KSKansas Famous People

The president Kansas raised but did not produce

No US president has been born inside Kansas. Dwight D. Eisenhower, president from 1953 to 1961, was born in Denison, Texas, on October 14, 1890, and his family moved to Abilene when he was about two. He graduated from Abilene High School in 1909, and after commanding the Allied landings in Normandy he chose that same cattle town of roughly 6,500 people for his presidential library. He, Mamie and their firstborn son are buried in the meditation chapel on the grounds.

Kansas has done better one rung down. Charles Curtis was born in Topeka on January 25, 1860, spent part of his childhood on the Kaw reservation with his mother's family, and served as Herbert Hoover's vice president from 1929 to 1933, the only person of acknowledged Native American ancestry ever to hold that office. Bob Dole, born in Russell on July 22, 1923, lost the use of his right arm to German machine gun fire in Italy in April 1945, ran the Senate for much of the 1980s and 1990s, and took the Republican nomination in 1996.

Amelia Earhart and the Wichita aircraft trade

Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in her grandparents' house on the bluff above the Missouri River in Atchison. The building survives as a museum. She flew the Atlantic alone in May 1932 and disappeared over the Pacific in July 1937 while attempting to circle the globe.

Wichita calls itself the Air Capital for reasons that come down to three men who worked within a few blocks of each other. Clyde Cessna, who farmed in Kingman County, taught himself to fly in 1911 by crashing repeatedly on the Salt Plains before building his company in Wichita. Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman worked alongside him there during the 1920s before founding firms of their own, which is why three of the best known names in light aviation all trace back to one Kansas city.

Gordon Parks, Langston Hughes and the Kansas page

Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott on November 30, 1912, the youngest of fifteen children. He bought his first camera in a pawnshop, became the first Black staff photographer at Life magazine in 1948, and directed Shaft in 1971. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902 but spent most of his childhood in Lawrence with his grandmother Mary Langston, whose first husband died at Harpers Ferry alongside John Brown.

William Allen White ran the Emporia Gazette from 1895 until his death in 1944 and won a Pulitzer in 1923 for an editorial defending free speech during a railroad strike. Damon Runyon, born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1880, wrote the Broadway stories that were adapted into Guys and Dolls.

Kansans on screen and on record

Hattie McDaniel was born in Wichita on June 10, 1893, and in 1940 became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award, seated at a segregated table at the ceremony. Buster Keaton was born in Piqua on October 4, 1895, into his parents' vaudeville act. Charlie Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas, on August 29, 1920, and grew up across the state line, where the Reno Club scene taught him the harmony bebop was built on. Ed Asner was also born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1929. Dennis Hopper came out of Dodge City, Melissa Etheridge out of Leavenworth, Kirstie Alley out of Wichita, and Janelle Monae out of Kansas City, Kansas.

Athletes, and the farm boy who found Pluto

Clyde Tombaugh grew up on a farm near Burdett, ground telescope mirrors from cast off machinery parts, and posted his drawings of Jupiter and Mars to Lowell Observatory on the chance someone would read them. They hired him, and on February 18, 1930, at 24, he found Pluto. Vernon L. Smith, born in Wichita in 1927, shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for experimental market work.

Barry Sanders was born in Wichita on July 16, 1968. Lynette Woodard, also from Wichita, captained the gold medal Olympic basketball team in 1984 and in 1985 became the first woman to play for the Harlem Globetrotters. One name gets misfiled constantly: James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts, then coached at the University of Kansas from 1898 and is buried in Lawrence. He is still the only head coach in the program's history with a losing record.

Questions people ask about famous Kansans

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