Dave Webb Terry Rombeck Beccy TannerOriginal artwork by Phillip R. Buntin Original photography by Craig Hacker

999 KANSASCHARACTERSA biographical series

AD ASTRA161 Adventurers, astronauts, discoverers,

explorers, pilots, pioneers, scientists

34 999 Kansas Characters • Ad Astra

It wasn’t until the morning of June 17 that Amelia felt it was safe to fly. As the mechanic readied the seaplane, she poured strong coffee into the pilot, who had been drinking the night before. On their first attempt, the plane was unable to reach takeoff speed. It was too heavy. Earhart ordered the men to dump extra gasoline to save weight. As they did, they eliminated London as a destination — it was too far to reach on the remaining 700 gallons of fuel. They decided to head for Ireland instead.

They climbed to 3,000 feet and hit fog. Going higher, they ran into snow. The pilot went back down and found clear skies — but not for long. The fog returned. “Not again on the flight did we see the ocean,” Amelia wrote. They would have to rely on the radio to help guide their course. But soon it quit. When they had an hour’s worth of fuel left, the pilot dropped out of the clouds and circled a passing ship in hopes the captain would follow the custom of the day and paint his position on the deck. When he didn’t, Amelia wrote him a note, tied it around an orange, and dropped the message toward the ship. It fell into the water.

Fortunately, they sighted land a few minutes later. After twenty-hours, forty minutes in the air, they landed offshore near a small town in Wales, just south of Ireland. They waved at men on a nearby railroad dock. The workers waved back, not realizing where the historic flight had originated. After Friendship bobbed in the water for an hour, someone sent a boat out to the seaplane to pick them up. Several hours later a crowd of several thousand had gathered to welcome the pilots and their female companion.

Earhart was an overnight celebrity. London greeted “Lady Lindy” with parties and receptions. She was introduced to Winston Churchill and received a telegram from President Calvin Coolidge. After sailing home, she appeared in parades in New York City, Boston, and Chicago. Henry Ford sent a limousine for her use. She was besieged with requests for interviews and photos. But Earhart couldn’t forget she had been only a passenger. In her mind she wasn’t a true heroine.

‘‘I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes. . . . Maybe some-day I’ll try it alone.’’— Amelia Earhart, 1928

Driven by that goal, she continued to hone her flying skills. With no planned route or schedule, she leisurely hop-scotched across the country — and back — in a small Avian plane she had purchased in England. At home on the East Coast afterward, she learned she was the first woman to fly across North America and back again. She set more speed records and successfully piloted an “autogiro,” a craft that was part airplane and part helicopter, across the U.S. and back. At the same time, she traveled the country on a speak-ing tour, worked as aviation editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, and became vice president of Transcontinental Air Transport. She also wrote a book about her trip, 20 Hrs., 40 Min.

Publicity photo of Amelia Earhart (right) before her final flight.

In early 1929 Earhart made plans to enter the Women’s Air Derby that summer, the first such event for women. Realizing her little Avian wasn’t fast enough to compete, she bought a bright red Lockheed Vega 5B. With added extra fuel tanks, modern navigation equipment, and a 500-horse-power supercharged engine, she said she was ready to go.

George Putnam, however, worried about her ability to fly such a powerful plane. He offered $75 a week to Elinor Smith, a sixteen-year-old girl experienced in piloting large aircraft, to fly Amelia in the derby (and on a national lecture tour afterward). He warned Smith that Earhart must appear

Earhart and George Putnam (right) in Boston, May 1928. They were married in February 1931.

Let’s get real • As is the case with most celebrities, not everything published about Amelia Earhart is true. And research has shown that some of the hype surrounding her was “enhanced” or even fabricated by her publicist husband or Earhart herself.

In her 1932 autobiography The Fun of It, for example, Amelia recalled seeing her first plane at the 1908 Iowa State Fair. “It was a thing of wire and wood,” she wrote. Historians say no pilots were flying at public events that early.

Biographer Candace Fleming discovered that the naturally curly hair Earhart claimed to have was created each day with a curling iron. Fleming also learned Earhart’s quiet and shy behavior in public masked her very outspoken and sometimes blunt per-sonality in private. She could also be a fierce competitor.

Fleming found this Earhart quote: “I must continue to be a heroine in the public eye, otherwise flying opportuni-ties will stop rolling in.”

Amelia Earhart is one of four notable Kansans honored with a statue standing in the statehouse rotunda.

The works were sculpted in native limestone by Kansas sculptor Peter “Pete” Felten. He created this small plaster bust to dem-onstrate his design concept.

Pilot, serviceman, author, inventor • Bird City • (1902–1974) • Charles Augustus Lindbergh, the first person to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean, lived in Kansas for a time. In the summer of 1922 he starred in an air show based in Bird City. Known as The Daredevil, he thrilled crowds with his ”wing-walking” and parachute jumps.

After serving in the U.S. Army Air Service (1924–1925), he was an airmail pilot on a route between Chicago and Saint Louis.

Then the young flier became a living legend. On May 21, 1927, he and his plane, The Spirit of Saint Louis, landed in Paris after making the first nonstop solo transatlantic flight. They called him Lone Eagle.

Ironically, he could have made the trip in “The Spirit of Wichita.” Lindbergh discussed his plans with his friend Marcellus Murdock and asked Walter Beech’s Travel Air company to build a plane for the dangerous flight. Travel Air chose not to, perhaps afraid of negative publicity if Lindbergh failed.

After his successful flight, the Lone Eagle was greeted with praise and parades. On a cross-country tour, Lindbergh flew low over Bird City and circled the town twelve times. Down below, hun-dreds saluted the former resident by standing in formation on the athletic field to spell out WELCOME.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, he grew up in Little Falls, Minne-

sota. He attended the University of Wisconsin (1920–1922) and then a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska. When the school sold both of its planes — before

Charles LindberghBird City’s Lone Eagle

Charles had completed his course — it refunded his tuition with twenty-five dollars in cash and a new muslin parachute. “Slim,” as Lindbergh was nicknamed at the time, then accepted an offer from one of his instructors to join him in the Kansas air show.

In a book about his 1927 transat-lantic flight, he recalled his experi-ences in the Wheat State:

‘‘Now, the movement of the ocean waves below . . . reminds me of the wheatfields. They too bent and rippled in the wind. I’ve flown mile after mile above their golden tassels, in Kansas, no higher than I’m flying now above the Atlantic. Sometimes I saw a coyote loping away from my plane, just as I saw the por-poise here at sea.’’— Charles Lindbergh, in The Spirit of Saint Louis, 1953

Lindbergh’s Kansas connec-tions continued. In the fall of 1928 he helped officials in Dodge City locate a site for a permanent airport in the town. He traveled to Wichita several times in the 1920s and 1930s to visit friends and acquaintances in the aircraft industry.

During the famous pilot’s time in the limelight, he received honors from governments around the world and was made a director of Pan American World Airways.

Sadly, the aviator’s triumph turned to tragedy in 1932 when his young son was kidnapped and murdered. To escape publicity, Lindbergh and his wife Anne left the United States in 1935 and lived in England, France, and then Swit-zerland. In 1936 he helped design the world’s first artificial heart.

The Lindberghs returned to the U.S. in 1939, living in Michigan, then New York and Connecticut. He opposed America’s entry into World War II but after the country was drawn into the conflict, he helped develop aircraft engines for military planes and flew combat missions in the Pacific as a civilian consultant.

In his later years Charles Lind-bergh was interested in solving environmental issues and traveled around the world in that effort. He died of cancer in Hawaii. ■

35

to be operating the plane, and if they posed for photos together, Amelia should be to her right — to insure that Earhart’s name would be listed first in the caption. The girl turned down his request. Rumors later circulated that before the race he arranged secret flying lessons for Amelia.

Earhart was one of nineteen contestants when the derby began at Santa Monica, California. The next day she over-shot the runway at a refueling stop in Arizona. On the sev-enth and final day, she made a poor landing at the finish line in Cleveland, Ohio. Although she had the fastest plane in the contest, she finished third. To some of the other contestants, it was obvious Amelia was inexperienced with her new plane.

With the race out of the way, she used her Vega to set a women’s speed record (181 miles per hour) and an altitude record (18,415 feet). She also helped set up the Ninety-Nines, the world’s first organization for women pilots. The other ninety-eight members elected her as its first president.

Alone over the Atlantic • In 1931, after he had proposed to her six times, Earhart married Putnam, who had published her book and was still acting as her publicist. A year later she told him she wanted to fly across the Atlantic a second time — by herself. After careful planning and delays due to bad weather, Earhart took off from Newfoundland on the

evening of May 20, 1932. The date — the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight — had been chosen by her husband.

The flight set a new transatlantic record, but it could have ended tragically. As she flew at 12,000 feet, the altimeter suddenly failed. Then she ran into a violent thunderstorm. Ice covered the Vega and it dropped rapidly through the clouds. With no way to measure her altitude, Amelia barely kept from splashing into the sea. Next, a weld on the exhaust manifold broke. Flames shot from the crack and the plane began vibrating badly. And, in the last two hours of the trip, a fuel gauge leak dripped gasoline down her neck and filled the cockpit with sickening fumes. At the first sight of land, a ►

Charles Lindbergh (lower left), at Lambert Field, Saint Louis, Missouri. The Lone Eagle’s record-setting transatlantic solo flight was commemorated on U.S. postage stamps (clockwise from bottom left) in 1927, 1977, and 1998.

The Lockheed Vega 5B that Earhart used for her 1932 transatlantic flight is preserved in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

66 999 Kansas Characters • Ad Astra

MARTIN • Explorer, photographer, filmmaker, pilot, author • Lincoln, Indepen-dence • (1884–1937) • OSA • Explorer, photographer, pilot, author • Chanute • (1894–1953) • He was barely a teenager when he first left home, and she was a teen when they married several years later. For over two decades the daring pair traveled to far-off destinations, returning with photographs, movies, and artifacts to share with their fellow Kansans — and others interested in cultures around the world.

Martin Elmer Johnson was born in Rockford, Illinois, October 9, 1884. A year later, he and his family moved to Kansas, where his father ran a jewelry store in Lincoln.

As a boy, Martin loved fishing and swimming in the nearby Saline River — but school was pure drudgery. By the time he reached sixth grade, his grades were so poor in all subjects (except geography) that he was held back. At first, he was so ashamed he ran away from home, but he returned to school to face his problems with help from his mother.

In 1895 Johnson’s father moved his business and family to Independence. There he became a dealer for Eastman Kodak cameras and supplies, which sparked Martin’s lifelong interest in photography. His father encouraged him to set

up a darkroom and use materials from the store to develop film and print photographs.

Young Johnson took pictures of everything in sight, and when he saw posters that advertised a circus in Kansas City, he decided he wanted to photograph the wild animals. The thirteen-year-old packed his camera gear, slipped out his bedroom window in the night and climbed onto a north-bound Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe freight train. Unfor-tunately, the train was headed to Topeka, and by the time he traveled on to Kansas City the circus had moved to the next location on its schedule.

Martin and Osa Johnson Pursued and photographed the wild and exotic

Decades after their deaths, Martin and Osa Johnson’s influ-ence is still felt.

Their Safari Museum in Chanute has won numerous awards.

999 Kansas Characters • Ad Astra 67

Three years later, the young photographer loaded his equipment into a wagon and set out on a tour of eastern Kansas. He charged a penny apiece to take, develop, and print photographs. However, without free supplies from his father, he soon spent more than he took in. He ran out of money in Chanute, where one of the photographs he made was of a three-year-old boy dragged in by his sister, Osa Leighty. She was later to become Martin’s wife.

Back in Independence, Johnson was expelled from high school for faking photographs of several teachers embrac-ing and kissing. Embarrassed, he bought a train ticket for Chicago and left home with $1.20 in his pocket. In Chicago, he worked at various jobs, and then headed to Europe — on a bet that he couldn’t travel there and back using only the money he had on hand, $4.25. He won the bet, but didn’t return to collect it until he was twenty. He then helped his father until adventure called again.

Adventure calls • In 1906, Johnson signed on as cook on the Snark, a ship belonging to Jack London. Martin had convinced the noted writer that he could cook, which he could not. His secret was soon exposed, and when they made their first port in Honolulu, a real cook was hired. Johnson then became engineer. For nineteen months, he worked onboard the Snark as London circled the globe. In the South Pacific, Johnson gained experience with movie cameras as he helped French cameramen film island people.

He returned to the United States as a stowaway on a cattle boat, but residents in Independence greeted him as a hero. Soon he had rented a local theater to show a copy of the Frenchmen’s movie and some of the thousands of photo-graphs he had taken himself.

After a shaky start — he forgot his talk and the projector operator broke some of his glass slides — the travelogue idea caught on. Johnson took his show to neighboring towns and eventually opened two more theaters. Named “Snark Theater,” they were among the thousands of motion picture houses that sprang up in Kansas in the decade after 1900.

One evening in the spring of 1910, sixteen-year-old Osa Helen Leighty attended one of his shows. She had been born March 14, 1894, in nearby Chanute. In fact, she had spent all of her life there and had never traveled more than thirty miles from home. Except for their brief meeting at his photo studio years earlier, Osa knew nothing of this young adven-turer from Montgomery County, Kansas.

After they were introduced, she was even less impressed. Martin was “conceited” and his “cannibal pictures” were “horrible,” she later said. The next day, however, he drove Osa to Coffeyville in his car, her first automobile ride. They

dated for three weeks and were then married on the spur of the moment in Independence. On their honeymoon in Kansas City they were remarried by a judge in Mis-souri, thinking Osa’s father might try to annul their Kansas wedding.

The young bride had hopes of building a home and raising a family in her home state, but her husband felt differently. He wanted to tour with his lectures and films. They began in Colorado, and eventually presented programs in much of the United States, Canada, and England. By 1912 they had saved $4,000 to finance an expedition to the South Seas.

Exotic travels • For over twenty years, the Johnsons followed that pattern. They traveled to an exotic location and then put together lecture tours, films, and books to finance their next expedition. One of their trips to the South Seas was nearly Osa’s last. While visiting Chief Nagapate, a cannibal, he took a liking to her and made it plain he wanted Osa at his dinner table — as the main course. When their native guides deserted them and the chief’s men captured Martin, their situation seemed hopeless. Fortunately a British gunboat arrived and Nagapate and his men quickly retreated.

The Johnsons next traveled to unexplored parts of Borneo where curious natives examined Osa’s teeth, rubbed her skin, and tugged at her curly hair. The explorers spent a year on the remote island, but their movies were disappointing. ►

(Far left) Martin John-son on location for one of the Johnsons’ films, 1930s. (Left) Curious monkeys visited Osa Johnson while she wrote — or attempted to write —in one of their safari camps, 1930s.

Osa and Martin Johnson on Africa’s Serengeti Plains, 1920s.

In 2001 National Geographic’s Adventure Magazine named Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure as one of “The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time.”

40 999 Kansas Characters • Ad Astra

High-flying Jayhawk

Joseph ‘Joe’ EngleAstronaut, pilot, serviceman • Chapman, Lawrence • (Born 1932) • From an early age, Joseph Henry Engle wanted to fly.

‘‘I was always interested in airplanes, always sketching and drawing planes, and building model airplanes.’’—Joe Engle, 2001

When he wasn’t launching his home-made model planes out of upstairs win-dows, Joe enjoyed flights of fancy. Years later, he recalled the thrilling dives, twists, and loops he made in imaginary dogfights as he gazed up at the high ceiling of the Chapman Methodist church during sermons.

And Engle’s daydreams came true. After graduating from Dickinson County Community High School in 1951, he studied aeronautical engi-neering at the University of Kansas. He received his bs degree in 1955 and

three years later earned his pilot’s wings through the rotc program. In 1956 he married Mission Hills native Mary Catherine Lawrence in Kansas City.

The couple moved to California where Joe trained at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School. There he caught the attention of fellow pilot Chuck Yeager — the first human to fly faster than the speed of sound. The famed test pilot was commander of the new Aerospace Research Pilot School, established to train military astronauts. Calling Engle “one of the sharpest pilots” he knew, Yeager selected him for the x-15 program in 1963.

In three years, Engle made sixteen flights in the rocket-powered hyper-sonic plane. Ten flights reached speeds five times the speed of sound; his fastest flight hit a top speed of Mach 5.7 — or 3,886 miles per hour. And, when he took his x-15 to an altitude of 280,600 feet (just over fifty miles), Engle became one of only a handful of pilots to qualify for a military astronaut’s wings by flying an airplane into space. The thirty-two-year-old was the youngest man to achieve that status.

Based on his impressive flight record, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose Engle for its astronaut corps in 1966. With his x-15 experience, he was the first and only nasa recruit to have previ-ously flown in space. And after his first space shuttle mission, he became the first astronaut to fly into space in two different winged vehicles. He was later recognized as one of the most experi-enced pilots to become an astronaut.

During his nasa career, Colo-nel Engle took part in America’s moon-landing program. He was the backup lunar module pilot for the Apollo 14 mission, and was sched-uled to fly as the lunar module pilot on Apollo 17 with fellow Kansas astronaut Ronald “Ron” Evans. Unfortunately, budget cuts in the 1970s eliminated the last three moon landings and Engle was bumped from his moon flight in favor of a nasa geologist.

Joe moved on to America’s next space program and

Engle piloted the shuttle Columbia (right) on its second flight into orbit on November 12, 1981.

Joe Engle flew sixteen test flights in the hypersonic x-15 aircraft.

commanded one of two crews that flew the new space shuttle’s approach and landing test flights in 1977. Released from atop a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, Engle and other astronauts checked the Enterprise’s airworthiness in making glide landings before it was launched into earth orbit.

Then when Columbia, the first shut-tle to return to space, made its second orbital flight in November 1981, Engle was at the pilot’s controls. Always the test pilot, the Kansan overrode the onboard computers and manually flew the Columbia from its reentry into the atmosphere at Mach 25 to a successful landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He performed twenty-nine flight test maneuvers on the way down, saying that he felt nasa needed more information on the shuttle’s flight capa-bilities before further missions.

On his second space flight in August 1985, Engle commanded the shuttle Discovery. This twentieth mission in the program carried and successfully deployed three satellites. Before their seven-day flight ended, Commander Engle and his crew were the first astronauts to retrieve an ailing satellite, repair it in space, and return it to orbit.

When Engle retired from the usaf and nasa in 1986, he continued flying, becoming a brigadier general in the Kansas Air National Guard. He maintains ties to family and friends in the Sunflower State. After the death of his first wife, he married Jean Carter of Houston in 2007.

During his career he flew over 185 different types of aircraft and logged 224 hours in space. After retiring, he remained in Houston and worked as a consultant and adviser for safety issues on the International Space Station.

Joe Engle’s impressive list of awards includes the usaf Distinguished Flying Cross (1964, 1978), nasa Distinguished Service Medal (1981), Air Force Asso-ciation David Shilling Award (1981), Kansan of the Year (1981), and ku Distinguished Service Award (1982). He was installed into the Kansas Avia-tion Hall of Fame in 1992. In 2001 he was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame as well as the U.S. Astro-naut Hall of Fame. ■

Engle–Evans

999 Kansas Characters • Ad Astra 41

Flew farthest from Kansas

Ronald ‘Ron’ EvansAstronaut, pilot, serviceman, business executive • Saint Francis, Topeka, Lawrence • (1933–1990) • “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” said Dorothy Gale to her dog Toto in the classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. But this familiar line might have been written for Kansas-born astronaut Ronald Ellwin Evans Jr.

As command module pilot on Apollo 17, America’s sixth manned flight to the moon, Captain Evans set a not-in-Kansas-anymore world record by traveling about 245,400 miles away from his native state.

During that mission in December 1972, Evans also set a record for time spent in lunar orbit — 147 hours, 48 minutes in the command module America. For most of that period, he was alone while his two fellow astronauts landed the Challenger lunar module and explored the moon’s surface in a lunar rover. They traveled a total of twenty miles in their “moon buggy,” gathered 249 pounds of moon rock samples, con-ducted seismological experiments, and left equipment in place to take readings from the lunar surface.

Ron Evans (above) before his Apollo 17 mission. Evans (left) during his sixty-six-minute spacewalk in 1972.

Before his death, Evans was a long-time supporter of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. He helped raise funds for several building projects, and always took time to give telephone inter-views to the KCSC’s Young Astronaut Training classes in the summer.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration termed Apollo 17 the most productive and trouble-free of America’s six manned moon land-ings — but it was the last in the series. Cuts to nasa’s budget caused the cancellation of three more planned missions.

On Apollo 17’s return flight to Earth, Evans spent sixty-six minutes outside the America, retrieving three film cas-settes and inspecting the spacecraft. He was awed and excited when he left the ship and began his spacewalk:

‘‘Hot-diggety-dog!’’— Ron Evans, beginning his Apollo 17 spacewalk, 1972

Evans was born in Saint Frances where his father managed a grain eleva-tor. The family later moved to Topeka where Ron graduated from Highland Park High School (1951). He earned a bs in electrical engineering at the University of Kansas (1956) and an ms in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California (1964).

After serving in the Vietnam War, Evans was selected for the astronaut program in 1966. Apollo 17 was his only spaceflight, although he was the backup command module pilot for the

1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission (the first joint U.S.-Soviet space flight).

Evans retired from the U.S. Navy in 1976 after twenty-one years of service. He spent another year at nasa working with the space shuttle program, then became a coal industry executive. He later worked with Western American Energy Corporation in Scottsdale, Arizona, and was Director of Space Systems Marketing for Sperry Flight Systems, Phoenix. He died of a heart attack at his Scottsdale home.

Ron Evans was named Kansan of the Year in 1972. Other honors included Navy Astronaut Wings, eight Air Medals, the Vietnam Service Medal, the nasa Distinguished Service Medal (1973), and University of Kansas Dis-tinguished Service Citation (1973). ■

This “Blue Marble” view of Earth as photographed from Apollo 17 is said to be one of the most widely-distributed images in existence.

999 Kansas Characters • Ad Astra 43

Lasting legacy • David Fair-child was instrumental in planting the now-famous Japanese flower-ing cherry trees in Washington, D.C. In 1906 he imported a hun-dred cherry trees from a nursery in Japan and planted them at his home in nearby Maryland. Pleased with the results, the next year he began promoting them as

Explored the plant world

David FairchildBotanist, author • Manhattan • (1869–1954) • Plant explorer David Grandison Fairchild made a significant impact on plants now grown in America — and also helped create lasting symbols of natural beauty in the District of Columbia and the state of Florida.

Fairchild was born in East Lansing, Michigan, and moved to Manhat-tan at the age of ten when his father became the third president of Kansas State Agricultural College (later ksu). David gradu-ated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from ksac (1888, 1889) and went on to graduate studies at the Uni-versity of Iowa and Rutgers University.

Early in the 1890s he became a plant explorer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In his work he traveled the world to collect plants that might be of com-mercial or aesthetic value if grown in the United States. Through the usda’s Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction — that he helped establish in 1897 and later led (1904–1928) — Fairchild was

responsible for the introduction of over 20,000 exotic plants and crop varieties in the U.S. New species he brought included bamboo, Chinese soybeans, pistachios, dates, nectarines, avocados, East Indian mangoes, horseradish, and several alfalfa varieties.

Dr. Fairchild wrote a number of books about his botany expeditions and expertise, including his 1938 autobiog-raphy, The World Was My Garden.

In 1917 Fairchild and his family began spending winters in Coconut Grove, Florida. They later built a home there that they named “The Kampong,” meaning

“a cluster of houses” in the Malay language. When he retired in the 1930s it became their permanent home.

Fairchild also established several plant introduction sites in Florida, and in 1938 cofounded the Fairchild Tropi-cal Botanical Garden in Coral Gables, named for him. The botanist who grew up in Kansas also was key in the move-ment to establish Everglades National Park. He was the first president of the Tropical Everglades Park Association and was pleased when the park was eventually established in 1947.

David Fairchild’s wife was the former Marian “Daisy” Bell, the younger daugh-ter of telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell.

The couple met in Washington, D.C., in 1903 and were married two years later. Their son, Alexander Graham Bell Fairchild, was a noted entomologist in Panama.

David Fairchild (far left) distributing small handheld lenses to his grand-children and some of their friends, 1946.

In 2012 the cherry trees in the nation’s capital were featured on stamps (below) that marked the centennial of their planting.

ful pink and white blossoms each spring.

When racism flourished during World War II, the Japa-nese cherry trees were temporarily referred to as “Oriental.” As part of its rebuilding process after the war, in 1952 Japan requested help from the U.S. in replacing trees from the original grove that had been damaged. The National Park Service shipped budwood from the American descendants of the trees to restore the original cherry grove in Japan. ■

an ideal tree to grow in the area.On Arbor Day 1908 Dr. Fairchild

gave cherry saplings to each school in the District of Columbia. During a speech delivered that day, he proposed that a “field of cherries” be planted along important avenues in the city. In the audience was Eliza Scidmore, a local woman who had suggested a similar idea in 1885. Encouraged by Fairchild’s message, she enlisted the help of First Lady Helen Taft. After two false starts, the program was underway.

The first saplings were pur-chased from a Pennsylvania nurs-ery in 1909. After they were set out, however, it was discovered they had been mislabeled and weren’t cherry trees at all.

In early 1910 two thousand genuine cherry trees, a gift of the City of Tokyo, arrived in Washing-ton. But they were diseased and had to be destroyed.

Again, Japan gifted cherry trees to the U.S., this time 3,020 of a dozen varieties. The first of them were placed along the Potomac River in March 1912.

They were the beginning of plantings that still fill the center of historic Washington with beauti-

42 999 Kansas Characters • Ad Astra

Pioneered preventive breast cancer screenings

Carol FabianOncologist, hematologist, medical researcher, educator • Kansas City, Law-rence, Fairway, Westwood • (Born 1946) • Many breast cancer survivors are alive today, often living ten years or longer after their initial diagnosis, in part because of the research Carol Jo Fabian has done throughout her four decades of practicing medicine and conducting medical research in Kansas.

Fabian, who grew up in the Kansas City area, began her medical career in the mid 1970s, when women diagnosed with breast cancer often received sur-gery and radiation as treatment. But in more than forty percent of the women, the cancer returned in a short time.

Fabian believed there had to be a better way. She was “emotionally devastated,” she later recalled, when she watched young women who had

done everything right by medical standards — screening mammograms, extensive therapy — and they still suc-cumbed to cancer.

She began to realize that no matter how early the cancer was detected or how aggressively it was treated, some women were genetically predetermined to contract it.

By the 1980s, drugs were also being used to combat the cancer — but the side effects could be debilitating. She turned her focus to prevention and became the leader in performing serial biopsies — a technique known as “random periareolar fine needle aspiration.”

It was controversial. When she pioneered the procedure in the 1990s, the common thinking was that breasts were fatty tissue and should be

penetrated by a needle only to detect a tumor. By using an extremely fine needle and inserting it into the breast, Fabian discovered she could take a few cells and then examine them for atypical cells and molecular markers of cancer — years before the cancer showed itself in the body.

“The idea of cancer prevention is to prevent the disease altogether or block it before it grows beyond the precan-cerous stage,” Fabian said.

She became a national and interna-tional expert on breast cancer.

‘‘If we could predict which women were more likely to get cancer in the next five years, they would be most likely to have the best benefit-to-side-effect ratio with preventive therapy.’’ —Carol Fabian, 2010

Fabian became interested in a sci-ence career during her early days in college. She was attracted first to psy-chology and then microbiology before settling on medicine.

She received her bs (1967) from ku and md (1972) from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Kansas City. It was while completing an oncol-ogy fellowship in 1977 that she was drawn to breast cancer. There were few women oncologists at the time, and breast cancer patients were often referred to her. At that point she joined the ukmc as an assistant professor. She was named a professor in 1987 and served as director of the Breast Cancer Prevention Center and Breast Cancer Survivorship Center; she was the founder of both.

In 2004 she was awarded Chair of the Kansas Masonic Endowed Research. She has served on scientific program committees for the Ameri-can Society of Clinical Oncology and American Association for Cancer Research, as well as scientific advisory boards for the Susan G. Komen Foun-dation and National Cancer Institute. She received continuous funding from the nci for over twenty years.

Fabian has been a reviewer and editorial board member of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention, and the Journal of Oncology.

Dr. Carol Fabian’s research has also taken her into linking diet and obesity to cancer — and how weight loss and the use of flaxseed can help in combat-ing the deadly disease. She has been named one of the best doctors in Amer-ica by Ladies Home Journal and Redbook magazines. In 2011 she was one of 150 Kansas scientists recognized by the Ad Astra Kansas Initiative in conjunction with the state’s sesquicentennial. ■

Carol Fabian, 2006.

Fabian–Fairchild

999 KANSAS CHARACTERSA biographical series

AD ASTRA161 Adventurers, astronauts, discoverers,

explorers, pilots, pioneers, scientists

Our newest book is off the press and available for sale! First in a planned series, 999 Kansas Characters: Ad Astra features encyclopedia-style articles about 161 people with connections to the Sunflower State. Colorfully illustrated with photographs and artwork, this volume includes well-known Kansas characters — George Washington Carver, Amelia Earhart, Martin and Osa Johnson, and the Sternberg family — plus dozens of others you’ll want to meet. Coming later in 2015: 999 Kansas Characters: Movers & Shakers!

144 pages, 9 x 12 inches, illustrated, indexed, with an extensive bibliography.AD ASTRA is available in both softcover (retail $24.95) and hardcover ($34.95).KANSAS HERITAGE CENTER, PO Box 1207, Dodge City, Kansas 67801-1207 620-227-1616

NEW! for your library!