Penner deserves state recognition

Marci Penner (in photo) was appropriately lauded in the Kansas Senate last week for being the state’s No. 1 promoter. Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, helped lead the recognition, reading on the Senate floor passages from Penner’s "Kansas Guidebook for Explorers." Penner, who co-founded the Kansas Sampler Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to sustaining rural Kansas culture through education, also heads the Kansas Explorers Club, which, as an Eagle news article reported Sunday, encourages quirky tourism quests — such as eating a hamburger in every county. Penner has described the guidebook as her love letter to her home state. The affection is mutual.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

4 Comments

  1. CrusaderX
    Posted February 14, 2006 at 2:25 am | Permalink

    Eating a hamburger in every county…. Does the guidebook give me free gas or do I have to walk to every county??

  2. ProudLib
    Posted February 14, 2006 at 9:50 am | Permalink

    Awww, that’s sweet.

    But what’s killing rural Kansas is government policies that result in farmers getting paid pennies for farm products that cost consumers many many dollars.

    Sure, mills and bakeries and food distributors et al. deserve a fair cut, but what we have now is not fair.

    A monopoly of buyers–Tyson, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and a few others–set prices just high enough to prevent total collapse of the farming base. Then they turn around and make billions on the mark-up.

    A few big operations do quite well mainly by farming the government subsidies, but the small operator and family farmer are just scraping by.

    The one exception to this so far is beef production. But it’s just a matter of time . . .

  3. Steve
    Posted February 14, 2006 at 9:56 am | Permalink

    I wonder what Galahad has to say about this. I’m sorry he doesn’t post here.

  4. doodaa
    Posted February 14, 2006 at 9:57 am | Permalink

    She is a great cheerleader, but too bad nothing ever really changes. Rural Kansas is already dead.