Twenty-seven Years Later

This column was published December 13, 2025 in the Manhattan Mercury.

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When my wife and I made the decision to get married in December 1998, I was living and working in Topeka, she was doing the same in Manhattan. The logical question arose. Where will we live?

We thought about it for three entire seconds, looked at each other and said in unison, “Manhattan.”

When I first left Manhattan, I was two years old and 40 when I returned. Born here while my father earned an agronomy degree on the G.I. Bill. We lived in a dinky trailer in what is still the Blue Valley Mobile Home Court. Two pine saplings he planted back then remain, towering like protective sentinels over the socio-economic reality of a trailer park.

Upon graduation, we returned to the Rooks County farm where my mother grew up and my father applied the science he learned at the land grant. When he could no longer apply the economics of the debt needed to operate, the folks had the courageous conversation, sold the farm, he went back to college and we transplanted to Wichita, where my father applied his graduate degree, teaching high school physics and geology.

I think about how much our society has evolved in 27 years and the impact it’s had on Manhattan. The land grant vibe is not as resonant today as in 1998. The 2000 census was the first in our state’s history where urban and suburban Kansans outnumbered their rural brethren. A generation later, the downstream ramifications for small-town Kansans and the land grant community where their children matriculate, are hitting home.  

This may border on blasphemy, but the once bright cultural line that separated Mass Street in Lawrence from Aggieville fades with each passing year. Today, in Aggieville, you’re just as likely to see a kid with gaged ears, tats and a man bun fade, as you are one wearing Wranglers, square-toed boots and a truckers’ ballcap.

How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve sampled the pleasures of a double skinny macchiato, while balancing their chakras and asanas doing yoga in the heart of Aggieville?

Over the last 27 years in Manhattan, I’ve become a big tipper. Not that I’m a bigshot, just a realization that the pizza deliverers, waitstaff and baristas are working their way through college.

Most of my career was spent in statewide venues and I used that as justification not to get involved locally. A few years back I recognized it as an excuse and began to make different choices about how to spend my idle hours. It opened my eyes to our community’s potential and put flesh and bones on poverty.

For me, it’s simple. If God expects me to love my neighbor, maybe I should climb out of the overstuffed easy chair and do it. Bring my lamp out from beneath the bushel basket. To those whom much is given, much is expected. That’s enough Biblical admonition-mangling for one bi-monthly newspaper column, but you get the picture.

More change looms. Roger Reitz is 93. Collin Klein is 36. 

I travel frequently and one of the best things about it is coming home from the east. When I cross the Konza and begin the descent into the Kansas River Valley, familiar landmarks enter my view: Kistner’s (which reminds me, better send some flowers to my wife), the massive cottonwoods on the banks of the Kaw, the Blue Earth Plaza and the Museum of Art + Light.

A feeling of calm and familiarity washes over me. These places, old and new, have meaning and value in my life. I never had this feeling in Topeka or Wichita, my priorities were different then.

The definition of hometown is as variable as those who seek to define it. Wichita is where I grew up, graduated high school, found and lost my first true love, came of age. Those memories will never fade.

Twenty-seven years after returning, the arc of my life descendant, the place of my birth has become the place of my rebirth. 

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ weekdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN.