Buoyed by a successful second year of the holiday season Polar Express rides and a $750,000 state grant, Midland Railway is upgrading its passenger cars and making ambitious plans that include a possible railroad museum. Wrapped up in those plans are changes that stem from the Midland Railway ...
The public might not recognize the name Rudy Love, the star of a documentary set to screen at Liberty Hall on Jan. 15, but they likely know his music. John Alexander, director of the film “This is Love,” called the Wichita musician the “untold source of a lot of R&B and soul and rap ...
The year ahead will be one in which the Baldwin City government is occupied overseeing the completion of projects that have been in the pipeline for one to four years. “We did a lot of planning last year,” said Baldwin City Administrator Glenn Rodden. “Now it’s time to get things ...
Horse-drawn carriage rides provided holiday cheer for Lawrence residents and a fundraising boost for the local homeless shelter. Several local businesses, including McGrew Real Estate and the Eldridge Hotel, partnered to offer the carriage rides in downtown Lawrence to benefit the Lawrence ...
A new musical festival will be coming to Lawrence this summer, and its promoter has high hopes that it will become a signature event. In launching what will be known as the Kaw River Roots Festival, local entertainment promoter Mike Hannah said he wanted to make Lawrence the Midwestern capital ...
An anonymous $10,000 matching donation has helped the Lawrence Public Library surpass the $20,000 goal it had set for its annual fundraising campaign. Kathleen Morgan, director of development and community partnerships at the library, said the campaign raised a total of $27,315 — $10,000 ...
A recently released novel set in northeast Kansas has received high praise, including from a former U.S. president. Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School,” which was released in October, was named as one of the best books of 2019 by both The New York Times and Barack Obama. The book places ...
Ian Spomer was watching the BBC's “Gardeners’ World” two years ago when the show's host, Monty Don, wondered aloud whether there was a solution to plastic containers in the garden. Spomer, a Lawrence resident with a degree in environmental studies from the University of Kansas, imagined ...
When Stacey Wycoff was first asked to dream big, she wasn't sure how. At the time, she was a new employee at Pennington & Company, 501 Gateway Drive, which does fundraising and alumni relations for sororities and fraternities around the U.S. She quickly learned the Dream Big program was ...
After his mother died in a car accident in 2010, Ehren Schwarz said he began to slip into a spiral of addiction that eventually led to homelessness. Instead of taking advantage of a scholarship to attend and play football at Washburn University in Topeka, Schwarz said he gave into the ...
The first baby born at Lawrence Memorial Hospital in the new year arrived at the wrong holiday. “She was due on Christmas, actually,” said Christin Bowman, who delivered Brynne Paige Bowman at 1:35 a.m. Wednesday. “She’s a little late. We joked she’d show up on New Year’s. I think ...
A temporary overnight shelter for the homeless is seeking volunteers and donations to help it keep running in downtown Lawrence through the winter. The Lawrence Winter Shelter opened in the First United Methodist Church, 946 Vermont St., on Dec. 15 to help address a shortage of emergency ...
Seventeen organizations in Douglas County failed state health code inspections in December. Each month, I take a look at inspection results and list every place either listed out of compliance or with 10 or more code violations. Full reports are available online at agriculture.ks.gov. There, ...
About a half-mile stood between Lawrence’s top story of the year and its top story of a generation. An early evening tornado that cut a swath through Douglas County on May 28 likely is the top local story of the year in many people’s books. The tornado injured more than a dozen people, ...
A contemporary ballet, a plastic waste sculpture and a music album are some of the works that young artists will contribute to the East Ninth Street art project. The East Ninth Project put out a call for youth art projects this fall and received five applications, according to project ...
Connie Hildebrandt has long known she was Chippewa, but it wasn’t until 2005, when her hometown newspaper published a small announcement about a meeting of Munsee descendants, that her mother mentioned to her that she was also part Munsee. The Munsee tribe in Kansas once had a reservation ...
Stanford, Calif. — The KU men’s basketball team’s charter plane lost an engine shortly after taking off Sunday evening, forcing the flight to return to the airport in California, KU officials said. “Upon our return flight home from San Jose (International Airport), roughly 20 minutes ...
With an annual rainfall total more than 9 inches above normal, 2019 was the wettest year in Lawrence since the National Weather Service placed a station at the local airport in 1998. Daniel Reese, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Topeka, said the airport received a ...
Historian Sarah Bell knows firsthand that researching and writing a dissertation can be a long and often lonely process. But on New Year’s Day, Bell, who earned a doctoral degree in May for her research on the women's suffrage movement, will be more visible — an estimated 93 million ...
Three years ago, Kyle LaRosh received a wake-up call when his doctor started him on medication for prediabetes. “I knew what that meant," said LaRosh, of Tonganoxie. “My great-grandmother and grandmother, aunt, uncle and dad all died from complications of type 2 diabetes. I have a cousin ...