It’s game day. The high school athlete has her jersey on and prepares to go into action. All eyes are on her as she makes her move. But right now this athlete isn’t using a ball, she’s using a book.
On game days at Frankfort High School, the athletes don’t just perform on the court, they read to younger kids in the classroom. This is small town athletics at its best.
Dean Dalinghaus is principal at Frankfort High School, home of the Wildcats. He went to high school at B&B, graduated from K-State, and has been principal at Frankfort since 2006. He has observed the significance of hometown sports teams in rural communities.
“I think it brings the community together,” he said. “It creates a sense of pride. It’s the joy of seeing the kids put their heart and soul on the line, for the (town) name on the front of the jersey.”
It’s the Big 12 championship football game in Arlington, Texas. The offensive starters take the field. The big offensive linemen get in position for the first snap. A look at the roster reveals that this is homegrown talent: Three of K-State’s five starting offensive linemen come from the state of Kansas.
Big 12 football championship trophy presentation
Cooper Beebe, Hadley Panzer, and Hayden Gillum are the Sunflower State starting linemen who help anchor Kansas State’s offensive line. Beebe is from Kansas City, Kansas and attended Piper High School. Panzer is from the rural community of Lakin, population 2,205, and Gillum is from the rural community of Plainville, population 1,746 people. Now, that’s rural.
Cooper Beebe became a starter at K-State in 2020 – the same year he first earned All-Big 12 Academic honors. In 2021, he earned First Team All-Big 12 honors from both the league’s coaches and Associated Press — the youngest offensive lineman to be named to the first team by either organization.
Beebe also was the first Wildcat freshman or sophomore offensive lineman to be named a First Team All-Big 12 performer since Dalton Risner in 2016. Beebe entered the 2022 season with lots of accolades: Pre-season All Big 12, pre-season All-American, and named to the Outland Trophy watch list.
At 6-foot-4 and 322 pounds, Beebe’s 2022 season has been outstanding. He was named a First Team All-Big 12 performer by the Associated Press for a second-consecutive season and First Team All-American by The Sporting News.
September 18, 2004. Bret Fitzpatrick was driving to a farm sale when his truck tire blew out on a two-lane bridge. He lost control of his truck, went into the ditch, hit a power pole, rolled three times, and ended up in the water.
When Fitzpatrick came to, he was in the water and could no longer move his legs. That was the beginning of a long, tough journey for this young man who has found ways to adjust to his challenging life in rural Kansas.
Fitzpatrick grew up near Sterling where his family had a diversified crop and livestock operation. He majored in animal sciences and business at K-State. One summer, he got an internship with a meat processing company in Hutchinson and found he enjoyed meat science and food science work.
After graduation, he was hired as a food scientist in the research and development department. That company is now part of Tyson Foods.
Fitzpatrick met and married his wife who is from Buhler. He worked for Tyson and helped his dad on the farm.
Then the accident occurred. The truck cab was crushed directly behind where Fitzpatrick had been sitting and there were power lines down in the ditch. When he regained consciousness, he was outside the truck and spitting out water.
It’s the Festival of Lights. Twinkly lights adorn five acres of trees, barns and buildings as excited families enjoy hot chocolate and homemade, spiced wine.
It’s an annual Christmas celebration hosted by a family-owned winery on the high plains of rural Kansas.
Kirk and Treva Johnston are the owners and founders of Shiloh Vineyard and Winery near WaKeeney. The vineyard hosts special events throughout the year, including the weeklong Festival of Lights during the week before Christmas.
Kirk Johnston grew up in Goodland. His wife Treva is originally from Damar. Kirk was always interested in farming. He grew up helping his uncle on the farm and earned a degree in agronomy from Kansas State University.
“I took lots of chemistry classes,” Kirk said. The two married and eventually ended up on his grandfather’s place near WaKeeney.
“My grandfather bought this place in 1921 because it had a horse barn on it,” Kirk said. “They built a chicken house and by 1925, had 300 layers in it.”
In 1929, they added the family home: “It was a house ordered out of the Montgomery Ward catalog,” Kirk said.
Amelia Earhart, as represented in Statuary Hall, U.S. Capitol
The pilot has come in for a landing. In this case, the pilot is the famous aviator Amelia Earhart (or her replica in the form of a bronze statue), and her landing place isn’t an airport – it’s the nation’s capitol.
Amelia Earhart was recently honored by the State of Kansas by having her statue placed in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol building.
Statuary Hall is that area of the capitol that displays statues depicting people representing all 50 states. Each state is authorized to send two statues to this collection. Kansas recently replaced one of its statues with one of Amelia Earhart, who captured the world’s attention as a pioneer in aviation.
With support from the Atchison Amelia Earhart Foundation, her statue was unveiled in the National Statuary Collection in July, 2022.
Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison on July 24, 1897. She must have been quite the adventurous child. One time she and friends built a homemade roller coaster by greasing boards with lard and suspending them from the top of a toolshed. Amelia made the trial run on this roller coaster in a wooden crate and crashed part way down.
She came up with a torn dress and split lip but a big smile, proclaiming, “Oh! It’s just like flying!”
“We deliver the male.” No, I’m not referring to the U.S. Postal Service.
In this case, it refers to a business that delivers selected male genetics to pork production operations across the Midwest. This same innovative farm family is also pursuing blockchain and bitcoin mining from its location in rural Kansas.
Lannin Zoltenko is president and managing partner at Zoltenko Farms and Wildcat Blockchain. His family’s farm is in Jewell County, just one mile from the Nebraska state line. Five generations of the family have lived here. The farm became a century farm in 2017.
Zoltenko’s folks are James and Sherryl Zoltenko. Lannin and his wife Melanie have two boys: Chandler, who is farming, and Taran who is at Kansas State University, which is also her father’s alma mater.
For decades, the Zoltenkos had a traditional diversified livestock farm raising cattle, crops and pigs. The hog operation was farrow-to-finish, meaning that the males (boars) were bred to the females (sows), which gave birth to piglets that were then raised to market weight.
In 1997, Zoltenko was considering whether to come back to the farm. His parents were trying to decide whether to retire or expand.
From left: Stuart Aller, Daniel Coughlin, Tamra Coughlin
Patent pending. We frequently see those words on a label but may not think about the process required to gain such a designation.
Today we’ll meet a small town Kansas law firm that specializes in helping clients across the nation protect their intellectual property.
Attorney Daniel Coughlin is founder and principal of the Coughlin Law Office LLC in Sabetha. Stuart Aller is the patent agent in the law firm.
Coughlin is a Michigan native. While earning a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Michigan, he researched a product that was thought to be patentable. “I was intrigued by the patent process,” he said.
Coughlin earned a law degree at the University of Toledo. Through a church youth group, he met and later married Tamra who was born in Sabetha. While working his way through law school, Coughlin built and programmed control panels at a Sabetha manufacturing company. He recognized that patents help encourage inventors by protecting their innovative ideas.
In 2012, he opened the Coughlin Law Office in Sabetha. Over time, he found a niche in developing and filing patents for his clients.
In 2020, Hiawatha native Stuart Aller joined the firm. Aller graduated from K-State with life science degrees and worked as a scientist for the State of Kansas before moving back to his hometown to teach. Aller met Coughlin and started doing technical writing for the firm during the summers. Aller became interested in the patent work that supports innovation.
“I’ve always been interested in science and technology,” Aller said. He sat for the patent bar exam, which is a specialized form of legal certification. “There’s something like a 40% pass rate,” he said. “It was definitely the hardest exam I’ve ever taken.”
Aller passed and, in 2020, became certified by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a registered patent agent. He joined the Coughlin firm in offering their KanPat® intellectual property services.
“An inventor will come in with some idea and we will work though it to identify the key factors that make it new and unique,” Coughlin said. Then they develop a proposed filing complete with technical drawings and explanations. Ultimately this is filed with the U.S. Patent Office.
“It is not necessarily a quick process,” Coughlin said. Filings are subject to in-depth review by patent examiners. “Depending on various factors, it can take 2-3 years at the fastest or up to 5-6 years for a patent to issue. However, ‘patent pending’ can usually be achieved in just a few days or weeks.”
“(Working with clients) is one of the best parts of the job,” he said.
Coughlin Law Office recently worked with a K-State student to patent an improved hitch pin. In another case, they worked with an inventor who had been turned away by a big city law firm, but Coughlin and Aller ultimately obtained a patent for him.
Sabetha is a fruitful home base for the company due to the multiple innovative manufacturers found in the community. However, the firm’s reputation has grown far beyond the region.
Coughlin Law Office has done patent work for clients across the nation, from Florida to Washington state. They have also done international work on intellectual property protection in such places as Japan, Brazil, Australia and South Africa.
That’s remarkable for a law firm located in a rural community such as Sabetha, population 2,545 people. Now, that’s rural.
“We get lots of referrals through our loyal clients who appreciate a rural small town law practice with this capability,” Coughlin said. As the law firm’s website states: “We strive to provide professional services with small town warmth and integrity.”
For more information, see www.kanpat.com.
Patent pending. Those simple words reflect a complex process, led in this case by a law office in rural Kansas. We commend Daniel Coughlin and Stuart Aller of the Coughlin Law Office for making a difference by encouraging innovation and protecting intellectual property in a small town setting. The benefit to rural Kansas should be patently obvious.
That was the title of a business book that was especially popular a few years ago, as a parable of how to deal with change. Today we’ll learn about a remarkable change that is coming to southwest Kansas, and it is literally about cheese. A new state-of-the-art cheese and whey protein processing plant is being constructed in Dodge City.
Joann Knight is executive director of the Dodge City/Ford County Development Corporation with headquarters in Dodge City. She’s a native of the region and a graduate of Dodge City Community College and the University of Oklahoma Economic Development Institute.
“Back in 1992, we started talking about recruiting dairies from California where they were being crowded out by population expansion,” Knight said.
Recruiting dairies became a successful strategy for the western Kansas Rural Economic Development Alliance in following decades. As milk production grew in western Kansas, leaders wanted to add value and create more jobs.
In 2021, Hilmar Cheese Company of Hilmar, Calif. announced that the company would build a state-of-the-art milk processing facility in Dodge City. “We’re excited,” Knight said.
“This will be a $630 million project and create 260 jobs. The average salary is projected to be $63,000.”
The plant will operate 365 days a year and have the capacity to handle 260 tanker trucks of milk per day, the equivalent of the production of 110,000 cows. “They’ll be bringing in milk from across the region,” Knight said.
Hilmar Cheese Company was founded in 1984 by 12 dairy farm families in central California. In 2007, the company opened a production facility in Dalhart, Texas. The company is now one of the world’s largest producers of high quality, American-style cheese and whey products.
“Hilmar is an incredibly environmentally sensitive company,” Knight said. One of the factors that attracted Hilmar to Dodge City is the city’s innovative waste water treatment system, which has won numerous awards.
“Milk is mostly water,” Knight said. “Once the cheese solids and whey are removed, that water will be recycled and reused. It can be re-irrigated and used in the biogas production system. They’ll actually be injecting water back into the aquifer.”
David Ahlem is president and CEO of Hilmar Cheese Company. “Dodge City gives us many opportunities, including a local and skilled labor force, a supportive and expanding agricultural region, and an excellent transportation network that allows us to easily reach our expanding markets,” he said at the time of the announcement in 2021.
The company specializes in the production of cheddar and American-style cheeses used by private label and national brand companies worldwide. It currently produces such cheeses as cheddar, monterey jack, pepper jack, colby, colby jack and mozzarella.
Whey is processed into whey protein products that are used as ingredients in many foods including nutritional beverages and bars; and lactose, which is marketed internationally as an ingredient in confections and infant formula. Hilmar exports products to 50 countries.
Increased demand for milk will benefit area dairies such as High Plains Ponderosa Dairy near the rural southwest Kansas community of Plains, population 1,037 people. Now, that’s rural.
“Dairy production is so advanced these days,” Knight said. “They’re using robotic milkers and computer operators. They monitor 600 data points on each cow and can test the milk on the spot with their state of the art system.”
“The economic impact will be compounded substantially by the additional dairies, transportation and services that will be required. This could double the dairy industry in southwest Kansas.”
For more information about the company, see www.hilmarcheese.com. For more information about business opportunities in the region, see www.dodgedev.org.
“Who Moved My Cheese?” A few years ago, that was a popular business book about change, and now we are excited to see this change in the southwest region of the state.
We commend Joann Knight and the people of Hilmar Dairy for making a difference with this investment in value-added agriculture processing. I’m glad to see that the production of this cheese has moved to rural Kansas.
In this case, I’m not referring to the temperature. HOTT is an acronym for Hispanics Of Today and Tomorrow, an organization that is working to promote higher education opportunities for Hispanic students in the Emporia area.
Rebeca Herrera and Patricia Saenz-Reyes of Emporia are active in Hispanics Of Today and Tomorrow. Rebeca is of Spanish and Mexican descent and grew up in Atlanta.
“Moving from a large metropolitan city in the east to the great plains of the Midwest was a culture shock,” she said. “I have now been in Emporia for four years. This wonderful community has welcomed me with open arms.”
She is now membership director at the Emporia Area Chamber of Commerce.
Saenz-Reyes is a self-described “border baby,” born in El Paso. Her mother is an American citizen and her father is Mexican. Patricia went to school in Juarez, Mexico until the 9th grade when she transferred to El Paso to continue her education.
Her career took her to west Texas where she was an insurance executive before coming to Emporia. Now she is the migrant community resource coordinator and student and family resource specialist with the Emporia school district.
It is nine o’clock at night. You are in the middle of a plumbing repair, and you find you need another plumbing fitting. The big box stores are closed. Delivery service is a day or two away.
What do you do?
Victoria Lumber
If you’re in Victoria, Kansas, you call Jim. He’ll come open Victoria Lumber so you can get the part you need. This is the kind of customer service that helps sustain this store in rural Kansas.
Jim and Becky Scheck are the owners of Victoria Lumber. Jim grew up in the area and worked at a manufacturing plant in Hays until the company relocated. He then farmed and worked in the oilfield.
In 1983, a neighboring landowner asked Scheck if he would want to work part-time at Victoria Lumber, the local hardware store and lumberyard.
Scheck took the job. Within six months, he was working there full-time. He started as a yard man, then worked at fixing screens and moved up to become a bookkeeper. “It gave me a good overview of the entire business,” he said.
Victoria Lumber Company was founded in 1952. In 2006, after the previous owner became ill, Jim and Becky purchased the business.
Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University writes Kansas Profile. The weekly posts highlight individuals or companies in rural Kansas who are making a difference to their community and state.
The Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development is a public / private partnership between Kansas State University and the Huck Boyd Foundation. The mission of the institute is to help rural people help themselves. Learn more at www.huckboydinstitute.org.
