Are you interested in serving your community; get involved by filing for candidacy for the USD 475 Board of Education or Junction City Commission.

The filing deadline is noon on Thursday, June 1st.

As of today, there are currently no filings for election to the Board of Education or the City Commission. Three seats on the City Commission are up for grabs, and four seats on the School Board.

Interested applicants should visit the County Clerk’s office at 200 E 8th Street to get applications.

JUNCTION CITY, Kan. – More than 100 Air Force active duty, guard and reserve family members got some much-needed together time during a recent weekend campout at the Rock Springs 4-H Center.

 

For Michael Olmstead, who returned just three weeks earlier from a deployment to Qatar, it was the perfect way to reconnect with six-year-old son Ghevin and wife, Ieaka.

 

“You feel that sense of missing out when you’re gone,” said Michael, who has served 22 years in the Air Force.

 

The weekend outing was made possible by a partnership between Kansas 4-H,

McConnell Air Force Base and the Kansas Air Guard Family Readiness Center. This is the first year for the family campout, and organizers said 41 families participated.

 

“The purpose was to bring our military families closer together, specifically during the reintegration process for those families who have just come back from deployment,” said Heather Jaynes, a training and curriculum specialist for youth programs at McConnell. “It’s a chance to just take a break, unplug from everything and make new friends.”

 

Melodie Skillman is the coordinator for the school-age program at McConnell, which  provides support for military kids ages 5 to 12.

 

“I think when a military member goes off, the family has to be resilient; they have to come together and survive while this person is gone out of their lives,” Skillman said. “The family learns new ways to cope. So out of that 6- or 12-month period, moms learn to schedule oil changes and kids learn to do things on their own.

 

“When (the deployed soldier) comes back, the family welcomes them but they have to realize that the family had to go on while they were gone. The soldier has to learn how the family has been functioning and what they did to remain successful.”

 

Kansas 4-H has worked with McConnell Air Force Base on various programs since 2002, and jumped at the chance to host the family campout at Rock Springs. It allowed numerous opportunities for outdoor activities, including canoeing, archery, hiking, environmental education, a ropes course, fishing, and more.

 

The campout was mostly funded through the Air Force/4-H Partnership Youth Camp Grant, a $20,000 award from the U.S. Department of Defense and managed through K-State Research and Extension’s 4-H Military Partnership. The grant covered participants’ expenses for lodging, food, activities and some supplies.

 

“This camp was designed to provide families opportunities to practice communication, teamwork and healthy living skills in a fun and low-stress environment,” said Beth Drescher, a 4-H Youth Development agent in Sedgwick County who wrote the grant.

 

“In the last few years there have been many more military families under stress due to repeated deployments and re-integration. This takes a toll on everyone in the family, especially the children. My military partners and I saw the need to help parents reconnect with their children and learn new ways to interact positively with each other, so we pursued this grant opportunity. We felt it was very important to help the children develop some resiliency skills, and this was one of the methods supported by positive youth development research studies.”

Families stayed overnight in cabins and ate meals together in the camp’s dining hall.

 

“It was really nice,” said Ieaka Olmstead, a 20-year veteran of the Air Force. “We love camping anyway, and this was Air Force affiliated, with no cell phone service so we’re not distracted. It was our first camping trip of the season and was important for me to just get a little family time.”

 

As the family sat having lunch on the second day of the event, Ghevin recalled how he felt the six months that his dad was deployed. “It’s like me being by myself,” he said.

 

It brought tears to his mother’s eyes.

 

“As an active duty parent, as a mom, it breaks my heart to hear my son say he felt alone,” Ieaka said. “It breaks my heart, because that is the biggest thing for me when (Michael) was deployed is just to make sure that I could fill that gap of going to work every day, sometimes 12 hours a day, and who was going to watch my child if something happens to me.”

 

Ieaka teaches a class at McConnell on how to live a resilient lifestyle. She admits she had to live some of her own lessons during Michael’s recent deployment.

 

“It wouldn’t be fair to the people I teach to say, ‘hey this is how to be resilient. This is what you do when you’re pushed up against a rock and you feel like giving up,’” she said. “But even so, it’s good for them to see that, yeah, I’m a human, I cry when my child says he feels alone. We have those times when we are driving or doing things and my child would get quiet and look out the window; he’s thinking about his dad.”

 

Ieaka pulled out her phone to show a video of her dressed in a dinosaur costume as she and Ghevin welcomed Michael back home in early April. Ghevin rushed to his dad’s arms. The family’s reunion had begun.

 

“With every deployment, with certain families, it’s a way to reinvigorate that family unit,” Michael said. “So if you’re having issues before you leave, take your breaks, do your things when you’re gone, and then when you come back, rebuild everything from the ground up because you’re learning each other again. (Ieaka and Ghevin) have a different bond than when I left, so now they’re closer and I’m just trying to get back into that unit.

 

“You’ve got to force the transition. If you just let it be, you’re going to fall back into your old ruts.”

 

That might just be why a weekend at the Rock Springs 4-H Center is an idea that will build in years to come, Jaynes said.

 

“It’s important for couples when they return from a deployment to have that time to say hey here’s how things are, here’s how they have been working, and our processes have changed a little bit,” she said. “You’ve had to be a single mom or single dad for ‘X’ amount of months. The kids grow and change, and re-adapting to a two-parent household is challenging.”

 

After lunch on the second day of the campout, Ghevin Olmstead sat with his parents and the family worked on answering questions to a quiz game led by Drescher. Ieaka smiled contentedly.

 

“The Air Force core values are integrity first, service before self and excellence in all you do,” she said. “If you think about the 4-H program, what are they trying to teach children: Think with your head, use your hands, lead with your heart….

 

“As an Air Force member, those are all things that we teach each other. We teach our subordinates, we teach our peers how to think about situations and how to apply that thinking. We are going to go back and talk to our leaders and we are going to tell them that this is a program that we absolutely need to do multiple times.”

Pat Melgares – K-State Research and Extension

 

 

 

ABILENE, KAN. (May 9, 2017) – Glen Dawson has his likeness on a belt buckle.

The Abilene, Kansas man has been selected as the cowboy to be pictured on the Wild Bill Hickok Rodeo’s annual buckle.

Dawson, a bareback rider and bull rider, is the first in the fifth series, with each series consisting of seven buckles, each with a cowboy from a different rodeo event featured on it (and in the barrel racing, a cowgirl.)

Dawson was born in 1933 and grew up in Abilene. He started rodeoing at the age of fourteen, after he worked for two Abilene ladies, Mrs. Clemmons and Mrs. Baker, who had show horses. He accompanied them to horse shows, where, at one of them, a steer riding was held. The ladies told Dawson they would pay his entry fee if he rode. He agreed, won the event, and was hooked from there.

Dawson graduated from Abilene High School in 1951 and served in the U.S. Army Airborne as a paratrooper from 1953 to 1955. He continued to rodeo while in the military, competing in Nashville while stationed at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky.

Even though he’s featured as a bareback rider on the buckle, his strength was the bull riding. “I was a lot better bull rider than bareback rider,” he said. He competed mainly in the Amateur Cowboys Association, an organization that sanctioned rodeos across Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma, finishing the 1953 year as the bull riding champion.

Dawson married Joan Geske in 1956, and that year he broke a hip when he was bucked off a bareback horse at the Wild Bill Hickok Rodeo. He spent 28 days in traction while the hip healed.

By that point, he and Joan had a baby boy, and “it was either give (rodeo) up or give the family up,” Dawson said. “And it was more my idea to give up rodeo than hers.”

His rodeo days were over, but he and Joan make the trek to the rodeo grounds each year to watch the Abilene rodeo. The cowboys are better and the livestock is tougher, he said, and cowboys compete at more rodeos each weekend than in his day. “We’d go to a rodeo and spend two, three, four days in one place. Now, they’re here and gone in one day.”

The Dawsons have two sons: Justin, who lives in Albuquerque, and Geff, who lives near Alma. Geff was a bull rider and tie-down roper and competed on the K-State rodeo team. Like his dad, his best event was bull riding, and, like his dad, he’s also on an Abilene buckle: the 2009 buckle, as a bull rider. Geff’s granddaughter and Glen’s great-granddaughter Haddie Matzke is a junior barrel racer.

Glen claims the rodeo committee is “scraping the bottom of the barrel” to put him on the buckle, but that is not the case, according to his son Geff. “He’s modest,” Geff said. When Glen won the ACA championship in 1953, he rode two formerly unridden bulls and a bull that had been covered only once before.

The public can purchase a buckle by sending a check for $34 (include an additional $10 if the buckle needs to be shipped to purchaser). The check can be made out and sent to the Wild Bill Hickok Rodeo Committee, PO Box 235, Abilene, KS 67410. Deadline for ordering buckles is June 15.

The annual buckle auction will be held Friday, August 4, at 6:30 pm at the band shell on the Abilene fairgrounds. Buckles numbered one through ten and number 500 will be auctioned off. Other commemorative items will be also be for sale.

This year’s rodeo is August 2-5, beginning at 7:30 pm each night. Tickets will be on sale in July. For more information, visit the rodeo’s website at WildBillHickokRodeo.com or call the fairgrounds office at 785.263.4570.

 

 

 

 

 

The Geary County Commission has announced the hiring of Tammy Von Busch to lead the Geary County Health Department.

Von Busch has extensive public health experience through her 24-year career in the United States Air Force. She served as Public Health Flight Commander at various bases in the United States, and most recently as Group Practice Manager at Irwin Army Community Hospital.

Von Busch holds a Master in Public Health from the University of Kansas plus a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Iowa State University. She will succeed current Health Department Director Pat Hunter, who is retiring.

Von Busch will start work as Director on May 22nd.

TODAY
	High	85°	Partly sunny. Highs in the mid 80s. South winds up to 10 mph.