With Clare, her being from Kansas and writing about Kansas and loving Kansas and all, I got to reminisce about Mike Printz, who ran an oral history project with his Topeka West High teens, documenting the lives of famous Kansans. (We did an SLJ article together called "E.T.'s Mom Phones...

It was a dark and stormy night. The little car twisted and turned through the howling wind as it raced through the rapidly flooding streets of Wichita, hoping desperately to make it to the hospital in time. It was November 6, 1964. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t dark or stormy,...