PARKER ? Mike Page doesn’t know Sen. Sam Brownback very well. So he was surprised a couple of years ago when the senator’s staff called him and asked if they could use his convenience store/gas station as the backdrop for the kickoff of Brownback’s re-election campaign.

Page and his wife had vowed not to get mixed up in politics when they opened One Stop about five years ago because they didn’t want to alienate customers. The business is somewhere area residents can gather to eat chili on a cold winter’s day, share a lazy game of pool and post snapshots of themselves posing with fish caught in area ponds or antlered deer shot on nearby farmland.

But the couple’s dedication to separation of business and state changed with the Brownback request.

“I said, ‘Well … yeah,'” he said.

Page also was asked to make an endorsement speech, but he dodged that bullet and enlisted Wayne Burk, manager of the local lumberyard, for the oratorical duty. Actually, it was more like a draft than an enlistment.

“I did no research for the speech,” Burk said with a laugh. “I was told (I was doing it) 15 minutes beforehand.”

Burk had no trouble singing Brownback’s praises that day. He has known the senator since their days in 4-H and Future Farmers of America, when they did chores on their families’ farms and “found time to play while we were working.”

But that was decades ago. Today, Burk and other Parker residents rarely see their favorite son. They, of course, follow his political career and are anticipating an influx of media and renewed interest in the small, conservative community in Linn County now that Brownback has announced his run for the U.S. presidency.

Reporters looking for a scandal won’t find many people – if any – in this town of 281 who will dish on the senator. Time, it seems, has stood still here when it comes to the senator.

Brownback is mostly remembered as the brown-haired kid who excelled in high school sports and became vice president of the national FFA in the 1970s, a kid who had a gift for speech-making and never seemed to be at odds with others.

In their mind, he’s THE kid – frozen in time as the hometown hero.

Life in Parker

Parker’s roots – like the Brownback family’s – lie in agriculture.

The town was laid out in an apple orchard in November 1888 and named after its owner, J.S. Parker. A few weeks later, in January 1889, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad ran its first train through the townsite.

By the early 1890s, Parker was bustling. The grasslands had become home to two hardware stores, four general merchandise stores, a furniture and undertaking business, two banks, two milliners, two restaurants, a jewelry store, a meat market, a barbershop, two livery barns, two blacksmiths, a harness shop, a newspaper, two physicians, a meal and feed grinder, a grain elevator, a dentist and a few churches.

During the 1960s, when young Sam was in grade school, Parker had three grocery stores, three service stations, a dry goods store, a recreation center where youngsters could roller skate, a lumberyard and an appliance store, according to Marilyn Rhoades, treasurer of the Parker Community Historical Society.

A road sign on the eastern edge of Parker tells passersby that the community is the hometown of U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback and state Sen. Robert Tyson.

“But the orchard was pretty much at its end at that time,” Rhoades said.

At least three generations of the Brownback family have farmed the land around Parker. Sam Brownback and his three siblings – Jim, Alan and Mary – grew up on a farm on the east edge of Parker, where his parents, Bob and Nancy, still live. The family raised cattle, hogs and row crops, such as wheat, corn and milo.

Today, Jim farms near Parker, Alan is a veterinarian in Lyndon and Mary lives in Manhattan, according to local residents.

“After consolidation, Parker began its demise,” Rhoades said. “There was no high school, and the highways were away from Parker.”

After the Brownback children graduated from high school, their mother took a job outside of the home as a rural mail carrier, while their father continued to farm, Burk said.

“Primarily, now it’s row crops and a few cattle,” he said.

‘All-American kid’

Sam Brownback’s ties to agriculture – and specifically his involvement in the FFA chapter at Prairie View High School – laid the foundation for his political career.

Joe Atwood, a boyhood friend of Brownback’s who has been the agriculture education instructor and FFA adviser at Prairie View for 23 years, tries to bring that point home to the teenagers coming up the ranks of the FFA chapter today.

Atwood was secretary of the Prairie View FFA chapter when Brownback was its president. Brownback went on to be elected president of the Kansas FFA in 1974-75 and vice president of the national FFA in 1976-77. He was appointed secretary of the Kansas Department of Agriculture in 1986.

Atwood remembers taking part in team judging competitions with Brownback during their high school days. Brownback, he said, excelled in parliamentary procedure and public speaking to the point his classmates gave him the nickname “governor.”

Brownback also was into entomology, or the study of bugs – another skill some might argue would serve him well later in the halls of Congress.

In addition to FFA, Atwood said, Brownback was the quarterback of the football team, ran the mile in track, was president of the student council and was often found on the honor roll. Socializing outside of school typically meant hanging out at friends’ homes, camping out or going to drive-in movies in the summertime.

Atwood can’t recall Brownback being in any sort of mischief.

“He was an all-American kid,” he said. “I’m not trying to build him up as a super hero, but in fact he kind of was.”

Sen. Sam Brownback's senior high school portrait is displayed in Prairie View High School's 1974 yearbook in La Cygne.

A couple of weekends ago, Atwood said he was at a livestock show in Denver and ran into an old school buddy. Their reminiscing eventually turned to talk about Brownback and his chances for winning the presidency.

“(Sam) had that charisma that people follow,” he said. “You can’t define it or really explain it.”

Memorabilia

It’s been a while since Brownback has been seen out and about in his hometown. Besides the senatorial campaign kickoff at the One Stop, the only other visit residents seem to remember is a town hall meeting at Prairie View High School about two years ago.

Louise Stites, who has been postmaster in Parker since 2003 and whose two sons went to school with Brownback, said the senator has never visited the white modular building housing the post office.

Rhoades, of the historical society, said Brownback visited the town’s museum in 1998 to present them with a U.S. flag that had flown over the Capitol building in Washington. Clippings and photos from that presentation are mounted in a large picture frame hanging by the museum’s door.

Also in the frame is a handwritten letter on U.S. Senate stationery that reads:

March 13, 1998

To the Parker Historical Society:

Thank you for preserving our common heritage. I was so blessed to be raised in Parker among good people with solid values. You are preserving what we stand for. God bless you all.

The museum has a small display of Brownback campaign memorabilia – buttons, balloons, brochures, a T-shirt, business cards and an “I’m a Brownbacker” bumper sticker – but it doesn’t hold a place of honor among the antique cameras, old hats and other historical items there.

In fact, there is little to indicate the pride the town has in its native son.

Two yellow signs, about the size of speed limit signs, posted at Parker’s city limits point out its the hometown of Brownback and state Sen. Robert Tyson. However, the lettering is too small to be more than a blur in a moving car.

Page would like to see that change. In addition to larger signs about Brownback, he wants to dedicate a wall at his One Stop to the senator. He said he has contacted the senator’s staff to request photographs for the wall but hasn’t received any.

Putting Parker on the map

Page sees Brownback’s bid for the presidency as possibly resulting in an uptick in the town’s visibility. And if the stars should align and he’s elected commander in chief, well ….

“He sure will put Parker on the map,” Page said.

Already, Atwood, the FFA adviser, is getting calls from the New York Times, Washington Post and other national media for interviews.

Janet Reynolds, a librarian at Prairie View High School, is anticipating an increased interest in Brownback’s hometown and childhood years. She already has gathered all of the Buffalo Spirit yearbooks and other information she can find from the senator’s days there.

From a librarian’s perspective, Brownback’s election as president – although pundits say that chance is slim – would be a dream come true.

“Maybe (we’ll get) a presidential library,” she said.