Ottawa VFW group plans veterans dance

Veterans are invited to a gathering Saturday at the Ottawa Veterans of Foreign Wars post.

Sandwiches and coffee will be served after live music and dancing. Admission to the event, which runs from 7:30 p.m. to 11 p.m., is free for veterans. Membership is not necessary.

The Ottawa VFW is on the east side of U.S. Highway 59, half a mile north of the railroad viaduct on the northern edge of town.

Felon going to prison on weapons charge

A Lawrence man has been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison for illegally having a gun.

A federal judge on Monday ordered Quinton S. Wilson, 26, to serve five years and three months in federal prison. Wilson pleaded guilty in April to one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Police found Wilson with a loaded gun on Sept. 17 after they responded to a complaint of a gun being fired, according to information from Eric Melgren, the U.S. attorney for Kansas.

Federal law disqualified Wilson from having a gun because of past crimes, including a 2002 felony conviction in Franklin County for making a criminal threat.

Ex-resident featured in newspaper article

Former Lawrence resident Lance Hill’s careers as labor organizer, civil rights advocate and college professor are the subject of recent cover story in Gambit Weekly, an alternative newspaper in New Orleans.

In the story, Hill describes the effects of growing up in Lawrence in the 1960s, a time when segregation often went unquestioned. He moved to Louisiana after serving a 21-month prison sentence for marijuana possession.

Hill later led efforts to expose U.S. Senate candidate David Duke’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Now on the faculty at Tulane University, he recently published “Deacons of Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement.”

The article is available is on the Gambit Weekly Web site: www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-07-06/cover_story.html.