WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 2004
ENTERTAINMENT
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
25
Town finds something it can crow about
The Associated Press
BURNS — The 500 or so folks who call Burns home are proud of their tiny Flint Hills town, which explains the Rooster Walk.
Forty or so one-and-a-half-feet tall, 70pound concrete roosters are scattered all over the few square blocks of Burns each adorned to illustrate some aspect of the town's proudly idiosyncratic personality.
There's a green Martian rooster to commemorate the city's starring role in the Hollywood movie Mars Attacks!
There's a rooster with buffalo hair and horns outside the Buffalo Gulch Ranch House supper club. The local volunteer fire department has a rooster with red suspenders and a fireman's helmet. The bank's rooster is adorned with various denominations of currency, and a "Vincent van Crouch" rooster painted with Van Gogh's Starry Night stands guard outside the Prairie Arts cooperative.
Other roosters speak to their owners' favorite pastimes, such as the domino-decorated rooster outside the home of a local domino player.
"We're trying to create some enthusiasm, draw people closer together," said
Barb Anderson, an elementary school teacher and one of the organizers of the rooster project. "And, it's just for fun."
Anderson was having coffee and cinnamon rolls with her friend and fellow rooster booster Sandy Heyman at the Burns Cafe & Bakery, a happily old-fashioned and wooden-floored spot where the cinnamon rolls are made according to a Mennonite family recipe and are quite good.
Heyman, a quilter, wheat weaver and seamstress whose creations have been displayed in several states and abroad said the roosters were also intended to both spur and celebrate the town's recent revitalization.
"It keeps growing, and every day someone wants another rooster," Heyman said. "We hope it's a drawing point for the town."
Anderson admited the town had recently been through hard times. "The school closed, and then the bank fell down." She also said that "One day it gradually started coming back, and good things started happening."
The good things include a new bank building where locals sometimes dropped by to enjoy the air conditioning, cookies and a friendly conversation with the
tellers. There's also a new community building completed with help from the state's Kan-Step program, the success of a local business that makes grills and smokers, a mural on the wall of the former general store, the arts and crafts cooperative, a new gazebo and an outbreak of dulcimer playing brought on by a local luthier.
To keep the positive trend going, Heyman, Anderson and their friend Carolyn Koehn seized the rooster idea. Inspired by similar projects that placed decorated cow sculptures all over Chicago, colorful pigs around Seattle and plane sculptures in Wichita, the three decided that Burns should be the smallest town to try the idea.
They chose roosters, Heyman said, in part because Burns residents had long ago eked out a living with money from eggs, and "It was sort of a heritage thing we could do," but also because "we figured we couldn't handle cows, and we had enough problems with these roosters weighing 70 pounds."
The group purchased several of the roosters from a Yoder concrete company and set about decorating them for local business.
Anderson painted one in Kansas State University purple to honor her late hus
band, a Wildcat fan, and Heyman decorated one with a quilt pattern as a nod to her usual artistic activities.
Other Burns residents then purchased roosters at cost and either decorated them to their own taste or had the organizers do the work, with NASCAR fans Mark and Elise Brunhoeber owning a "Jeff Gordon Racer Rooster," Brad Stuhlsatz owning a "Handyman Rooster" for Burns Hardware and postal employees displaying a "Postal Rooster," among others.
Just to add a little more incentive for a stroll around town, the trio placed stamps next to some of the roosters, and anyone who gets a brochure stamped five times gets a rooster-shaped key chain with the slogan "A Town to Crow About."
The project is still under way, Heyman said, with a "dulcimer rooster" and a rooster honoring the late country singer Roger Miller among the planned additions
The project has already succeeded in bringing Burns residents together, Heyman and Anderson agreed, and now they're hoping it will bring Burns together with a few visitors.
"You should come here on a Friday night," Heyman said. "We keep this place open late."