In many states teachers are being attacked by politicians who oppose public education. In many states trans people are being attacked by politicians for, well, who really knows.
So imagine you’re a transgender, public school teacher. How hard is that? In this episode we find out from Riley Long, a trans high school teacher in Kansas.
Chances are whatever you know about trans issues in education came from reporters who cover the issue. The best education reporting starts with students and works its way out to larger issues.
Few things have complicated education reporting more than trans issues. The reporting is complicated by state lawmakers and school board members who use it as a campaign issue.
On this issue, we speak with veteran reporter and editor Barb Shelly who has been a journalist in Kansas City for decades.
With everything else they must deal with…law enforcement, taxes and economic development…state legislators spend an enormous amount of time on transgender issues in education. Why, is the most important question but also, are we done watching endless debates on trans students in statehouses?
On this episode, we hear from Missouri state Sen. Greg Razor, a Democrat from Kansas City and the only openly gay member of the state senate.
It’s hard enough being the parent of a middle school student. But now your child comes out as trans and you have to navigate the school district bureaucracy to make sure your child is safe. Add to that, many school board members lean towards anti-trans and that makes parenting even harder.
In this episode, we hear from Virginia Franzese from Leawood, Kansas. She has faced all of these problems and more.
There are few education topics more heated than transgender students. Should teachers use preferred pronouns? What restroom should trans kids use? And the question that generates the most heat: should kids be allowed to play sports on the teams they identify with?
In this episode, we ask two former school district superintendents how we got here. We hear from Cynthia Lane, former superintendent in the Kansas City, Kansas district and Bill Nicely, former superintendent in the Kearney, Missouri school district.
We start this season of Archiver in 1960 on the streets of Russell, Kansas—right there on the plains about half-way between Kansas City and Denver.
It was a railroad town and an oil town but, for our purposes, it’s Bob Dole’s town.
His first campaign for federal office featured four girls in homemade skirts called the Bob-O-Links, singing on the streets of western Kansas. In between numbers they handed out Dole Pineapple juice.
“The thing that really strikes me about Dole is if you could somehow take the spirit of western Kansas, just kind of collect it up and make a person out of it, you would get Bob Dole,” says Michael Smith, a professor of political science at Emporia State University.
In our first episode, we hear about his boyhood days in Russell, the World War II battle in Italy that grievously wounded Dole, and how they shaped the rest of his life.
By 1960 Bob Dole had his sights on a much bigger political stage. After his one term in the Kansas Legislature and five terms as Russell County attorney, there was a shake-up in the western Kansas political landscape starting in 1954. Dole saw his opening.
There was a bitter three-way fight for the Republican nomination for Congress from western Kansas that year. In the race with Dole was Keith Sebelius, future father-in-law of Kathleen, who would be elected the Democratic governor of Kansas in 2002 and someone who felt he was the heir-apparent.
He would finally win the seat eight years later.
Here’s how the Salina Journal described the last debate in its July 31st edition, just three days before the primary: “All played a game of catch with hot bricks as they strived for the electorate’s love, prejudice and votes in Tuesday’s primary.”
Purple prose? Sure. But accurate. Someone started a rumor that Doyle was dropping out before the primary. Sebelius claimed Dole was in the pocket of big oil. Dole called the charges a sham. In the end, Dole squeaked by Sibelius by 982 votes.
In the general, Dole breezed by his Democratic opponent with 60 percent of the vote. Dole entered the House in 1961 with guns blazing.
When Bob Dole was sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives in 1961 it didn’t take the freshman congressman from western Kansas long to attack the Democrats. He opposed almost everything the new Kennedy Administration wanted.
In March 1961, he voted against extending unemployment benefits. Democrats in Kansas immediately labeled him a reactionary. He also latched onto a controversy involving a Texas con man called Billy Sol Estes. So big was the scandal that a minor rock star named Jesse Lee Turner even wrote a ballad about Billy Sol.
Here’s how the New York Times led Billy Sol’s obit on May 14th, 2013: “Billie Sol Estes, a fast-talking Texas swindler who made millions, went to prison and captivated America for years with mind-boggling agricultural scams, payoffs to politicians and bizarre tales of covered-up killings and White House conspiracies…was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Granbury, Tex. He died in his sleep and was found in his recliner.”
If you’re an ambitious freshman congressman, who wouldn’t want a piece of that?
Dole also opposed the Peace Corp and, after he was reelected in 1962, he opposed federal funding to expand college classrooms. The Salina Journal on August 16th, 1963 labeled him the “Kansas Againster.”
The 1964 election was a disaster for Republicans. Lyndon Johnson crushed Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater with 61% of the vote. Goldwater only carried six states. It was the biggest landslide since Franklin Roosevelt crushed Kansas Gov. Alf Landon in 1936. But, out in western Kansas, Bob Dole was bucking the trend as he sought another term in the House.
Even though he was doing better than most Republicans, Dole was still in a very close race with a relatively unknown Democrat named Bill Bork.
How close was it? So close that Dole barely won his home county of Russell and lost nearby Saline County. In the end, he was reelected 51 to 49 percent, a margin of about five-thousand votes in the 58 county 1st District.
Dole was now a bit of a rising star in the GOP. After surviving the LBJ landslide, he had a lot of agitating to do against Johnson Administration’s Great Society programs. To a group of young Republicans in Wichita he warned LBJ’s plan would make “America the land of plenty, owe plenty, tax plenty and spend plenty.” He called it, the “Great Anxiety.” You can almost hear him saying it on a late night talk show. But he was conflicted by part of the civil rights act of 1966.
While he voted yes on voting rights in 1965 he voted no on fair housing in 1966, suggesting it violated people’s property rights. If the 1964 campaign was a nail bitter for the man from Russell, the 1966 campaign was a cake walk. He beat a woman named Berniece Henkle from Great Bend, the wife of former Kansas Lt. Governor Joseph Henkle, with almost 70 percent of the vote. Now, Dole could seriously think about his next political move.
After Bob Dole’s victory in 1966 many political observers believe he started to move toward the middle.
Hunger became an issue that Dole got deeply involved in. CBS showed the documentary “Hunger in America” on May 21, 1968 and it helped profoundly change how the U-S government dealt with hunger. It would also help solidify Bob Dole’s moderation.
No longer the Kansas Againster, as the Salina Journal called him, he was becoming more of a statesman. President Johnson would dispatch Dole as part of a four-member, bipartisan congressional delegation to India to see what the U.S. could be to mitigate a famine that was killing thousands.
“It’s hard not to give away the Capitol when you see people starving,” Dole told the Wichita Eagle when he returned. But even before his trip to India, Dole had been thinking about hunger.
At the end of 1965 Dole proposed the Bread and Butter Corp, an idea that would send Americans abroad to help developing countries with agriculture. So the man from Russell moved to the middle and got himself elected to the Senate in 1968.
In an editorial after the election, the Topeka Daily Capital said Kansas chose well, that Dole had a winning personality and a devotion to duty. But his next election would be the toughest of Dole’s congressional career.
In his first run for Senate in 1968, Bob Dole had no trouble winning. He crushed Gov. William Avery in the Republican primary with 68% of the vote and in the general election he beat Democrat William I. Robinson with 60%.
It probably didn’t hurt that Tonight Show regular and Kansas City jazz singer Marilyn Maye sang his campaign jingle, a far cry from the Bob-O-Links in Russell. But Dole’s reelection in 1974 with Congressman Bill Roy from Topeka was a political knife fight.
In 1971 President Richard Nixon appointed Dole Republican National Committee chairman. Then there was Watergate, and in the ’74 campaign Democrats wanted to know what Dole knew about the break in. It would dog him the entire campaign. Especially when the national columnist Jack Anderson reported on June 1st that the Dole campaign hired famous Nixon, and later Trump, dirty trickster Roger Stone.
In a statement five days later, the Dole campaign accused Roy of leaking the Stone hiring to Anderson. He said Anderson and a group of liberal writers were engaged in a number of dirty tricks aimed at Senator Dole. Stone was fired.
The polls showed Dole trailing Roy. But it was the Kansas State Fair debate that changed Dole’s fortunes in politics forever. The debate was supposed to focus exclusively on agriculture. But with just a few minutes left, Dole accused Roy, an obstetrician and lawyer, of favoring abortion on demand.
Roy said no such a thing in the debate but the accusation stuck and Dole, barely, was reelected.
On August 20th, 1976 the new ticket of Gerald Ford and Bob Dole made their first campaign stop in Dole’s hometown of Russell, Kansas. It was the night before the two were nominated at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City.
It was also Bob Dole Day in Russell, 95 degrees with a 20-mile-an-hour wind that can make the plains feel like a convection oven. Still, a thousand people showed up to hear Dole and see Ford. Dole choked up as he spoke to the same people who helped pay for his rehab after wounds suffered on hill 914 in Italy during World War II. A “tearful homecoming” the Parsons Sun called it.
Everyone knew Ford picked a partisan running mate; Dole had been attacking Democrats since entering the House in 1961. But it was on October 15th, during the vice presidential debate, when he earned a nickname that would stick with him forever.
Dole called World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam “Democratic” wars. Jimmy Carter’s running mate, Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale responded coolly, "Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man.” Time Magazine said it was number one on its top ten list of veep debate moments. Two weeks later Carter and Mondale would beat Ford and Dole 50 to 48 percent.
Dole went right back to work on hunger, a deep passion for him. In the summer of 1977, the cash requirement for food stamps was eliminated as Dole worked with his long-time collaborator on hunger, Senator George McGovern, a Democrat from South Dakota.
Dole briefly flirted with a presidential run in 1980. But, in the year of Ronald Reagan, it didn’t last long. He was reelected that year with 64 percent of the vote, beating Republican-turned-Democrat John Simpson from Salina. Dole carried all 105 counties.
The GOP captured the Senate with Reagan at the top of the ticket and Dole became finance chairman and helped pass much of Reagan’s economic programs. Then Dole was elected Senate majority leader and became even a bigger deal.
He was headed toward another national campaign.
After losing as Gerald Ford’s 1976 vice presidential running mate, Dole made another run for the White House in 1988. It was a crowded GOP field that included Ronald Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush.
The campaign started well enough with Dole winning in Iowa. But Bush started running ads in New Hampshire saying Dole helped raise taxes, and he won the primary.
On TV that night, Dole ended up in the same segment with Bush and, when asked what message he had for the vice president, Dole snarled into the camera that Bush should “stop lying about my record.” Dole was done after Bush swept the south.
So Dole went back to the Senate. In 1990, he once again had a decision to make on civil rights. He voted against a civil rights bill, saying it did nothing but impose hiring quotas on American employers. Ten Republicans joined all the senate Democrats to pass the bill. Dole was joined by his Kansas colleague Nancy Kassabaum in opposition. The legislation was vetoed by President Bush and an override failed.
Dole was again easily reelected in 1992, beating Gloria O’Dell whose campaign slogan was “Gloria versus Goliath.” Dole won with 63 percent of the vote. Also elected that year, Bill Clinton as president. The national media dubbed Dole Dr. Gridlock and Dr. No.
All of this would set up the final campaign for the Man from Russell. On August 15th, 1996 in San Diego, California Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination for president. He dreamed and strived for this moment since he entered politics in 1950.
A CNN poll around Labor Day had Bill Clinton with 55 percent, Dole with 32 percent and Ross Perot, running as the Reform Party nominee, with six percent. On November 5th, 1996 Bill Clinton was reelected with 49 percent of the vote to Dole’s 41 percent and Perot’s eight percent. The New York Times called Dole’s campaign one of the most ineffectual in recent memory.
So what is Dole’s legacy? That’s in our last episode.
On November 8th, 1996 just three days after Bob Dole got pasted by Bill Clinton for president, he walked on stage at the Late Show with David Letterman to a standing ovation. There has never been a politician just as comfortable and formidable marking up legislation as they are on late night TV. He joked that he was making $200 for the appearance and it was the first work he’d had in sometime. While staff and reporters knew Dole was a very funny man, it was a side voters rarely saw.
After politics, Dole would do commercials for Viagra and Visa and those close to him would applaud his new found freedom to be funny. But Dole’s legacy is complicated, some would say tainted, by his endorsement, twice, of Donald Trump for president.
So how do I, a native Kansan who is quite partial to his home state, feel about Bob Dole, a politician who I covered and, in all honesty, voted for a couple of times? You can’t help but be proud of a small-town guy who rose to the top of the political world and accomplished so much.
You have to admire his actions as a platoon leader on Hill 914 in Italy, actions that grievously wounded a young man who as an older man would remember his struggles as he helped pass the Americans with Disabilities Act.
But I’m left to struggle with Dole's endorsement of Donald Trump. During election time, it’s clear the partisan politician ruled and the statesman took a back seat. Maybe nobody could have seen all of this turmoil coming. Or maybe it was just Dole being Dole. He joined the Republican team in 1950 and if that meant backing Nixon, Trump or whoever, well, that was Dole’s version of loyalty.
All I know for sure is that it’s very, very complicated.
KMBC radio was headquartered atop the swanky Pickwick Hotel in downtown Kansas City. The Pickwick was the place to stay for men doing business with the city and county. It was a favorite of Harry Truman when he was Presiding Judge of Jackson County. And while there were probably plenty of deals made by men in smoke-filled rooms, at KMBC they were thinking about and celebrating, women. Like all radio in the 30s and 40s, it was all live; the announcing, the commercials, the music, all of it.
You think local TV news invented live? Not a chance. Also, KMBC was a powerhouse radio station. At night it could be heard from Canada to Texas and from Colorado to Illinois.
The station had a school of the air, owned its own farm and produced the national distributed Brush Creek Follies variety show. Newsman John Cameron Swayze started his broadcasting career at KMBC. So did country singer Tex Owens and Paul Henning who would become quite famous for creating the Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction.
Most of what we talk about in this series comes from Arthur B. Church collection from the Marr Sound Archive at UMKC. Church was the founder of KMBC and the Marr Sound Archive acquired thousands of broadcasts on 16 inch lacquer disks and then digitized them.
In some cases, they were literally the first cut of history. Chuck Haddix, archivist of the collection, says KMBC broadcast everything; news, sports, farm reports, music, comedy and programs for women.
“They were pioneers in putting women on the radio. Also, there were a number of women on staff,” he said. “At that time they programmed according to the target audience. And those men of course worked during the day at that time. And women were often homemakers and so they did programs like soap operas and programs to improve women's housekeeping.”
Things like The Woman in the Store, heard Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from from 10:15 to 10:30 in the morning at A&P and Milgrams stores around Kansas City.
The announcer introduction said the hosts would ask incisive questions and the audience would hear the drama. Truth be told there wasn’t any drama and the show was really a vehicle to sell Wilson Hams and other Wilson pork products. How the women in the store described themselves stuck with me. They were always Mrs. so-and-so, rarely using their own first names.
They preferred talking about their husbands and kids and took little credit for housework and child rearing. And when asked where they live, everyone gave their exact address. Talk about a different time.
Co-host Beulah Karney was an impressive women for any generation. She started at KMBC in 1935 and ended her career on radio and TV in Chicago.
But before that she was the women’s page editor at the L.A. Times, had a syndicated national column on nutrition and then supervised 10,000 cannery workers for the federal government before her broadcasting career, according to a 1945 profile in the Harrisburg Telegraph. And after retiring, just to keep busy it seems, she wrote three novels.
Another popular program aimed at women was, simply enough, called “Today’s Women of Kansas City” sponsored by Chasnoff’s a downtown ready-to-wear store for women that was in business in Kansas City until 1983.
One show in 1938 featured Opal Hill, one of the founders of the LPGA and one of the best female golfers ever. She would win hundreds of tournaments and awards, according to her UPI obituary.
We kick off this season of Archiver on February 8th, 1941 at the Ivanhoe Temple in Kansas City.
The Ivanhoe was home to much of the city’s musical talent but on Saturday nights it was home to the Brush Creek Follies which originated on KMBC in Kansas City.
In the 1930s and 1940s The Brush Creek Follies was one of the most popular radio variety shows in the country and KMBC was a powerhouse radio station. It was headquartered at the swanky Pickwick hotel in downtown Kansas City.
It had been broadcasting in some form since 1922 but changed its call letters to KMBC in 1927 to reflect the owners, Midland Broadcasting Company. The next year, it was the 16th affiliate to join the CBS network where the Brush Creek Follies was distributed across America.
It’s hard to overstate how deeply embedded KMBC was in Kansas City. The station covered news, sports and local politics. It had morning shows for homemakers. The station covered agriculture and even had its own farm. But KMBC reached way beyond Kansas City with its entertainment programs.
Chucj Haddix, curator at the Marr Sound Archive at UMKC, says early on the owner of KMBC, Arthur Church, Jr., figured out he had two distinct audiences.
“Mr. Church looked around and saw all this farmland around Kansas City and so he developed programming for both the urban market in Kansas City and also the farm market too.”
That farm market was vast, especially at night when the KMBC signal reached from Colorado to Chicago and from the Canadian border to Texas and Louisiana. And Church knew exactly what those folks wanted to hear; hillbilly music and country comedy.
The host of the Brush Creek Follies was Hiram Hibsbee who also worked at WLS in Chicago, the Grand Ole Opry on WSM-Nashville and is in the Country Music D-J Hall of Fame. And every Saturday night he presided over a pretty large stable of acts. There was Colorado Pete, who had the biggest gold tooth this side of Colorado. A comedy character named Rube Wintersuckle who sounded exactly what you think a guy who called himself Rube Wintersuckle sounded like. And there was Kitt and Kay, teenage singers who the paper in Stanberry, Missouri said in 1940 that they were “appealing to the eye and blessed with beautiful singing voices.”
There were other big time KMBC entertainment programs like the Red Horse Ranch, a cowboy soap opera. But the Brush Creek Follies was the crown jewel.
The company did road shows across Missouri and Kansas was heard all over America via CBS. Because they were nationally distributed, some KMBC talent went on to pretty big entertainment careers. The Texas Rangers quartet moved to Hollywood and backed up Gene Autry at Republic Pictures. Tex Owens also went to Hollywood. He wrote the classic song “Cattle Call” which hit number one on the county charts in 1955.
But the KMBC talent with the longest lasting impact on American entertainment, someone who changed the landscape of network television, is someone you’ve probably never heard of but whose work you can still see on television.
Paul Henning grew up in Independence and created the Beverly Hillbillies and would go to create Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.
Henning got his start at KMBC when radio was still a bit of an experiment, says Brent Schondelmeyer who is on the board of the State Historical Society of Missouri. “This was a place that had an unlimited amount of time to fill. It was the internet of its time. Nobody quite knew how to use it. Nobody quite knew what its reach might be. Nobody quite knew what it could support.”
He says Henning got his start on KMBC as a singer but figured out that wasn’t his future. “Singing might be one thing, but as anybody who's involved in early radios says, the more things that you can do, the more value valuable you could become. And so he started writing scripts.”
By the time the Beverly Hillbillies was a hit, the powerhouse days of local radio were over. Radio was, and still is for that matter, popular but those days of dominance faded in the early 50s. Programming was once aimed at the widest possible audience but now is narrowly focused. But even in the 30s and 40s, KMBC knew its audience and who was listening when. The Women of the Air.
That is the next installment of Archiver.
By: Sam Zeff & Kaite Stover
Archiver: Kansas Voices of the Vietnam War ends the way it begins, with remembrances of faces and places from retired First Lieutenant Lou Eisenbrandt.
Eisenbrandt has never been afraid to talk about her experiences in Vietnam. In fact, she wrote an unflinching compelling memoir of her time as a nurse during the war, Vietnam Nurse: Mending and Remembering. What resonates is Eisenbrandt’s ability to connect with people.
She comes by that naturally as the oldest of five children. Eisenbrandt was born and raised in Belleville, Illinois. She joined the Army right out of nursing school. Eisenbrandt served with the 91st Evac hospital in Chu Lai, South Vietnam.
It’s the heat Eisenbrandt remembers most on her first day in Vietnam, but on her last, she thought of the people she was leaving behind.
“That first day? Hot, hot, hot,” Eisenbrandt recalls. “I can remember the overwhelming heat on the last day, but the thing that stands out in my mind is a picture of me taken that day. I did not discover this picture until three or four years ago. I’m standing by a jeep and in the background is my hospital. I was surprised when I looked at it again because in most of the other pictures of me in Vietnam I'm smiling. In this one, I'm just looking very sober and I know what was going through my head. I was thinking ‘I survived in one piece and I did some good’. But it was hard to leave these people I'd gotten so close to during the course of the year.”
“When you look at the pictures, you can certainly tell by the way I look, which is the beginning, and which is the end.”
Eisenbrandt talks about her coworkers with whom she spent long hours in the emergency room.
“It was mainly the doctors and nurses, but there were also patients that have stuck with me. I think about the soldiers, often not knowing whether they actually survived once they were evacuated out to Japan or Germany.”
“We worked shifts that were twelve hours on then twelve hours off. But if you heard more than two helicopters come in, bringing wounded, you dropped whatever you were doing to help. We became close because the only way to ‘forget the war’ was to hang out with everybody else. There were no videos, there was no Skype there were no movie theaters. You just spent time with each other.”
Like most Vietnam War nurses, Eisenbrandt has clear cut memories of her patients that stay with her. She wonders if their names are on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. Eisenbrandt recalls one in particular who was badly wounded with shrapnel.
“We didn't realize the extent of his wounds. He was carried in on a litter and we cut off all his clothes so we could properly assess the wounds. When we rolled him over onto his stomach, his back stayed on the litter. It was severely damaged. We put him back down and he did survive to go to surgery. I think about him almost every day because I don't know if he made it. If his name is one of the 58,000 on the wall. I just don't know what the final story was for him.”
As with the other Vietnam War veterans in this series, Lou has visited Vietnam and the locations where she was stationed. She was one of the first American tourists to visit and has returned four times.
“It's a beautiful country. I love Vietnam. The people are very warm and loving, very friendly. The real reason that I went back the first time was that I was just curious. Our hospital was in a very pretty setting, on a cliff overlooking the sea. I wanted to see what had happened to the hospital.”
“I was working as a travel agent at the time and the United States had lifted our embargo on Vietnam. They were encouraging tourism, so I was able to go with a group to Vietnam. Everybody in the group knew that one amongst us was a nurse. When we gathered in Chicago to get on the plane, everybody's wondering who’s the nurse?”
After Eisenbrandt’s tour of duty in Vietnam, she returned to the United States where she met and married her husband, Jim and started a family. She did not go back to nursing. Instead, Eisenbrandt lead childbirth classes, taught cooking and worked as a travel agent. She's chair of the board for Turning Point and serves on the board of the Veterans' Voices Writing Project, but most people in Kansas City know Lou Eisenbrandt for her memoir, Vietnam Nurse: Mending and Remembering.
Kaite Stover is the Director of Readers’ Services for the Kansas City Public Library. She is a regular guest on KCUR 89.3’s Central Standard “Bibliofiles” segment and hosts the Kansas City Star’s FYI Book Club. Follow her on Twitter @MarianLiberryan and Instagram @KaiteStover.
By: Sam Zeff & Kaite Stover
‘No’, ‘can't’ and ‘won't’ are not words in the vocabulary of retired army Lieutenant Colonel Susan Backs.
From the very beginning of her military career, Backs had a clear picture of who she was, where she was going, and how she was going to get there.
Only once did Backs hear the word ‘no’ regarding her career choices and in retrospect it's the Air Force's loss and everyone else's gain.
Backs was born in Geneseo, Illinois and the French Horn player planned to be a music teacher. College didn’t work out as planned. She left school and got a job in a hospital as an aide and from there decided to go into nursing.
For the next three years Backs attended nursing school while working in a hospital before deciding to go into the Army. But first, she tried to enter the Air Force.
“I didn't pass their beauty board,” Backs said. “They liked tall, willowy nurses that looked the model of the flight nurse. I’m a short little lady.”
Immediately after completing training, Backs was ready to deploy to Vietnam, but the army had other ideas.
“They promised that I would go to Vietnam on my first assignment. So when the orders came for Fairbank, Alaska’s Fort Bassett Army hospital, I said, oh no, no, no. I sat down with the personnel officer and explained why I hate being cold. That's why I'm leaving Illinois. I don't like the cold and they're sending me right up there to the coldest place I can think of? Somehow he got my orders changed to Vietnam.”
When asked what she recalls first about Vietnam, Backs mentions the helicopters like the ones she saw in the movie, M*A*S*H, and the reactions of those characters to approaching helicopters. “Even today I’ll often be watching for the choppers coming in. We’d watch M*A*S*H over and over and it was like that. You hear the choppers coming in and it’s a just a moment, the pucker factor. You wonder, ‘what is it this time? Is it anybody I know?’ “
Despite the opinions of others, Backs is adamant that she does not suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
“My husband keeps telling me I have it. I don’t. I've been through three complete psych evaluations and they say I don’t,” states Backs. She admits that there were things that happened in Vietnam that would not have happened anywhere else.
“I can talk about it and there are things that I did that you certainly wouldn't do. I worked the POW hospital when I was first assigned. They'd never had a woman nurse before. There were two male nurses and four or five medics and we had all the NVA (North Vietnamese Army). We had one fellow that came in, he was a hardened soldier.
“He was on crutches and I was encouraging him to get up and walk and the next thing I knew he had spit right in my face. Out of nowhere came my hand and it went boom, right across his chin. I'm sure I told him something about the nurse will not tolerate that. But I've never hit a patient in my life. It was probably 25 or 30 years before I ever told that story to anybody.”
Like most Vietnam War veterans, Backs returned to the country many years later.
“I was lucky enough to go back in 2010 with a group called Vietnam Battlefield Tours,” she said. “We took the bus out to where my unit, the 24th Evac was. The water tower is left and I saw where my hooch was.”
Backs continued to work as a nurse for the military. Her career spanned 23 years, two continents, and a variety of specialties ranging from female surgery to the newborn nursery to the operating room. She finally landed in Kansas where she worked as a prison nurse at Lansing Correctional Facility and closed out her career as an RN at St John Hospital in Leavenworth. The retired lieutenant colonel has a new army to command now, one made up of nine grandchildren.
Kaite Stover is the Director of Readers’ Services for the Kansas City Public Library. She is a regular guest on KCUR 89.3’s Central Standard “Bibliofiles” segment and hosts the Kansas City Star’s FYI Book Club. Follow her on Twitter @MarianLiberryan and Instagram @KaiteStover.
By: Sam Zeff & Kaite Stover
It's been more than a half century since the start of the Vietnam War. Vietnam changed American politics, changed the US military and most importantly changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
In this special Archiver series, we meet four Kansans who fall into that category. Four people who fought the war, not with claymore mines and grit, but with bandages, medicine, and pure compassion.
Dr. H.C. Palmer was born in Pittsburg, Kansas. He was in his first year of residency at the University of Kansas Medical Center when he was drafted in April 1964.
“Lyndon Johnson drafted 1,500 doctors at once in that month. Interestingly enough, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was five months later in August of 1964. So it appears in retrospect, Johnson was plugging some holes in some of the divisions with battalion surgeons for field hospitals. He wanted to be ready to start the war.”
Ask Palmer about his experiences in Vietnam and he talks about the people--the wounded he tried to save and the ill local villagers he tried to treat, the friends he lost and his comrades who came home.
Palmer spent one year in Vietnam with the First Infantry Division as a battalion surgeon. He was a captain. The rank of most doctors drafted into the military. From the very first Palmer was wary of the people with the power to make decisions about his life.
“I had no idea we were going to go to war. Little did I know that a year after I went into the Army, I'd be going to Vietnam. You'd think with several hundred doctors at Fort Sam Houston, they'd be teaching us to take care of injured soldiers in the battlefield. We never had one class about that. We learned to march. We learned coordinates on maps. We learned to find our way back in the middle of the night when they dumped us off somewhere. We learned to crawl under live fire that appeared to be about two feet off the ground, but it was probably actually 10 or 12 feet. Of course, we could all start IVs, but we did not learn anything about what replacement fluids they had that we could use in the field.”
During a training exercise, Palmer recalls seeing a civilian observing his battalion. “I asked my CO who that was and he asked the general who said, ‘That's Mr. Robert McNamara. So that was a little clue that something was up. “
The seriousness of where Palmer was going started the day he landed in Vietnam. “I remember that morning we were there. We were just waiting to find out where they were going to send us, when a helicopter crashed. We saw the fire and the smoke and it had jet fuel on board in 55 gallon drums. So it was a big fire and there were bodies around, burning. You know, this was self-inflicted. That helicopter wasn't shot down. It just crashed for some reason. That was my first sobering moment.”
This sobering moment wouldn't be the last and it is this memory that leads to other memories. All featuring faces from the war whom Palmer has never forgotten.
“I suppose the worst thing I saw was one of our medics had been shot in the head by a sniper. He was a medic from San Diego and he was a surfer. He loved the Beach Boys. He was always singing Beach Boys songs. He was singing a Beach Boys song when he was killed.”
For Palmer, his personal turning point came on a hotel rooftop with a friend while the two of them sipped wine and watched the war in the distance.
“I remember one night we were sitting in the rooftop garden restaurant at one of the nicest hotels. We were eating seventy-five cent lobster tails and drinking Pouilly-Fuisse wine. We’re on the seventh floor of the hotel. At the time it was the tallest building in Saigon. We could see out over the Saigon River and see the sampans. They're bobbing around. It was night and we could see the war going on out in the delta. We saw flares and tracer bullets.”
“This is the absolute stupidity, the dichotomy of the war. Watching it from a rooftop garden at the hotel, drinking wine and eating some of the best food in the world. We start thinking what the heck is going on here? At that moment we knew for sure we should never have been there [in Vietnam] and that we'd been lied to. That was a turning point for both of us.”
Palmer remembers the faces, but he remembers the sounds, too. There are two songs from the Vietnam War era that can take him back to that time and place and bring back the faces of friends. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” and Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
Palmer hears the opening strains of “Sound of Silence” and it immediately takes him back to his time in Vietnam. But he doesn’t harbor any ill will towards the song. “I still love the song. It's not a song I don't want to hear. The other one I liked was “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Nobody had pot yet in 1965 in Vietnam. So I might have liked it better if they had pot,” he grins.
H.C. Palmer returned to Kansas City to complete his medical education. He practiced internal and sports medicine for over 45 years. Nearly 20 of those in Kansas City. When he retired, H.C. turned his attention to writing poetry to help him work through the memories and experience he still carried with him from Vietnam. In 2014, H.C. co-founded and organized Kansas City's Veterans Writing Workshop. His debut poetry collection, Feet of the Messenger, was published in fall of 2017 and was a finalist for the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award.
Kaite Stover is the Director of Readers’ Services for the Kansas City Public Library. She is a regular guest on KCUR 89.3’s Central Standard “Bibliofiles” segment and hosts the Kansas City Star’s FYI Book Club. Follow her on Twitter @MarianLiberryan and Instagram @KaiteStover.
By: Sam Zeff & Kaite Stover
There is a quiet current of honor and duty that runs through Richard Schroder’s stories of his time in Vietnam. He may not be aware it is there. To Army Master Sergeant Schroder, it is a given response--when one is asked to help, one steps up. Schroder is the second military medical veteran in this Archiver series. And unlike most doctors, nurses, and medics, he made the army a career.
Schroder went into the service on June 6, 1968. The date stands out, he says, because it was the anniversary of D-Day. After basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, he went to San Antonio for basic medical training, then onto Fort Lewis, Washington for advanced medical training. After that, Schroder went to Vietnam.
Schroder was an army medic stationed at the fire support base in Song Be province, not far from the Cambodian border. Fire support bases were set up to provide artillery support for soldiers operating in the area. Schroder spent almost two years in Vietnam with the Fifteenth Medical Battalion attached to the first cavalry.
Military service runs in Schroder’s family. His father, whom his mother divorced, was at the Battle of the Bulge. He had several uncles who served in the military. One was killed in Korea, others served in World War II.
Schroder remembers his first day in Vietnam. “It was nighttime when we got there. They opened the doors of the plane and the first thing that hit you is the unbearable heat and humidity. It was tremendous. I think they took us to Ben Wa that night on buses. The next day we received our assignments. That’s when I found out I was with the First Cavalry.”
When asked to describe a typical day, Schroder says, no such thing exists. “You could say that a regular day wasn't a regular day because some days were very slow and monotonous. Other days were busy because we were getting wounded in.”
Schroder recalls one particularly harrowing day at the base. “We got word a Chinook helicopter was coming in. Chinooks can carry a lot of men. We sent all our ambulances and jeeps up to the Chinook pad to bring back the wounded,” he said.
Schroder and a fellow soldier stayed behind and were waiting for the injured to arrive. Suddenly, they heard a helicopter. It was the Chinook, trying to land on a pad that was designed for smaller helicopters.
“We run to the door and we look out and here's this Chinook landing on our little pad. Trash cans are flying everywhere because of the downforce from the rotors. The tents, they were blowing in and out. There were about 20 men on the helipad. And luckily, when we get a large number like that, the cooks down in the mess hall and the clerks in other parts of the company area, they all responded. People off duty. They all come in. Flocking to the treatment bunker to help bring in the wounded.”
Schroder turns thoughtful when asked what might have changed for him after Vietnam and offers his take on the outcome of the Vietnam War.
“I don't think it changed me in a drastic way. It was a very big aspect of my life, one that I would not particularly want to do again. I kind of bristle when I hear somebody say, well, we lost the war. And I'll say, we didn't lose the war. Meaning the military and the politicians lost.”
Richard Schroder continued to serve his country first in the Kansas National Guard and then the army reserve along with other veterans. He speaks regularly in the Kansas City area about his Vietnam War experiences in schools, senior centers and ceremonies and programs honoring veterans.
Kaite Stover is the Director of Readers’ Services for the Kansas City Public Library. She is a regular guest on KCUR 89.3’s Central Standard “Bibliofiles” segment and hosts the Kansas City Star’s FYI Book Club. Follow her on Twitter @MarianLiberryan and Instagram @KaiteStover.
