The businesses downtown are active. The brick streets are quiet. Two schoolboys are walking home with their bookbags. To the south, pickup trucks and livestock trailers are clustered around the sale barn. Downtown, a large 4-H clover is painted on the intersection of Main Street and Wisconsin Street.
This is Russell, Kansas: Quintessential small town America. The flags in this community are flying half-staff today, because the citizens of this rural community are mourning their favorite son who served his country his entire life.
Robert J. Dole was born in Russell in 1923. His parents had modest means, operating an egg and cream business. Young Bob was a bright and athletic kid who went to the University of Kansas to play basketball. His studies were interrupted when World War II hit and he enlisted in the U.S. Army.
In 1945, as a second lieutenant, Bob Dole was leading his troops into battle in the mountains of Italy when he was struck by an enemy shell. When his fellow soldiers saw the extent of his injuries, they gave him a shot of morphine and used his own blood to write the letter M on his forehead so a medic would know that he had already been administered the drug and would not give him another shot which would prove fatal.
In the military hospital, his fever soared to nearly 109 degrees. It looked like he would not survive, but his life was saved by a new medicine, streptomycin, which was an experimental drug at the time. He pulled through but was despondent about losing the use of his right hand and arm.
