Mulvane, Kansas, Here I Come...Right Back Where I Started From...

If you've ever been associated with California in any way...say one of your former students was a porn star (true, in my case), or you've ever been shipped out of San Francisco to war (true of my dad and Larry Richardson), or you've had the curiosity to go see the stage production of Beach Blanket Babylon ( a can't miss!), you are familiar with one of the most famous landmarks in the United States: the Golden Gate Bridge. This 1.7 mile long structure is truly a compliment to the ingenuity of mankind. Anyone who's ever been near just HAS to go across it, whether in a car, on a bike or on foot, most of whom actually make it all the way across. I travelled across on foot/bike, and it was truly amazing. To see huge ships passing below that looked like HO scale models, or watch helicopters fly underneath the bridge were spectacles not to be believed. An oddity, though, were the number of emergency hotline phones, placed there just in case someone wanted to make a desperate last plea for help before plunging to a certain death...really...the are EVERYWHERE along the span...mostly because there is nothing to stop someone who is even moderately agile from stepping over the rail and into space. Seriously, you would think there would be high bars, fences or rails to discourage folks like there are on the Empire State Building (you'd have to be a monkey to get over those things to fall 105 stories or so...but then, I guess a pancake-like body would be more disruptive on the sidewalk than it would in San Francisco Bay. But, that's not the point of my story. Larry Richardson is the point of my story...his bridge and the one degree of separation between it and me.
Richardson, of Mulvane, Kansas, had a dream about the Golden Gate Bridge. He wanted to see it and wanted to have it. His only exposure came as he was bused across it on his way to a deployment in Viet Nam. There was something about the magnificence of the structure that enthralled him. Not having the wherewithal ( I guess) to go there again, Larry built his own version.
He began 21 years ago on the 150-foot span over Cowskin Creek on his property just outside of Mulvane, a bug about 20 miles from Wichita. Over 11 years, he salvaged usable material, enlisted family help and spent $5,000 before finishing 10 years ago. Not an engineer by trade, Richardson noted that he "...had no blueprints. I just worked off the picture on a postcard."
Now THAT'S the kind of Yankee know-how that won us our place as leaders in this world!
As the original celebrates its 75th anniversary next year, Larry's will be 10 years old, and like the more famous of the two, his version still attracts visitors...having been visited once by The Today Show and still popular enough to get folks visiting from out of town as well as visitors who've made multiple trips from the Mulvane Senior Center.
I just gotta go back. Why back?
I began my teaching career in Mulvane in 1972: an eager 20-year-old, recently-married and only slightly-older-than-my-students teacher. My career there was somewhat short-lived (seriously, how many hyphenated words can I out in one blog?), but I will always remember it as the place where my dreams were as big as Larry Richardson's.
Go, Wildcats, and you go, Larry!_