Were buffalo used to roam there is now the Glacial Hills Scenic Byway where no one roams anymore, just an occasional car with passengers who didn’t find anything better to do on a gloomy Sunday. Scenic Byway officially starts at Ft.Leavenworth, passes through Atchison, twists and turns through Troy and stops right before the Nebraska border at White Cloud – a place still recovering from the housing bubble of 1929.
White Cloud is home to the 4-State lookout – a place where you can see Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska at the same time.
Panoramic view from the lookout can be seen here.
Miss Teen Kansas lives here (at least until 2010):
White Cloud was voted the best place to dispose of a dead body:
Just don’t forget to “dispose of all head and guts” and leave the work area clean for the next person.
North of the White Cloud you will find an Indian Casino adorned by the symbols of past glory: Eagle Feathers, Eagle without feathers and an unfinished tepee:
At the casino zombie-looking white people are sitting in the clouds of smoke, mistakenly hoping they can fool the Indians again. Instead, their money is financing the modern-day tepees.
On the way back you can cross the river, drive past the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge,and return home via I-29.
Overall, this is a pretty nice weekend trip, but it will probably look more picturesque during the spring and summer months. There is a lot more to be seen in Atchison and there is a 10-mile auto route around the Refuge.
It all began in 1955 when Eugene M. Pond, then Kansas City’s chief of detectives who now is chief of police in Wichita , became alarmed at the menacing hot-rod situation here. Motorcycle patrolmen were having a tough time coping with wildcatting, illegal drag racing, on city streets. High speed chases of 100 miles an hour or more were common occurrences.
Pond held a series of meetings with motor-happy youngsters that resulted in formation of the timing accociation. The Kansas City Southern Lines offered a plot of land for $2 a year. A loan of $70,000, to be repaid from profits of the strip , was obtained from a patron group and a contractor agreed to contribute half the cost of grading and paving.
Caught in a swirl of public enthusiasm, the strip was finished two months sooner than planned and suddenly, nocturnal cat and mouse episodes between dragsters and police largely disappeared. The situation has remained relatively the same ever since.
With paramedics, polyclinics and plastic bone banks everybody gets free care in the USSR.
In the 1919 when the newly launched Soviet Union was threatened by a plague of louse-borne typhus, Vladimir Illyich Lenin bluntly warned his countrymen: “Either the lice defeat socialism or socialism defeats the lice.” The USSR survived the lice and in the half century since has built to most massive system of the national health care ever known, still based on Lenin’s logical, if unsentimental premise: Russia needs her workers, and a sick worker cannot work.
From birth do death the Soviet citizen is followed by a dossier of his health history. He may get production line preventive treatment without leaving his post at school, factory, farm or office. If he is sick but can walk, he goes to a polyclinic, one of thousands of free, all-purpose infirmaries. At least in the cities there are doctors aplenty. Of the world’s 2.5 million physicians, 500,000 – or one in five – are Russians. (The U.S. by comparison has 309,000 M.D.s, for a population 85% as large. Another half million trained medical assistants called feldshers supplement the doctors, particularly in the vast, thinly settled rural outlands.
The system has flaws. To achieve quantity, the quality of treatment often suffers. Hospital sanitation is spotty at best. Anesthetics and modern equipment are often unavailable and most advanced drugs have to be imported. Dentistry is painfully old-fashioned. Medical education considered as a whole, is not up to U.S. standards (I would argue with that. M.V). But the Soviet goal is a lifetime health care for everyone, and any enterprise that ambitious is bound to have failings.
In 1958, six months after the Sputnik was launched, the Life Magazine ran an article comparing an American and a Russian student and drawing conclusions about problems with the American education system. Many of these problems are still with us today; while the Russian education is not what it used to be, the American educators are still busy making kids feel good about themselves, rather than teach, resulting in generations of students without advanced and, sometimes, basic skills.
You can read the article for yourselves and I will post just photos starting with the Russian student Alexei Kutzkov and continuing with his American Counterpart Stephen Lapekas in the next post.
Before you look at these photos, I want to point out that not all the Soviet schools in 1958 looked like this one, complete with chemical, physical and mechanical labs and not all the students were genii. Generally in Moscow everything looked better than in the rest of the country, but in every big city there were a few “show” schools, like the one I attended, happy to display the advantages of the Soviet system to the unsuspecting foreigners. Before the showtime an extraordinary amount of cleaning, scrubbing and painting occurred, combined with special deliveries of rare equipment and teaching aids; it wasn’t unheard of to serve improved lunches during the VIP visits; the school had to impress or else. Nevertheless, even without all these things the Soviet education system was one of the best in the world, not only producing world-famous scientists but maintaining high intellectual level in the rest of the population.
Recent post by M.Toast (it rhymes) where she effectively came out as a jam addict made me take a look at my fridge.
Guilty, but there is a difference. With my shopping habits you can say I’ve been preparing for a financial crisis all my life. While M.Toast is paying big bucks at high-end stores and at the City Market, I get my fix at the Big Lots. Today’s trip netted some French concoctions (it’s French, so it must be delicious).
I am sure these run probably close to $5-6 at some fancy stores; Big Lots -$2.50. Inventory always changes. Couple of months ago, I picked up a couple of jars of the “Fantastico Fig Jam”.
I am still mad at myself for not picking up a whole case. Who knew fig jam would be so popular in Olathe.
If you are wondering about the item in a plastic tub in my fridge with Russian/Hebrew writing on it, it’s a hard-to-find fresh black currant ground up with sugar. It’s not exactly a jam, it’s preserved by exorbitant amounts of sugar so it doesn’t have to be cooked. We used to preserve raspberries this way. Fresh all winter. Locally found only in the Russian stores and is not very cheap but totally worth it. Make sure you are not buying similar-looking but heat-treated version of the same.
Even when the times are hard you can sweeten up your life a little with some money to spare for your other vices like prostitutes and drugs. You just have to know where to look.
