Definitely. I can probably speak for a lot of people that have come into the legislature. You may have had a particular issue you ran on or you have a certain area that you have an interest in, whether it be agriculture or education. I think you come down here with the feeling of “Okay. Let’s go get it done” or as they say now, “Get ‘er done.” But you come down here with the idea that you’re going to get things done, and then there’s this slow process, the committee hearings, and so forth, and I’ve seen a lot of legislators get really frustrated by that. I’ve seen a lot of people often not come back because they just didn’t like that pace.

So I would probably advise any new person coming in, you’d better exercise a little patience, or this is going to be a very frustrating experience for you. In the House, you’ve got 125 different opinions. A lot of times they match up. Over in the Senate, 40 people, so you’ve got to grind through that and try to get everybody on the same page and get the wording right and see how to fix your district and so forth and then move on from there.

So I would say that I kind of—I got the impression that’s the way it was going to be. So my frustration level didn’t get too bad. There was a lot of things I suppose along the way that kind of took—had that effect on me. I’ll tell you this, the first session, I remember my seatmate was Gwen Welshimer from Wichita, and she said to me, she said, “You might want to co-sponsor this bill with me,” and I said—I was so new. I was like, “What do you mean, co-sponsor? What’s this all about?”

She had a bill, this was 1997, and it was a bill to eliminate the sales tax on food, on groceries. She said, “This would be good for your district.” She goes, “This will help a lot of people.” I said okay. And then near where I sat, a gentleman also from Wichita, George Dean signed on. So there were three co-sponsors on that. In 1997, we filed that legislation. Now, 2024, and it has not been eliminated. So in answer to your question about frustration, if I had been frustrated, I don’t think I would have lasted here very long.

CC: Understood. I know that as ranking Democrat on Insurance, and please remind us when in your career that was when you were the ranking D on Insurance, you also seemed to have a good rapport with your Republican colleague, former Representative Bob Tomlinson, who chaired the House Insurance Committee before he would later move on to become Assistant Kansas Insurance Commissioner. Can you talk a little bit about that working relationship across party lines? You already mentioned some of this, and maybe that kind of interaction between Republicans and Democrats seemed to be occurring less frequently by the time you ultimately left the legislature in 2018?

EP: The first part of the question, that would have been my second session. So that would have been ’99 and 2000. I remember when the committee assignments came out, I was the ranking member of Insurance, which my knowledge of insurance at that point was car insurance and homeowner’s insurance, whatever. I  really didn’t have a lot of background. It’s like anything. You just got to get on the fast track to learn about it.

And then as far as working with Bob Tomlinson, that was a very good experience because of the way Bob handled that committee. I always tell this story about we’d have a hearing on a bill or something or give testimony, but if we did pass a bill out of committee, the Vice Chair—I’d either go to his office or he’d stop by mine, and we’d write up a bill brief while it was all fresh in our mind.

But let me back up a little bit before that. I forgot to mention though that prior to the session starting, Bob Tomlinson and I and then Don Myers, the Vice Chair, we would meet with Sandy Praeger. Sandy Praeger was the Chair of the Senate Insurance, and I’m thinking the ranking member on that committee I want to say might have been Janis Lee. The Vice Chair escapes me. But the point is, we’d go there and one of the things we’d do is we met with the Governor and went over the bills. We’d discuss it, and they’d say, “Well, we’ll start this one in the Senate, and this bill will start in the House, and this one in the Senate, and this one in the House. These were the Governor’s initiatives, and so you take these two. We’ll take that two.”

So it was just input from everybody. I remember Bob Tomlinson looking at me and saying, “What do you think? Which ones should we take?” I said, “I think you’re a little more qualified to answer that than me. If you want my opinion, let’s do this one here.”

But my point there is that there was input from everybody that was at the table, and then you went to your committees and did the work. As I mentioned, Bob always wanted my input on something, and he’d even stop by my office and say, “Next week, which of these do you think we should run?” He always wanted to get my opinion on that: which bill we’d start with at the beginning of the week and which hearings we’d have. I dare say I don’t think that happens nowadays.

CC: Understood. As we’ve noted earlier, you have always been an unapologetic champion for education at all levels. Can you share with us if it was how you were raised or whether some of your own experiences honed that sort of fierce advocacy for you?

EP: I believe that was instilled in me, not only my mother, but a lot of her siblings because they grew up in that Depression era and the Dust Bowl and everything, and there was a whole generation there that would have loved to get more educated than what they were. A lot of the men had to stay home and work on the farm. So they were lucky.  A lot of the folks in that era were lucky to have an eighth-grade education or maybe even a couple of years of high school. So that was my mother’s emphasis all the time was to do good with my education and so forth. So I think from that, I realized obviously the importance of it.

And somewhere in my readings, I remember reading that, and you’ve heard it, it’s kind of a cliche where they say, “The best workforce is a well-educated workforce.” If that’s ever true, it’s true today because you’ve just got to be able to read obviously, and you’ve got to be able to write, and a well-rounded education I think makes you a lot better person.

So with that in mind, I had a—two of my sisters were educators, and I know I had a couple of other relatives who were. So I knew how dedicated they were and I knew how dedicated a lot of the teachers that I had along the way. So if I could support them in any way, that was something I wanted to do.

CC: I would like to get your reaction to an important change in state policy in late 2002 and early 2003. In the wake of the 9/11 recession and the budget crisis it was causing, outgoing Governor Graves and incoming Governor Kathleen Sebelius both felt that they had no choice but to recommend that transfers earmarked for property tax relief and revenue-sharing programs with local units be suspended temporarily. These, of course, were the local ad valorem tax reduction fund and the county and city revenue-sharing fund transfers as well as several others. I gather the loss of those monies may have upset many of your former colleagues and other local officials back in Hays and Ellis County?

EP: To a certain degree. I believe, and it’s probably a worn-out statement, but, you know, communication is key. I always felt that what I did down here, you needed to go back and talk about it, write about it, whatever the case may be. So, during a legislative session, whenever it was possible, during the break in the session, it was to go back and go before the city commission and the school board and kind of brief them on what was going on.

So I think with regard to what we had to do there with the local tax thing, I just explained it to everybody. Just like the state had to tighten its belt, they realized they had to do the same thing. So I didn’t get a lot of grief over that. Obviously everybody would have liked that not to have happened, but the fact of the matter was, it was what had to be done.

CC: What are your recollections about how Governor Sebelius interacted with you personally, with the full House Democratic Caucus, and with the legislature writ large? Did any of that seem to change much relative to how things had been under Governor Graves?

EP: I would say that I guess because of her party affiliation, she came to our caucus a little bit more often and would interact I think with the legislators, especially of her own party. But I would also mention that Governor Graves was a little bit like that as well. I had my office on the second floor west wing, and Governor Graves would a lot of times I think just – to clear his mind,  he’d go walking up and down the halls, and then he had that tie to Hays. He worked in the summers as a young man because his father owned Graves Truck Line in Hays. So he’d stop in my office and just chat and ask about certain people in Hays and so forth.

Interestingly enough, a little story on his administration, his appointment secretary was Judy Krueger-Nelson. Her father was a physician in Hays. She grew up in Hays. When the governor had to do his appointments, he needed like a Republican insurance agent to be on this committee or something like that, she’d go, “Can you tell me a Democrat farmer in your area that might want to be on this committee” or whatever.

So I’d always call back and get a name or two for her. I remember one time going in with pages to get pictures taken with Governor Graves. And he looked at the parents of the pages and he goes, “You know, your community is over-represented.” He was alluding to the fact that every time he needed to make an appointment, Judy would give him a name, and he’d go, “Hays, Kansas, Hays, Kansas.”

CC: Or Hays, America.

EP: Hays, America. So he always said, “You’re over-represented there.” So we had a little fun with that.

But I thought Graves made a genuine effort. I remember he came to the Democrat Caucus a couple times and addressed some issue that we had supported, and he came to thank us. Then Governor Sebelius was the same way.

Now, if you recall, I used to do a radio program. I didn’t want it to be me talking all the time. So I’d interview other legislators, and I remember going down. I think I did it with Graves. I went down and said—it was at the end of the session. I said, “Any chance I could interview you for five minutes?” Sure enough. I did that with Kathleen Sebelius as well.

CC: The relationships you built here at the Statehouse, you mentioned the one with Governor Graves, even though you were in different parties. I wanted to ask you something else. You told me one time that as Hays is, of course, a pretty far drive from here, you were a books-on-tape fan back in the day. Is that correct? I remember some story about how you bonded with another legislator from across the aisle who was a big books-on-tape fan. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

EP: Absolutely. That’s a two-and-three-quarter hour drive from here to Hays. After a while, I got tired of listening to the radio or got tired of listening to music, and I never thought I’d enjoy listening to an audiobook, and I don’t know how I came about it. Somehow I got a hold of—the very first audiobook I ever listened to in the car was The Horse Whisperer. I was so fascinated with that and so absorbed in it, I kind of equate it to where you’re reading a book, and you say, “I’m going to read to the end of the chapter.” When you’re listening to an audiobook, you don’t know where the end to that chapter is.

So I would get so engrossed in a book on the audio CD, I’d be driving and I’d say, “I’m going to stop at Abilene and get a cup of coffee” or something like that, and all of a sudden, I look over, and I’m driving past Salina. I totally missed Abilene.

Now it gets worse than that. Twice it happened to me, I drove past Hays, and I had to go to the next exit and turn around. “Oh, for god sake,” I had to turn around. You just get wrapped up in it and kind of forget about “Oh, there’s my exit.”

But as far as bonding, when you’re in there looking for CDs—

CC: This is here at the State Library.

EP: Yes, the State Library. Senator Les Donovan was one of them that I’d meet up with in there, and he’d go, “Have you listened to this?” I’d say, “No, I haven’t listened to that.” So we’d get to talking all of the time. He’d stop me in the hall and say, “By the way, on my trip over, I listened to such and such book. I just turned it in.” He goes, “You need to listen to that. It’s a really good book.”

If you recall, when they were remodeling the Capitol, the library was moved out from its third-floor location. It was out here on the west side in kind of an annex. That was when you could still walk out those west doors. So Les would come in. He saw me in my office, and he’d come in and show me what books he had and asked me what I was listening to and so forth.

There was somebody else that really got into that. I knew Dennis McKinney down in Greensburg listened to it all the time. It actually is something I do to this day. I’m always at the local library or I’ll get it on my phone and just listen to it on my headphones. When I was in the hospital at the KU Medical Center, I would just lay there in bed and listen to a book, try to forget about what I was going through.