Round the county
I am a big admirer of (recently-retired Wichita Eagle columnist) Bob Getz, but I am obviously "not him." Nor am I Tom Schoening, who worked here at the Marion County Record in 1986 and '87.
But this is an attempt to try to revive the type of column Schoening wrote in those years, which he called "Tom's Tales." Just some little snippets of fun, humor, information, interest from people around the town.
If you have any such little or not-so-little items of interest and/or fun, please let me know about them, on the phone, at 382-2165, in person, or by mail at Box 278, Marion. Thursday or Friday would be preferable days for letting me know. Thanks in advance.
Sheriff Lee Becker reported Friday he had just four inmates in the Marion County Jail. And two of the four would soon be going to the custody of KDOC (the Kansas Department of Corrections), he said.
"We've been having an average of 15 to 20 in jail, in the recent past," Becker said. This was true in January and February, he said. Then the average number of inmates dropped to 10, and now it's four.
"That's good," the sheriff said. "It saves the county money."
One young waitress, or server, as the politically correct nowadays would have it, had some wool pulled over her eyes at about 1 p.m. Friday.
One of her bosses told her that two young men she had just waited on, who had left the eatery after paying, were members of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, this year's Chingawassa Days highlight concert band.
She wondered aloud why the boss did not tell her sooner. She started to wait on me, then dashed out the door to get their autographs, chat a bit, etc.
She did get an autograph, but the men were not members of the OMD. It was June 6, but she was the victim of an April 1 leg-pulling just the same.
That's OK — one of them did look kind of like one of the OMDs in the poster picture for Saturday's concert, also published twice in the Marion County Record with stories and several times with ads.
And I would not have known if the boss was just "funnin" me, either, although I did interview one of them, Steve Cash, for a story that ran in last week's Record. But without any visual aids such as on some of the cell phones they've been advertising now for a year or so.
So "you coulda fooled me," too.
A little bird, or rather, a member of the Chingawassa Days committee, told us that the Ozark Mountain Daredevils told him a story about two older men dressed in overalls who are pictured on one of the band's album covers from the 1970s (remember albums? Album covers?).
The men are both in a nursing home in the Springfield-Southwest Missouri area now, and the Daredevils have adopted them, pay for their care and residency at the long-term care facility.
That's pretty neat.
Congratulations to Chuck Maggard and Heidi Doyle. Way to go, Chuck. It's nice to see someone do something "fun" and out of the ordinary once in a while.
We hope they will "live happily ever after."
Nancy Pihl, Family and Consumer Sciences Extension agent for Marion County, says an older gentleman called her about a year ago to tell her how he cores tomatoes before canning them.
He freezes them, then uses a half-inch drill bit to get those cores out.
— JERRY BUXTON
