2016 Kansas Notable Books, Part I

i know today on kbr preserves the best new books i can sense or about kansas i'm kay mcintyre each year the state library of kansas elects fifteen books as cancers notable winners in the first of a two part series we'll hear from the authors of many of those books including fiction nonfiction poetry young adult literature and more it's my favorite show of the year a chance to read some good books meet the authors and give some books away later this hour find out how you can win a kansas notable book we'll start with to leave my shadow a gritty detective novels set in nineteen thirty seven wichita the author michael graves of emporia the protagonist pizza stone our hard boiled private eye in a philip marlowe sam spade model might tell us about pete stone well thank you for mentioning film are all in the end sam spade because i did have

those characters in mind when i wrote this however pizza stone the reason it i wrote this the reason i chose pete stone was because i was thinking of a grandfather that i didn't know very well and my grandfather's last words to my father were told boys not to forget me and the boys were my brothers and myself and down and those words have stayed with me through the years but as i've gotten older i realize that i am i didn't forget the words but it i felt like i never knew my grandfather and nineteen thirty seven that was part of his year of soul i put him in his hometown wichita where he lived and i made up a story an end and that's that's how he came to be his name was pete graves i didn't want to use that i thought of graves gravestone stop pete still what i call story thank you tom

he's easy is important to me even more i think today as i grow older com because of of you know i think i think the words tell the boys not to forget me is probably not too much that's remarkable about those i think we all have the desire to leave something that is remembered and i wanted him to leave his shadow so that's how the book came to be in classic detective novel form the story begins when a woman walks into the office looking for her missing husband sydney hamilton take it from there because a little snippet of the plot well part of the league backstory is based on truth my grandfather was divorced and he re married lucille and so i wanted him to meet lucille at this time in wichita and lucille hamilton is is a woman very determined woman the description that i give in the book is very much as i remember my grandmother she was a bird like a very small very

tiny but determined hadn't had a hit the tough little job she would set in and she was determined she was going to see things through she was looking for her husband who had gone missing and she had gone to the police she had gone to other detectives and we remember now this is nineteen thirty seven wichita and i was not unusual for men the takeaway up you know things would get awfully tough during the depression and so they would they would take off they would leave and since there were was no sign of foul play no one was willing to take up this woman's just this woman's project or you heard him look for her missing husband the stone was the last one on her list and he said he would do it so let's jump out it would be to leave i sat out isn't just a great detective story it's all walk through wichita historian fronstin aircraft than boeing all the way down to the car that keeps don't drives told about by car sure he

drives it dries jones a roadster and the jones company was in wichita for a very brief period of time in the nineteen twenties nineteen nineteen i think until early twenties and it was a very successful car company but unfortunately it did because it was several fire it would burn down and they were just too far behind they couldn't rebuild so late they build these cars from for about six seven eight years and that just came about the reason the reason i chose that was because i took my dear wife monica and we started really researching a little bit about things in wichita and when we went to the sedgwick county historical museum we found jones roaster and i said that's a score fest what that's what has to be hand and so that's how that came about and and then that we went down by grandfather did work and retire from boy i have no idea what he did for boeing

but i know we work for boeing so one of the aircraft industry to be prevalent in this novel and we went to the air museum most outside wichita and there was the stearman trainer and i said that's got to come into the story so all of this i am not an expert on wichita history but i had so much fun researching this i started with the library main library reading old issues of the wichita eagle which my father delivered that was his first job when he was a boy i want to make sure that the eagle played a strong part in this they start of the year i found an old map almost of the theories it's a nineteen forty one i believe map of wichita so i had the streets and then i began plotting where i wanted the story to take place by using that can sew much chess it fell into place we stopped in to a little

sandwich shop on arms seneca that is called merle survey when a nineteen thirties it was thomas place and it was a beautiful little bar celebs where pete hangs out quite often stops in for a sandwich and a beer celeb became central to the story in place for him to be and then my good friend kevin ramos who's a jazz drummer let me a book on jazz in wichita during that era and i found some of the club's and some of the people who are playing back then and work them into the story also calico cat peed brewer ray and those were real names real places real people back and in that time and and what i found when i when i read the newspapers it was so much of it was of course unique to the nineteen thirties but so much of it was relevant today the same stories then we were in we knew that the country or people some people knew that the country was in real trouble because we had liberal roosevelt in office we had auto

workers on strike in detroit we had violence in schools i couldn't believe that i actually came across a story of love and then i did know uses in the novel but i came across a story of a young boy who took a gun to school and shot a teacher i mean some of the things that we that we talked about today we think are just so unique to our time really happened just the same back in the nineteen thirties so i found that fifty two candidates you to read an excerpt sure it i'm going to skip the first two pages because i would like to have the reader i read that on on his or her own bum pete stone has just returned from a case he's ease travel to chicago spent kind of a rough trip it was a runaway case and he's just returned back to his office and he's he's reading the newspaper and waiting for something to happen i guess it's a

friday afternoon an end and he's just wanting a little resting these low arrest and then and then she walks in she opened the door stop at the threshold and looked around the room and i don't know what was running through her mind but i can imagine maybe she expected comfy chairs in a few begonias decorating a coffee table maybe she assumed a secretary would smile and greet her with good day that help you if that's what she thought she must have been disappointed i didn't have any of that my office was an office nothing fancy nothing for lee and just the way i like it i was its owner occupant the lady scanned to the core or was it must escape i had a desk a couple of straight back chairs interact to hang my hat on at that particular moment my feet were up on the desk my hat was on the rack her eyes met mine and she spoke for you a private detective that's what it says on my license i'm still waiting on my secret decoder ring

funny she said i didn't think you know that are you any good that depends on who you ask i'm asking you then the answer is yes but i confess to a slight prejudice and then they they go ahead and they visit he he realizes she's a determined woman looking for her husband she is she gives him the details and the house get to toward the end of this section then after she left i glanced over my notes he didn't look promising men had been running off for years now between the stock market crashed the midwest drought in the ongoing depression many a strong man had broken under the strain i replayed our conversation in my mind and try to get a fix on hamilton i looked at this photograph and read over my notes but i couldn't get a clear picture of the man i thought of that pulp fiction character the shadow who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men indeed who knows i looked out the window at the shadows falling over the city

men wearing suits and hats and women in dresses and high heels scary for cars and buses the lucky ones were headed home to warm meals and loving families looking forward to a bit of time away from work someone so lucky i thought about this is helping going home to an empty house she was afraid i'm alone i considered my own situation i was afraid that i was alone i didn't have a family at home there would be no hot meal waiting for me when i did have for a client some notes a few bucks in my pocket what i needed was a clue it's to leave this arrow by michael graves of emporia mike thank you so much for coming in today make you kiss my pleasure from the gritty streets of which are tied to the sweetest book and this year's kansas notable list our next book is sun and moon by lawrence artist and illustrator lindsay yankee we first met lindsey last year when her book blue bird was named at two thousand fifteen kansans notable winner great to see you again lindsey thanksgiving family

like bluebird sun and moon as a children's book with gorgeous illustrations can you describe your style of artwork shipped in i suppose a good way to start describing is an iaea use old toyota for materials bomb unlike willkie watercolor pencil linoleum cut trim anything goes on to best suit each page in each illustrations so this book has a lot of different tales that vary from page to page so a lot of variety i think i would probably use a whirlwind so called to describe your your artwork i've ever known what i am oh lovely story about a conversation between the surprise the sun and the man without giving away the plot can you summarize it for us sure the idea behind it is there the moon is jealous of the sun because he thinks that she gets to see everything cooled

and so the book and it uses all kinds of different scenes in animals that are unique to the nighttime kind of show him in his own his own world and kind of finding a new value in it could you read the first couple pages the sudden and forrest church just for one day that the man does all he wanted after a lifetime of darkness many ways to spend just one day as the sun at night with everyone asleep his world was often boring and lonely then imagine that the son saw beautiful sites like flowers blooming children playing and tigers sunbathing i'll take my day for night if you meet two conditions and holding first if we trade that will last forever not just for one day and second you must spend the entire night live in the sky looking very closely at the earth closer than you ever have before and only then that may decide if you want to trade places minister held a promise a lot closer than ever before he told the sun men hurried to his place in the night sky as heroes on

the horizon he peered through the darkness expecting to see nothing more than a sleepy world that's lindsay and keep reading from sun and moon two thousand sixteen kansas notable book lindsay this is such a lovely story of yearning and watchfulness and the beauty of that observation is there a story behind this book i guess i started this story will that be a first idea for it was long ago and about two thousand and four men i was walking home from class to you and it was a beautiful day and the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing in the sun was out and i discuss ai while the incentives to see all night this is just amazing and then it kind of got me thinking well what about the moon and what doesn't get a c and an approaching the challenge of what is especially need to the night time that the main witness is that maybe we just are aware of and don't see under our noses did you spend time night's

perhaps won around taking a fresh look at what them and see if our mud and not exactly no i just kind of a can as a sat down and started making a listserv a lot of things in it it would be un special to illustrate and deftly some influence from one of my favorite books the little prince there's a a shout out to the bay about trees in the lamplight erin was really in love with the book i still am kind of working in with those references to like a metaphor we first met last year win you came in to talk about your book bluebird are there similarities between that book and some and men i think so i stylize understands kind of has like a richer palate and say it's not as soft nigel the marbled and constricting but i have noticed that the two books that i've written an illustrated we can go from place to place to place and that's the way i like to tell stories

that if the city and the whale until a state so that's definitely a strong similarities similarity between the two it also cursed him a bit in bluebird the protagonist was a bird that is looking at the world from on high and here you have the sun and moon again looking at the world from and why yes good observation i don't know if i've even put that together that kind of earth from far away prospective and it's a lovely book and how wonderful edison the kansas notable book was congratulations a tremendous stephen johnson is an artist who lives in lawrence and teaches at the university of kansas and he's also the author of several children's books including alphabet school which was named a campus notable book welcome stephen go before alphabet school let's go back to nineteen ninety five you

published a book called alphabet city you which won the prestigious tell the cat owner tommy better but that was a book basically out of my love affair with new york city and living in brooklyn at that time walking around and discovering shapes and textures that to him i like artistically just for their coloration and foreman one on and then i soon discovered that i could find water shapes in a fire escape or i'm you know bricks or whatever maybe and so i had this little idea and i pitched at one day sitting in my editor's office much you try to bridge that as a viking books hoffa varick street in lower manhattan and on and they thought it was a great idea and i've been to the finals the site is and i thought to myself oh i'm ok and she said don't overdo it to contract and i said only think about it and the young live so i think so by the time i got down to the subway with one of my immediate so i had to find work and

pay phone and called a ride back of course ordered and so then what happens is true generally these paintings which i never painted these large pastel watercolor paintings in a hyper realistic manner in order to convey the honesty and finding shapes you know unknown and there's actually two for more answers than the q as a railroad we'll turn from north korea it's unnerving you know telephone poles but anyway so i just would do a painting and technical expert in a minimal a package of about for a time in a big after bag black hefty bags so i could take an ensemble and miserably and cuddly tone on when you spill coffee on himself so they were taken into office and present these every month or so and everybody liked what they saw and then eventually became the book that are well let's jump forward about a decade i understand that the year aspiration for alphabet school came

from your daughter and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that's pretty much it also having to address that yet so one the only chris peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and gershon didn't eat only the inside enough to cross that come back and we'll talk where thing and then one day just too tough pieces of peanut butter jelly sandwich were cobbled together the perfect upper case g and i photographed it and i kept that in my archives the other thing that was the inspiration for the school's is speaking to schools over the years and and gauging student's optical elementary school and how the their teachers and librarians used my alphabet city book to engage the students and seeing the rule differently so a lot of maybe a fan mail in and things like that of schools around atlanta foreign leadership summer schools and some of your quite good in fact the kids from painting years ago came up with my letter u which is bishop

is an interesting one and it's the actual opera case that supports it up mix a perfect and an affectionate and the two of them the toilet seat because they have those old parts and i mean not to get too graphic but they're kind of beautiful on that old fashioned ship canal so but that was an example of using an inspiration from from kids and i went back to revisit my schools and ten and one around lawrence cannon fact they're all warrants based school soldiers each image hers some new york school core bleak will run the country i'd love for you to take out a couple pages from alphabet school and describe the illustrations for me sure the letter c was a complicated image to do with one of my favorites it's a globe on on a shelf with the window and it truly represented my experience of going to a mile elementary schools and gina and central and centennial

coleman to do it in all your student here in the classroom when it's sunny outside and you're looking through that window in you can a wannabe outdoors i'm not interested to have that kind of feeling and at certain routes a courtly actually for the real world and so beer globe i of course the creator of the idea of the letter c's so i have a big ocean and china as part of that but the ocean makes an abstract shape and then download theirs a series of books and they created a book that doesn't exist on a local c is for continents which has graphic quality that reminds me at least of the un dr seuss books were going away the typewriter for you was used in the simplicity of the covers which i still adore and then i plugged in some of my own books they're on the well for that city book i have a book called of the strongest ginger thats about a grandmother and granddaughter attorneys story from the census count fifties and suddenly little things like that are hidden in the book you mention the letter k details from pinckney elementary and in

there or it's a staircase and i changed into tiles and things to make it more in my color palette and then i used her children's drawings that were sent to me based on a book that i did come a little robots other's children strong spin up on the wall so things like that it will use some of my other books in a different way as usual inside the imagery off course this follows the same rules as the alphabet city couple letters for position and trying to find the most interesting aspects of schools which isn't quite as you know sex if you will as a new york city landscape but still in all there's a lot to be found from hopscotch to windows to flagpole student interiors to pencil sharpener the playgrounds are wonderful place to find ships so there's nothing better than running around schools with his kids trying to find and discover the role a new in hidden places all places we don't really care law going to survive to go forward but if we take a

moment and stop and look at corners and shadows and little pebbles or whenever some magical world to be found even in the toilet seat to an opposing stephen johnson is an artist and author of alphabet school thank you so much for coming in today because i'm a traveling if you're just joining us today on tv are present gives the two thousand sixteen kansas notable books the best new books by kansans or about kansas selected by the state library i'm kate mcintyre you're listening to kbr prisons on kansas public radio coming up to books for young adult readers including the story about buffalo bill growing up in kansas but first kansas wildflowers and weeds by michael john habit of

manhattan great free men of lawrence and jeanette pair of littleton colorado greg freeman join me and akp our studios earlier this week back in nineteen seventy nine jeannette mare published wildflowers and weeds of kansas and in the introduction to your bike you say bad since then our understanding of flowering plants has undergone dramatic changes how so well primarily it's it's a result of changes in our understanding about how plants are related so many names have changed in the last thirty years or so as a result of science being applied to understanding relationships and the other thing that has affected dan flores is that the floor is dynamic and white talk about the floor and talk about all the plants that occur in a particular area it can also be used to talk about a book that describes all of those those plants and so the book is a florida but when i talk about the floor of kansas i'm talking about all the plants look around here

and soap people tend to think of a floral as being static not changing very much but in fact we see huge changes in and the species that are represented around here things that are coming in from other sources are things that are disappearing and so over thirty or forty year period we find the need to take a look at what we'd published before an undone and scrutinize it and account for all those changes that have occurred in nomenclature and in our species' compositions and he take me by surprise because it had never occurred to me that they're actually been changes in the plans that we see here in kansas is that because of climate change or just dig plants can come and go in terms of poppy literally they come and go in terms of popularity that's one of the big factors that influences the the flora as an example one of the things that i did when i was working on the book is to work with a lot of specimens that we have and the research

collection hear a k u on there's also a large collection over kansas state university and those collections document the floor of a plant life of kansas going back to the sixties and when you look at the species that were documented in kansas for the last hundred and sixty years or so on we find that oh about fifty to sixty percent of the native species the things that we thought were here when you're americans arrived were documented by nineteen hundred and there hasn't been much of an increase in the the native species in the last forty or fifty years we don't find very many new species on in in the floor but when you look at that introduced things are things that have been brought in purposefully as ornamental ski off for food and fiber armored or things that got your accidentally the things that we like to call we are we see that number increase at a rate of about three years almost four species per year and so that represents about five hundred species during the last hundred and sixty years these are species that weren't here when we first

started to settle the state and now they've become established as part of the floor there their acting like they are they're characters that have been here for a long period time your book kansas wildflowers and weeds is it's a it's a big book itself it's kind of embarrassing to have lots of pictures and it is certainly not a field guide that's right you see people using that yeah i'm just you note coming about the suspects were these you know useless bits of information is the original aa but kansas wildflowers which was written by william j stevens who was a faculty member here in and really is where this lineage starts it was published in a non nineteen forty eight i think it weighs about five to half pounds when jeanette bears book was published it had no mushroom to about four pounds and kansas while flowers and weeds is now about five pounds of anybody's paying attention to that where there's a recent statistics

about our obesity and in the us to leave we followed that trend and fortunately so it's not the kind of thing that you would walk with you out into the field you might leave it in the in that's right on fortunately there are our guide books both mike and i have published while for guides that are much easier to tuck into a pac and take with you out in the field and if you find that you really can't pin something down on a lot of people take pictures or take them back to the car take him home and that's where he can use kansas wildflowers and weeds if you need our door stop or a tornado shelter i you know it might be useful for that as well so there may be some advantages to not that we didn't think about it as the nice coffee table but yeah yeah and that's where we usually see it and dom you know were really really happy with the quality of the photographs with one of the things that we wanted to do is increase the number of photographs in and go from mostly black and white photographs that were used in the internet's book to color photographs and so

merle university press a kansas was really good and working with the us to allow us to have bub i think it was closed a hundred fifty color photographs and we expanded the number of species that we treated from about eight hundred internet book too close to a thousand two hundred in in kansas while flowers and we soak it did it really did bulk up and that accounts for a lot of that additional weight eye i think when i was looking through your book can smell flowers and waves i happen to be on a car trip at the time as and was driving at night i pulled it out not really knowing what to expect i put in my lap and i took a look at a holy spirit i am i said that was incredibly it it was very interesting in the descriptions of the plants and as well the photographs are beautiful book what was really interesting to be was after i had spent some time flipping through the pages i looked out the window of the car and i notice wild flowers everywhere that's a pretty typical reaction from people who

don't use for us or field guides routinely arm it really impresses upon them the diversity that they've missed we tend to look at the conspicuous things were driving down the highway flowers the five mph seventy miles per hour and we can pick up the sunflowers but do you know that there are a dozen different kinds of sunflowers for example or these tiny little things that are hidden away amongst the grasses and those are the kinds of things that you can talk about in flora you can provide descriptions and you can give people hints about where to look for them the kinds of habitats in which they occur and it becomes sort of a game with a lot of people are a challenge for them to try to find these things as there are you know traits and across the lot the landscape they want to see more of these things and i think that works for plants and in animals as well so that's one of the real benefits of field guides and anne flores is that it it it causes people to really take a much closer look at their surroundings in

and to to try to find these things that they weren't even aware existed there was certainly my experience and it was really eye opening that senate it sounds like your work but were in your case it worked your day job is you're the senior curator aggies are barrier that's right yes i didn't even know we had an herbarium but here at the university of kansas what is that basically in arabic well i joke about it as being a giant plan more ah it's it's over search collection we use it to document the plans that occur in this part of the world so it's a collection of about in our case about four hundred and thirty thousand pressed and dried plant specimens it's a very significant collection four hundred and thirty al say it ranks in the top five percent in terms of the size and mong more than seven hundred collections in in north america so it's a significant collection but it's small by comparison the big collections like missouri botanical garden or new york botanical garden or you know phew or paris which may have six or seven million specimens

but i'm it's the largest collection of its kind in in kansas there's also a collection of kansas state university and we use that to document the diversity of plant life through time and so that's how we can look at these trends that occurred in a non native and introduced plants the specimens are shared with researchers around the world we can ship the materials to individuals who want to study them where they can come to the collection and work with them they can obtain tissue from the specimens if they're interested in extracting dna from the specimens they can do that doesn't have seeds in the collection and we have fruits in the collection but most of what we have are pressed and dried our specimens of flowering plants and for a few fungi some lichens and a few other odds and ends as well greg freeman is the co author of kansas wildflowers and weeds along with michael dunn head of manhattan and jeanette bare of littleton colorado it's just one of fifteen books that won the two thousand sixteen kansas notable book award selected by the state

library of cancer as books for wildlife lover is a gritty detective novel children's books there's something for everyone on the kansas notable book list including young adult readers or older readers who just love a good fantasy rather timely of lee wood is the author of many fantasy novels for young adults i first met robert back in two thousand and ten when his book blue shoe was named at kansas notable book his latest a bitter magic tells the story of twelve year old says fleet of all she's searching for her mother the beautiful marine at the mall supposedly the most beautiful woman senior disappears during a magic at marina and her brother a set format have a magic show the tape around europe and a very famous and the congressmen act ended we're she disappears on stage in front of the whole audience and in fact she does so but she does not reappear at the end and

so suddenly her own twelve year old daughter sicily is orphaned and earth is looking for her mother looking for clues walking by the ocean every morning a dawn with a petty mobster named colin who is who basically your only friend until she meets a sort of rough hewn kid from a ten so what's the premise is pretty wild and actually it's you know am i most extravagant book of remittances now and then there's a shape shifting labyrinths says korea has a closet of whispering ball gowns that sicily almost gets lost an elegant dancer with spring leave it to her or to each other on the mirror that doesn't reflect on but it does make things disappear and so i

i a little bit wilder than usual on that and yet i found myself doing with some simple deep themes for instance for young girls loneliness insists he has no friends and her uncle is says occasionally cruel and certainly called and obsessed with his own things i mean after all if your only friend is a lot so you have some social problems as you said the split or offend and she goes to live with their uncle ace i in this mansion called the crystal castle what's special about the crystal castle was just one of those more extravagant it it's made out of glass and it has a vibrancy outside and inside so you can easily get lost either getting there or find your way through and sicily has room upstairs for the crystals to replace

course the danger of living in glass houses is not only the people my first film to sir magical things might happen would kind of mess things up not to speak of the ending a lot happens that many of course is that you would think in a crystal house that very little would be hidden and yet much as hayden and mysterious in the crystal castle well that's true because uncle is or who has designed this is designed to be as mysterious as possible they supported by giving tours of the place through dangerous crystal labyrinths that could at any moment turn into crystal sanders if you slip on the wrong thing so you think it would be entirely invisible more permeable to slide further in fact there are many secret areas in it as you've

already mentioned this is the has an unusual pet owen the lobster lego that direction which was sort of the one character that is going to ground sicily as having a friend even if it's a lobster unexplained even to myself i am i know that once i had a lot of the aha of course and it's going to go on in shame which she works mr weinstein and in the lobster seems to talk to her then we don't know throughout the whole book whether the marchers actually speaking whether its arms whether it's in her imagination because she needs someone and she imagines or could it possibly be her disappeared mother trying to communicate to her through this crustacean

and so i think that's an unresolved even to the end and i really like to do i have an athletic book mentally so that the reader has to run around and see you for the reader and so it may not be where i am today cable router why a lobster i don't know i know i have that the name golem home it's so it's hard to name the character and texas whose name came to me because we know someone named to sicily from all who is actually a journalist in kansas city who is interviewing wyatt my wife and i hire and for a book a magazine and i said could i use your name and there she said why would you do that i'm not very interesting i mean i

didn't plant then i wouldn't have said oh i know you're not interesting i just want your neck for the country she is interesting going down to pick up different than we were reading at him the letters of the six hundred page book olive ep white's letters and turns out that and we didn't know that his first name is going to go and brooks white and three are similar and then i said okay there's an option they are for that's why you have to get the name that didn't get the character as soon as possible and to get the character it helps to get the name right and then you can determine what that character would do and pretty soon you have a situation then after that you finally have a no i get you to read an excerpt from a bit of magic and i don't really

have a beverage ok well i had been anticipating that possibility i have a few pages from the first chapter nine charities are only for necessities illusionist uncle who's the star of her his magic show at the end of his magic show where he swoops on stage for a final act he calls them we're proud to present animation never before attempted one that's extremely dangerous he scans the audience and turns his head to the royal box tonight for the first time we bear perform it in honor of his excellency the archduke and his lovely console his excellency nods silently a lovely concert raises one by how the music swells mother appears in a pool of a fight in flowing silks and a white silk scarf around

her shoulders she stands perfectly still at the front of the stage which has been built out into the audience the crowd pushes the scarf begins to recall although there is no breeze then little floating lights appear swarms of them she lifts her chin and stares into the audience i lean forward slowly the tiny lights orbit mother soon i noticed there are fewer lives than before and less of my mother parts of her dress her arms her hair or just not there more lights disappear more of my mother disappears just dissolving in front of my eyes the audience begins to realize what's happening ladies peer through opera glasses the archduke in his box across the whey gets abruptly to his feet the lowest points of light pink out

a place where mother stood is beer thats not quite true or her white scarf letters then encrypt itself on the edge of the stage innovation or ups continues for minutes on autism returns bows deeply oppose a kiss to the cheering audience and turns his arm extended toward the wing welcoming his sister on stage his arm remains extended but she does not appear marina he calls out above the tumult of the crowd come out they want to see you know a marina you're close ties down but mother continues not to appear i think my beautiful assistant is playing with us businesses will come now marina dear your audience awaits know marina funnel murmurs ripple through the crowd the archduke speaks to one of his aides who nuns and hurries off abruptly the stage curtain jerks closed

a moment later i hear a loud crash like glass breaking and out of my seat and running i know my brain isn't working right because the same crazy words keep churning inside me mother my mother has evaporated that's a better battered by robert conley thank you so much and congratulations robert thank you listeners andrea warren of prairie village is the author of numerous award winning books for young adults her latest the boy who became buffalo bill growing

up billy cody him bleeding kansas most of us know buffalo bill as the greatest soul man and this time the star of the wild west show with cowboys and indians daredevil riding trucks and the like and many people know of buffalo bill's time writing for the short lived pony express bake your story opens when billy cody is just eight years old when his family moved to kansas why start there was the turning point for the cutie family the year before that they'd been living on a very prosperous farm in iowa believes father isaac was very much anti slave percent he didn't believe in it he didn't wanna see the extension of it anywhere and that plays in this story to the family went through terrible tragedy when billy's older brother was killed in a riding accident and the lift the family just needed a change of everything

in their lives especially billy smother so the father decided that this was the time ed was a bit of auto wonder he was an entrepreneur he'd had various kinds of jobs lack the skills really a western man himself and he decided it was time to come to kansas territory they were opening up for a summit and the erst people and would get the best property he had a brother who lived in western missouri and this is what brought the family on some stairs when they meet uncle eliza the brother that lives in west and it really has a pretty profound impact on their family well luckily lies is a us slave holder is oh oh oh wonderful man and he was very supportive of his brother and his family but he'd he believed in slavery so this is very much divided the brothers although they stayed close they discern had one of those agreements is the topic we don't talk about billy kelly's life reads like a who's

who of kansas history he needs abolitionist john brown governor charles robbins then how did his family especially his father get pulled into that whole free state slave state debate with family settled in the salt creek valley outside leavenworth and a lot of the very first family still live there and i see made an assumption that people were moving into kansas territory at that time would all be opposed to slavery and that when it came to vote kansas would be a free state and he was taken by surprised to find out that a lot of the new settlers coming and were pro slave they were coming in from the south for that very reason that they're coming in from missouri and they had a lot of claim jumpers coming in from missouri too and they were probably because they could go to the polls and vote nobody was asking for a kind of identification or addresses a bad day so they just say i live here now and and down vote whichever way they wanted to do and in the beginning i say kept his views to himself because he was trying to establish a farm and that he had six children to support

and he just had too much else going on but we and because his brother was well known in that area and was a slave holder the pro slavery is just assumed that this where he's relied isaacs views as well but one day he got cornered and a drunken mob insisted on knowing how he felt about this and he was never meant to back down billy was with his father that day and writes very movingly about this experience of his father being stabbed and then the attempt to save his life to get into western to a doctor and he did recover and i heard a recurring quotes because he he never fully recovered that injury was an elevated the knife and slice through one of his lungs and he was never a truly healthy man again is very prone to infection and three years later he'd he actually died from that so this is the one on tremendous sacrifice for the cody family in the service of trying to make kansas a free state

billy's mother was very much a unionist and that she was not willing to sacrifice other family member and that's where she gets into conflict with billy as he gets older because he wants revenge has so many kansans dead and missourians did too and then this whole war border war starts heating up and embarrassed to admit this but it's so i read your book i didn't realize the buffalo bill had this campus connections i dont think many people do it there's there certain this tug of war and who gets to claim a buffalo bill because he has spent much of his adult life in wyoming and founded the town of cody and was such a proponent for yellowstone he helped get the first highway enter yellowstone because he was good friends with roosevelt i'm going to do it if you go to wyoming buffalo bills picture is on everything that has to do with a statement he is wyoming but if you go to iowa why he was born in eau claire and they claim him baby buffalo museum day a

buffalo bill days if you go to the brass get if you go to north platte he had his adult homes there for a long time and this is where his wife louisa made her headquarters and where that the children were where the children went to school and cody had a big huge ranch they're called scouts rest ranch built a beautiful beautiful victorian home in the town another victorian home on the ranch the victorian from town doesn't exist anymore but the ranch is very much as it was and it's now says the full bill state park and they have buffalo bill days so nebraska has a huge claim on into and i'm a nebraskan by birth and i always thought the flow there was a nebraskan but i wanted to write about the border war i been in kansas now for the last thirty years and this is my home now i was living in the old west lawrence when i was a graduate student at the recent kansas and would see the markers of up on trial and all of these things and i don't know any of this history and i i love history and so the first thing i did was i wanted to write about where

we're just felt that there is so much material there and that most americans think the civil war started back east we know it started right here and finding a child to whom i could tell my story because that's the way i write history turned out to be a big challenge when i came to the literal about buffalo and i read about his childhood it was so rich it i felt it was a real gift because he spent the years from age eight to twenty right here in our area in reading about his childhood is there one incident that you can point to that speaks to what the future buffalo bill will be like i'm gonna pick the pony express he was only fourteen when he wrote it easley they were looking for sixteen to eighteen year olds they wanted skinny orphans and down below at that time what was supporting his family his father died when he was eleven he was now the

bread winner he had five sisters of a baby brother and there just weren't any jobs that women could get women and girls and so he was the one who is employable and how he started learning skills by working for a russell majors and when dowd of leavenworth herding cows are taking care of the horses and then gradually starting to go on supply trains going west he was fascinated with native american culture he learn their languages he was fluent in several of them and the skills you learned as a trapper our hunter and guy he what he was just the all purpose western man but i'm using the word man when he was eleven and twelve and thirteen years old and at fourteen when russell majors what else started the pony express he wanted that job because it paid a hundred dollars a month and alice farnham weigh the less money to be made anywhere for anyone and dumb

so you know he wrote it less than a year because it wasn't in business for very long but he encountered everything chased by indians lying flat on his horse knowing that they would try very hard to avoid hitting the horse with their arrows going through blizzards and the heat drought everything you could name was out there on other trails writing hard and writing fast and he always claimed he loved every minute of it his mother didn't she was afraid was going to be shaken to death that you have an excerpt you'd like to read for us i don't think it's well known that billy cody as he was known then before he became both of those railroad workers who gave him the name buffalo bill because he was such a crack shot he'd bring down a buffalo with one shot and they'd never seen anybody do that before but when he was a teenager when he was sixteen and seventeen and before he enlisted in the kansas seventy five a civil war for kansas he

was again unfair and in that part in the beginning he was just going out stealing horses cows horses row is in short supply and there were so many raids going on across the border the missouri is were doing on campus and stealing horses that he felt very justified in doing that when his mother found out she was a religious woman she wasn't going to have a son of hers involved in theory and says he put a stop to it but then things got a lot of work a lot worse and now wasn't just for stealing now these bushwhacking for coming across the border and burning out people's homes as well as stealing their their horses but they work schilling i mean there's a great deal of violence going on around the border and really wanted revenge you know they'd they'd already killed his father and his eyes they had destroyed the family home and created so much hardship and his mother had also made billy promised that he wouldn't join the army you had to be eighteen legally but i had to do was step

up three career and say i'm a teen you to be sixteen and they'd take you because they needed cannon fodder so i'm gonna read a real quick excerpt hear about how billy becomes one of the red lake school and they were the most violent of the j hawkers the family is still living on the farm in the salt creek valley near leavenworth that this time though he kept his promised his mother not to join the army which workers were threatening the area and there needed to be defended billy had turned seventeen when he became a j hawk are once again this time he was open about it with his mother i felt i could join without breaking my promise not to us for the war and joy that i did he said he wrote with one of the most infamous joe harper bands of them all the red likes the name came from the red stockings its members more while on the mission the leader billy's group was a cold hard man captain bill tough who had a reputation for cruelty he'd been known to hang captured the sweaters we had plenty to do billing reported missouri

growers were daring fellows and kept us busy they robbed banks raided villages burned buildings and looted and plundered but the great lakes did the same when they cross into missouri they didn't care which side their victims supported the red legs are decimating the country they have no respect for any person's political opinions when missouri said historian noted that a full recital of their deeds would sound like the biography of the devil both kansans and missourians reforming home guards or militias to try to protect themselves and their property from bush workers and janitors billy's family thought he was involved only in protecting kansans and their property julia here's a side she's billy sr naive lee commented that the regulators are proud that despite numerous provocations they did not copy the enemy's tactics but restricted themselves to purely defensive fighting it's doubtful that billy set her straight we were the biggest group of thieves and record he later admitted

he said little his participation merely commenting that we had many a lively scariest with bush workers and when we were not handing them we had a very festive time we ran things to suit ourselves that's the boys' you became buffalo bill growing up billy cody him bleeding kansas been visiting with andrea warren of prairie village thank you so much andrea thank you would like to be here the boy who became buffalo bill a bitter magic alphabet school sun and moon to leave a shadow kansas wildflowers and weeds just a few of the two thousand sixteen kansas notable book award winners for best new books by kansas authors or about kansas selected by the state library do join us next week on k pr presents when we'll have more kansas notable books and their authors in the meantime if you'd like a chance to win a copy of the kansas audible book we've got several to give away go to our website to a pr that kay you that ed you look under

extra and then available giveaways again that's k pr that kay you that edu click on an extra and then available giveaways and j mcintyre kbr prisons is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas