From the Alvin and Rosalee Sarachek studio, PBS Kansas Presents, Positively Kansas, It's Time for Positively Kansas coming up, Kansans celebrate the 50th anniversary of an iconic game that took the world by storm.

We'll show you how it still creates excitement for all ages.

Also, we catch up with a local fashion guru who's making a name for herself worldwide.

Plus, we'll revisit the wicked side of Wichita, see how the city earned a seedy reputation back in its early days.

Im Sierra Scott, join us for those stories and our Wild Edge report on this edition of Positively Kansas.

If you're of a certain age, chances are you've played with a Rubik's Cube at least once in your life.

The iconic 3D puzzle was invented in 1974 by Hungarian Erno Rubik, and by the 1980s it was taking America by storm.

50 years after its creation, competitors squared off in which to win a competition they call speed cubing.

Anthony Powell was there.

Rubik's cubes were twisting fast and furiously at a late fall competition in southeast Wichita.

There were numerous categories, including twisting five sided cubes and solving blindfolded.

The event was organized and overseen by Wichita and Dan Smith, who was called a World Cube Association delegate, meaning he oversees competitions all over America and the world.

But Smith doesn't just help organize and run these events.

He also loves to spin the cube himself.

You know, it's an outlet for me.

I used to do taekwondo, and before that I used to climb some mountains.

Before that I did some writing before that.

You know, it's it's an outlet for me.

And as I get older, I realize I don't have the physical ability, but I'm trying to increase my mental ability.

Smith tells us he first got the Rubik's Cube bug in the early 1980s, just a few years after the puzzle was invented by Hungarian Erno Rubik.

The cube became a worldwide sensation.

It was everywhere.

Once you get your hands on a Rubik's Cube, you may never be able to put it down.

Cube mania eventually died down considerably, but it got new life with the internet and has been going strong now for close to 30 years.

Instead of buying books like 20, 30, 40 years ago like we would used to do to solve the cube, people are using YouTube videos and very popular YouTube channels.

When it's called Jay Perm, their speed two review where they teach you how to solve literally every puzzle.

The CIA has and.

Yes.

Oh, videos like this one showing cube and YouTube star Max Pak solving the puzzle in get this 3.1 seconds have also helped grow the popularity with a new generation.

Dan Smith uses social media to communicate with Midwestern kids about cubing his Facebook page.

Southern Hartland Cubing helps get the word out about competitions to those already involved, as well as kids wanting to know how they can participate.

I just get really excited when these kids have a success.

These competitions are a family reunion where a competition breaks out.

I love spreading speed cubing to to kids.

Want to give them an outlet outside of screen time?

Dan Smith is so passionate about spreading the word.

You can find him talking to kids throughout Wichita about the Rubik's Cube.

I was probably like 11 when I started.

Now in his 20s and still spinning the cube widget.

Ten Ben Irwin sits.

The mind power it takes to solve the puzzle has helped him in many ways, including academics taught me to think fast, which helps in tests, to like the thoroughness because like if you like, especially in blindfold, you cannot make a mistake.

But perhaps most importantly, says Irwin, you make friends around cubing.

And so then now you have somebody to say, hey, I just got a personal best solve.

Some of you have somebody to talk to about your hobby using your mind, using your hand.

Getting out, meeting friends is super important.

Dan Smith also loves how inclusive cubing is and what better than a than an event where you don't have to be physical.

It's not boys versus girls.

It's not young versus old.

It's just about having fun using your mind, getting off devices and making new friends.

What could be more positive than that for Positively Kansas?

I'm Anthony Powell.

The competitors urge anyone who hasn't picked up a cube in decades to give it another try.

They say you're missing out on fun and a great brain workout.

Wichita A woman is taking her fashions to new heights.

Hazel Stabler shows us her clothing designs at Paris Fashion Week.

Chris Frank introduces us to the designing woman, whose life is more than just a needle and thread.

I don't follow the norms of style.

I follow what I like personally.

Hazel Stabler is in her happy place when she's at the sewing machine.

Here she stitches her designs into finished garments.

Each one of a kind is my safe space and my decompression.

You know, I have a lot of, I will do.

I work on the school board, and, you know, sometimes it's a lot of pressure and commitment.

And this gives me an outlet to, release my tension and de-stress here.

Stabler doesn't have to think about school closings and budget issues as a Wichita school board member.

At this video session, she's thinking about Paris, France, and the Paris fashion Week.

It's, a great experience for me.

And, like I said, a great opportunity for me to share what I do.

And, if someone happens to.

Because I do make my own patterns.

If someone would be interested in purchasing or the fabric that's been designed that I use, you know, maybe it would be an opportunity to market that.

The Paris Fashion Week is about couture.

The business of designing, making and selling fashionable, custom made clothing.

And while Stabler understands couture, sharing her native culture is of greater importance to her.

But as far as the runway and showing, what I'm doing, and in Paris, the significance is to share my culture in a whole nother realm, a whole nother place where they don't know really much about native people.

Showing her fashion, she says, opens doors of communication and reminds others, quote, we're still here.

Stabler says in Europe, she gets asked questions that show a great lack of knowledge about native American culture.

Natives are still here.

We're striving, we're educated.

We're working.

We're members of society.

You know, one question that that I always get asked is, do you live in a teepee?

Do you know what kind of food you eat?

What kind of you know, what do you drive?

You know, and and people.

There's a misconception as to, our assimilation into society about, success.

Europeans are very intrigued with cowboys and Indians.

Stabler is always happy to remind Europeans about the successes of Native Americans, while also sharing her culture through her fashions.

Not just my story, but stories of my ancestors, our stories of my culture.

The purpose of using the women.

Women are very strong in our culture.

And, we were leaders in our in very well were highly respected in our societies.

She calls these fabric designs the girlfriends because she says they're all traditional women.

Stabler often uses elk teeth in her native designs.

This fabric right here, we're calling it the Girlfriends because it's all traditional women.

And I have several pieces that incorporate this, design in it.

And then elk teeth, of course.

No teeth.

I'm, Ojibwe and more northern tribes use, elk teeth to embellish their, their clothing.

So, I thought that was important.

And here is a plain black shirt, and I'll actually be showing some, elk teeth on here.

So I will embellish this with elk teeth.

Stabler draws upon the traditions in her two native cultures.

So I am Yup'ik and Ojibwe.

Her mother was of the Yaqui tribe in southern Arizona.

Her father Ojibwe, from the Great Lakes region.

The building of the railroads brought them to Kansas.

These are my scraps that I do not throw away because I don't know what I might need.

Stabler was born in Kansas City and raised in Emporia.

Stabler says she had no inclination to sew as a youth.

I wasn't interested, I never took sewing classes.

I took shop classes.

As a teenager, she wasn't interested in making her own clothes, but she was very interested in making fashion statements.

As a debater, I always went to, vintage stores and bought wool suits, the kind that they were in the 30s and 40s, the long pencil skirts and the jackets and that I dressed just.

I was dressed impeccably.

Even though Stabler is getting invitations to major fashion shows, she says she doesn't purposely follow current fashion trends.

She pursues simply what appeals to her.

She sells her dresses as one of a kind outfits and sells custom made garments.

Stabler also makes non-native clothing, but when it comes to fashion shows, she sees it as an opportunity to share her native culture.

But as far as the runway and showing, what I'm doing in Paris, the significance is to share my culture in a whole nother realm, a whole nother place where they don't know really much about native people.

Stabler has had her share of personal trials and tribulations with cancer issues.

She's a survivor of two cancers in the past year.

She's now cancer free.

She says she'll probably do Milan next year, which means starting all over again with designing clothes.

It's, a great experience for me.

And like I said, a great opportunity for me to share what I do.

She says interest in native clothing has increased since the movie killers of the Flower Moon came out.

It's like a cycle in Indian fashion, and Indian Western styles are like going.

They get recycled.

And, I think we're in that recycling mode right now where there's a great interest in Western and southwestern wear, and that works out well for her designs.

So with Paris behind her, she'll be thinking about what to pack for Milan and show the Italians her native fashions for Positively Kansas.

This is Kris Frank reporting.

And that was Stabler as she was preparing for the Paris fashion show.

Upon her return, I sat down with her to find out how it went.

Hey, so the first thing I want to ask you, because it is such an honor to be able to show your clothes on the runway in Paris.

I mean, that's huge.

What did that feel like when you found out that was actually going to happen?

It felt like a dream.

I mean, you get a bucket list.

Everybody has a bucket list.

And, some of the things on your bucket list are.

And, you know, they're unattainable, but you still want to reach for them in the hopes that, you know, it can be accomplished.

So it felt like a dream, and it really didn't feel real until I packed my bags and headed to the airport.

That's when it really felt like that's when it hit me.

Wow, I'm going to Paris.

So before it happened, you had to have in your head what you thought it might be like.

Was it like that?

Was it better?

Was it not as good as you thought?

I really didn't know because I've experienced New York fashion Week and I've done other, private fashion shows, and, I didn't feel that it was as organized as I thought it would be.

You know, in Paris, I'm like, wow, everything is just going to be run like clockwork.

It wasn't as organized as I thought, but thank goodness I was organized.

And I had a great assistant and I had great models and people who went with me, who helped me, you know, to stay organized and be prepared.

Otherwise, I might have been I might have had a real problem.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Did you feel like your models were good representatives for your clothing?

Did you feel good watching them come down the runway?

So when you said that, I got goosebumps because I feel like every model that I had chosen, when I look at a model and I think about my clothes, I see them immediately.

The fit everything.

Like I'll put things on people.

I'm like, how did you know that would fit?

Because I can see ahead of time I can just see it.

And so I, I really had great girls.

Their spirits were great.

They just really were a perfect fit.

There was one garment that I didn't that I felt that was mis represented.

So you see these models come down the runway.

What what what's going through your head when you see it happen?

So I actually stand in the back and I prepare each one before they go out.

And it happens so fast.

You really don't have time to think about anything until the tell is there, done.

And then it's the final walk, and then it's my turn to walk with them and then it's over.

So everything just happened so fast.

So you really don't think about it, you just relive it afterwards.

You just kind of relive everything, and you hope that people that you went with got good pictures that you can look at and, you know, have a good documentary of what your experience is.

What kind of reception did you get afterwards?

Did anybody talk to you about your showing and your clothes?

Yeah.

So, you know, how important it is for the opener and the closure of the show.

And that's something that sometimes they let you know ahead of time.

Sometimes everybody's just waiting.

Who's the opener?

Well, I did not know.

I was not even thinking about it.

I did open in New York and I just thought that was a great privilege and opportunity.

So when they announced it, I didn't hear because I was busy getting my models and people were coming to me.

You're opening your opener.

I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm the opener.

And you know, I just felt really proud.

And, you know, I just was really, energized about, you know, and nervous made me really nervous.

I bet it did, because really, that's a lot of pressure.

It is because the opener sets the tone for the whole show.

Absolutely.

What what are you hoping when people see your clothing come down the runway?

What are you hoping they take away from it?

Well, I've always said that I share my culture through fashion.

My culture is very, very important to me and the true history.

There's a lot of history that's been written by non-Indians or history that's been written by people.

Just want to make money.

And I think it's important that, we have true history.

So I hope that through my clothes, I can emulate that picture of and and, you know, I always start my show with traditional dress, the total traditional men and women, so that they can see the components that I'm using in my clothing and how, where I get my vision from.

Yeah.

What's next for you?

I would like to go to Milan and show a collection in Milan showing or fashions in Milan.

Italy would complete the trifecta of the three major international fashion shows.

Less civilized, but every bit is beautiful.

The Kansas wilderness is full of fascinating creatures.

Mike Blair shows us the grace and wonder of Teal as they buzz over Kansas marshes and tight flocks, signaling a change of season.

In September, marshes lie waiting.

To.

In wet years, when water pools and the food plants color up on cooling nights, the wetland scenes are pleasant frames of a coming fall.

But they're lonely when the sky is empty.

And they wait for north winds to bring them teal.

The first flights come jetting in when lows reach 60.

And suddenly skimmers and blue.

It's no longer rule.

The Little ducks speedsters among their can arrive in squadrons.

They eat ripening seeds and plump larvae from submerged plants.

And they find their liking in waters only boot up high.

Restless birds.

These.

They fancy fly and often arise to make fast laps around their flat.

Sliding wing patches confirm the gray missiles as blue wings.

Advance Scouts of the Waterfowl World.

Then, not prone to move on easily, they settle back down.

If the coast is clear.

Like all trekkers, they find favorite eateries and tend to loiter, sometimes staying days, maybe weeks before traveling on.

And then they're gone.

Tracing on toward the gulf is larger and hardier.

Ducks replace them.

Blue wings, harbingers of autumn.

Our days are blessed.

When they cross our skies.

I'm Mike Blair for Positively Kansas.

From wild animals to wild people.

Wichita had its share back in the early days.

A local writer uncovered several eye opening details during an historic investigation.

Jim Grawe has the story.

The.

Every city of any size has crime and shady business going on.

Wichita is certainly no exception.

But writer and historian Joe Stump says the situation now is nothing compared to the good old days.

I think what made it so wild is Wichita was a frontier town at that time.

It sounds strange, but Oklahoma at that point wasn't even a state.

Illicit gambling halls, opium dens, crooked cops.

The city was a sea of decadence and violence, swarming with hoodlums and hookers.

Wichita had 100 or 1000 times more violence and corruption than Dodge City ever saw.

Stump says Wichita earned a bad rap right out of the gate in 1873, only three years after becoming a city.

Newspapers across the Midwest were referring to it as Wicked Wichita.

And that was just the beginning.

What I discovered was that there's a pretty big misconception about, what really was Wichita's history.

I think most people think that Wichita had a very few, years as a wild cow town that only lasted 3 or 4 years.

Then almost all that took place was a quote across the river in Delano.

The truth is, the city itself of Wichita was, pretty wide open for at least its first 50 years.

The biggest, fanciest house in town was a brothel located right downtown.

The owner operator was a madam who went by the name Dixie Lee.

And she operated, very openly in the city, out of a large mansion that sits right where the Garvey Center does today.

And she became she was very well-connected politically.

She was occasionally arrested or fined by police, but she did operate for at least a decade down there and became so well-connected politically that she that Wichita became known as Dixie Leesville.

Her story is both colorful and tragic, with twists and turns that make it a real page turner.

Also, around the same time.

Wichita was home to another shady character named Professor Henry Samuels, who, produced, what was known as Peyton Medicine back then.

Samuels got rich scamming millions of dollars out of sick Americans from coast to coast with his phony eyedrops.

Samuels hoodwinked people into believing his miracle medicine would cure anything from tired feet to terminal cancer.

His so-called medicine turned out to be nothing but sugar and salt.

But he was one of the wealthiest businessmen in Wichita until the federal government finally, suddenly frozen another crooked, which often was a notorious gangster named Edie Adams.

Adams robbed banks, trains, any place.

There was a lot of loot.

A master of disguise and of escaping from prison.

Clever Eddie, as they called him, based his crooked operation out of Wichita for two years.

Then he was gunned down in a shootout with police in 1921, as they did back then, they propped his body up in the city morgue.

And, somewhere between 7 and 9000 people came by to view is dead body.

That is twice as many as showed up to view John Dillinger's body in Chicago when he bit the dust a few years later.

So, I mean, this Eddie Adams out and Dillinger.

Dillinger.

Those are just a few of the stories in Stump's book, Wicked Wichita.

I really wanted people to be number one entertained, but also to realize that their hometown is not some boring place in the middle of nowhere.

It had a really colorful, lively history.

And to me, that just makes it a much more interesting place to live in.

So what do you think were more boring now?

Yeah, I think I'm more boring now, sadly.

Although if you think about it, that is probably a good thing for Positively Kansas.

I'm Jim Gray.

Well, that's a wrap for this week.

Email us at PositivelyKansas@KP.TS.ORG if you have a question, comment or story idea.

I'm Sierra Scott.

Thanks for watching.

I'll see you again soon.