GROWING UP IN MANHATTAN

By Nancy Kruh

© The Dallas Morning News, 1989

MANHATTAN, Kansas –  Joanne's idea of a night at the movies was a bottle of Boone's Farm, a couple packs of Marlboro Lights and a Clint Eastwood triple feature at the Skyview Drive-In.

Back in the early '70s, that didn't sound half-bad to me, either. But on a balmy night in 1973, I was the one who decided that we two small-town Kansas girls were in need of some honest-to-goodness cultural enrichment.

I had managed to drag my best friend to sit in a nearly empty theater and watch “Mean Streets,” a new artsy film about New York City.

Halfway into the show, the screen went black. An usher soon appeared to explain the town was under a tornado warning and the power had gone out. The movie would resume as soon as the electricity returned.

Joanne lit up. "A tornado warning – all right!” She bounded out of the theater and I followed close behind.

Outside, the summer sky, clear just an hour before, was swirling with smoky-green clouds. Blasts of wind whipped our hair. It was all just too irresistible. We hopped into the car and went out in search of funnel clouds.

             Forget the mean streets of Manhattan, N.Y. That night, to us, the streets were meaner in Manhattan, Kansas.

             Looking back on this little incident, I know that what we did was more than crazy. It was downright life-threatening. But once I get over the miracle of surviving growing up in Manhattan, it strikes me that this was a place that almost forced us to be creative. We had to be, if only for a little excitement every now and then.

Manhattan is not an inherently exciting place. It's a medium-size town, population 35,000, whose main claim to fame is Kansas State University.

The town got its name from its first settlers, unimaginative Easterners who tussled between "Boston” and "Manhattan” before the pushy New Yorkers won out. My Manhattan and the other Manhattan do have one obscure and unlikely tie: Damon Runyon – a writer famous for his stories about Manhattan, N.Y. – actually was born in Manhattan, Kansas. Soon after his birth, he did what so many other Manhattanites wind up doing: He left town.

In thumbing through a class directory handed out at my 15-year high school reunion, I figure four out of five of us eventually left Manhattan. We all moved on, to other towns and other states. I point this out not to disparage the town.

Believe me, I love this town. I can give an insomniac a sound night's sleep with touching, Norman Rockwellian stories about the place.

It's just that there came a time in my life to move on – just as there was a time in my parents' lives to leave their hometowns. For most of the parents of my generation, Manhattan was the place that they had moved on to. And one of the reasons, I'm sure, is that they could not have found a better town for their children to grow up in.

The irony is that Manhattan turned most of us into grownups with dreams that were bigger than the town. Manhattan set us on our way, our bags packed with what the town had given us.

Above all, Manhattan taught us how to not take life too seriously. How can you take anything seriously growing up in a town that calls itself "the Little Apple”?

Manhattan is this engaging mixture of convention and eccentricity. Here is a town that can just as easily organize quaint summer concerts in the city park as it can erect, in that same park, a bizarre, 35-foot concrete statue of a mythical farmer named Johnny Kaw.

Johnny is like one big, inside joke. Out-of-town visitors gawk in shock at this farm-style Paul Bunyan with a pompadour. We from Manhattan, meanwhile, are eternally amused by the statue.

That sort of amusement epitomizes the sense of humor that Manhattan helped develop in my friends and me: It never mattered to us if other people didn't get our jokes. Sometimes we were grateful that they didn't.

My friend Karen was the most ruthless, particularly with phone pranks. "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” is peanuts compared to what she could do when she let her fingers do the walking.

She and Joanne used to spend Saturday mornings listening to Swap Shop, a local radio show where listeners called in with things to trade. When a woman called in to swap her stockpile of bacon grease, Karen dialed her up and took off: "Yes, I have a recipe that calls for massive amounts of bacon grease . . . How much did you say you had? Twenty-four cans? No, no . . . That's not enough – can you get me more?” She kept the woman on the line for a good 20 minutes, never breaking character as Joanne sat there, stifling guffaws.

Subtlety was the key here – and an appreciation for subtlety is something one can acquire through years of living in Manhattan. The town is set in what surely is one of most subtly beautiful parts of the country. Where outsiders may see a stretch of monotonous land to endure on the way to the Rocky Mountains, we see the understated elegance of gently rolling hills.

To me, nothing is more beautiful than a Kansas sunset, with pastel pinks and hazy tangerines that send the sun off with a sigh. I remember, at age 17, witnessing my first Texas sunset during a trip to look at colleges. The brilliance was almost campy – like bad furniture from the 1950s.

The Kansas prairieland imbues a sense of wide-open spaciousness – a feeling that the world and all its possibilities are without limit. That could be a scary concept to a kid, unless that kid is growing up in a cozy little place like Manhattan. (Since moving away, Joanne has maintained it doomed her to a life of being perpetually late, since wherever you wanted to go in Manhattan, it only took five minutes to get from here to there.)

During my more wretched pre-adolescent phases, I went on a number of walks in search of pensive solitude. I could tell my parents I was going out and they would reply with no stronger caveat than, "Be home in time for supper.” There just wasn't any place dangerous to walk to in Manhattan, and I could revel in a giddy combination of security and freedom.

It wasn't long before we all had access to our parents' cars. Restricted licenses allowed us to drive, to and from school anyway, by the time we were 14. We all quickly found imaginative, out-of-the-way routes to get to and from school, and often took them even on Saturdays and Sundays.

In high school, cars provided our social life. We would pick up a carload of friends, hit Vista Drive-In for a Dr Pepper Icee, then drive around looking for other carloads of friends.

Our cars made us feel like we were going somewhere, even if it was only to the next town for a football game. They allowed us to extend our privacy and our imaginations. We often went out in twosomes to sneak cigarettes and have serious heart-to-hearts. My friend Ellen worked out problems alone on the open road. Karen drove on the obscure back roads outside of town just so she could get temporarily lost; it made her feel like she was having an adventure. Joanne was always on the prowl, out looking for “action” – which, for her, could mean anything from a police chase to a prairie fire.

But the centerpiece of our lives was, of course, school. And because most of our fathers worked at the university, education was a way of life in our homes.

My class, the class of '72, was very smart – and smart-alecky. By the time we got to our teens, we had developed a certain dubious view of all the pageantry that goes with high school. We went along with it, but deep in our hearts, we understood there was more to life than prom royalty, class mottos and school songs.

Our iconoclastic impulses showed up when several class members spearheaded a petition drive to change the school mascot from the Indian to the glyptodont, an extinct member of the armadillo family. The drive never quite got off the ground, but I think it gave the school administration a little scare.

Then when we were presented with our biggest challenge – the opportunity to continue a 50-year tradition and elect one of our very own to be high school queen – we simply balked and threw out the whole process. When push came to shove, was a group of 400-some teen-agers who actually valued comradeship over status.

A personal lesson in the relative importance of position arrived my junior year when I lost my bid for pep club president. My opponent was treasurer and I was secretary, and both of us were expected to run. I campaigned long and hard, so once the results were announced, I had no choice but to skip school and go have the obligatory cry. After about five minutes of squeezing out tears, I noticed an unexpected wave of relief splashing over me. Thank God! I wouldn't have to spend my senior year being pep club president! Truth to tell, I was much more interested in working on the school newspaper and I hadn't exactly planned a career in professional pep-dom.

Life went on and it all worked out. I discovered that you aren't required to be what the rest of the world expects you to be.

In fact, in the rules according to Manhattan, you often get to be exactly what you want to be. Among the careers that classmates have settled into: chemical engineer, brain surgeon, elephant trainer and guitarist for the rock group Chicago.

Ellen is now a lawyer who lives in Cairo, Egypt. Karen spent 10 years as an actress in New York's Manhattan and actually made it to Broadway before moving to Tucson and getting married. She's now working on a master's degree in drama therapy. Joanne also landed in Tucson, where she is a landscape architect.

Last year, Joanne worked on the widening of a highway that cuts across one of Arizona's most scenic mountains. Her biggest thrill, however, was being allowed to detonate one of the dynamite charges on the project.

A step down from tornado-spotting, to be sure, but it was still bona fide Manhattan-style “action.”