Thursday, May 16, 1968
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
13
Kansas town gradually dies with population
By Dan B. McCarthy
"Big city" newspapers tossed from one of the two daily passenger trains arriving in Traer 54 years ago brought townfolk in the northwest Kansas Decatur county community encouraging news that was headlined:
TOWN WITH FUTURE
TOWN WITH FUTURE
Traer Has Developed a Good
Shipping Trade; Needs Bank
In that July 27, 1914, edition of the Topeka Journal, printed some 400 miles east of Traer in the state capital, a glowing report delighted Traer readers. In part the article said:
"The town is situated in a fine section in the valley of Beaver Creek and on the Burlington railroad. J.H. Howard, who has filled the position of agent here for some years, says Traer is one of the best small stations on the Orleans branch.
"The good corn crop on top of the fine alfalfa and wheat crops make the Traer merchants and farmers enthusiastic and they are standing up for Decatur County with high hopes. All the businessmen in Traer want to see a bank opened up. There is enough trade to justify it."
Looking back today across a half century since that news report was published, records show that those businessmen did open a bank. Traer's First State Bank's teller cages were busy leading into the Depression, then closed. Those two daily passenger trains no longer chuff into town. Only one freight train a day now, and there used to be three.
Traer's high school, two churches, the Woodman's Lodge hall, the blacksmith shop, the livery stable, the lumber yard and hardware store, two grocery stores, and the town's onetime newspaper, Traer News (first issue published February 20, 1918, and nobody todays seems to remember when it folded), and the barber shop are gone.
In 1968 the community grain elevator, with a 170,000-bushel capacity, still goes full blast, but that little railroad station written about a half century back is gone.
Traer is 14 miles northwest of Oberlin, Decatur county seat. The latter is a city where population continues on the rise, despite population declines in communities like Traer, Cedar Bluffs, Kanona and Dresden—places that never had more than 300 residents.
Today's Oberlin population is 2,578, whereas in 1946 it was only 1,766. Some of the inhabitants of the surrounding, disappearing communities have moved to Oberlin. In Decatur County the population shows a decline, too, from 6,333 in 1946 to 5,675 residents this year.
While aggressive, sprucing Oberlin (with a downtown renewal plan underway that would make Topeka envious) shows a population rise, one sees the lively town spirit as a factor. Decatur County's population decline reflects a shift of people from unincorporated hamlets to centers where employment, larger schools, hospitals and entertainment are available.
Working on a patch quilt in the front room of her Oberlin home, Mrs. Etta Callahan Brown said that if she had her way, she'd like to be back at her old home in Kanona (now a ghost town a half dozen miles or so east of Oberlin.) "I'd have my garden again, too," she said.
Adolf Lohoefener is a retired farmer who in his 82 years in the same farm home between Oberlin and Traer has watched the rise and decline of the Beaver Creek community.Recalling the pre-1920 hustle in Traer, Lohoefener said:
"To me it is almost dismal to go there now, remembering what I do.
Delbert Shields, Oberlin Herald publishing plant foreman, is a former Traaer resident whose depression era search for employment took him to Denver, where he worked from 1938 to 1948. His parents settled in Decatur County 60 years ago; his father did farm and carpentry work.
"However, in 1938 Denver was beginning to build and there was employment there," Shields said, adding that when his former community around Oberlin showed prospects of moving ahead in all areas of economics, he left Denver's hurried pace for a return to "the open-handed friendliness of small towns." Shields added: "Concern for your neighbors' welfare, clean air, and a good environment for raising a family were part of our return."
Everyone doesn't agree about such small-town advantages, like the woman now living in the Northwest who wrote that she misses "nothing at all" about her former Decatur County hometown.
On the state scene, Jack Lacy, director of the Kansas Department of Economic Development, disclosed in a talk before the St. Francis, Kan., Farmer-Merchant Association;
"We are encouraging the establishment of sound, new plants, either by existing businesses or new organizations, which can operate profitably in the countryside—and permit rural Kansas parity of income and opportunity."
That such focus is being directed towards the countryside is reflected in the current city renewal plan in Oberlin, spearheaded by a Kansas State University College of Architecture and Design graduate team. This pilot project, says Oberlin Herald Editor Howard D. Kessinger, has 19 downtown businessmen signed for modernization of their store fronts.
Shortly after an Oberlin family moved to Kansas City, where the father took new employment, the early April riots of 1968 broke out. The family was in a shoe store making purchases when rioters swarmed along the streets outside. In a hasty rescue effort, the father got his family away from the troubled area without injury to anyone or damage to their property. But the danger was all around them.
Away from the riot zone, 5-year-old Philip Vigo put his hand on his father's shoulder as he was being carried to safety, and said:
"Well, Dad, I guess you know now why I didn't want to leave Oberlin."
OLD MEN TALK
James Lazaroff, retired section foreman for the Burlington railroad, tells Adolf Lohoefener that his trusty railroad watch still keeps good time. Lazaroff makes his home in Traer and had 37 years' service before retiring in 1947.
Labor-
Continued from page 12
David E. Todd, manager for the Kansas City Building and Construction Trades Council, said, "Generally,union membership when educated definitely will follow union recommendations.
"But far too many locals fail to inform their membership. Some have a very bad habit of not even trying to. It's an A-1 big problem."
Todd's colleague, Willard Wilkinson of Kansas City's largest Laborer's local, added, "Lots of times we can't elect a candidate, but he can't be elected without us."
Wilkinson's comment is particularly true in industrial Missouri. In Kansas, however, labor endorsement is "like the kiss of death."
Because of labor's wide consumer interests and active political participation, its eyes are turning now to organization of the non-union working forces, who have had organized labor's
representation on many levels all along.
This continual drive to organize, along with campaigns for better working conditions, is the biggest foreseeable goal for labor.
Long a liberal partner with civil rights in the legislatures and Congress, labor now is intensifying its efforts to organize Negro laborers and to incorporate them into existing unions.
The president of the Kansas State Building Trades Council, WCA "Brick" Hardy says, "the pressure is on to cooperate."
Registration drives in cooperation with civil rights occur throughout the state, he says. But when it comes down to hiring a Negro apprentice, there are two problems. First, it is difficult to find someone qualified. And, second, when they do find a qualified applicant, he usually does not want to wade through five years of apprenticeship.
The problems are many, though the fire and brimstone days of obtaining recognition are over.
A DYING CHURCH
The deteriorating church at Kanona, Kansas, about seven miles east of Oberlin in Decatur County, unattended grass, and crumbling buildings spell the death of that community except for the grain elevator in the distance where business goes on as usual.
New method of treating the deaf developed by French ear specialist
By Marilyn Zook
The method is the Perdoncini Method, a revolutionary approach for teaching children with hearing impairments. The man is Dr. Guy Perdoncini, a deaf specialist.
And his method has apparently been successful, for in three years Perdoncini reports that he has placed 100 per cent of his moderately hard-of-hearing students in their own grade levels in public schools.
The main difference in the new approach is that Perdoncini uses practically no lip reading or sign language. His method is geared to the physical act of hearing.
The children Perdoncini works with are not deaf. He says that "deaf" connotates "no hearing." They do all have a hearing loss, however. And in this category there are three levels of loss — severe, moderate and mild. The Perdoncini method works with only the first two categories.
For children with only a moderate hearing loss there is an almost complete possibility of training them to function without hearing aids. But hearing ability will not develop on its own. Perdoncini works to make children aware of sounds, patterns, pitches and frequency.
He explains that the prime time to train these children is before three years. If they already have used visual aides, such as lip reading, the possibilities of auditory training are lessened because the difference in the two senses is too great.
In the case of a severe loss, however, visual aids may be used to supplement the auditory training. The child needs to see a person's face in order to understand. The two senses work together to enrich understanding. But the visual aids are taken away at specific times to focus the child's attention on the auditory.
Perdoncini has two schools in France—one near Paris and the other on the French Riviera. The method already has spread to eight other nations, and the Institute of logopedics in Wichita is introducing it to the United States through a year's research project evaluating the method against the conventional methods used for generations.
The training takes from three to six years, but the result is reached only if the child is trained early. By nine or ten years of age the stimuli is lost and the method will not be successful.
In this country hearing-impaired children who graduate from high school often have barely attained language and reading skills comparable to those of a grade school child.
They—
Continued from page 12 leave behind friends and relatives for the belief that they must perpetuate the isolated group.
It is the belief of many modern Mennonite groups in the United States that these Old Colony Mennonites are lacking culturally and especially spiritually. They say the traditional Anabaptist idea that every man is his own priest and, therefore, equal with every other believer, is true in theory only, not in fact, among the Old Colony people. The minister or bishop, who has had no training is the final authority on religious matters of all kinds.
The group now going to Bolivia isn't escaping "worldliness" entirely.
They'll take a jet from Mexico City.