Arkansas City

Oh.

So for, like, a week, we went on bare bones management staff, and the rest of us had to-- We did work a little more, but we worked in the Arkansas City store, not down in New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina, August twenty-ninth, two thousand and five.

Estimated economic damage, a hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars.

I started writing historical crime fiction years ago, about 2016.

My wife's late uncle lived in a small town in Kansas called Arkansas City.

Anyone outside of Kansas will call it Arkansas City.

We call it Arkansas City.

This small town was known for having underground tunnels that were built during the days of the Prohibition era, the gangsters would hide out down there, go from building to building, hide their booze.

And it was also referred to as Little Chicago because a lot of the gangsters from the big cities, when they were trying to escape and hide out, came to places like southeastern Kansas or northeastern Oklahoma.

Oh.

Arkansas City.

Cheese.

Cheese.

So five years later in October of 1916, two men falsely claiming to be McCurdy's brothers persuaded Johnson to release the body for what they said would be, uh, he would be buried in San Francisco, California.

Instead, McCurdy was shipped to Arkansas City, Kansas, where, uh, James and Charles Patterson exhibited him as the outlaw who would never be captured alive with the Great Patterson Carnival Shows, and he was a traveling carny, you know? So after learning about the popular exhibit, the brothers had devised a scheme to obtain McCurdy by posing as his long lost sibling, and McCurdy remained, uh, with the Patterson Carnival until 1922 when James Patterson sold the operation to showman Louis Sonney.

Uh, over the next three decades, McCurdy appeared in a variety of traveling exhibitions and, uh, across the United States.

So Sonney, uh, e- displayed him in the Museum of Crime alongside wax figures of well-known outlawing, outlaws, including Bill Doolin and Jesse James.

Calluses stopped at first.

They're here from Arkansas City, Kansas.

Arkansas City, Kansas.

Arkansas City, Kansas.

Anyway, they're from Kansas.

We also hear from Kirkwood.