THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
A special supplement
Copyright, 1969
Poverty
Poverty is a muddy street no one cares about except at election time.
Poverty is standing in lines.
It's the endless questions of a social welfare worker.
Powdered milk, powdered eggs, corn meal and dried beans. Or wondering whether there'll even be, that tomorrow.
Poverty is a tattered coat that's too big. A child's tennis shoes with toes cut out for growin' room, with pieced together shoe laces, one brown the other grubby white.
Poverty is a set of springs for a bed and sleeping with two brothers and a baby sister.
Poverty is a baby drinking sugared water.
It's an abandoned house for a playground and a trash-strewn creek for a swimming pool.
Poverty is the other side of Lawrence, the side "respectable folks" will tell you doesn't exist.
But they're wrong.
The poor exist in Lawrence by the thousands. A team of Daily Kansan reporters discovered that in a two-month probe. They discovered that and more.
Steve Nafus, another staff correspondent, examines welfare programs, while Richard Louv, a prize-winning staff writer, records a visit with a poor family; Ken Peterson explores the embryo local anti-poverty effort and Viki Hysten takes up city services in North Lawrence, the city's most serious area of blight.
Fred Parris, the Kansan's prize-winning senior staff correspondent, writes on the roots of Lawrence poverty and examines unemployment, housing and neighborhood problems in addition to visiting with a man who owns much of housing in Lawrence's blighted neighborhoods.
They found, for example that Lawrence's "mini-slums" have many of the problems of big city ghettos. They also found a raft of conditions peculiar to Lawrence.
It's all here in this special eight-page supplement.
But read their findings yourself. Lift this special section out of our regular pages. We think you'll find it interesting. -The Editors
Staff photo