25 years ago: Volunteers endure rainy weather to participate in Stan Herd artwork

From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Oct. 23, 1988:

  • Crop artist Stan Herd and 800 helpers stood out in an empty soybean field near Ottawa this week to participate in Herd’s latest artwork, “The Ottawa Beanfield Cola Wars,” an image featuring two crushed cans of Coke and Pepsi. “I’m not anti-commercial…. I’m not against these two corporation,” Herd explained. “I’m just trying to poke fun at us. We are so commercialized in this country that it affects our image of who we are.” The participants donned red and blue clothing to provide color for the cans and then stood in a light rain for about three hours while photographers took aerial pictures. “I believe in doing anything if it is fun,” Williamsburg resident Joy Louderback said. “I could think of a lot of other pictures I’d rather be in than two crushed cans…. But I get a chance to be an artist of my own. I could’ve been home running the sweeper.”
  • A scary time was in store for local radio listeners. As a Halloween treat for the community, KANU-FM was planning to broadcast the Mercury Theatre production of “War of the Worlds” almost fifty years to the day after the original. Darrell Brogdon, program director at KANU and director of the Imagination Workshop radio acting troupe, said that the famously panicked public reaction to the 1938 broadcast was due in part to its realistic script, use of news bulletins, and good sound effects. “Sometime after the broadcast, a radio station in Peru translated the script to Spanish, changed the place names and broadcast the production,” Brogdon related. “When listeners found out they had been duped, there was a riot. Listeners stormed the station and burned it down.”