To subscribe for FREE call 316-942-5385
Vol 45 No. 4
Inside: Win a makeover with Bonnie Bing
www.theactiveage.com Kansas’ Largest Newspaper
March 2024
VA garden offers peace, produce
By Annie Calovich Laura Nutter was turning the soil for a new garden on the grounds of the VA hospital when it already started to accomplish its goal. Richard Manning, a Marine
ACTIVE AGING PUBLISHING, INC 125 S West St., Suite 105 Wichita, Ks 67213
Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Wichita, KS 67276 Permit 1711
Laura Nutter started the VA hospital garden to honor her father, an Air Force veteran.
veteran, was going through counseling in Building 5 at the hospital at the time and would come outside and sit on a step overlooking the then-empty plot. “I didn’t know it was a peace garden or anything else," said Manning, who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. "I would sit and contemplate and try to digest everything I’d just been through." Eleven years and thousands of pounds of tomatoes and potatoes later, the garden just inside the east entrance of the hospital has helped not only Manning — who gardens there now — but other veterans who rest there, get fresh produce or do a little gardening themselves. It also gives their families and grateful benefactors a place to honor them and VA employees a place to relax. “It’s the best-kept secret at the VA,” Nutter’s husband, Mark, said of the Robert J. Dole VA Memorial Peace Garden. He spearheads the sale of $50 bricks that honor living and deceased veterans and that help pay for the garden. The bricks form a Circle of Honor within it. “Our mission is to help veterans through therapeutic gardening,” Laura See Garden, page 6
Photo by Fernando Salazar
Larry and Cathy Mong have called south central Wichita home since the early 2000s.
South central at crossroads
Could neighborhood ease housing crunch?
By Joe Stumpe As lovers of all things old, Larry and Cathy Mong were thrilled with the home they bought for $50,000 in Wichita 23 years ago: a 1906 Victorian in south central Wichita, less than a mile from the heart of downtown. The neighborhood was a little rough, but the Mongs had seen similar neighborhoods in the Dallas-
Fort Worth area go through the gentrification process. “We thought in five to 10 years it would be like downtown Dallas, but it isn’t,” Larry Mong said. In fact, in some respects it seems to have declined. When they moved in, Larry remembers, every home on the block was occupied by owners or
See South central, page 14
WSU prof preserves history of black-owned businesses
By Amy Geiszler-Jones When Robert Weems Jr. joined the faculty of the Wichita State history department in 2011, one of his first research projects was to document some of the city’s black entrepreneurs and their businesses. People like the Rev. John Henry Van Leu who at the turn of the century was one of the largest landowners in Wichita. Van Leu owned a department store and an office building on North Main that housed several early Black-owned businesses in Wichita including Jackson Mortuary. As part of a series of Black History Month presentations at the Advanced Learning Library, Weems — who is the See History, page 7
L.K. Hughes Photography operated for four decades, primarily documenting Wichita's black community in photos like this one.
Questions about services?
Central Plains Area Agency on Aging/Sedgwick County Department on Aging: 1-855-200-2372
Butler County: (316) 775-0500 or 1-800-279-3655 Harvey County: (316) 284-6880 or 1-800-279-3655