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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.

Georgia Neese Clark Gray

This is a signed studio portrait of Georgia Neese Clark Gray, 1900-1995. Gray was National Committeewoman for the Democratic Party, 1936-1964. On June 9, 1949, President Harry S. Truman appointed her as the first woman to serve as the U. S. Treasurer. She served from 1949-1953. She was born in 1898 in Richland, Kansas, to Albert and Ellen Neese, Gray attended school in Topeka and graduated from Washburn College in 1921. During college, she developed an interest in acting and after graduation attended the Franklin Sargent School of Dramatic Art and spent nearly ten years acting with various stock companies. She married her manager, George M. Clark in 1929. They divorced in the mid-1940s. She started working at her father's Richland State Bank as an assistant cashier in 1935 and became president in 1937 following his death. She became active in the state Democratic Party and was elected National Committee Woman in Kansas in 1936, a position she held until 1964. She was an articulate and well-liked representative of the party and an early supporter of Harry Truman. It was this support that brought about her nomination as the first woman to be Treasurer of the United States. She served in that office from June 1949 until January 1953 when Truman left office.

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.