A Nostalgic Touch of Humor
| Publication year | 2013 |
| Pages | 12 |
| Citation | Vol. 82 No. 2 Pg. 12 |
A Nostalgic Touch of Humor
Larned State Hospital: Urban Legend in Johnson County
By Matthew Keenan, Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP, Kansas City, Mo., mkeenan@shb.com
Editor's note: The KBA Journal returns to the time capsule and reprints one of the Keenans classics ... Psycho Santa ...
Most parents, at some point, become skilled at story telling. Lawyers, particularly trial lawyers, are even more adept at this art. In the former case, the audience may start as toddlers, but eventually they become teenagers. It's my experience that the toughest audience are teenage boys. They can be living, breathing skeptics of most things that any father wants to sell them. So as both a parent and a litigator, I refined my art and discovered the best stories were ones that had an undeniable part of truth, with a sprinkle of fiction, which also had the potential to scare the heck out of them.
Now, as you may know, growing up in western Kansas always provides the inventory of tornado stories, which dovetails nicely with the "Wizard of Oz." The best stories were, without question, ones that arose from Larned and that city's largest employer, Larned State Hospital (LSH). LSH was real, of course, having been established in 1914 to provide care and treatment for the mentally ill in the western half of Kansas, but gained additional responsibilities with the opening of State Security Hospital in 1939.
So Larned is where the truly crazy people were sent. And calling it a hospital added to the mystique. That moniker conjures up notions of prisoners coming and going through waiting rooms, showing their insurance cards, and then heading out of the emergency room to do more violence. And in truth from time to time people would "escape" from the place and head to the nearest "big town" ― Great Bend. For some reason, they would take off on those days when my two brothers and I were out on the town for nine to 10 hours, taking care of whatever business occupied us that day. That happened pretty much every day.
Based on my own focus groups, there were always a couple stories that were true home runs. One was the night my older brother, Tim, and I were fishing in the Walnut Creek, adjacent to the hospital. The same night, some prisoners decided to take a stroll outside the prison boundaries for some hands-on clinical research. We were clueless. We were...
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