The flag painted on the barn 20 years ago had badly faded. That bothered Chris Koenig, who saw the decay as a metaphor for our memories of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. "It just bummed me out," he said. He was a freshman at Pittsburg State University on 9/11, deeply saddened by the day’s horror, and he remembered how seeing the vivid little flag on the barn with the word ...
"The Ballad of Black Jack,” a homegrown musical about Bleeding Kansas, has been around for about half a century, but it's hardly a static relic from another era. If you saw it at Baker University in the 1970s, as many schoolchildren on field trips did, and then in some later decade, something likely was quite different about the second show: a new song, a new character or two, an extended — or vastly ...
Updated at 5:15 p.m. Thursday Jeff Hamm has an office just west of the Wishing Bench in East Lawrence. Like many, he was saddened to wake up on Aug. 15 to discover that the quirky little landmark had been consumed by an overnight fire that destroyed much of the structure and all of the whimsical decorations that passersby had contributed over the years. "I knew that was an iconic part of East Lawrence," he ...
Friends of cannabis activist Thomas Trower gave the local icon a memorial he surely would have loved as they stood on the corner of 11th and Massachusetts streets and asked — one last time — for passing cars to “Honk for Hemp.” Hundreds of drivers honked not just once, but repeatedly — once for the cannabis cause and many more as a clearly emotional tribute to Trower, who had stood at the downtown ...
Updated at 11:08 p.m. Tuesday Thomas Trower, popularly known in Lawrence as the "Honk for Hemp" man, has died at age 70, the Journal-World confirmed with the Douglas County Coroner's Office on Tuesday. The office provided no additional details about Trower, who was well-known in Lawrence for regularly standing at the northeast corner of 11th and Massachusetts streets — dressed head to toe in hemp — with a ...
The spirit of East Lawrence's "Wishing Bench" is undaunted after an early-morning fire Sunday consumed the beloved art installation at Ninth and Delaware streets. By Monday afternoon, the shrine-like structure was looking more like its old self as well-wishers festooned it with signs, flowers, drawings, socks and other decorations. Someone even left a large office chair on the charred platform, presumably as a ...