From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for March 4, 1974:

• Kansas Gov. Robert Docking announced this week that he would be going home to Arkansas City in January 1975, ending the longest tenure of any governor in state history. Docking’s decision to retire from public office at the end of his current two-year term had come at the Democratic party’s annual Washington Day Dinner in Topeka over the weekend. “I will not seek re-election as governor. I will not seek election as United States senator. I will return to private life,” he proclaimed about halfway through his address, which was televised in eastern Kansas. His pronouncement was met with “deathly silence” by the dinner’s attendees, who just a moment earlier had applauded loudly when Docking had mentioned one of the options open to him was to run for the Senate. “There no doubt will be a dramatic change in Kansas politics,” said U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, who had expected Docking to be his opponent in Dole’s bid for re-election to the Senate this year. “It changes things for both parties…. Republican governor candidates no longer can run against the Docking record. I’ll have another opponent. It’s a whole new ball game.” Docking confirmed that he had given strong consideration for running for the Senate, but in the final analysis, he said, “My heart is not in Washington, D.C.; my heart is at home here in Kansas.”
• Meanwhile, in Lawrence, the latest “college craze” had hit the Kansas University campus the previous month when a streaker “wearing sneakers, a rubber mask on his nose and absolutely nothing else” had dashed about 250 yards from in front of Watson Library to some bushes near a parking lot. “I’d never heard of streaking,” said one female student who had witnessed the incident. “I thought he’d lost his marbles…. It was hilarious.” A different streaker had been spotted on a recent Saturday night, running from the east side of Hoch Auditorium around the flower planter and off to the west. A witness described the second streaker as “rather fat and out of shape.”