The Day Stanley Parsons Met The President
From NY to Medicine Lodge to Hutchinson
A welcome sighting of the scarce Whangdoodle
Poor Mrs. Parsons, how could she have known?
synopsis by Johnny Kansas
It was the author Tom McNeal who “remarked in passing that Stan was generally well to the front of the procession” but he was not referring to the day when Stanley met the President.
Well before that day, Stan had instead become acquainted “with a brand of liquor of far-reaching and intensive power” found in towns like 1870’s Medicine Lodge inside the “great free ranges of the west.”
The frontier men who drank it “were apt to acquire a new variety of delirium tremens, under the influence of which their diseased imaginations not only beheld ordinary reptiles but prehistoric monsters - ichthyo-sauruses, dynastidans, pterodactyls, and mournful whangdoodles from the mountains of Hepsidam.” It was the front of that procession of men to which Mr. McNeil referred in his book, When Kansas Was Young.
Read the tale of Stanley Parsons in "Didn't Recollect the President" by Thomas Allen McNeal.
