In Greensburg

One of the most interesting obstacles we encountered last week wasn’t people we couldn’t reach for interviews. It was the sand roads north of town. Well, for one of us anyway.
Chandra Stauffer headed to an interview seven miles north of town. A while later, my cell phone rang. It was her husband, back in Wichita. [...]

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Vic Hannan, the owner, was on vacation in New Jersey, but the coffee crowd still showed up last week at Haviland Hardware. And, for the most part, they were happy without Vic around — until the store ran out of biscuits and gravy mid-week.
Bill Johnson, the ever-present volunteer, is still helping in the Greensburg [...]

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City Hall’s lost-and-found collection may not be around much longer. The city of Greensburg has been storing items recovered after the May 2007 tornado, but they soon may have to go when the new city hall opens.
City offices have been housed in portable buildings since the storm, but city hall is expected to be ready [...]

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KAKE’s Larry Hatteberg, the master storyteller, talked to our group this morning. He showed the video he made right after the tornado in Greensburg. It is true Hatteberg, an exceptionally emotional piece even two years later. One woman from Greensburg working in the adjacent church kitchen paused to watch the video and got teary-eyed later [...]

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Evan Evans calls himself a helper — “a Martha,” a worker in the Biblical sense.
Evans, 68, and his wife Bonnie are among a group of 47 volunteers from Ainsworth United Methodist Church in Nebraska. The high school students and adult sponsors have been in Greensburg all week, performing what Evans calls handyman jobs at an [...]

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Looking for a place to build your dream green home? Greensburg resident Matt Deighton is offering a free lot in his hometown.
The 100×150-foot lot is on Spruce Street, about four blocks south of U.S. 54. He bought the property from a woman whose home was destroyed in the tornado. She later moved to Pratt, Deighton [...]

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Two or three of us were up early today to get a jump start on our Greensburg stories.
I was awake shortly after 3 because my Coleman air mattress gradually deflated during the night. By 3:30, I was flat on the basement floor in the Sunday school classroom where we bunked.
Figuring I could beat the shower [...]

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Before today, Matt Deighton and his dalmation Molly had given 152 tours of Greensburg. He’s been using an old school bus on loan from the Church of the Nazarene in Dodge City.
Deighton’s job officially ended March 31, but he’s been tying up loose ends and handling unofficial tasks, including tour requests. The church is [...]

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Our caravan from Wichita State arrived in Greensburg shortly after 10 a.m. There are 19 of us. Most are from Kansas, but there are two from Iowa and one from Lagos, Nigeria. Everyone, though, has heard of Greensburg.
We’ll be staying in the Greensburg United Methodist Church with Methodist volunteers from Ainsworth, Neb. Another group of [...]

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A year ago, good friend Cort Anderson and I took a Wichita State University class to Greensburg to report on the town one year after the tornado. One year later, Cort and I area headed back to document Year 2 of the community’s rebuilding process.
We’ll have new faces and new voices in the group, with [...]

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