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By NICK SCHWIEN

nschwien@dailynews.net

NESS CITY -- The wind was constant.

But for western Kansas, it might not have been considered windy.

Amid the near 80-degree temperatures, Gary Gantz was hopping from truck to truck, cleaning seed wheat for the approaching fall wheat planting season.

The wind occasionally whipped dust from the chute slowly pouring wheat into the truck's bed, but it wasn't enough to distract Gantz from what needed to be done.

A quick glance around D.E. Bondurant Grain Co. showed a horde of trucks loaded with seed wheat -- some already finished, and others waiting in the Friday morning sun.

Gantz hopped into one truck, moving it forward, then hopped back in another one, pulling it into position.

It's just another time of year where Gantz and the grain elevator are going nonstop.

"Western Kansas is a tough country to make a living in," said Gantz, also the mayor of Ness City. "But we've had a lot of people put down their stake and do it. That's a testament to them and their willingness to hard work. I think that's what's kept areas like Ness County going, even in times where we've seen such negative growth."

The night before, Gantz got off work late -- which is nothing new for someone who wears many hats at this time of year. Then he made his way to the football field to watch the junior high team play.

He struggled to find a place to park amid the large crowd -- for a junior high game. But it was a quick reminder of just how important the school district is in small towns such as Ness City.

Later Friday night, Gantz would show up again, wearing another tired look and the same clothes he had been working in early in the day. There was no time to change apparel.

But there was time for the school.

That night, the Ness/Dighton Titans -- a combined effort between two small towns in western Kansas -- battled undefeated Satanta from well southwest of the county.

"The school has always been it," Gantz said earlier that morning.

His arrival after a long day of work proved that statement.

Many in the stands echoed it as well.

Times are a changin'

Jim Yaeger sits in the corner of the bench in his barber shop along the main street in Ness City, peering out the window and around a sign made to let folks know the homecoming game is Sept. 26 against Kinsley.

Yaeger has been cutting hair for 43 years now, and he's been in the community long enough to see what changes have taken place.

"We went from a farming community to an oil community," he said. "When I started out, we had five barbers in town. Now we're down to two.

"The numbers have went down tremendously. Now, we play football with Dighton, and Ness City has only about four or five kids playing. And now we play 3A schools. That's tough to compete against."

The change in football classification from 2-1A to 3A isn't the only transformation. Ness City is considered a 1A school in other sports, but the combined school populations of Ness City and Dighton for football bounced the team into the 3A ranks for the next two years.

But Yaeger knows one thing remains the same.

"We still provide a good education for them," he said.

Yaeger long has been a fan of the school, but a stroke a year ago didn't allow him to attend any football games last fall.

But early Friday morning, Yaeger was ready for the home game later that night.

"I still look forward to them," he said. "I had a stroke last year, and I didn't get to go to any games. Tonight is the first home game, and I'm going to that. Most of the rest of the games are at Dighton. I usually don't miss games when they're here."

Yaeger's days are a little more relaxed now, but that's fine with the 64-year-old.

"If I'm busy enough to keep busy, I'll be OK," Yaeger said. "It keeps me out of trouble."

Just down the street at Miner Brothers Co., Bill Miner is toiling away at the fourth-generation business his great-grandfather helped start.

Miner hasn't been around since the start of the company in 1885, but he has been around long enough to know the county -- and Ness City -- have seen the population base dwindle. But he also knows that's just part of a small town.

"There's been some negative attention because of the largest population decrease in the state," he said. "We've had a large elderly population decrease."

He also knows many small towns are facing the same scenario.

"Any small town does," Miner said.

Opportunities abound

Sure, there's been a population decrease.

But the school district hasn't seen much loss in the last few years.

That gives the mayor a reason to think something might be a bit skewed in some people's eyes.

"The census will tell you we've lost some population," Gantz said. "But with the school being able to maintain what it has, you can argue a little bit of that."

Gantz knows things could be a lot worse, however.

"Ness County geographically is something like the 10th biggest in land acreage in the state," Gantz said. "We have different communities around Ness City, but when you look at it, we've got it good. We've got two barber shops, hair-dressing salons. We've got two banks. We've just got a lot of things. We've got a lot of independence."

But some of that is lost on other folks. Getting people to realize what small towns have to offer is sometimes difficult.

"Ness City is a good town and a great place to raise kids," Gantz said. "But it's difficult whether we're hiring here (at the elevator) or hiring teachers. People want to know, 'Where's Wal-Mart?' It's hard recruiting in small towns. ... Sixty miles away from Wal-Mart is difficult for some."

But it's just right for others, including Brennan Uehling.

Uehling was a standout athlete at Ness City before graduating in 1989. He went on to play college football and run track at Dodge City Community College before earning a degree at Chadron State College in Nebraska. He later tried out for the Chicago Bears.

"Some people grow up and move away and come back and realize if they're hard working, decent people, they can come back and do well for themselves," said Uehling, owner of Riverside Chiropractic in town.

Uehling also works in Jetmore and Dighton with his business, and he's in the process of opening up a new venue in Hays. So he more than occasionally is near a Wal-Mart. But he's not tempted.

Instead, he'd rather spend his money at Ralph's Supermarket, the local grocery store in Ness City.

"I'm leaving it where I make it," Uehling said. "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours."

Uehling is in his fifth year of business in Ness City.

"I can't completely get out of the small town where I grew up," he said. "Some patients, it's took four years to work up to a T. Now, they lay down on the table, and I know what's wrong without them even saying a word."

Uehling knows a key reason he has been successful is the people in the town.

"When you go into a community, if you give to the community, you get it back 10-fold," he said.

Uehling's practice is just one of many businesses in the Ness County seat. There's also the grocery store, restaurants, a pizza place and more several more businesses for the city to hang its hat on.

"We're amazingly diversified here," Gantz said. "For a county with 3,500 people in it, we have two school districts and a private school. That's pretty amazing in itself."

Riding the school

The building is full of power -- literally.

Myers Engine Service is stock full of engines for the oilfield and race cars. And Kirk Reinert is busy working on the company's relatively new dyno machine and fine tuning an engine for a 305 sprint car.

With the emergence of the United Rebel Sprint Series the past few years, the business has seen even more action. That's brought even more people into Ness City.

"I think it's really important because we have a lot of people coming into town to dyno motors," Reinert said. "We've had a couple of them spend the night, and of course they go and eat when they're here. It brings a little money back into the community. It pays my wages and keeps me here."

Reinert was on the World of Outlaws circuit -- the largest and highest-paying series for sprint cars -- a year ago. But his father became ill, and Reinert now is back in town and enjoying his job.

But he also knows it might not be possible to keep such a business in town without the school.

"I think they have a good school program here, and I think that is bringing people into the community," Reinert said. "I think that always helps. It does."

Despite the popularity of the URSS and the recent oil boom, Reinert knows the school is helping the town stay active.

"That's one of the things that keeps the town going, it really is," he said.

Welcome back

It's changed since his glory days of high school in the 1990s, but Nathan Copeland knows it's great to be home.

Copeland is in his fourth year back at his alma mater, and he's wearing many hats in his return. He's the industrial arts teacher, the FFA guru, the athletic director and junior high football coach, to name a few.

"I just decided it was time to move back home," said Copeland, who spent eight years in the Oberlin district before returning.

"It's kind of fun to come back and look at the pictures," Copeland said. "After I left, I hadn't been back really in Ness City for 12 years. I'd come through town to go back to the farm, but I never stopped. I never really came to events at the school after I went to college. I was tied into college stuff, and I really didn't make it back much. It's kind of neat to go back and see now."

The biggest change Copeland has seen is the numbers. When he graduated in 1994, Ness City was a large 2A school that had success in multiple sports.

"Besides the numbers, we are down on numbers -- we're a 1A now instead of a 2A," Copeland said. "And there's a lot less teachers in high school. There used to be two teachers per subject, and now we're down to one, except for some of the core curriculum."

But Copeland is home, and he's seeing some younger families moving into town.

"It's a good place," he said. "We do get some families from larger towns that do like the small-town atmosphere. They have the opportunity to move to a smaller town. We do have some of my classmates that have moved back, and some haven't left. And they do have families."

Losing everything

It's not that Ness City is worried about losing its school, but the realization is evident of what that might mean.

"Roll up the streets -- and lock the doors, I think," said Darcy O'Toole, who's worked at the John Deere dealer in town for 21 years and has seen changes in management throughout his tenure.

"If we didn't have that, we'd be just another two-horse town."

O'Toole remembers what a former boss, Gerry Kuhlman, used to say about the importance of the school right across the street.

"Nearest and dearest fan," O'Toole said. "That's still my motto, too. Whenever the school needs help with something, I always still get the phone call for the forklift or whatever. We're always willing to do it if we have the time. I really wish that's what everybody would do. We need to have a lot better deal going around."

The local John Deere business -- part of four BTI businesses also in Greensburg, Pratt and Bucklin -- is growing and adding on to existing space to fit needs.

But it's also been a die-hard supporter of the school.

Gantz, the mayor, struggles to come up with words to describe what the town would be like without a school.

"That's pretty difficult to address," he said. "It's hard to think of anything more important. When the school systems slim down, it's difficult to maintain things a lot. But if you look at it from a countywide perspective, it's huge. ... I don't know how you put a value on it, but it's big."

Superintendent Randall Jansonius has been in small districts for years, including Ransom and Jetmore before coming to Ness City.

He mixes no words when discussing the school's importance.

"It's extremely important because we employ about 70-some people altogether, including bus drivers and paras and everybody else," he said. "If you take the full-time people out of here, it would probably be in the neighborhood of 40 or so people, it does have a big effect on a small community. Then you also lose the things you buy out of the community.

"The whole hub kinda loses a couple spokes out of it when the school shuts down. Here, we're fortunate to have the hospital and old-people's home. We're fortunate to have the oil business that we have and the district valuation we have, as well as the community support and business downtown."

Jansonius is happy the school still is alive, and with the enthusiasm the people show for it.

"Our community is great," he said. "They support the school well. You probably need to interconnect with them a little more on things, and you try to keep them as informed as possible. They come up here and support our activities very well. That just doesn't happen with sports, it's also for music, and some of our quiz bowls get a lot of parents to show up. They're very supportive of our schools. They support us financially and with everything else."

A healing feeling

Wins have been few and far between for the Titans in football. A year ago, the team didn't win a game.

This year, the team started out 0-2, with most of the buzz shifting to the Ness City boys' cross country team, which is ranked in the state.

Faron Kraft, the head football coach, wanted the players to know what the possiblities were if everything came together just right.

"Tonight's the night we finish," Kraft said in his pregame speech to the players. "We're rebuilding that swagger. Ness and Dighton, there's a lot of tradition between the two schools. ... Let's make them proud tonight. Play proud, play fast, and play to ... "

The team finished the phrase.

"Win!" the players shouted.

The game was a microcosm of what the town of Ness City has gone through. Satanta scored first, but the Titans answered.

Then it happened again, and the Titans found a way to claw back into the game.

At halftime, the team led 24-12, a feeling it hadn't had at that point in a game in some time.

"This is going to be huge for both communities," Tom Flax, principal of the seventh through 12th grades at Ness City, said midway through Friday's game. "We went winless in football last year at 0-9 and started out 0-2 this year. ... But if we could somehow pull this off, it would be huge for the school. It would give us a little bit of pride again."

Flax is no stranger to small towns. He graduated from Ransom in 1988 and spent time in schools at Satanta and Fairfield before taking his current position at Ness City.

"I just think that the pride of the town goes synonymous with the school," Flax said. "Like right now, Hanston doesn't have their own school. But when we were younger, you heard of Hanston and thought about their football team because they were always winning, and that was just the center of their town. I'm not saying you have to have success, but the schools are such a rallying point for towns."

The rallies for the Titans were finished Friday night against Satanta. There were no more needed.

The team took control in the second half and went on to win 38-12.

"You guys deserved that," Kraft said in the locker room following the game. "No one else but you guys deserved that. You played your hearts out. You don't know what this is going to do to your communities. This is a new start, a new beginning. I told you guys that. We got off to a slow start, and we came out tonight and kicked their ass."

Perhaps Kraft's final words to the team will reverberate throughout the team and the town.

"There ain't nowhere but up. Nowhere but up," he said.

There wasn't much dilly-dallying in the locker room for the players. They wanted to get out and see their friends and family and enjoy the feeling of a win. After all, it had been a long time.

"This is amazing," said senior Jerry Lira. "We haven't won a game in I don't know how long. We just needed this really bad to get everyone's confidence up. I hope we can carry it on and keep doing this every game."

Then Lira gathered up his bag of belongings and headed up the stairs and out the door of the locker room.

No one could wipe the smile off his face.

Not even the constant wind.