Kansas Five - Text
Recorded by Ginger Bartkoski and edited by Paul Meier 3.30.01. Running time 00:03:44.
TRANSCRIPTION
I was born in Hutchison, Kansas, and we lived (um) six miles out of town, and (um) both my parents worked inside of Hutch. And (um) I went to a smaller school outside of Hutch, called Buhler. It was very tight; (giggling) we had a tight community. And (um) there were several smaller communities outside of Hutch. It’s the Bible belt (laughs), and (um), I don’t know… It kind of shaped like what we learned in school, like everything-- We’d have to memorize like… Old Man and the Sea, we’d have to memorize like the-- the (um) 14 or whatever parallels to the Bible, and like… I mean, like, if you knew the Bible, it wasn’t that hard, but like, if you didn’t know anything about it, like, it was completely hard. An’ my parents didn’t go to church, like. We never went to church, so I was like-- they all kind of a… upper hand on me, but…
We had-- there were some interesting contrasts, ’cause like, we’d get people-- like, it was just so-- so much ostracism towards people who had just moved there, an’ like a lot of people from other countries would move in, and a lot of times weren’t accepted. Most of the time they got along, but…
(Uh) Kind of German, there was a lot of Germans. There’s a ton of Rathsliffes and Meyers. My gran’ma and gran’pa’s name was Blumenschein. (Um) I don’t know, they seemed ve-- it’s jus-- it was pretty German. We ate lots of zwiebachen and kraut. Mom makes good kraut.
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY JACQUELINE BAKER, ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR TRANSCRIPTIONS, March 11, 2008