Duane Schrag ‒ journalist, science fiend, photographer, craftsman and traveler ‒ died October 17 in Abilene where he had been in hospice care less than a week. The cause was metastatic pancreatic cancer. He was 69.
He was in many ways an expert and specialist, drawn to explore mysteries of the half- known or rarely explained ‒ of roads seldom traveled, of houses that needed rebuilding, of the sun’s light on one patch of Earth, of computer coding, of a parade that needed an amazing float.
At lunch once with friends in Lindsborg, Schrag drew on a paper napkin the complexities of spherical trigonometry whirling about Earth, and why science doubted that we could breathe free on Mars ‒ at least any time soon.
Another time he and Robin planned a road trip to Alaska and on to the Arctic Circle pulling their little camper ‒ but only after he had rebuilt the Jeep’s engine.
He built his own coffee bean roaster, then wrote a 30-step operating manual for producing best results.
On a stairwell wall at their home, a series of black and white photographs document precisely the Sun’s orientation to a single patch on planet Earth ‒ their home. The photos were taken with a view camera Schrag had built, the aluminum salvaged from a Boeing scrap pile in Wichita.
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Duane Peter Schrag was born August12, 1955 in Basim Berar, India, the son of Christian teachers and missionaries in southern India. He is survived by the widow, Robin Black, of the home; a son, Brad, of Albuquerque, N.M., a daughter, Rebekah, of Salem, Ore.; three sisters, Joy Bartsch, Lincoln, Neb., Grace Johnson, Tecumseh, Neb., and Faith Busenitz., Whitewater, Kan.; and two step-daughters, Rachel Sherck, Manhattan, Kan., and Amanda Sherck, Ceresco, Neb.
He and Robin were married in Junction City on January 16, 2004.
The body was cremated. Plans for any celebration of life or for the ashes remain undetermined.
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Schrag attended Lushington, a British boarding school in southern India, returned to Kansas and finished high school at Moundridge High School in 1973. He majored in photojournalism at Wichita State University and finished at Oregon State University.
He returned to Kansas, reported for the Washington County News and in 1985 joined the Hutchinson News, flagship of the Harris Newspaper Group, where his reporting and writing gathered force.
Schrag wrote with precision, stories layered with fact and the flavor of surprising detail: the suspicions lingering after a Garden City murder conviction; the fatal danger of Kansas’ unmarked railroad crossings; the long, lively days of another Bike Across Kansas event; the science and politics of wind and solar energy; the majesty of a lunar eclipse, the ruin of drought that choked a great river to a trickle; the tense thrill of pilot Steve Fossett’s round-the-world flight in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, a record-breaking event that began and finished in Salina.
For Schrag, no circumstance was slight, no detail trivial. Only the peculiarities differed.
He was an early expert in the software coding and personal computers that would change every aspect of newspaper publishing. In the mid-1990s, he moved from the newsroom at Hutchinson to the computing rooms at the Harris Group business division. There, Schrag helped take the science of business data aggregation into the newsroom; his work prompted something new, allowing reporters and editors to share stories using a form of the business data process.
In 1997 he was named editor-publisher of the Tribune, a Harris Group newspaper in Chanute. There he met Robin.
Six years later Schrag transferred to The Salina Journal as an investigative and special projects reporter.
As drought savaged western Kansas in the early 2000s, Duane took Robin to Wallace County and Sharon Springs near the Colorado border to see the dry ravines and gorges where the Smoky Hill had once cut into the tableland. “He had to see this,” she said. “He couldn’t do the story of a river without seeing where it had been.”
Schrag joined The Land Institute, an environmental research facility, in 2010 and retired seven years later.
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The projects continued: He had already built an immense wood-fired pizza oven, its heavy walls riddled with devices to transmit heat readings; near Manhattan, he rebuilt a 1948 8N Ford tractor for step-daughter Rachel; he wrote computer codes for an array of in-house radio programming, access to keyboard screens and phone, weather forecasts, radio and TV programs ‒ even while they were away.
He and Robin sang in the Messiah Chorus. Once he mounted his view camera on a balcony wall at Presser Hall, rigged it with remote control and snapped a full-front photo of chorus and orchestra in mid-concert.
He built and rebuilt the top of their back yard pergola.
They built floats for the annual Central Kansas Free Fair parade. This year, Schrag adapted the metal frame of a prior float (a giant ear of corn), rebuilding the armature and movement into a large rocket. It took him three months. The nose cone opened with compressed air and shot out Milky Way candy bars attached to parachutes. Wild Bill Hickock (paper maché, by step-daughter Amanda Sherck) was riding the rocket. It was their fifth year of floats: “Each year they got more complicated,” Robin said.
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They traveled, often weeks on the road, to reach distant places and spend time among those who lived there: the Arctic Circle and Prudhoe Bay; across Canada or up to Cold Foot, Alaska; to Quebec (twice); over the Trans-Labrador Highway; to Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island.
They try to find the lonely roads, Robin said.
In-country, Philadelphia, the Outer Banks, the Grand Tetons, New Orleans (many times), Key West, Santa Fe, Taos, Glacier National Park and most everywhere in-between.
A few years ago outside Rockland, Maine, they found a replacement for their Jeep, a used Toyota Fj Cruiser in good condition. They bought it and drove home, Robin in the Cruiser, Duane with Jeep and camper.
“If there is a road we haven’t traveled,” she said, “someone should tell us.”
‒ John Marshall
