Volume 20, Number 4,
April 1974:
With These Two Hands

Text-only version

ISSUE HOME PAGE

ABOUT THIS ISSUE
- about KSN

IN THIS ISSUE
- section 1
- section 2
- section 3
- section 4
- section 5
- section 6
- section 7
- section 8
- section 9
- section 10
- conclusion

With These Two Hands
by Robert J.Boles

continued...

As Richard’s museum collection became better known, the great number of visitors began to affect the privacy of his family, so the problem was temporarily solved by moving the specimens into an empty room with an outside entrance. Visitors could then come and go with less disruption to their family life. Not only relatives and friends came, but many high schools and colleges began to book tours to the little farm museum. One visitor asked Richard if he had ever mounted a pink elephant. The young man, unfamiliar with the slang for one of the hallucinations of a drunkard, seriously replied, "No, but if you will catch me one, I’ll try to do the job."

The Schmidt family became adjusted to the visits of students, oil men, doctors, and distinguished professors and ministers, but an invitation to speak before the Canton Lyons Club in the spring of 1931 came as a distinct shock. What does a young, unsophisticated country taxidermist say to a group of city businessmen, especially when they were drowsy after a meal? Some of that first attempt did "fall flat," but since then hundreds of people over the state of Kansas will recall seeing Richards folding, seven-foot-wide display case, filled with examples of his work, including many of the interesting birds that pass through the state. The speaking engagements were educational and entertaining, and more and more groups requested him to present his program in Kansas and neighboring states.

Richard’s gentlemanly manner, his patience with young people, and his knowledge of the outdoors resulted in invitations to work as an instructor at various summer camps, so that for some fifteen years he tried the nearly impossible task of camping out with young people, sometimes for weeks at a time, and operating a farm as well. It took a loving and devoted wife to handle many of the farm chores, which often included milking eight or ten cows in 100 degree weather, while her husband was in the Colorado Rockies working with young people.