An oil boom in 1937 may well be the reason Lonnie McCarty is in Great Bend today. 

He was born in 1934 and his dad, who worked in the oilfield, moved the family from eastern Kansas to Holyrood in 1939. “I’ve got a picture of Chase, Kansas, in ’37, at the height of the oil boom,” he said.

McCarty did his share of work in the oil field as a teenager, even though he had polio in 1943. That year, he was one of many polio patients assigned to the third floor or the basement at Grace Hospital in Hutchinson.

“I basically got off scot-free,” McCarty says of his battle with polio, even though one of his legs is now shorter than the other. “There was a kid in my room, one little boy, it just mangled his body. I’ll never forget.”

Always independent, McCarty said his shorter leg didn’t stop him from working on an oilfield pulling unit on Saturdays and Sundays during school and for a couple of summers. There were no insurance laws that kept boys from doing that dangerous job back then, he said. “We worked daylight to dark.”

After graduating from Holyrood High School with 18 other seniors, he considered his next move. A career in the oil business didn’t appeal to him. It turned out that his first career choice, while safer and less physically demanding, also had periods of boom and bust.

Changing hairstyles

“A barber from Holyrood talked me into going to barber school,” he said. The nine months he spent at barber school in Kansas City in 1954 were the longest he’s ever lived away from the Golden Belt.

“I worked for a guy in Holyrood for about two months, and then I got a job in Ellinwood and I was a barber there for about 13 years,” he said. “I enjoyed it.”

But, “The long hair came in and forced us out of business in 1968,” he said. “If you got a kid in once a year you were doing good. The boys all had hair down to here,” he said, pointing to his shoulders. That year, seven Barton County barbers went out of business.

During his years as a barber, McCarty met his first wife at a football game in Ellinwood. Later, when he switched from cutting hair to selling insurance, he met his wife Martha.

McCarty had his own insurance company in Ellinwood for 37 years. Martha was one of his clients but she’d signed up through his secretary. It was only when she needed to file a claim that they got to know each other.

“A girl made an illegal U-turn and hit the side of her car, and she had to go see her insurance man,” he said. “The secretary told her to go on back and see me. That’s the way we met. We’ve been married — we’re on our 32nd year.”

Still active

The McCartys moved to Great Bend about seven years ago. His sister Kay Kratzer lives in Holyrood and his son Michael has an accounting business here in Great Bend. His other son, Kevin, lives in Bennington and his daughter Jan lives near Salina.

These days, Lonnie and Martha like to travel. He enjoys driving, but they have also taken several bus trips out of the county and have flown to other countries. Asked which destination was the most beautiful, his choice is New Zealand. “It’s just like a garden.”

But he also drives all over Kansas, and it was a recent road trip that brought him to the Great Bend Tribune office this past week. He noticed that everywhere they went, from Hays to Garnett in eastern Kansas, the gas was at least 20 cents a gallon cheaper than anything they could find in Barton County. “Why is it so high?” he asks.

Whatever the reason, he’s not going to let it slow him down. 

Community Connections is a regular feature of the Great Bend Tribune. We welcome readers to submit names of individuals they would like to see featured in a future story. Send suggestions to news@gbtribune.com and explain their “community connections.”