Greenburg ? Lonnie McCollum walks through town wearing a stretched-out undershirt and blue jeans.

From his tennis shoes to his star-spangled hat, he’s covered in dust. The afternoon sun has burned his face red, his neckline redder.

McCollum looks more like a guy headed to a fishing hole, not a mayor touring what’s left of his hometown. And four days after an EF-5 tornado tore through on a Friday night just before the 10 o’clock news, little is left but devastation.

Nearly 1,000 homes are gone. So are the restaurants, schools, a hospital, City Hall and most businesses. Police cars and firetrucks are flipped and ruined.

“Where were you in 1962?” asks McCollum, working his way through the downtown district. “This is where we went cruising. … I wish I had the ’55 Chevy I had back then.”

The 62-year-old tells how he and his buddies would grab malts at Hunter Drug.

“That’s a real gen-u-ine old-time drug store,” McCollum says. “Everything in there was an antique. Including the soda jerk.”

Before the May 4 tornado, this south-central Kansas farming community of 1,450 was holding its own in a region where many towns are dying.

About 35,000 visitors came each year to see the world’s largest hand-dug well. The mayor and his new, young city manager had grand plans to lure more.

Family farms handed down through the generations were surviving. Older people never thought of leaving, and slowly, young families were coming in.

And remember the soda jerk? The one who knows how to pat the ice just right? He was pushing his 55th year behind the counter.

All this made up Greensburg, a town the mayor says is worth resurrecting.

Residents see future

Others see it, too.

Bob and Ann Dixson hung a blue-painted banner: “Future Home of the Dixson family. We are so blessed.”

Susan Reinecke hopes hers will be one of the first businesses to reopen.

And a few blocks from the grain elevator, Marvin Lawson says it best.

“Why should we run?” asks Lawson, balancing his 70-year-old frame on a pile of debris that used to be his bedroom. “You can’t let Mother Nature get your britches down.”

They still don’t have running water, working sewers or electricity here, and no one knows when they will. Nine people died in the tornado. Most, everyone knew.

But this town is getting support from across the nation, the governor and even President Bush. And they have McCollum and that city manager, Steve Hewitt, brought in a year ago to take things up a notch.

“I tell you what, I got the best people in the world to do it,” McCollum says. “If I don’t believe in what we can do, how can I get the people to believe?”

City manager efficient

From their first meeting, the mayor knew that Hewitt, now 34, was the young face this aging town needed. Raised about 30 miles east in Pratt, Hewitt had a background in parks and recreation but wanted to manage city government.

In that first year, with efficiency the chief goal, the hire seems to have paid off.

Greensburg’s electric fund got out of debt and then some, Hewitt says, banking $400,000. McCollum says that by modernizing, Hewitt trimmed more than $200,000 from the budget. Before Hewitt came aboard, the city had $800,000 in the bank. That grew to $1.5 million.

“This kid is good,” McCollum says.

The way Hewitt sees it, “the mayor is the rah-rah one, the cheerleader. … He says ‘I want to do it,’ and I tell him how we can get it done.”

Plus, Hewitt says, city employees share the vision.

Leaders affected too

Since the tornado, the two have played their roles like always.

Once McCollum tended to his injured wife, he turned to the town. After losing his vehicles and three-story yellow home with a wrap-around porch, the mayor slept in the bed of a friend’s pickup.

Once Hewitt had his wife and toddler son safe in Pratt, he went to work. Their home, built with his grandfather’s own hands, was gone.

“I had lost an important part of my life,” Hewitt says. “But my obligation was to be city manager. … You just have to step up and play the role.”

Their new City Hall is a folding rectangular table and chair in front of a motor home, not far from the courthouse. Hewitt attends the briefings and handles the “nuts and bolts” of cleanup and utility restoration.

And McCollum, who admits he has teared up many times and “dropped to his knees” when he first saw downtown, tells people that their dreams for the town were not destroyed. “I think with the mayor’s vision and my management, we can get it done,” Hewitt says.

Sure, they’re going to lose people, the mayor says as he walks toward the rubble that was his home.

Older folks may move closer to relatives. The soda jerk is leaving, leaving Greensburg without the “Dickie Drinks” that kids would beg out of school to go get.

Though the mayor says it’s a shame to lose Dick and the old-fashioned drugstore, “For every one we lose, two will come back,” he says.

Rebuilding is priority

The team of McCollum and Hewitt know they have to give people a reason to stay.

First, get the utilities and water up and running.

As the mayor walks down Florida Street, National Guard members already are clearing utility easements. A stream of dump trucks head to the landfill where wood debris is burned.

Next, rebuild schools, homes and the business district.

“I really don’t see, unless they get jobs in there, that people can stay,” says Scott Huckriede, Dick’s nephew, who plans on leaving. “But maybe if they knew there would be schools a year from now and there’d be housing, enough people would.”

School will start in August. All teachers will have jobs. It’s all about one step at a time.

“We have the ability to build a new town,” Superintendent Darin Headrick says. “A lot of towns don’t have that opportunity.”