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Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company's Fred Harvey lunchroom, Emporia, Kansas

This photograph shows the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company's Fred Harvey lunchroom in Emporia, Kansas. At the horse shape counter a group of Harvey Girls are serving and taking orders from customers.

Nellie Cline

Nellie Cline, a native of Larned, Pawnee County, served in the Kansas House of Representatives from 1921 to 1924. She is also credited with being the first female lawyer to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court.

Boeing Airplane Company, Wichita, Kansas

Boeing Airplane Company

This is a view of men and women employees working on B-29 Superfortress airplanes at the Boeing Airplane Company plant in Wichita, Kansas.

Lutie A. Lytle

Portrait of Lutie Lytle, one of the nation's earliest African American female lawyers. Her family came to Topeka and lived at 1435 Monroe Street and Lutie and her brothers attended Topeka schools, including Topeka High School. Lytle graduated from Central Tennessee College and was admitted to the Criminal Court in Memphis, Tennessee, after passing an oral exam. She is reported to be the first African American woman to be licensed to practice in Tennessee, and third in the United States. After returning to Topeka, she became the first African American woman admitted to the Kansas bar. This portrait was copied from A New Negro for a New Century.

Amelia Earhart

This photograph shows aviator Amelia Earhart on a parade float at a homecoming parade in Atchison, Kansas. A native of Atchison, Kansas, Earhart spoke at Memorial Hall to a crowd of 3,500 people during her visit. Earhart set a record flying solo across the Atlantic in her Lockheed Vega. She made the 14-hour, 56-minute flight from Newfoundland to Ireland in May 1932. Earlier, she had been the first woman to cross the Atlantic as a passenger in a plane.

Amelia Earhart

This is an informal photograph of Amelia Earhart, 1897-1937. She is seated between two women on a parade float in Atchison, Kansas. The two women may be Barbara and Lorraine Hellener, daughters of the City Manager, Earl Hellener. Also visible are the float's driver, spectators, and parked automobiles along the city street. A native of Atchison, Earhart spoke at Memorial Hall to a crowd of 3,500 people during her visit. The parade was June 7, 1935.

Vivian Vance

Vivian Vance, 1909-1979, was a well-known actress born Vivian Roberta Jones in Cherryvale in Montgomery County, Kansas. As a young child, Vance moved to Independence, Kansas where she found her love of acting under the tutelage of playwright William Inge. Her most famous role was as Ethel Mertz on the television show "I Love Lucy" with Lucille Ball.

Nancy Landon Kassebaum

A portrait of Nancy Landon Kassebaum, United States Senator from Kansas, 1978-1997, and the daughter of Kansas Governor Alfred Mossiman Landon.

Mary Elizabeth Lease

Deane

Mary Elizabeth (Clyens) Lease is perhaps the best-known Kansas Populist. She was born in Pennsylvania on September 11, 1850 to Irish immigrants. At the age of twenty she moved to Osage Mission, Kansas, in order to teach school at St. Anne?s Academy. While there, she met and married Charles L. Lease, a local pharmacist. After several unsuccessful attempts at farming, Lease turned her attention to the plight of her fellow farmers, and by 1890, her passionate criticisms of railroads and big business made her a formidable force in the newly formed People's (Populist) Party. She became a well-known lecturer for the Populist cause, traveling throughout the West, Midwest, and South. Although this statement has in fact been misattributed to her, she is most known for her assertion that farmers must "raise less corn and more hell.? Her zeal and refusal to compromise eventually alienated her from mainstream Populists, and by 1896 she had turned her attention toward other reform causes, including prohibition and suffrage. She divorced Charles in 1902, spending the remainder of her life living with various children on the Atlantic coast. She passed away on October 29, 1933 in New York state.

Olive Ann Beech

This is an informal portrait of the "First Lady of Aviation," Olive Ann Beech (1903-1993), co-founder and President of the Beech Aircraft Corporation, standing by a Beechcraft Bonanza (Model 35) airplane. Beech was born and raised on a farm south of Waverly, Kansas. She attended business college in Wichita and worked for the Travel Air Manufacturing Company in Wichita, before marrying Walter H. Beech on February 24, 1930. In 1932, they co-founded the Beech Aircraft Corporation. After her husband's death in 1950, Beech assumed the position of president of the corporation, and was named its chairman emeritus after her retirement in 1982. She brought the company through fifty years of growth from the Staggerwing Biplane to Skylab and from ten employees to ten thousand. Her other honors include: Woman of the Year (1951); Kansan of the Year (1958); and nomination to the NASA Space Shuttle Study Committee (1971).