You are in Liberal, Kansas
 

B. H. Fairchild’s book of poetry Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest mentions the city Liberal, Kansas as one of the poet’s childhood hometowns in “The Big Bands: Liberal, Kansas, Summer of 1955” and “The Second Annual Wizard of Oz Reunion in Liberal, Kansas.” But where is this town where big bands play and “munchkins” from the Land of Oz visit the residences of the F. Nightingale Retirement Home? What is this town’s history and what in this town has inspired some of the poems in Fairchild’s collection?

Liberal, Kansas, which gets its name from the liberality of the original inhabitants, began primarily as a farming and cattle community in 1888. Liberal is located in Seward County in the southwest corner of the state near the Cimarron River and owes its existence primarily to the railroad and to the discovery of natural gas around the area in the 1920s. Liberal is just west of the Hugoton Gas Field which is the largest gas reserve in the world. The economy is primarily retail and natural gas, but it also has extensive agricultural and cattle investments.

Interestingly, Liberal has some claim to fame as the home of the Seward County 5-State Fair and the Land of Oz attraction. Liberal also holds an annual Pancake Day race and festival in which the women of the town, all carrying pancake skillets, race to a designated finish line against the women of Olney, England. This particular race takes place on Shrove Tuesday, commonly called “Fat Tuesday” in the South, and has been run competitively against Olney since 1950. The Seward County 5-State Fair is particularly intriguing because it attracts guests and artists from Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, as well as Kansas. The events in the fair are telling examples of some of the imagery in Fairchild’s poems, more specifically the Native American imagery and the big band music which may have been based upon visiting tribes, musicians, and artists the poet may have seen as a child at the 5-State Fair.

The Land of Oz attraction mentioned in Fairchild’s poem is particularly interesting as one of Liberal’s main tourist attractions and as a main subject for Fairchild’s poems. Judging from the title of Fairchild’s poem “The Second Annual Wizard of Oz Reunion in Liberal, Kansas” and his description of the reunion, it may be safe to assume that he is describing the city of Liberal’s OzFest which is a celebration of anything and everything Wizard of Oz during the second week of October. OzFest celebrates Dorothy’s safe return home to Kansas, which makes Fairchild’s poem all the more significant in its emphasis on the inability of a person to return to the home he or she remembers. The speaker does not return to find Liberal or its inhabitants the way they once were, nor does he have the “courage, brain, nor heart to find his way back home again” because both he and the town are essentially changed. Having been changed through life experience, the speaker has only his memory of Liberal on which to look back, and Liberal is not the town the speaker remembers because it is not bound to his memory.

--Dana Morency