In Greensburg

Any time you go out with Les Anderson, you know it is going to be interesting.

This morning, we got up early and drove over to Mullinville to check out the morning coffee crowd. As any good small-town journalist knows, this is where you get the good stories.

The crowd was small, so Les struck up a conversation with a truck driver from Utah, hauling beef from Liberal to New Jersey. The conversation touched on fuel mileage, his family and how he got started as a truck driver.

The next stop was the Southern Plains Co-op in Greensburg to make arrangements for me to shoot an overview of town from the top of the elevator. While talking with Deb Wyrick at the co-op, Les noticed she had a WSU pennant. When he learned she was an alum, he grabbed a pen and a small pad of sticky notes from her desk, and the interview was on. I even got in on the action when she said she was from Fowler, and I asked if she knew my mother-in-law’s family.

After getting the info to make the arrangements, we headed back to Haviland. Along the way, we passed a dead armadillo on the side of the road. Not an unusual sight for me, but it intrigued Les. He turned around and asked me to shoot a picture.

As I was getting out, he started joking about how we were going to get killed shooting a dead armadillo. I couldn’t help but visualize the two little crosses along U.S. 54 with the stuffed armadillo between them.

All this before 10 a.m. Be careful if Les asks if you want to go out for a cup of coffee.

—Cort Anderson, no relation