![]() KCUR 89.3 Marcus Allen (El Dean Holthus' great nephew) pulled a hay-ride trailer at the Home on the Range Spring Celebration in Smith Center. Holthus has other ideas for the property, including a shelter house and an outdoor stage, so the community has organized events and concerts by cowboy performers such as Michael Martin Murphey to raise money. Now, twenty miles outside of Smith Center, down what's now the official Home on the Range Highway, the cabin's open to visitors every day from sunup to sundown. Over the last few years, Holthus' family members and others in Smith Center have restored the cabin and cleared walking paths around 13 acres of wild, rugged land on the banks of West Beaver Creek. There were times Uncle Pete and Aunt Ellen could have sold it," he says, ticking off the names of attractions such as Knotts Berry Farm in California and Pioneer Village in Nebraska – whose founder, Holthus says, presented his aunt and uncle with a blank check for the place, which they just slid back across the table.Įllen Rust died in December 2008, and now the property is managed by a non-profit. "Then in 1947, the Kansas Legislature made it the State Song of Kansas. "It was always known in this area that it was the Higley cabin, and that he had written the song," Holthus says. KCUR 89.3 El Dean Holthus tells Home on the Range Cabin visitors that they are gathered in area Brewster Higley would have seen when he looked out from his dugout and wrote 'Home on the Range.' His homestead eventually ended up as the property of Holthus's aunt and uncle, Ellen and Pete Rust. Higley, who had "an addiction to liquor" (according to Mechem), lost three wives and some children to illness and injuries in Indiana before abandoning his fourth wife there and heading to Kansas, where he appears to have found the peace and quiet that inspired his poem, later set to music by another local man named Dan Kelly.Ī few years after writing his poem, Higley married his fifth wife and in 1886 the couple moved to Arkansas Higley died in Oklahoma in 1911. (Higley actually wrote the song a year before he built his cabin, but that seems to be a technicality at this point.) Moanfeldt kept looking farther back, until he came to a poem by a doctor named Brewster Higley, written in 1871 while he was holed up in a dug-out on his homestead near Smith Center. Brewster Higley wrote the poem that became 'Home on the Range.' The Chiefs open the 2023 NFL Season on Thursday Night Football as Kansas City hosts the Detroit Lions.Credit, Kansas State Historical Society, copy and reuse restrictions apply. "Right, we're just opening up to this new reality show episode one, 2023, and who knows, but that's why I've got a little nervousness in my stomach right now." "Here we go, we don't know what's going to happen," Holthus said. These iconic phrases are forever engraved in the minds of Chiefs Kingdom, and the Chiefs have a chance to do it again. "Coach would hold it and his reflections in there, or Clark would hold it, and Patrick, I thought 'that's it.' For the second time in four years, the Lombardi trophy has a red and gold reflection, a big red reflection," Holthus said. Then came the second iconic call Holthus would make at Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Arizona, when the Chiefs defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35. Neither was his first Super Bowl call at Super Bowl LIV in Miami, Florida, when the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers 31-20. "The first five are with Marty Schottenheimer, who was an incredible human and a great football coach, and we were close, there was the five years of being a really good team and being so disappointed," Holthus said. ![]() When dividing up his three decades of time with the organization, Holthus said he looks at the first five years, then 15, followed by the past 10. In 1994, Holthus was back in the booth at Arrowhead Stadium, never thinking he and the Chiefs would be where they are today. I'm going to sign this contract tonight before somebody changes their mind." It's like the sixth inning, I go, I'm out of here. "I remember the guy doing the game with me, I said, you got the rest of this game, I'm out of here. "I remember, I'm in the press box doing a baseball game, and I got a call, and it was, 'Hey, do you want to be the Voice of the Chiefs?" Holthus recalled. The right call eventually came three years later while Holthus was in the middle of doing play-by-play for a Kansas State University baseball game. Holthus said he was also a candidate for the Chicago Bears, Carolina Panthers, Minnesota Vikings and Atlanta Falcons.
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