Hello from Topeka! Things continue to work at a quick pace in the 2017 Kansas legislative session.

One of the most urgent issues facing the legislature is the consideration and passage of a rescission bill (amended budget) for the remaining months of fiscal year 2017, which ends June 30. Governor Brownback’s proposed rescission budget is contained in HB 2052, and primarily depends on the use of PMIB funds as a source of one-time money to fill the $342 million deficit the state currently faces.

The Pooled Money Investment Board (PMIB) invests money available from the State General Fund as well as hundreds of other state funds deposited with the State Treasurer. The funds are used for a variety of purposes, including the general operations for many state agencies. Many of these funds are used only at certain times, so those funds which are temporarily idle are invested by the PMIB. Currently they are invested in high-grade short-term investments to provide liquidity.

In 2000 the Legislature authorized the State Treasurer to invest a portion of the Pooled Money Investment Portfolio (PMIP) in equities and longer-term bonds to help finance the renovation of the State Capitol. This portion is invested in equities and longer-term bonds to achieve a higher rate of return. It is managed by KPERS and the amount invested each year is based on the net difference between the unclaimed property received by the State Treasurer and the claims that have been paid.

$317.2 million has been transferred to the portfolio since 2000, and its earnings have provided $114 million in revenue to the State General Fund (SGF). If liquidated today, $46.5 million of accumulated interest and capital gains could be transferred to the SGF and the remaining $317.2 million principal could be returned to the PMIP and used as a short-term loan to the SGF. The Governor has proposed a seven-year repayment with the first payment beginning in FY 2018.

This is just one idea on trying to fill-in the budget gap. As I have said earlier, there are going to be some tough decisions to be made. We must get this issue solved before we set a more stable plan for long term revenue and spending plan.

There are several points need to be stressed if this option is chosen as the best path forward to solve the short-term fiscal shortfall in the current year:
1) The money transferred from the PMIP to the account in KPERS is NOT unclaimed property, and borrowing or liquidating the fund would not extinguish the claims of Kansans who have assets in the unclaimed property fund and can prove their ownership.
2) The PMIP fund is not a part of the KPERS retirement system. It is merely invested for the state by the financial gurus at KPERS to achieve a higher rate of return. Use of these funds would have virtually no effect on the stability of KPERS.
3) Liquidation or borrowing from this fund would mean that future earnings from the fund would no longer be available to help with repayment of the bonded costs of the Statehouse renovation.
4) Some have characterized the use of this fund as being akin to cashing in a retirement account to meet current expenses. While there is some truth to that charge, it reflects the stark and unappealing choices currently before the legislature. As an alternative, the Kansas Senate is considering another round of budget cuts, including a cut to K-12 education funding.

As a member of the Taxation Committee we have been hearing testimony on the possible repeal of the pass-through income, known as the “LLC Loophole.” We will also be looking at other ways to work towards a fairer tax system in Kansas.

There is much more going on but I am trying to keep this column a reasonable length.

If you come to Topeka during the session, my office is in Room: 352-S. My phone number has changed to: (785) 296- 7463 and email is: [email protected] and my cell number is (785) 302-8416. You can also follow along with what is going on through social media: kenforkansas on Facebook, @kenrahjes on twitter or my website: kenforkansas.com.
Wishing Kansas a Happy Birthday on Sunday. It is my honor to be your representative.

Ken Rahjes, (R-Agra) is the 110th Dist. State Representative.

By this story’s publication, either Kansans will be cleaning up after the ice storm of the decade or forecasters will be the butt of jokes at local coffee shops. While technology helps Great Plains residents survive catastrophic storms, it also creates worry over weather that doesn’t manage to star in an advertised performance. I wonder what our ancestors who settled this landscape would think about meteorological prognostication that involves science more than folk wisdom.

Those who love me know I’m a weather channel junkie. In fact, a daughter teased that I’m one reason bread and milk supplies run low before storms hit. Yes, I prepare for whatever heads my way, whether it’s blizzard, ice, wind, or flood. I’ve failed to pay attention enough that I’m gun shy and stock up at first warning.

I’ve awakened to rising waters soaking into my tent and sleeping bag during a spring campout. This event occurred before cellphone alerts, and I was so excited about the adventure I didn’t watch the news. Who knew a moisture-laden front would arrive the same day we did? I’ll never forget wearing drenched clothes to breakfast and watching people laugh at waterfalls pouring from a trunk stuffed with a sopping tent, pillows, and bags.

That wasn’t my only experience with bad weather. During my early parenting years, blizzards and tornadoes caught me unaware and wishing I’d watched the news. That said, I don’t know that meteorologists were as knowledgeable then as they are today. I recall the Highway Patrol shutting the I-70 Hays gate behind me as I drove14 miles west in a whiteout. I prayed for two solid hours that I’d make it through snow so heavy I couldn’t tell where the road was.

Another time, a July tornado outbreak caught me on the road between McCracken and Ellis. It rained so hard I couldn’t see the pavement or nearby tornados touching down according to the radio. Such adventures give new meaning to white knuckle driving.

These experiences make me wonder about relatives who migrated to Kansas in 1872. They came from Canada in time to experience grasshopper invasions and later the killer blizzard of 1886. Unaware of the building storm, Great-Great- Grandpa sheltered with strangers when that storm caught him riding home from a preaching assignment. His poor wife worried about his safety as well as her family’s diminishing food and coal supply.

Mari Sandoz’s novella Winter Thunder offers a more recent example of nature running amok. The author based her tale on a niece’s experience guiding students to survive a 1940s Nebraska Sandhills’ whiteout. Again, no warning. The tempest caught the school and surrounding ranchers unaware. An inexperienced teacher and teenage bus driver used their wits to ensure everyone’s survival after a fiery wreck forced them to spend three days outside in the storm.

My own experiences and those of others make me appreciate multiple weather sites and forecast models. Fronts can fizzle out or head other directions, encouraging armchair quarterbacks to second-guess and tease my favorite prognosticators. As for me, I’ll freeze that extra loaf of bread and gallon of milk just in case….

Native Kansan Karen Madorin is a local writer and retired teacher who loves sharing stories about places, people, critters, plants, food, and history of the High Plains.

“I wouldn’t have a dog that doesn’t pull at the leash.”

That was dad decades ago, but the concept that a dog is curious, eager to reach out, to pull against restraints, well, that shows the dog has heart.

And, just days into the 2017 Kansas legislative session, there’s at least one dog that is willing pull against the budget leash held by Gov. Sam Brownback.

That pup? The newly created House Committee on K-12 Education Budget.

Last week, the panel decided that it doesn’t want the governor to pull $85 million from the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System that is owed by the state on behalf of schoolteachers and other school workers. Actually, it includes the governor’s non-payment proposal for other state employees, but the teachers and general government workers are in the same pension pool, so the panel voted to preserve all the pension cuts.

That’s pulling against the leash. It’s nearly a quarter of the savings needed to balance the state budget in the current fiscal year, and because at some point those employees are going to retire, the state is going to have to come up with their pension money anyway.

The K-12 Education panel’s decision is a long way from enactment, but it was the first real, printed out on paper objection to the governor’s budget plan. It is unlikely that the KPERS provision will sail through the next level of consideration, the House Appropriations Committee, but it is a clear message to the governor that at least one panel of legislators isn’t interested in his plan to just delay and eliminate payments to finish his term without having to raise taxes.

That action is probably going to make this week interesting, because that KPERS plan of the governor is so technical that most Kansans would never know that it happened…which is exactly what Brownback wants to happen.

The governor’s plan, recall, doesn’t raise anyone’s taxes, doesn’t really inconvenience anyone, but takes spare cash out of state agency funds, delays or cancels payments to agencies and cashes out long-term revenue streams to get to July 1, 2017, with at least a little cash in the bank.

So where do things go from here?

Most likely budget cuts, actual reductions in state spending through June 30, which won’t be pretty but which won’t have out-year consequences that future legislatures are going to have to wrangle with.

And, of course, the biggest appropriation that the state makes is to K-12 education, so a single-digit cut there would solve most of this fiscal year’s projected deficit, but at a major political cost to many legislators…unless they can clearly make it a one-time, never again deal and convince Kansans that they are serious.

Oh, that cut might also mean that school districts across the state would have to pull money out of their dozens of narrow purpose funds, money they are hanging onto just in case something like an across-the-board state aid reduction actually happens. That spare money in school district budgets is referred to by some conservatives as hoarding.

Plainly, there is no simple solution to the budget deficit, and until it is fixed, there’s little pressing reason to start hashing out the biennial budget that covers the next two fiscal years which are the last two years of the Brownback administration.

The budget issue comes down to one key: Whether Kansas voters will realize the depth of the deficit and take a break from blaming previous Brownback-dominated sessions when taxes were sharply cut or eliminated and allow their senators and representatives to fix the short-term problem before they attack the long-term problem.

Pulling against the leash, well, that’s a start…

Syndicated by Hawver News Company LLC of Topeka; Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver’s Capitol Report—to learn more about this nonpartisan statewide political news service, visit the website at www.hawvernews.com.

If you remember, last fall I was given the opportunity to do some nuisance beaver trapping at Turkey Creek Golf Course in McPherson. I’ve been helping a local lad, Jared Austin learn the do’s and don’ts, and the in’s and out’s of trapping as I knew them, and he became a constant companion as the very first morning we caught what I hoped was the only beaver left there on the golf course. But, as is usually the case, more damage appeared in the form of chewed trees and shrubs, so our quest was not over.

For starters, it’s difficult enough to catch every single beaver on any given property, and when the water source is a stream or a river that obviously runs for miles, it’s nearly impossible. Turkey Creek Golf Course is named for Turkey Creek which runs completely through the course and for miles in each direction, plus the grounds also sports several acres of pond water to boot, so there can theoretically be a constant supply of predators and beavers.

The new chewing was on the opposite end of the creek from where our first beaver was caught, so we began by scouting there. Most beaver dwellings in our part of the country are dens in the bank of a pond, river or stream, and are often hard to spot because beavers attempt to conceal openings to their dens by placing them where they’ll be under water except during very dry times.

We walked the creek bank for a time but spotted no den openings, so a couple traps were placed at points where the creek narrowed down, theorizing the beavers would encounter the traps as they cruised up and down through their neighborhood. Jared lives just a hop, skip and a jump from the golf course, so he checked the traps each morning, saving me lots of time and miles.

After a week of checking empty traps, he was on the phone with me one afternoon as he had donned waders and was in the creek checking under every tree stump and looking under every single wad of overhanging grass, searching for a beaver den entrance (I vaguely remember when I still had that kind of exuberance.) Catching your quarry the first day like we had that first beaver is great, especially for building enthusiasm in a youthful apprentice like it had in Jared. But it also offers a teaching moment for the mentor to impress upon their students how success in hunting, fishing and trapping is often not immediate. He found a couple likely looking locations, and though I silently thought them “iffy” at best, I encouraged him to move traps there and see what happened (yet another learning opportunity.)

The next couple days he caught raccoons but no beavers, then the ice storm happened and the creek became too high to find the traps for a day or so. On Thursday morning I set several traps around the biggest pond on the golf course and the two of us made plans to meet early Friday morning to check them all.

Friday morning was foggy with a light mist falling as we commandeered a golf cart to make our rounds. Our first stop was where he had moved traps a few days prior, and we parked the cart beside a chewed-up tree the beaver had cut completely down. I think the cart was still moving when Jared dove out and all-but-sprinted down the bank. I was still stumbling around trying to wipe the mist and fog from my glasses when I heard him splashing across the creek, followed by hoots of “Got one, alright, finally!”

The traps we use kill a beaver very quickly, so with my glasses still foggy and propped onto my nose, I blundered across the creek to find a kid with a smile on his face the size of the crescent moon holding up a gigantic old beaver. I estimated the old monster to weigh 45 – 50 pounds with immense front incisor teeth an inch long and as wide as my thumb nails. No wonder it had caused so much damage and was capable of completely toppling trees. Who knows how long that old rascal had live there and how many of the problem beavers we were after it had apprenticed itself. We continued on, checking traps I had set around the pond and were rewarded with one more average sized beaver. I explained to Jared why I’d put each trap where I had, and he helped me set a couple more. He also got to sense my frustration with not catching as many as I’d hoped in the traps I had set.

Beavers are amazing critters that get themselves in trouble just doin’ what God created them to do. Beaver colonies cutting down trees to dam up streams in mountain meadows somewhere create ponds that actually do Nature a favor by providing homes for trout, ducks and other wildlife. But here in Midwestern farm country, beavers damming up streams and rivers that flood productive farm land, or chewing and cutting down trees on the local pristine golf course are not going to be tolerated.

It’s kind of ironic that my apprentice’s first beaver was so big, as the first beaver I ever caught was just as large and required my wife and I hauling it up a steep river bank, through a briar patch and a couple hundred yards to the waiting pickup. I don’t know the average life span of a Kansas beaver, but to be sure the old brute Jared caught had beaten the odds and bested the average!

Steve Gilliland, Inman, can be contacted by email at [email protected].

On Jan. 29, our state will be 156 years old. Kansas was admitted to the Union two and a half months before the beginning of the Civil War – one of our nation’s most terrible times.

It’s important to recall our heritage, our roots and a bit of our state’s history, especially in celebration of another Kansas birthday.

The war between the northern and southern states officially began on April 12, 1861, after the shelling of Fort Sumter. The Kansas territory had been at war for years before it was officially admitted on Jan. 29, 1861, one year after Abraham Lincoln was elected president.

Because of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the Missouri Compromise was overturned. That meant Kansas did not have to enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. The people of the Kansas territory were free to answer the slavery question on their own. This was called, “self-determination,” and once a state, Kansas could decide its own destiny.

This was a period of bloody battles and fighting as both proslavery forces and abolitionists flocked into the Kansas territory. Both sides were determined to tip the balance of Congress in their favor. The term, “Bleeding Kansas,” aptly described the tension and bloodshed of that period.

Sixty-six years later, during a much better period in our state’s history, state legislators adopted our flag. This flag depicts a history of peaceful coexistence between the natives of the land and the newly arrived settlers.

Like so many other states, the flag is the state seal set on a field of dark blue. In the foreground of the seal is a farmer plowing his field. A little further up is a wagon train with oxen-drawn schooners headed westward. Beyond these pioneers are Native Americans hunting bison.

The pioneers in the Kansas flag represent Manifest Destiny. This was the prevailing attitude of the United States government starting in the 1840s. The farmer and his field represent Kansas’s rich agricultural heritage. The seal also includes a steamboat churning its way down the Kansas River and was meant to represent commerce. Today, agriculture, manufacturing and service industries play an integral part of the Kansas economy.

Above the plains in the state seal are rolling hills and above them, 34 stars representing Kansas’s entry into the United States’ expanding family of states. Above the stars is the sate motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, Latin for “To the Stars Through Difficulties.” This is a tribute to the original settlers who dreamed so grandly when they left their homes and moved westward.

Above the seal is the state crest, a sunflower above a bar of blue and gold. The sunflower is the state flower, and the blue and gold represent the Louisiana Purchase, which made the lands of Kansas a part of the United States. Beneath the state seal is Kansas in large, yellow block letters.

Kansas has several nicknames including the Sunflower State, Jayhawk State and the Wheat State. Our state is located in the Heartland, in fact Lebanon is the town situated closest to the geographical center of the continental United States.

Kansas agriculture is proud to be part of this rich rural heritage of putting food on people’s plates and helping feed the world. This state’s farmers and ranchers wish our Wheat State a happy birthday on Jan. 29.

John Schlageck, a Hoxie native, is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas.

Sending an “open letter” to President Trump has been in vogue these days.

Social activists, business moguls, media chieftains and political leaders all have penned a multitude of them since the November election. Some offer advice, some raise alarms, some offer praise and some just convey insults.

All well and good — those exchanges and more are in the “free speech and free press” ethos protected by the First Amendment of speaking “truth to power” — even if the response from Trump more often and not has been to vigorously tar unfavorable messages as “untruth.”

So this moment in history is just too ripe not to join in, but with a twist: Here’s my open letter about our core freedoms of speech, press, assembly, petition and religion… as a note not to the new commander in chief, but to the rest of us — “We, The People.”

For those reveling today in Trump’s oath of office, take a moment to consider that the freedoms of speech and press which he seems to be targeting were in no small way vital to a campaign rooted in reaching out to those who felt marginalized, ignored or even betrayed by both major parties.

Trump’s ongoing “fireside tweets” are both new to American politics and an echo of FDR’s similar mastery of the new medium of his era, radio, to speak directly to voters. He and we need to keep in mind that loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue a reporter also will make it easier to mount a legal challenge to all of us — including Trump — over our online comments.

And then there’s Trump’s biting, emotional indictments of the news media. More than 60 news and free press organizations earlier this week sent a multi-page note to the President and Vice President Pence, asking for a meeting to discuss transparency and press access to their administration.

We, the people, should endorse that call to coverage by our independent “watchdogs on government.” In turn, journalists must take action to reverse a widespread view — 74% in the latest State of the First Amendment survey — that the news media is failing to live up to its responsibility to be accurate and unbiased in news reports — or to, at the least — be transparent in declaring bias.

Holding government accountable in public for how public policy is made, and how public funds are spent, would seem to be a non-partisan objective we can all agree on. In that same SOFA survey, 71% of us said that was the case.

We will need to keep in mind as a nation that discussion, dissent, disagreement and debate are the hallmarks of a strong and open system of self-governance — and provide the means for self-correction when this nation goes astray. Let’s consider how rare it is in the world to be able to peaceably assembly without fear of government persecution or prosecution, to petition the government for change.

In like manner, there may be those who decry the “Women’s March” that will follow the Inaugural parade by one day as divisive. But what a grand example to other nations: Hundreds of thousands of Americans on one day, celebrating the peaceful transition of national power after a heated, closely contested election — only to be followed a single day later, in the same space, by hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting the political particulars of that transfer.

And finally, there’s certainly every reason to fear domestic and international terrorists. But we need to remember that targeting others solely because of their Muslim religious faith not only violates our nation’s unique commitment to respecting all faiths, but resurrects images of a time when unjustified wartime fear and disgraceful ethnic bias led us to intern Japanese Americans at the start if WWII.

More than ever, as we enter this new “Era of Trump,” we should heed the call to duty as citizens expressed in the observation by my late colleague John Seigenthaler that “our First Amendment freedoms are never safe, never secure, but always in the process of being made safe and secure.”

We may disagree — and often do — on how those five core freedoms of the First Amendment apply to any given set of facts.

But we should all stand behind them against any attempt to limit, weaken or ignore them on the basis of the variable political winds, the power of fear — or even the impact of the occasional Presidential tweet.

Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. [email protected]

The Thunderbolt was a publication of the American Nazi Party. I saw my first copy my first year of teaching in rural Kentucky in 1969. Before class, a high school student showed me a copy, careful that no classmates were nearby. The feature story was an outrageous claim that African-Americans were more closely related to gorillas because they could produce hybrids and white Aryans could not. The article had a picture of a very hairy black infant to “prove” the case.

I recognized the picture. I wrote the term “hirsutism” on a slip of paper and sent the student to the library with instructions to look it up in the World Book encyclopedia. When he came back, after class was over he came up and whispered: “They lied, didn’t they.” I nodded. He had found the encyclopedia entry on the wide range of infants that have this rare hirsute condition and realized how the neo-Nazis had fabricated their racist article.
We did not use the term “fake news” in 1969. We had fake news, but it was slow to spread in print, and readership was small.

Today with social media, such fake news could “go viral” overnight.

Today, both K–12 and higher education are rushing to battle fake news with so-called “information literacy” courses that have magic cures for detecting the range of amateurish didn’t-quite-get-the-story-right misinformation to vicious falsehoods, such as the example above.

Librarians are often called upon to sort truth from trash. That is ironic because before the internet, library materials were classified: 500s and 600s were the pure and applied sciences. The occult was in the 100s. But our misunderstanding of free speech has kept the internet free from classification. How dare anyone put vaccines-cause-asthma or dolphins-are-just-underwater-humans in the non-sciences.

So the internet has become a vast wasteland. I let my student teachers discover this themselves. I assign them to find 10 accurate websites on the internet in some specific biology field that they choose: kidneys, ferns, fish, etc. They think it will be an easy assignment, but it takes hours or even days. They have over 40 credit hours of biology under their belts and they detect website after website that looks good—until they read the details. Tips on search words and other literacy tricks have little effect. A study in the journal Pediatrics found the majority of online information on childhood diarrhea was wrong, and sometimes fatal. Dot.gov and dot.edu sites are no more accurate than dot.com addresses.

A most damning piece of research came from the University of Connecticut. Seventh grade students were taught to become “research pros” by using RADCAB®, a “critical thinking assessment tool for online information” teaching about Relevance, Appropriateness, Detail, Currency, Authority and Bias.

The Connecticut study directed students to use RADCAB on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website. The students found that the Tree Octopus website passed all the tests for authority, citations and other criteria (the PhDs and journals were fake, however). But when an actual expert was brought in to explain how the octopus only lives in the sea, nearly all of the students rejected the expert. They now had “ownership” of this falsehood.

This would not have happened if the students had actually known something about an octopus. To combat fake information in the future, citizens are just going to have to know more content.

To return to the Neo-Nazi Thunderbolt article I described at the beginning, my ability to de-fuse that terrible lie came directly from my having read through the World Book encyclopedia in fifth grade and then recognizing the picture over a decade later. Without that knowledge and our unique ability to recall faces and photos for long times, I would have had to resort to an authoritative “believe me” explanation that would not have undermined the legitimacy.

Abstract “information literacy” lessons don’t work. If there was any god-like truth-detector, we would all be using it.

Simply, any assertion that schools can teach students a method to separate truthful reporting from fake news, is itself “fake news.”

January 20, 2017

Some Details of the Governor’s Rescission Bill:
House Appropriations Hears Details of the Bill

On Wednesday, January 13, Shawn Sullivan, Director of the Budget, released the governor’s budget report.
It contained proposals to close the projected $340 million shortfall for fiscal year 2017 (ending on June 30) as well as proposals to deal with a $580 million projected shortfall in fiscal year 2018.

Some Highlights:
FY 2017 (ending June 30):

Liquidate long-term investment fund designed to offset the unclaimed property fund. Direct transfer of $45 million in interest earnings to State General Fund (SGF), then transfer the principal of $317 million to SGF and repay over seven years.

Defer payments into KPERS by $86 million.

In the short run, our list of potential solutions is short and it will be a process of ranking a variety of undesirable options in order to find the best possible approach. Whatever the legislature settles on for a solution, it too is likely to be quite unpalatable. For the future, the people of Kansas are asking for and deserve a long-term structural solution to the current fiscal imbalance. Finding that solution will require resolve, persistence, and cooperation on the part of all legislators.

First Bill Passes the House

The House passed an elections bill by the Elections Committee. With the likely confirmation of 4th District Congressman Mike Pompeo as the new Director of the CIA, a special election is necessary to pick his replacement in Congress. Inconsistencies in current Kansas election law raise the prospect that the election results could later be challenged. This bill removes those inconsistencies and allows for an orderly selection of Pompeo’s replacement. The bill was passed by the Senate and signed by the Governor on January 18th. The new law will be in place before the resignation of Congressman Pompeo.

Ad Astra Rural Jobs Act:
A Bill to Boost Rural Job Growth

Next week, I will be introducing legislation referred to as the “Ad Astra Rural Jobs Act.” The details for this bill are that there will be assistance and incentives for businesses to expand or relocate to an area of Kansas defined as a rural area with a city population of 60,000 or less. I have been working on the legislation for months and have gained the support of many of my colleagues, both urban and rural, the Department of Commerce, and local Economic Development directors.

This legislation partners well with the existing Rural Opportunity Zones (ROZ) and it incentivizes businesses to hopefully create jobs in rural Kansas, as ROZ incentivizes those to move back.

Contact Information

As always, if you have any concerns, feel free to contact me (785) 296-7672, visit www.troywaymaster.com or email me at [email protected]. Also, if you happen to visit the statehouse, please let my office know.

It is a distinct honor to serve as your representative for the 109th Kansas House District and the state of Kansas. Please do not hesitate to contact me with your thoughts, concerns, and questions. I always appreciate hearing from the residents of the 109th House District and others from the state of Kansas, as well.

Troy L. Waymaster, (R-Bunker Hill) is the 109th Dist. State Representative and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

By RON WILSON
Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development

What was the first fast food hamburger chain in the world, and where did it begin? You are correct if you answered White Castle in Wichita. This innovative company was begun by a man from rural Kansas. It’s today’s Kansas Profile.

Walter Anderson was born in 1880. He became a short order cook. In 1916, he opened his first diner in a converted streetcar in downtown Wichita.

Walt Anderson liked to experiment in the kitchen. According to legend, one day he became so frustrated with how his meatballs were sticking to the griddle that he smashed one with a spatula. With that, the flat patty was born.

Anderson found that starting with a mound of fresh beef, pressing it into a flat square and poking five well-placed holes in the meat meant that he could cook the burger thoroughly without having to flip it. He also found that cooking the patty on a bed of chopped onions on the grill with the bun on top permitted all of the flavors to permeate the bun.

His hamburgers were so popular that he wanted to expand to additional locations. He enlisted the help of a real estate agent named Billy Ingram. As the men got acquainted, they decided to go into business together on a hamburger restaurant.

But, there was a problem. In 1906, Upton Sinclair had published a book called “The Jungle,” which exposed the unsanitary meat processing methods of the time. This book caused consumers to worry about the safety of hamburger.

Anderson and Ingram decided on an approach to food safety which was ahead of its time. They insisted on absolute cleanliness and transparency. They wanted to make their restaurant sparkling clean and white. They equipped their restaurant with white porcelain enamel on steel exteriors, stainless steel interiors, and employees outfitted with spotless uniforms. The kitchen was also viewable by the public so it would be clear that the food was prepared under highly sanitary conditions.

For a name, they combined two words that suggested purity and solidity: White Castle. For the shape of their building, the two men were inspired by the castle-like look of the water tower in downtown Chicago so they used similar design features for their restaurant.

In 1921, they built their first building on the northwest corner of First and Main in Wichita. They used Walt Anderson’s cooking style and sold the hamburgers for five cents each. The hamburgers were small and went down so easy that they would later be called “sliders.”

The restaurant was so successful that it expanded to a second location in El Dorado and then beyond. In 1923 they expanded to Omaha. Before 1930, White Castle had branched into 12 major cities in the Midwest as well as New York and New Jersey.

Of course, at that time there was no such thing as a fast food chain. The company had to establish centralized bakeries, meat supply plants, and warehouses to supply itself.

The company’s business design of multiple locations and standardized products and menus make White Castle credited as the first fast food hamburger chain in the world.

In 1933, the company made a transition in ownership. Billy Ingram bought out Walt Anderson’s interest. Ingram then moved the company’s headquarters to Columbus, Ohio so as to be more centrally located near the new restaurants that were being built in the east.

White Castle continued to expand and innovate. It was the first fast food chain to reach the landmark of one billion hamburgers sold, which it did in 1961. Eventually, however, other fast food chains would outgrow White Castle.

Today, White Castle has more than 400 restaurants, although none of those are in Kansas. Billy Ingram’s descendants still control the company.

It all began with a small town short order cook named Walt Anderson. He was born in the rural community of St. Mary’s, Kansas, population 2,221 people. Now, that’s rural.

What was the first fast food hamburger chain in the world? It was White Castle, created by an entrepreneur who made a difference with innovation in the food industry. Now, would you like fries with that?