Commercial and chimerical – the value of beauty

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Salinans have praised the arts for generations and lately

their government has increased the arts as a mission. The

list of public and private organizations that promote and

recognize beauty in its many forms is more than impressive,

including a symphony orchestra, community theater, a River

Festival, museums, a small university, an arts cinema, and too

much more to list here.

The City’s enthusiasm has evolved recently as an invest-
ment in public art, an invigorating display of sculpture and

other art installations around the town. Predictably, people

have complained; they don’t like the art, it’s too expensive, a

waste of valuable public funds.

What rot. A town without art is a place without a soul, and

Salina is certainly not that. The City is right to invest public

funds in the arts. It’s a simple matter of sharing a resource,

recognizing that it adds to the color, the texture, the look and

feel of a place.

Lindsborg has long dedicated resources to the arts because

they have been fundamental to the city’s settlement, its

growth, its many passions. The arts are essential to any com-
munity that values beauty.

FOUR YEARS ago, as the governor and his crowd of legisla-
tive cretins began to dismantle the Kansas Arts Commission,

Lindsborg offered a brief series of public meetings in an

attempt – futile, as it turned out – to prevent this crime.

Eradication, we said, scoffed at our heritage, our culture,

and, yes, our economy. The governor, showing his usual

keen eye for budget matters, rattled his abacus and declined a

seven-figure truckload of matching federal grants; the money,

without a state arts commission, bypassed Kansas for other

states whose Legislatures believed the arts were important.

At that Lindsborg meeting it was noted that the arts are

very much an economic development issue. Many people, for

example, have moved to Lindsborg because of the arts.

We see the arts in the way a place looks (its homes, its

shops, its streets); how it acts (its grace, its turn of mind);

how it worships (the message, its music); and in the way it

fosters a gentle, modest embrace of beauty, in so many forms,

as essential ‒ if not instinctive ‒ in a community that is more

liveable, not just lived-in.

As a dollar-and-cents matter, the arts are an employer, they

encourage tourism, and audiences. They put men, women

and students to work. They bring people and their friends and

children to a town.

FOR LEGISLATORS in Topeka, the arts are no longer at issue.

When it came to the budget and the arts, meatheads ruled. But

in Salina, McPherson and Lindsborg, and other communities,

the arts are alive and well, if fund-challenged. They are not in

the least spirit-challenged.

Look at these places. They’re hard at work making things

brighter, better, more pleasing – in public improvements, in

workshops, in shows, in concerts and lectures and in celebra-
tions of all shapes, sizes and intention.

For one example, The Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery

has opened the 117th annual Midwest Art Exhibition, an iconic

event in national art circles and the oldest annual art exhibi-
tion in Kansas. The Exhibition runs through April 19, folding

around the 134th annual Messiah Festival, presented Palm

Sunday through Easter Sunday.

Messiah Festival highlights include a performance of Jesus

Christ Superstar, and Bethany Oratorio Society performances

of Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew on Good Friday

and Handel’s Messiah on Easter Sunday.

This eight-day music and art festival has been a Lindsborg

tradition since 1881. Music and the visual arts have been at the

core of life in Lindsborg since Swedish-American immigrant

pioneers settled the community in 1869 in the Smoky Valley.

In one slice of a month, a moment in time, here at once is the

commercial value of art, and the chimerical – fanciful, vision-
ary, imaginary – value of beauty.

It has a price – and no price. What Plato said of music can

be said of the arts:

“Music is moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to

the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to

life and to everything.”

Our settlers knew that this lay in the bedrock of their faith,

the seed of their determination, the origin of love, the very

core of reason and perseverance.

Why can’t we?

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Our Post Offi ce, its people

always a treasure

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Remember this?

“Due to safety issues within the building, effective Sunday,

November 9, 2014 we are temporarily moving our operation

to the Salina Post Office, located at 211 E. Ash …”

Black mold had been found in places enough that caused

alarm. The cleanup had begun and customers with mailboxes

soon discovered the pleasures of collecting their mail out-
doors, mostly in sub-freezing temperatures while leaning into

the teeth of a raw north wind. This went on for two months.

An inconvenience for customers, sure. The drive to Salina

for parcels or other special mail, through the holidays and their

heavy loads of mail, soon lost its novelty. Friends, neighbors,

colleagues pitched in to fetch mail for those who otherwise

couldn’t. Other not-so-random acts of kindness sprouted here

and there as the days became weeks.

And what of the postal workers? Every day out in that

bleak north lot, wind-blown and facing a line of gritty boxes,

their metal gray and cold, the locks frozen, each little door a

special challenge. This at times with rain coming in a steady

drizzle or, on better mornings, the driving lashes of sleet, or

snow stinging with each gust of wind. Yes, the postal workers,

whom we know by first-name, enjoyed special tortures then.

But they continued, stopping to help a customer fumbling

with his key, or the person who had forgotten it, or the sev-
eral who had forgotten which belonged to what. And always,

always with a smile. These people, burdened with uncertainty

and belted with brutal weather, managed mail delivery in our

town with efficiency, courtesy and the patience and manner

of saints.

Our postal workers deserve every accolade, and more.

THE BUILDING itself, now amidst the clamor and clatter of

a massive downtown renovation, is a treasure. The flower

bed at the front is winter-bare but we look up, above the

great door, to a clerestory, its painted flowers along the frame

and panes. Inside, magnificence in limited space: The old

wood, polished; the heavy, high writing tables; the etched

and frosted glass in doors that say Janitor, and Postmaster.

On the west wall above the oak of the Postmaster door, the

striking Sandzén mural, Kansas Stream. Past the framed teller

windows, a small alcove holds the rows and stacks of drawers

with raised numbers and boxes with tiny windows, keyholes

at the ready. Here are walls of wood and brass, buffed, speak-
ing of times ago when things were sturdy and complete and

unalloyed.

The building has been with us since 1936. Outside a brass

plate near the door notes that it is on the National Register

of Historic Places. A stone inlay in the brick planter tells us

the officials responsible then, in 1935: Henry Morgenthau,

Secretary of the Treasury; James A. Farley, Postmaster

General; Louis A. Simon, supervising architect; Neal A.

Melick, supervising engineer.

It stands gallant and solid at Second and Lincoln, still

active, still crucial. More than once we have wondered how to

wrestle large boxes that had been sent to us, and without miss-
ing a beat a postal worker would carry them outside and place

them in the car. It’s a pleasure, they say, always in a way that

tells you they mean it. They smile and hurry back inside.

The pleasure is ours. By the look and feel of it, this build-
ing and its people are as vital and valuable as ever, still quite

a treasure.

– JOHN MARSHALL

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