For more information, contact Michael Dawes, 620-792-9307, dawesm@bartonccc.edu

April 15, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Story by: Michael Dawes
dawesm@bartonccc.edu

Video View: Barton Visionaries Tour and Reception – April 15, 2010

Where would the community be without the efforts of the Great Bend Jaycees, other community leaders and a determined newspaper editor who banded together to push a grassroots cause in the early 1960s? Sufficed to say, the community would be without Barton Community College, which has educated thousands of students and served as an economic engine to the community for more than four decades.

The Great Bend Jaycees was an organization comprising about 50 members, who met once a week in the basement of the old Parrish Hotel, which existed next to Zarah Mall, but burned down more than 40 years ago. In 1959, Jaycees members sent survey letters to area residents, seeking ideas for community projects. Not getting much response, they enlisted the services of Great Bend Tribune managing editor Paul Conrad. The idea of bringing a college to Barton County took hold from that feedback. From that point in 1959, until the issue passed in 1965, the Great Bend Jaycees and other community leaders kept the dream alive and helped turn the dream into reality.

“The Jaycees took it on as a project and never dropped it,” explained Great Bend attorney Brock McPherson, who served as vice president of the organization at the time. “We kept the ball rolling with subsequent presidents. It was a project that banded us together as a group and it helped us to overcome various obstacles we ran into. We ran into a lot. It would have been easy to give up.”

Although not a Jaycees member, Conrad wears the label of “father of Barton” because he pushed forward the message to the public of bringing a college to Barton and helped rally support for the cause. Conrad served as general chairman of the first college steering committee, helping to get the right people on board and giving the cause organized momentum. Conrad reluctantly accepts credit for magnitude of his early efforts.

“The community was very much aware of the fact that Great Bend was the largest city in the state without any higher education,” said Conrad, when the longtime Washington state resident made a rare trip back to Barton in summer 2004. “I didn’t initiate that concept. It was the way most of us felt during that time.”

McPherson concurred with Conrad’s sentiments. The Great Bend Jaycees as a group were recognized with an award from their national organization when the vote finally passed in 1965. There were no individual accolades given.

“Nobody seemed to be after the credit,” said McPherson. “It was about getting the job done.”

The now defunct Mayflower Café, which existed a few doors down from the Great Bend Tribune on Forest, provided the early backdrop for the grassroots effort.

The original idea was to establish a four-year college, and community leaders even went so far as to inquire whether Sterling College officials would consider relocating their college to Great Bend. The inquiry never went beyond initial consideration, however. Eventually, the focus turned toward Barton County establishing a two-year college. The idea evolved from casual conversation over morning coffee to an organized committee bent on bringing higher education to Barton County.

Great Bend attorney Glenn Opie didn’t initially believe a college in the county would be successful. He declined an offer by Conrad to join the steering committee, until Conrad offered him a position as chair of student enrollment potential. Opie jumped at the opportunity.

“I thought that was my chance to prove my point, that a two-year college would not be supported in Barton County,” explained Opie.

He committed himself to becoming an expert on the topic of enrollment potential, writing to public and private colleges across the state, the State Department of Education, and to several national experts, seeking information about enrollment potential and student demographics.

“I drew circles around our enrollment areas,” said Opie. “I began to assemble all of this data and had my compass with my numbers of students graduating from area high schools and I concluded from that research that, ‘Yea, this is possible.’ I had to overcome my bias because I was dead certain that it would not go.”

Conrad, who served as Great Bend Tribune managing editor for eight years from 1955 to 1963, also held a law degree from George Washington University. He, along with McPherson and another Great Bend attorney, Jerry Ward, wrote and introduced legislation in 1961 that allowed Barton County to vote on establishing a county-wide junior college district rather than utilizing the public school system and its limited tax base. Their legislation also called for allowing community colleges to operate under separate boards of governance. The bill passed and the community college idea took hold, moving closer to reality.

“There were a number of drafts,” remembered McPherson. “It didn’t fly the first time; it was re-written several times.”

Beyond writing legislation and examining enrollment potential, the committee studied finance, community attitude, economic impact, potential for site location, building and equipment needs, faculty availability and salaries, accreditation and credit transfer, operating expenses, taxation and school income.

Even with the concerted community effort, however, the vote failed when presented at the polls during the general election in November 1962. The community college plan passed in Great Bend, but failed in the district representing residents outside of Great Bend. Conrad’s community-college efforts ended when he left Great Bend for Washington state in 1963 to work for Allied Daily Newspapers, but with the Great Bend Jaycees and other community leaders still on board, the dream didn’t die.

Local proponents of the plan regained their momentum with the 1963 “One Man, One Vote” landmark ruling by the Supreme Court, which allowed the county to be counted as one district.

The push for a new college was active once again when new attorney Larry Kopke and his wife, Marilyn, moved back to Great Bend that year. Kopke soon got involved in the effort. He, along with area businessman Ken Grobe, met with a legislative committee in Topeka and challenged the two-district state legislation, based upon the landmark Supreme Court ruling. The committee adopted the concept and asked for help in wording the new enabling legislation. Kopke wrote the actual wording used in legislation on a piece of paper in a cloak room adjacent to the committee meeting room and the Revisor of Statutes for the State of Kansas examined it and provided approval of the language there in the cloak room. The law was revised.

“I take great satisfaction in that they took the concept and idea of all of us out here who were working on this effort and it came to fruition on a piece of paper,” said Kopke. “But it would never have happened if all the ground work hadn’t taken place by so many people beforehand.”

A second vote was conducted in the general election three years after it failed, and this time it passed. Barton County Community Junior College was founded in 1965, a bond issue to fund the College passed in 1966, ground was broken in 1967 and Barton opened in fall 1969.

“It was a roller coaster,” remembered McPherson. “We just didn’t let it die. We started the project as an embryo and it gradually grew. People who were willing to help and people who wanted to see it happen. We built the frame but just didn’t get it across the first time. We went back and improved it until we got it right.”

When Conrad visited the College for the first time in 1981, his one-word reaction about Barton to a Great Bend Tribune reporter was, “Wow!” He repeated the one-word comment in 1989, when he returned to Barton to speak during the College’s 20th Anniversary. Following a tour of the campus in 2004, he reiterated that expression.

“Wow still fits,” said Conrad. “It’s a marvelous facility, far beyond anything we envisioned. We thought we could have a successful college, given the right law. We just never dreamed what would be done with it.”

Kopke acknowledges that Barton has evolved into far more than the steering committee members envisioned, but as the College celebrates 40 years of success, he’s reminded of what would not have been, if not for the dedication, commitment and sacrifice of community members more than four decades earlier.

“We developed this composite of what we hoped to achieve,” said Kopke, “and I’m sure what we have today is 100 times more than what we contemplated. But our effort was a magnificent effort. There’s a parallel to Winston Churchill’s quote of ‘Never … was so much owed by so many to so few.’ We all benefit from the College today. Barton County benefits, communities benefit, individuals benefit. If it hadn’t have been for the Paul Conrads, Ken Grobes, Glenn Opies, Paul Stigalls – people like that – we wouldn’t have these opportunities that we have today. I think the question is, what would we be without the College here right now?”

Thank You Barton Visionaries – A thank-you sign appears in the background of six individuals who were instrumental in helping to bring a college to Barton County. Their efforts, which began 51 years ago, resulted in Barton Community College. From left to right are Brock McPherson, Jerry Ward, Glenn Opie, Bob Bates (sitting), Paul Conrad and Larry Kopke. Barton Community College invited members of the two steering committees to a reception Thursday afternoon as a way to show gratitude for the commitment those individuals provided in bringing forward the College.

Proud Contributor: Paul Conrad reads the names of many of those responsible for making Barton Community College a reality. Conrad reluctantly but proudly accepts much of the credit for pushing forward the idea of a community college in Barton County, he says it was the “mothering” of many other community leaders, which paved the way for the College’s existence.

“We can generalize that the community college has become a much stronger part of American education today,” Conrad said regarding the influence Barton and its peer institutions hold within their respective communities.