It's time for Positively Kansas coming up.

It's a major milestone in the ongoing effort to celebrate the efforts of war veterans and help them find closure and perspective.

Also, the shutter is about to close for good on Wichita's last camera store.

We'll pay a visit to this Long-Time family business.

It's been a Wichita institution for almost 80 years.

Plus, we'll talk to a Wichita author and illustrator of a whimsical and wacky new book designed to tickle your funny bone.

I'm Sierra Scott.

A half hour of information and inspiration is queued up and ready to roll in this edition of Positively Kansas.

Kansas honor flights reaches the major milestone of 100 trips to our nation's capital.

Veterans often return changed from their experiences.

Chris Frank was there to capture this momentous event.

Nearly 100 veterans lined up for their hero's welcome home from their Kansas honor flight.

These military veterans wait their signal to move.

Inside the hotel.

Hundreds of family members, friends and dignitaries anxiously await to kick off the celebration.

And when they come back home, they're in for a big surprise.

They?

The Wichita hero's welcome home.

If you can't put words into it, this is our 105.

But we want to go single file 100 flights is a noteworthy achievement for the nonprofit organization Kansas.

Honor flight has been taking World War two Korean and Vietnam veterans to Washington, DC since 2012.

And they're going to start going here.

Mike van Kampen has been on more than 60 of these flights assisting the veterans.

It's absolutely fantastic.

All the people across the state of Kansas have, stepped up to make this happen for our veterans.

A grateful public, funds all of it.

There's no government money involved, and that's special.

But we don't ask the government to, these guys stepped up to serve their country.

And so the public says, heck yes, we'll send you on a free trip to Washington.

Kansas honor flight is connected to the Honor Flight network.

The national network got started in 2004 with the completion of the World War Two memorial.

There was a realization then that World War Two vets were passing quickly by ever larger numbers.

So the first honor flights were for those WW two vets.

Most of the ones we had on the very first flight were in their 80s and 90s.

When they went to start with, because it took so long for them to get to World War Two Memorial Bill.

It was the last one built de Mayo.

A Vietnam vet says there are 186,000 veterans in the state of Kansas.

Just over 4000 votes have gone to Washington, DC with Kansas on flights.

So we have a lot more work to do.

We have a lot more work to do.

We need to get the veterans to come in and sign up and go with us.

The honor flights take world War Two Korean and Vietnam veterans to see their war memorials in Washington.

The flights will include Desert Shield, Desert Storm and Afghanistan war vets.

Once their memorial is completed.

It was very impactful.

Would you talk?

Marine veteran Jack Walker was emotionally moved seeing the war memorials.

When you stop and think about Iwo Jima and that massive monument was huge.

But then you look at Vietnam and all the people that were killed didn't come home.

Tear your heart apart and really does.

Walker, an active duty veteran from 1958 through 1962, at first was reluctant to go on the honor flight, but is now glad he went.

But it was a very rewarding.

And my heart comes back full gratitude.

Walker's experience is shared by most vets making these trips.

Fort McHenry was the most impressive for me, and seeing where the star Spangled Banner all started right there.

When they wrote the song.

But anyway, that was my favorite spot of the trip.

Vietnam vets often get to experience appreciation and welcoming they didn't receive when they returned home from their service.

What was amazing about it was how much people cared.

Everywhere we went, people clapped and cheered.

They praised this.

And it was.

It was honor.

This is a photo of Smith doing his job as a helicopter door gunner serving in Vietnam in 72 and 73.

Smith describes the experience.

It was 20 or 30 minutes of beauty.

Just beautiful country from the air, just peaceful and quiet.

And then you get 10 to 20 minutes of sheer terror, and then you get to enjoy the quiet going back.

The stories of those combat experiences are more likely shared amongst the vets on these trips than even with family.

Leader de Mayo accompanied her father, a World War Two veteran, on the first honor flight.

It was probably one of the best experiences I ever had with my dad.

The honor flights give these vets a chance to open up and talk about their war experiences.

We didn't even know until Honor Flight that he had been at Normandy.

He never told anybody.

So, Honor Flight gives them that opportunity to open up and actually talk about it.

These are things that they have held inside for decades, bottled up emotions for decades.

Sprung free in a matter of days.

They're gone for a couple of days.

And when they come back home, they are literally changed.

God bless America.

And some of these men actually have told me, says this, this has helped me close those bad nightmares that I was experiencing because he spent that time with other veterans to share their stories and things.

And it kind of gives him release.

I won't say.

Many come.

The time has come for those from this 100th flight to experience their welcome home to Kansas.

You see, expression of happiness and everything when they see their families with signs being held up.

They.

Saw the are the welcome homecomings are.

They're probably the highlight of the whole trip.

It's such a positive experience.

It's really worthwhile because this is a closure.

A lot of them needed.

It allows them to talk about it, and it allows them to give them the self-confidence to be proud of what they did back in their time periods.

Well, my dad said when he came back, he said he said, well, they never made this much fuss.

When I came home the first time.

So this is the welcome home they never got and they deserved.

100 welcome homes and many more to come.

For Positively Kansas this is Chris Frank reporting.

If you're interested in taking part, you can go to the Kansas Honor Flight website to find out more.

Author Leslie Johnson is one of those people who agrees that laughter is the best medicine.

She's a native of England who moved to Kansas many years ago and says her humor helped her assimilate into the local culture.

If you'd like to get a sense of her style of humor, you just need to pick up a copy of her book.

As Jim Grawe shows us, it's just like the characters in her book.

Leslie Johnson is a character in her own right.

There's a certain element of crazy about some of we should we say, Mitchell, I don't.

Fearless Freddy and His Fanciful Friends is a book of what she calls light verse.

Another way of describing it is a collection of off the wall poems about odd characters, 26 of them, one for every letter of the alphabet party.

Pat.

I love the way the turkeys dance when they are full of cold, said party part 1st August night.

As the moon waxed bold.

They sneeze and wheeze and snuffle too, and trot about most quirky.

That is when I know they have an illness called cold turkey.

Yo yo yo yo yo.

A native of jolly old England.

Johnson married an American and moved to Kansas several decades ago.

She worked as a teacher and semiprofessional singer and found that almost any situation is made a little better with laughter.

Humor is a survival tool for me and a communication tool.

I came to Kansas from a totally different culture.

Now, how am I going to work my way into this culture?

How am I going to be acceptable?

Because even though we think we're open, you know, even with a white face and speaking a similar language, it was a challenge to, to be integrated, shall we say.

And I was in schools, many different people that I met, and I just found a little humor was helpful.

From Armenian Albert to zealous Zachary Zander.

This book is all about quirky characters with flawed personalities.

It just sort of.

I guess it says something about my brain and maybe I should say a doctor has been Harry as bright as the sunshine and quick as a wink has been.

Harry.

It was not what you think.

How did he acquire his curious name?

When he went to restaurants, he played a strange game.

He always would order a liquid or dove.

Then someone, the waiter was thinking of.

What is this concoction, this porridge, this bilge?

Pray tell me it's secret.

You'll swiftly divulge it's bean soup.

The waiter would sigh with mock.

Bow says.

How so?

It has been.

But what is it now?

You might wonder if at least some of these characters are based on real people.

Disclaimer no.

My dentist.

No, not my dentist.

No.

Johnson's clever and delightfully dark humor is accentuated by the illustrations of her friend and self-taught artist, Victoria Beardsley.

I've never illustrated a book of poetry before.

I was down for it, but I wanted to make sure that my style is what she was looking for because, like Leslie, I had this heightened view of poetry as like something like esoteric and very colorful and ethereal.

And my style is more cartoony.

And so I was like, are you sure?

And then she sent me some of her verses and I was like, oh yeah.

And it says on the cover for Children of All ages.

So anyone who's still an adult that still retains that kind of like childlike cheek, but also younger children who want to feel smart because there are a lot of big words in there that they can learn from.

This one called Querulous Clemens opinion.

That's a that's a mouthful.

Everybody after me.

Querulous.

Convenient.

He's again.

I liked the word.

What the heck does it mean?

Well, I should I'm going to tell you to look it up, because that's an extra part, isn't it?

And what about the book's namesake?

Well, this, of course, is Fearless Freddie.

And he was a an acrobat, and he wanted to try more and more exaggerated them.

Fantastic feats.

Unfortunately, he overdid himself.

He's got a little bit of.

As you can see from his expression, he's rather he thinks he's brilliant, you know, and he is, but he's not quite as brilliant as he believes.

So he tried one trick too many fell off the high wire and died.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Sorry.

They don't all die.

Fearless Freddie and His Fanciful Friends is a quick read and a hoot in Wichita for Positively Kansas.

I'm Jim Grawe.

Fearless Freddie at His Fanciful Friends is available at Amazon and other online retailers.

Johnson says if the response is good, she'd love to team up with Beasley to do another one.

Wichita's last camera store is trying to sell its merchandise and close up shop.

Chris Frank takes us down memory lane.

When film was the medium to capture images.

There was a time when if you wanted to buy a camera, you had to go to a specialty camera shop.

A store like this one.

Molars camera on each Douglas Avenue.

Stepping inside is almost like entering a camera museum.

Tables are full of camera bodies and lenses.

Things.

At one time I thought I must have but couldn't afford.

Then.

And are now nearly being given away because there's such old technology.

Mohler still gets a few customers like Daniel Garcia.

Garcia hunts for equipment for his business of filming weddings, and he incinerates all.

But most of the cameras and photographic equipment are from the latter part of the last century.

But a few items date back more than a century.

One of the more unusual items in Mohler Store is this movie film projector.

Bob Mohler says it came from a Douglas, Kansas theater, 1916.

They added the sound hit on it in about 1927 or 28, and those days film was almost explosively flammable.

Yeah.

It's horrible.

So they always put the film in metal containers, close the door, and you can see through here how much was left on.

The real film was made from cellulose nitrate from the late 1800s through the 1940s.

Nitrate film was highly flammable and caused some major and tragic movie theater fires, resulting in many deaths.

This projector is from that highly flammable film era, and of course, the Mohler is seeking a new home for this and all the camera equipment here.

But this optical sound and this sound was added to the theater, to the projector and about 1927 or 28, when the show experimented with sound.

You know, I had some really nice, beautiful antique cameras that I sold, kind of.

I said catch more of them, as is typical, but I'm 83 now, and a few years I've be gone.

Who knows what'll happen to them?

Somebody's yard sale.

So I, like I say, I don't mind selling some of my nice stuff.

As long as I know it's going to a good home.

At 83, Mohler says he's seen so many of his friends and relatives pass away, but he knows it's time to close the retail side of his shop.

Molars camera goes back to a different era when downtown was the place to shop.

His dad started the business that opened the store.

The retail store, in 1946.

He started doing repairs during the war.

He couldn't buy cameras or lenses.

And a lot of them needed repair.

So we got into the repair business, you know.

Bob says there were four camera shops in that single block on Broadway then, and there were more camera shops besides those scattered about Wichita.

It says a lot about the way retail specialty stores existed back then.

There was a lot of camera shops, and if you want to buy a camera, you went to a camera shop.

You know, the big box stores selling almost everything, including cameras, didn't come around until later.

Moeller says family owned camera shops back then could survive, with profit margins up to 40%.

He says those margins got squeezed to the single digits when large department and big box stores started selling cameras.

Mark and Mary Finkel, Di are the type of customers that keep Moeller in business for the time being.

They found a several decades old roll of film that needs transferred to a modern digital format for viewing and preservation.

Well, it's something from 1954 that we want to get transferred much more to her genealogy.

I don't know what's really on there, except that it's from my childhood in 1954, so we need to find out what it is.

Transferring film and video cassettes to the digital is what's kept Moeller in business in recent years.

Even that's been a big surprise to Muller.

He figured most everything that needed to be transferred to modern viewing formats would have been done so by now.

Not so.

Customers are still coming in for that.

Videotapes.

VHS made a max eight millimeter.

The little ones, the big ones in between people bring us in by virtual basketful, you know.

Muller says it's long past time to sell the retail side of the business.

It's just tough on them.

Yeah, the phone's gone.

It's not like it used to be.

And he's been having a closing business sale for months.

So once he sells what he can, the retail door will close, leaving only the business of transferring video.

For Positively Kansas, this is Chris Frank reporting.

Molars is one of only two specialty camera shops in Kansas.

The other one is in Kansas City, Kansas.

It's the end of an era.

Now to the great outdoors, where Mike Blair uses his camera to capture the wonder of Kansas wildlife.

This week, he shows us why deer are especially interesting to watch in the fall.

It all starts quietly in September.

The deer rut, one of Kansas grandest wildlife spectacles, begins, as always, with summer doughs feeding and resting easy in the first cool breezes.

He'll begin to move.

Plants go to seed.

And the first autumn color hints at what will come.

For now, all this tranquil.

And then the yearling bucks begin to show up.

All male deer are growing restless, but the older, wiser animals move at night and put out their calling cards.

Rubs and scrapes.

Meanwhile, younger males begin to cruise the open feed fields to interact with those who.

No romance for them, but they like to hang out with the ladies.

October's end kicks things into gear.

Intermediate bucks now begin to prowl in daylight.

Looking for love.

And by the 11th month, the older breeding bucks join in, making sure they arrive for the parties beginning.

Now is the best time of year to see big, handsome male deer, which basically live like ghosts through most of each calendar.

Those are ready to mate by mid-November, and the biggest bucks travel constantly to find partners.

Those signal their readiness through a special scent in their urine, and the bucks analyze this via a special nasal organ.

They curl their lips and measure the sand in an odd behavior called the Fleming posture.

If the doe is near reception, the buck immediately joins and stays with her, staying back just far enough to avoid pushing her away.

But close enough to guard her and ward off other bucks.

And now the rut reaches a fever pitch.

Almost always, free breeding involves breathless chases that prove a bucks vigor, and these can last for a day or more.

Should warm weather occur during the Red peak, there's heavy developing winter coats and exhausting runs make it hard on both sexes.

But even then, they don't slow down.

In colder, normal weather, such hardships are reduced.

The annual deer rut is a fascinating drama and nature's most colorful time.

Beautiful and graceful deer are worth the tickets in this never ending show of the Kansas outdoors.

I'm Mike Blair for Positively Kansas.

Unfortunately, it's during the rut.

The deer are most likely to cross busy roads and collide with cars, so please keep an eye out.

Well, not everybody's a singer, that's for sure, but a Wichita musician can turn just about anybody into one without them even knowing about it.

How?

Jim Gray shows us keyboardist Brandon Etheridge can play any style of music from classical.

To rock.

To this, and probably I've never realized television before, but I'm proud.

And sometimes I don't want to watch the news because I'm a kid.

It's what Etheridge calls a mini musical, and he he's been doing a lot of them lately.

Music, has been my career now ever since I graduated college.

Somehow I've made it work.

When the pandemic hit, this, Wichita, who has performed on Broadway and travels the world with a Queen cover band, found himself twiddling his thumbs.

Then, around the time of the January 6th Capitol riot, a friend on Facebook had this funny video that she shared and she said, hey, composer friends make music with this.

And I looked at it and I thought, yeah, the woman has a sing songy voice.

So, I gave it a try.

This was during the pandemic where I didn't have any touring going on or other music, so I was thankful to get away from house renovations and, make this music.

Well, what happened to you?

I got bass, got married the first.

And what happened?

You were trying to go inside.

Oh, I'd be like, a foot inside.

And they push me out and they pass me.

What's in it?

What's your name?

Where are you from?

My name is Elizabeth.

I'm from Knoxville, Tennessee.

Why did you want to go in?

We're storming the Capitol.

It's a revolution.

This mini musical was an instant hit on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

I couldn't believe it.

It's like within just a few minutes, I had 100,000 views and I thought, there's something wrong here.

My computer.

And then the next morning it was 500,000 views.

Then it ended up racking up 3 million views or so.

Suddenly, the classically trained Etheridge, who is a serious musician, became famous for something that isn't.

The stuff I'm doing is mostly, sarcasm stick funny, parodies.

But Etheridge is taking his new musical genre beyond silly viral videos into the corporate world.

He's been hired to work on employee training videos and commercials.

We'd like to invite you to combine visit with us or check out our website.

He says the process takes some time, but for him, it comes pretty easy.

Whenever you speak, there's a rhythm.

Whenever you speak, there's a rhythm, right?

And so you can find that rhythm and every person has a different one.

Every word has a pitch.

Excited voices are better than low grumble.

And songs for going like this.

It's not going to make for very good music.

Right?

So if it's a higher voice or an excited voice or an angry voice or really enthusiastic, you know, then you can really make good music out of it.

John is now retired, but he says that includes one of the most familiar and beloved voices known to Kansas.

Okay, Larry has a really low voice, but is very melodic, so this is going to be a fun one.

John is now retired, but he says really not much else has changed and even still lives that model take.

You can find as many musicals on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

Just Google Brandon Etheridge.

Well, that's a wrap for this week.

We're glad you took the time to watch.

If you would mind, we'd love to know what you think of the show, what you like, what you don't like, and what other stories you'd like us to cover.

Our email address is PositivelyKansas@KPTS.ORG I Sierra Scott.

Be well.

We'll see you again soon.