In Kansas, a Growing Phone Company Helps Keep a Small Prairie Town Alive & Bucking Trend, They Stay on the Plains, Held by Family and Friends

In Kansas, a Growing Phone Company Helps Keep a Small Prairie Town Alive

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Thanks to Tom Rolfstad – Williston Economic Development for passing this along. The full series "Vanishing Point- The Empty Heartland" can be viewed at: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/national/RURAL_INDEX.html

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By PETER T. KILBORN NY Times

LENORA, Kan. — Highway 9 hurries past drought-ravaged prairie where nothing remains but petrified plows and weather-scorched relics of stores. Trees have retaken little Densmore and squeezed the life from its stately old Free Methodist Church. In Edmond, the hinges of an outhouse door whine in the wind.

But in Lenora, the great engine of commerce still turns. In the middle of Main Street, a sleek low building of khaki and brown brick spreads the length of a block and most of its depth. "Rural Telephone Service Company," the blue canopy says. Three blocks away, the two-story brick fortress of the senior and junior high school was vacated with the 2001 graduating class of 10. Today the name on the front says "Rural Telephone Plant Department."

Karen Coffman, the owner of Karen’s Cafe, said, "I believe if Rural Telephone wasn’t here, we would have nothing."

The population of the 18 contiguous northwestern Kansas counties that make up most of the telephone company’s expanding terrain dropped an average of 17 percent in 20 years, to 100,000, the 2000 Census found, and has kept falling since. But for a decade, Lenora’s population of 305 has been holding, and Rural Telephone’s keeps growing, to 240 today from 50 a decade ago. Sixty employees work in the Main Street headquarters, the others in Hays, Norton, Osborne, Great Bend and Dodge City.

Through decades of population decline in the Great Plains, rural communities sought remedies from government and courted outside corporations to send them factories and offices. The corporations sent pig-feeding and meatpacking plants, telemarketing and data entry shops, and paid the minimum wage.

"What they got was a race to the bottom," said Chuck Fluharty, director of the Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri, "with tax giveaways, the lowest wages and the most destruction to the environment." And then, when the economy stalled a couple of years ago, many of those jobs, too, disappeared.

More commonly now, communities are nursing their own indigenous seedlings — small entrepreneurs and old businesses with new ideas that bring back the young, bring in investment and revive Main Street.

Most of these businesses are minuscule compared with the titans of corporate America. Just a few, like Gateway Computer in South Dakota and Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, Okla., have become titans themselves. But in scattered small towns of the prairie, one vigorous little enterprise — a hotel, a store, a propane dealer, a software writer — can make the difference between dissolution and survival.

The deck is still stacked against those who would become the new Gateways, Mr. Fluharty said, because the tools — like loans, roads and airports, and schools to train workers — are not there. Rural Telephone, however, helps with telecommunications. As it grows, it is lacing this region with technologies like digital cable television, wireless and high-speed Internet connections and fiber-optic cables instead of copper wire, which lubricate other pioneers’ attempts to expand.

As Larry E. Sevier, 60, chief executive and general manager, builds Rural Telephone, he is bringing young people back to the rural Plains. Some come from vanishing family farms. Web page designers, software writers and computer technicians have come back from Denver, Omaha and Silicon Valley. Some are new immigrants.

The company’s central office manager, Dennis Johnson, 42, supervises the company’s 31 switching centers. He grew up in Minnesota, worked in Chicago, married, and moved to Galesburg, Ill., to work for the Sprint Corporation. Five years ago he moved to Logan, a 25-minute drive east of Lenora.

Since moving, Mr. Johnson said, "We discuss population decline quite a bit." He and his wife worry about whether remote regional schools will swallow up Logan’s.

Doctors and dentists are also a concern. "There are small hospitals in towns like Norton and Hays," he said. "But when you need an expert, you might have to go to Wichita or Omaha," more than five hours by car.

So two years ago, Mr. Johnson submitted his resignation. "Then I went home and said, `Wait a minute. Why are we doing this? We have a good home, a good community, friends.’ The next morning I went back. `May I have my resignation back please?’ We like it here. We’re comfortable here.’ "

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Bucking Trend, They Stay on the Plains, Held by Family and Friends

Tornadoes, droughts and the brutal busts after gas and oil booms have chased people from western Oklahoma for decades. Settlement after settlement has crumbled into the red-slate soil. Others hang on, barely.

By PETER T. KILBORN NY Times

In Reydon, population 161, a turtle crosses Main Street unscathed.

And yet after 70 years of flight from the rural Great Plains, a resolute core of people just will not go. They are people like David and Berla Barton, both 45, owners of a three-bedroom white stucco bungalow on Fifth Avenue, where spider plants hang over the patio, an orphaned black calf lies in a shed and eight fishing rods line a wall of the garage.

One Sunday at noon, cars pulled up and dogs yelped. Michael Barton, 17, stopped watching car races on television with his brother Zack, 15, to take the carrot cake he had made from the oven. Mrs. Barton loaded the kitchen counter with mashed potatoes, corn and a beef roast from the crockpot and arranged chairs around the long oak dining table that her father, Joe Handke, had built.

"Grandma, Grandma," said Maddie, coming in from Cheyenne, the county seat 18 miles away, with the Bartons’ oldest son, Chris, and his wife, Janet, both 23, and their infant son, Trent. Four years old, possessed by her plan to be an angel ballerina on Halloween, Maddie asked: "Do you have a purple dress? With wings?" A daughter, Sarah Barton, and her boyfriend, Justin Batterton, both 21, arrived from outside Cheyenne.

As the plows of depopulation and decay slice through the Plains, these are the people who remain. Many would never think of moving. Some are too old or unskilled to have a choice. Many families — like the Bartons, the Yowells, the Calverts and the Lippencotts in Reydon — have members who do go away, for the Army, maybe, or college, and then come back to build new generations.

Blessing or trap, the lure invariably is family — the family ranch, the homestead, the business, the assurance of help with a job. Sociologists and demographers do not know whether families like the Bartons are the stragglers of an exodus who will finally be swept away, too, or whether, like the survivors of fires and floods before them, they will adapt and hold on.

"You have a general regional trend of depopulation," Leonard Bloomquist, head of the sociology department at Kansas State University, said. "But you do have families that are making viable communities and carving out a niche for themselves."

One old reason to stay — pursuit of the bigger-is-better American dogma of progress and growth — fits Reydon like a glove on a goat. "They make a conscious choice of what kind of lifestyle they want," Mr. Bloomquist said. "They just don’t want to go to the maximum-achievement approach. A lot of this is tied to a pioneer spirit, to making a go of it."

In polls of Great Plains communities, Jim Sylvester, director of survey operations at the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana, asks people why they stay. "Forty percent say their family keeps them there," he said. "That’s the big one." In urban areas, he said, 40 percent say their jobs are No. 1.

To make it in Reydon, people rely on one another. Bonds among families and neighbors supply the economic energy that used to come from small farmers, big employers, government offices, Main Street services and stores and, ages ago, streams of new settlers.

The Make-Do Economy

In this make-do economy, you pay a mother-in-law something to baby-sit, just not a lot. You leave a note when you enter an unlocked house and take something. Pauline McNeil, 80, the retired postmistress and widow of a carpenter, sews. "I don’t charge for it," she said. "Someone will say, `I’ve got a pair of pants that’s too big.’ "

No one need buy maternity clothes. They are delivered to the doorstep, worn and dropped on another doorstep. In Reydon, families put the surplus from backyard gardens inside the post office door, for others to take. Cousins fill in for cousins who call in sick. You try to get a job with a telephone company, utility or oil field company, because then you get a truck to take home.

Families squabble, but with three people per square mile in Roger Mills County, they need not cross paths. "If there’s someone you don’t get along with," Mrs. Barton said, "you just don’t go by their house."

Places like Reydon have "high social capital," said Curtis Stofferahn, a sociologist and co-director of the Center for Rural Studies of the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University.

"In the Plains, it’s a sustaining feature of life," Mr. Stofferahn said. "It’s built on reciprocity and trust. You do favors without expecting you will be repaid, but you know you will be repaid by someone."

People who linger can be said to have made an economically irrational choice, said Karl Stauber, chief executive of the Northwest Area Foundation, an organization in St. Paul that promotes ways to foster community revival. In this view, he said, "anyone with any get-up-and-go has already gone."

"There’s another way to look at it," Mr. Stauber said. "These are folks who value family and an economically simple life. People are taken care of. What you see are decentralized, informal systems that sometimes deliver services better" than growing communities with government services and large employers.

Still, for these places, there is a breaking point. "Schools close or you can’t get an ambulance," Mr. Stauber said. "Opportunities become so limited, people have to choose between subsistence and leaving, and they leave."

Stuart and Kimberly Sander in Cheyenne, population 718 and dropping, fear facing such a choice.

"We wanted to give our kids the same opportunities we had," said Mr. Sander, who is 34 and senior vice president of Security State Bank. "Out here, people are more content with what they have. I have a good job. I’m home every night to see my kids. I’m very happy with that."

But all around the county, schools keep shrinking and consolidating. "They’re just not doing your kids a service," Mr. Sander said. "I’m very worried about this place, this bank, what this town will be."

The Town

The families of Roger Mills County live in an America without trains, planes or buses, and an hour’s drive to a road with more than two lanes. The county, with a population of 3,300, has lost 30 percent of its people since the oil bust of the 1980’s.

Reydon has five streets going north and south and six going east and west, including Main Street. The post office, the firehouse, the American Legion building and Kay Danks’s tax preparation office are clustered at the east end of Main.

In the middle, across from Shirley Dyer’s abandoned gasoline station with a tornado-wrung roof, is Tennery’s beef-jerky plant. At the west end is the cinder-block Hilltop Cafe, with a 7-Up sign in front. The Wednesday special is brown beans, ham and coleslaw, for $2.95.

These days, the seven tables with 36 seats fill up at noon, with retirees, hunters, oil and gas field workers and cowboys from the ranches. At one table, Coby Lippencott, 28, and Jerry Burks, 44, dug into burgers and fries. Both raise cattle and work as natural-gas compression mechanics in the oil field. Mr. Lippencott graduated from Southwestern Oklahoma State University. Mr. Burks finished high school.

"There’s always a reason people come back here," Mr. Lippencott said, "not just because they want to. There’s parents and grandparents that leave them something. My family’s been here forever. We farm and ranch. The reason people leave, if they don’t have parents or grandparents to help support them, then they leave. By the time I graduated from college, my grandparents bought a house and some land. Somebody had to live in the house. It was free. It always comes back to grandparents."

The Family

David Barton is a wiry man with thinning hair and a laugh that bursts like a thunderclap. As a student at Reydon High School, he found part-time work in the oil field. "I worked at night," he said. "I was making more money than the teachers."

A year after he graduated, he married Berla Handke, a classmate. Mrs. Barton quit nursing school so they could move to the oil fields of Wyoming. She became pregnant with Chris, so they returned to the oil fields here.

"Things were good," Mr. Barton said. "We bought a house, new vehicles." Sarah was born. A week later, Mrs. Barton was in the hospital with an infection. Mr. Barton visited. "He said, `Honey, I just lost my job,’ " Mrs. Barton said. "He went on unemployment." They lost their home.

"We had to sit down and rethink our position," Mr. Barton said.

With the 1980’s oil bust, 14 percent of the county bailed out, but the Bartons stayed. "It got to where it was more important to be close to home than to be away and make plenty of money," Mr. Barton said.

The ad-hoc economy kicked in. A farmer gave them a house for a year, rent free, in return for cleaning it up. Mr. Barton became a hunting guide in the fall and a carpenter in winter. Mostly, though, he trades cows and calves. He drives up to 300 miles a day tending cattle scattered over 4,000 acres he leases.

In a typical year, he earns about $16,000. Some years, when cattle prices plunge, he earns less than $10,000, and one year in the 1990’s, he made nothing. In down years, he exchanges farm work and carpentry for cattle feed. "Or if I’m running a little short," he said, "my neighbor will sell me some hay and let me pay when I sell my calves. You can make a man-to-man deal for a vehicle and go ahead and pay when times get good."

Eight years ago, the Bartons had saved enough to buy their current home, for $4,500. It needs a new roof. But with a bedroom for each boy, its wood stove, outbuildings and patio, it is an amiable middle-class home that could be anywhere.

Still, with four children, making a living was a struggle. So five years ago, Mrs. Barton went to back to school to become a licensed practical nurse.

Now she earns about $22,000 a year working in the maternity ward of a hospital in Clinton, 62 miles away.

With that and good cattle prices, the Bartons are having a good year. Mr. Barton cleared $28,000 this summer raising and trading calves. They are passing the windfall around.

They bought Michael and Zack $2,000 Kawasaki motorcycles. They bought the clapboard house next door for $7,500. They are renting it for $400 a month until one of the children wants it.

Janet and Chris are now settling into the make-do economy. Chris had gone to college for a year expecting to become a teacher. But he dropped out to take a full-time, full-benefits job as a lineman with the Northfork Electric Co-op in Cheyenne.

With a mortgage and a third child due soon, he has to hustle for other jobs. "I own a hay truck," he said, "and in the summer time, I’ll haul square bales of hay. In the fall, we cut firewood and haul it to Pampa, Tex., where they don’t have trees. I help a guy in a taxidermy shop. We mount deer, bobcats, coyotes, elk. We build fences." He and his partner won a bid this year to clear neglected lots in Cheyenne for $1,500.

Soon Janet is going to work, too. She has started classes to become a licensed practical nurse, like her mother-in-law.

Everyone else in the family works. Sarah is a loan office secretary at a bank in Sayre, about 40 miles away. Michael and Zack have after-school jobs as farm hands that pay $5 an hour, plus meals on Saturdays.

Michael and Zack, unlike many of Reydon’s young, expect to remain nearby. Next year, Michael plans to go to a vocational-technical college to become a mechanic and welder. He doubts he will live in Reydon, but does not expect to move far.

Recruiters from Duke University in North Carolina have urged Zack to consider applying. He shrugs. He is thinking of somewhere cheaper and closer, and then a career in nuclear medicine, provided he can practice no farther than Elk City, 34 miles to the east-southeast.

Mr. Barton said: "The main reason people stay is because it’s where the family is. A lot of parents, if they make a place for their kids, they come back."

"It’s just normal," he continued. "It’s just normal to be here. If you’re not accustomed to a real expensive lifestyle, you haven’t lost anything."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company