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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN, LAWRENCE; KANSAS
MARCH 21,194
Look To Your Own Back Yard, Villager Advises Kansan
Sunflower Editor Protests Article On Veteran Housing
Says the Sunflower Villager, the semi-monthly paper of the area: "No refrigerator here. Another view of K.U. veteran housing."
(Editor's note: A week ago, the Daily Kansan printed a descriptive feature story by Becky Vallette, its managing editor, on housing facilities used by veterans at Sunflower Village. The Village newspaper, a semi-monthly called the Sunflower Villager, today prints what it terms a "reply" to the Kansan article. The author is the managing editor of the Villager, Ransom O'Burke, who works in Kansas City.)
By Ransom O'Burke
There is an old saying which goes something like this: "Sweep your own doorstep before criticizing the housekeeping of others." And with that saying in mind the following article is presented in answer to the story carried in the University Daily Kansan of March 13, 1946.
This outburst of righteous indignation comes from the rising temPTure of the residents of Sunflower Village, who, with tongue in their cheeks have read and listened to various forms of criticism from the press, pulpit and upfrom right citizens of other communities until the breaking point has been reached. The article in the Kansan was the final straw, so now the pages of the Villager are to be used in a categorical denial of every charge made in the unfortunate article by Becky Vallette, managing editor of the Daily Kansan.
The Villager, as a paper, has no quarrel with the Kansan, never has had—in fact the writer was not aware that the Kansan existed until K.U. veteran students began moving into the Village. It is perhaps childish to publicify resent the slur which the editor of the Kansan gave the Village, and quite likely nothing would have happened, outside of mention of the fact in the Village, Ramplings, had not so many veterans who are students at K.U. asked that some reply be made. The old time residents of the Village have become so inured to criticism that it falls on them like water on a duck's back—but even some of them are highly incensed.
Statements and Answers
"If you talk low neighbors can hear everything, but you certainly can't beat your wife"-the fact of the matter is that the walls in the old addition are four inches thick it isn't the trick of talking so low, as it is in not listening so hard "... tiny inconvenient homes at Sunflower Village." Yes the homes are tiny, when compared to the fourteen room house where my wife was raised or the nine room house where I was raised, but inconvenient? Well that is a matter of speculation—the Village is equipped with all the modern forms of utilities now available in all the large cities, including Lawrence. Each apartment in the new additions is equipped with an electric stove, and an automatic electric water heater; in the old Village there is a modern, but small, gas stove and an automatic electric water heater. Each apartment is also equipped with a modern refrigerator, several lucky families has pre-war mechanical refrigerators.
"Streets aren't paved too well" . . . where else is there a community where every house has an outlet to a hard surfaced roadway? True there are a few of the lanes in the old Village where the ground was not receptive to pavement, and as a result there are, occasionally, some days when it is muddy. Each street has a good surface, a year ago this was not true, but it is now. Every street in the new addition is paved with concrete, every street in the old Village has been surfaced twice, and every land has a bed of crushed rock topped with chat and held together with a coating of blacktop. "Grassless". . . true there are some parts of the Village where grass has been hard to grow, and the two new additions were not finished in time for a satisfactory seeding last year.
The two photographs on this page and the picture on Page 1 were made by Joe Kaplan for the Sunflower Villager.
Both additions are being seeded now.
"Scarps of paper and other trash litter the streets, because there is no individual or group responsibility for keeping them clean." This statement is false. Paper and trash do not litter the streets, and there is a group responsible for keeping the streets clean. The F.P.H.A. maintains a crew of over twenty men. The yards are the individual's responsibility.
"Each home has a bath with all of the conveniences—except a tub." The above statement was printed in blackface type, and there was no further explanation that each home was also equipped with a shower, where hot and cold running water was available 24 hours a day. Can this boast be made by each apartment or housing accommodation in Lawrence? For that matter where can you find a community of over 1500 apartments where EVERY apartment has a private bath?
Telephones? Well have you tried to get a telephone installed during the past four year? If you have you will know why there are no private phones in the Village. Pay stations have been conveniently located so that it isn't much further than a block to the nearest one. At least it's better than barging in on a neighbor and asking "May I use
your phone?" . . . A villager isn't under obligations to his neighbor for conveniences, for all are in a like situation.
Chief Hopkins of the Sunflower Ordnance Works fire department was rather put out over the statement that "I told my wife if our house ever caught on fire, just to grab what she could and head for an open field." While the fire department hasn't been needed in the Villages more than a half dozen times since its founding, the fire trucks have made the run in good time and have rendered efficient service. Loss from fire in the Village in almost three years hasn't exceeded $100.00 according to the best estimates available.
The "out-of-the-front-window" view pictured on the front page of the Kansan was ill advised. In the first place it was a view of the back of an apartment. Is there anything wrong with a clothes line in the back of an apartment? The garbage bail pictured is not a garbage pail at all. It is the coal bucket. When the Village was ready to purchase coal buckets there were none available, as a result most every apartment is provided with a five gallon paint bucket to serve as a coal container. The garbage pail is out of sight, in a space provided for it at the side of the coal bin. Garbage and trash collections are made every other day. The only rubbish visible in the picture is the rubble from the adjacent trash pit, the walls of the pit
According to the Villager: "Modern sanitary facilities provided for veterans near K.U. campus."
Summary
have, evidently, been knocked down. Law enforcement in the Village is in the hands of the law enforcement agency of Johnson County, the same as any other unincorporated community; and Luther Fillinger has been doing a very efficient job in Sunflower Village. The "ordnance police" as the Kansan calls the plant Guards have no jurisdiction over the Village.
About 175 wives of student veterans were initiated by, the K.U. Dames last night at a meeting in the Union. A musical program under the chairmanship of Mrs. John Leonard was presented and refreshments were served.
Now that the Villager has called attention to some of the most glaring mistakes in the Kansan's article some very important information will now be divulged. The residents living in the Village are not here from choice, but there was a war to win, remember? And to the credit of many of the old time residents and the new veteran residents goes the credit of winning that war, the former for making the materials and the latter for the use of them; let's not look down our noses at the living accommodations afforded these people. "Thin walls, dirty streets, howling babies" sounds too much like a tenement district, even if the statement was true there
K.U. Dames Initiate 175 Wives of Veterans
FRITZ CO. Phone 4 8th & N.H. CITIES SERVICE PRODUCTS
Officers elected are Mrs. Richard Schiefelbusch, president; Mrs. Eleanor Lind, vice-president; Mrs. Ralph Moody, recording secretary; Mrs. Loren King, treasurer; and Mrs. Elmo Geppelt, corresponding secretary.
could be no advantage in publicizing it.
Residents of the Village are civic, minded, public spirited American citizens who for the lack of fore-sight on someone's part are forced to live miles from urban centers because they can not find suitable living accommodations in these centers; to ridicule their homes is bad taste, very bad taste, or hasn't your house mother taught you that?