Marion memories

To the editor:

One evening, I was sitting in my apartment in New York, watching Stephanie Ruehle on MSNBC, when Eric Meyer, Marion, Kansas, and its stellar newspaper, the Record, popped up on the TV screen. What a random, out-of-the-blue surprise that was!

In the late 1960s, when I was in college at Emporia State, two of my best friends were from Marion.

Some of the coolest guys I’d ever met were in their circle: a wacky set of brothers (names omitted to protect the innocent) and numerous other loud, fun-loving, hard-partying boys and girls who were, nonetheless, good-natured and genuinely kind.

The Marion kids brought a sense of adventure and a wild, heartland innocence to the nuttiness of my college fraternity life.

The weekends I was invited to spend in Marion are still among my favorite college memories.

I was so jealous of the American perfection that Marion represented — dragging Main St. all weekend, beer, rotgut wine (Thunderbird or Boone’s Farm, anyone?), and other things better left unsaid; building a fire on the frozen lake and listening to it rumble and groan. (Our angels were surely working overtime.)

I remember Marion as being the perfect American town.

I was from Kansas City, and we didn’t have a Main St. that one could drag. There were no frozen lakes. There wasn’t the close-knit warmth of people one knew well and grew up with, friends one could depend on.

It was an ideal that I’ve always held on to, even though maybe it isn’t exactly true.

Obviously, small towns come with problems that probably seem larger simply because the setting is smaller.

Disagreements over a food truck take on a harsher glow than a similar disagreement would in the “big” city.

A quarrel over a school mascot is a significant issue, rightfully so. And there are still the terrible accidents involving kids driving too fast after drinking too much. Sadly, we lost one member of our Marion group this way.

To me, Marion was an ideal.

I always extolled Marion’s virtues when I lived in Europe and New York City. (I’ve since moved back to Kansas City.)

I would go on about a close-knit place where the kids were crazy cool and wild to the nth degree. I loved Marion.

The editor of the Record suddenly appearing on my television in downtown New York just underscored how cool Marion could be, even if the story wasn’t all that cool.

I immediately ordered the paper and have had the great pleasure of opening the mailbox once a week to pull out a paper made of — wait for it — actual paper!

I’ve read it for more than a year now and find the editorials, the letters, the Another Day in the Country, and the high school teams’ ups and downs hilarious, annoying sometimes, and endlessly fascinating.

I have yet to see a familiar name from the late ’60s. I guess they all moved on. That happens.

But the fortunes and the to and fro of a pristine, elegantly structured town in the middle of Kansas seem to remain pretty much the same even if the names change.

Some of my favorite readings are stories from past issues. How many papers go back 145 years? It’s amazing.

I also want to commend the Record on the addition of Finn Hartnett. His attention to the individual personalities of the people he covers, his descriptive ability to set his stories in time and place, and his gentle, good-natured take on the issues from fishing to baking to an abandoned poor farm are wonderfully intelligent and genuinely moving at times.

I love your paper and my memories of Marion.

Jon Johnson, Kansas City