Kansas Boy

Jeffrey H. Barker is provost and professor of philosophy, Converse College, Spartansburg, South Carolina.Melissa Walker is George Dean Johnson, Jr. professor of history emerita, Converse College, Spartansburg, South Carolina, and author of Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History.

A. J. Bolinger's memoir of growing up in Kansas is fascinating reading. He had the knack of being in the right place at the right time and can tell us a great deal about life in Kansas towns, both small and large, many years ago. His description of joining Carrie Nation in smashing saloons in Topeka is priceless. Bolinger’s work does a very good job of explaining, without even trying, that his was a different time and place." - Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, author of The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America since 1865"A. J. Bolinger transports us back to the American Midwest when the nineteenth century was drawing to a close and possibilities seemed endless for those seeking a better tomorrow. Frontier settlements were growing into cities, new states were forming, industries were developing, and pioneer heroes of the Old West were passing their torches to a new generation. Editors Jeffrey Barker and Melissa Walker skillfully set the stage for Bolinger’s captivating memoir, adding valuable historical context to the narrative." - Lana Wirt Myers, editor of The Diaries of Reuben Smith, Kansas Settler and Civil War Soldier, and author of Prairie Rhythms: The Life and Poetry of May Williams Ward"Arthur Joel Bolinger’s story of his Kansas boyhood is not your typical grandfather’s (or great-grandfather’s) frontier memoir. In the first place, it goes well beyond his late nineteenth-century boyhood in several Flint Hills locations, where his father tried farming and storekeeping; to his educational experiences in Topeka with frequent visits to Kansas City; to his early adulthood sojourn to Oklahoma, where circumstances found Bolinger ‘a died in the wool, born and reared Republican,’ editing a ‘rip-roaring’ Democratic newspaper. In the second place, as the editors point out in their fine contextual introductory essay, the memoir often eloquently offers ‘delightful and revealing insights’ into the turn-of-the-century life of a middle American of modest upbringing—as Bolinger opined, his are mostly ‘simple tales,’ seemingly ‘trivial and unimportant. Trivial they are of course, but unimportant, no. All our lives are a woven pattern of trivial things.’" - Virgil W. Dean, editor of John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History"A delightful romp through the early twentieth century, Kansas Boy exhibits Bolinger’s sharp eye, which is immediate and fresh—a backstage glimpse of both daily life and national events faithfully rendered by a true Kansas boy." - Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, former executive director, Chapman Center for Rural Studies, Kansas State University, and author of Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory and Sauble: Stories from the Flint Hills