It’s 8:45 on a midweek morning inside an obscure white house at 12th and Indiana streets, and the momentum already is heading toward controlled chaos.

Phones are ringing. A voice hollers, “Richard, are you back there?” and another volunteer has just walked in the back door.

The hubbub is in the old Pinet house, well camouflaged behind trees, shrubbery, bricks, decorative iron and out-of-control ivy. The first floor houses the temporary offices of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics; the upstairs is living quarters for the institute’s enthusiastic director, Richard Norton Smith.

“More color guards,” Smith says, hanging up the phone. “If we could accommodate every color guard that’s called, we could have an entire program of color guards.”

The program is the three-day tribute to World War II veterans that will accompany dedication next month of the Dole Institute’s real home on Kansas University’s West Campus.

Guests will include former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter; the senators Dole, both Bob and Elizabeth; former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; George Russell Barber, the last surviving chaplain from the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach; and thousands of World War II veterans and their families.

Some estimates put the number of visitors expected for the three-day event at 70,000 or more.

Those responsible for bringing it all together and on schedule are Smith, two full-time assistants, three temporary workers on loan from other offices at KU and a cadre of volunteers.

Photo gallery.

On this day, Smith is wearing his summer uniform: white sneakers, khaki shorts, a polo shirt and his trademark ball cap.

Calm under fire

It’s hard to see where Linda Kay Pritchard’s desk ends and the wall begins. She’s the “calm-under-fire” Dole Institute secretary.

“They wonder every day if I’ll come back,” she says, smiling.

The longtime KU employee has been working with Smith since September.

One of Pritchard’s tasks is scanning into a computer nearly 2,000 photographs of World War II veterans. Nine hundred or so will be a part of the Memory Wall, a permanent display at the institute. The remainder will be projected on “the world’s biggest outdoor video screen” during the three-day celebration.

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The deadline for submitting photos was May 15, but each day’s mail brings more.

“I’m afraid some people are angry with us because they only heard about the project but not the deadline,” she said.

“The faces on these photographs are so young. They were just children babies,” the mother of two sons says as she scans the hundreds of faces again. “Some included copies of their discharge papers and some had notes saying, ‘This is the first time my father or my husband wanted to get involved in anything having to do with World War II.'”

Tour guide

The sound of Smith’s voice singing lines from “Guys and Dolls” emanates from his office. A historian and author, he spent time as director at the Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan presidential libraries before signing on with the Dole Institute.

Smith emerges and suggests a visit to the building.

Though he undoubtedly has done it hundreds of times before, Smith seems eager to show off the building as he leads the way through a maze of sawhorses, scaffolding and power cords. It’s unkempt now, but there are assurances the work will be done by the dedication weekend.

“The building will be completed or heads will roll,” he says authoritatively, then adds, “Mine.”

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As the tour begins, Smith describes the finished product.

“The Memory Wall will go here,” he says, pointing to a blank space above the entrance, “and you’ll notice there are no straight lines in the entire building a great metaphor for the political process.”

Smith has made changes in the building’s original design.

“But I’ve also removed $100,000 from the original plan’s costs,” he says.

Besides Smith and the architect have come to a meeting of the minds. “I get the interior and he gets the exterior,” Smith says.

‘It’s for Kansas’

He pauses for a couple of seconds, waving his arms toward the ceiling. “This is not for KU or K-State or Wichita State University it’s for Kansas.”

After leaving the lower level, where 4,000 boxes of Dole’s papers will be housed, Smith points to the space where a three-dimensional replica of the U.S. Capitol dome will stand.

Photo gallery.

“We need to plan for the possibility that thousands of school kids may find their way through here,” he says. “This shouldn’t be about Dole in a commemorative fashion but what we can distill from the Dole experience. Kansas culture, the whole notion about public service.

“Frank Carlson is here, Nancy Kassebaum is here, Alf Landon is here,” Smith says, leading the way back to the entrance. “The roles that women have played in Kansas politics is here. It’s not just the Bob Dole story if they have the eyes to see.”

Displays, some with videos, will include information about the early 1930s and the tough times most Kansans faced in those dark days of the Great Depression.

“I’ve always thought Bob Dole was as much a product of the Dust Bowl as he was of World War II it was very formative,” Smith says. “I mean, here’s a young student who sent his laundry home on a train because it cost 15 cents to have it done in Lawrence.”

He said it was intentional that the institute has the feel of a cathedral, with its openness and soaring stained glass windows.

“This is a civic cathedral a cathedral of the civic religion. Service, not just patriotism. Service,” he says.

An emotional spectacle

Standing on the hillside outside the institute, Smith describes part of what will happen Monday, July 21, the day that will be the emotional centerpiece of the three-day dedication.

“You’ll be able to see everything from here on your blanket and with your picnic basket,” he says. “The huge video wall goes there. Bill Kurtis (TV broadcaster and Kansan) will be out here working the crowd. Tom Brokaw (NBC anchor) will pass this way. Dole will walk through here to the platform. … Everyone will sing ‘God Bless America.'”

And he stops.

“But,” he says with a big smile, “on the world’s biggest outdoor video wall, Kate Smith will be on the screen leading the crowd in ‘God Bless America’ … this is not understated.”

Smith describes how Dole will push a button lighting the institute’s interior and showing off the stained-glass flag the world’s largest and signaling the beginning of a 3 1/2-minute laser light show “making up in spectacle what it lacks in length.”

As Smith heads back toward the new building, an older woman wearing a dark blue dress with matching stockings and sunglasses approaches, holding out her hand.

“I recognized your cap,” she says. “I’m Dixie Roberts from Manhattan and my husband, Tom, and I wanted to see your new building. It’s beautiful.”

Smith immediately offers her a “five-minute inside” tour.

Inside, after a number of oohs and aahs, Roberts says she and her husband had known Bob Dole since he was a congressman and they lived in Scott City.

‘Uneventful day’

Back in the Oread Neighborhood, Smith re-enters his 12th Street office and is stopped by his assistant, Erik Nelson, and volunteer Bill Howell, a U.S. Marine captain.

Smith earlier described Howell as a “godsend” who walked in off the street and “just started getting things done.” The two wanted to bounce their latest findings about dinner prices off their boss.

After a 30-minute hamburger lunch at Molly McGee’s with Howell, Smith heads back to his computer. At 3 p.m. a television crew arrives ready to tape a lengthy interview in the front yard. The office is getting crowded.

Earlier Smith had shown a visitor samples of the Dole Institute’s commemorative bricks that allow a donor a 42-letter inscription for a $250 contribution. Brick sales already have raised more than $100,000.

So far, Smith says, he has raised $2.6 million for the institute, “and am still doing it from increasingly unlikely sources.”

As Smith and Dole Institute archivist Jean Bischoff head out the door for yet another tour of the institute, Smith apologizes for the “uneventful day” and is gone.

It’s nearly 5 p.m.

“Oh, he’ll be in his office tonight,” Pritchard says. “It’s pretty high energy around here. It’s like this all the time … bang, bang, bang.”