[Music] There is a name you hear a lot in Northwest Kansas.

It's the name of a man who loved his family, loved his work, and chose to leave a legacy to benefit the people of his home state for generations to come.

[Music] Dane G. Hansen was a Phillips County native.

He dealt a lot in oil and real estate and was able to accumulate a lot of money.

But he was very kind and before he passed away he set up a foundation called Dane G. Hansen Foundation.

The foundation is a not-for-profit foundation and serves a lot of people with various sorts of grants of preservation, education and improvement throughout northwestern Kansas.

And they also set up a museum in Logan, Kansas which is in eastern Phillips County a pretty little town along the north fork of the Solomon River.

Welcome to the museum.

My name is Sheri Buss.

I am the director here at the Hansen Museum.

Mr. Hanson was born and raised almost entirely on this very block where the museum sits.

Mr. Hansen lived in Logan pretty much his entire life.

He was a confirmed bachelor, never married, very family-oriented, took care of his mom, helped take care of his sister's child after she passed away.

He was a well-known figure all throughout his life here in Logan.

His father was a prominent businessman and well-known.

He was an immigrant.

He immigrated to the United States from Denmark.

His family home had been attacked a couple of times and the army, the German or Prussian army, was going to constrict him into service and he refused to serve that army that had destroyed his family home.

So he first landed in America and he went to Wisconsin and he tried his hand at being a lumber jack.

Well that didn't work out so well for him.

He went to Solomon, Kansas and he tried his hand at growing wheat.

His crop was attacked by grasshoppers and so that was a fail.

Then he moved up to Norton County and he went into business with a fellow named Bill McClellon and he was raising cattle.

Had a great herd of cattle going and then a late spring blizzard knocked him out.

So he finally found footing here in Logan as a mill owner.

He came to Logan and he opened up a lumber mill.

As people were coming in to settle they needed wood to build and as that started to die down, Peter pivoted and he turned his wooden mill into a gristmill which was grinding flour.

So that's where Peter finally found success in his immigration story and so we see that Mr. Hansen, he came from Tenacious Stock.

And it's interesting because his mother who was a school teacher initially, you know, at the age of 16 because that's how it worked back then, she she opened a millinery shop.

And so Mr. Hansen, he actually got his footing in business at the age of 22.

He went into business with his father who had by then opened up a general store.

He learned his ability to pivot as to what the people needed by watching his father because his father went from owning gristmills and to the general store business.

And so he went into business and that was his first introduction to business.

And as his father got older they also began to branch out and see, you know, when the society became more mobile they decided that it was time to get out of the general store business and they sold it.

We have the closeout advertisement for the general store when him and his father decided to close down the store and move on more into the lumber business.

But during that time they had started a breeding stock.

They were raising herford cattles and they were already ahead of their time and getting a pure bloodline.

And so they had a stock ranch and then later on he went into the lumber business and road construction.

There's a great story about how he supplied mules to the Army in World War I because that's how they moved heavy equipment in World War I.

Well then the war ended and he kind of ended up with a bunch of mules and he wasn't sure what to do with that so he started a road construction business because if they could pull heavy equipment for the Army they could pull heavy equipment to do roads.

So we have a photo here of him doing road construction work in Lakeland, Kansas.

He's on the back of the big grader here just surveying the road ahead and so he really just was thoroughly involved in every one of his enterprises.

He hands on deck all the way.

I've heard it quoted from several people who have come through the museum who worked with him in the past say that he could actually bid a road construction job down to the last shovel full of sand.

One of the gentlemen that worked with him that I interviewed a long time ago also talked about how he owned a lot of the sand pits that created the asphalt so he was a great business mind and he saw things that he knew would be important for the future of the area that he loved and he made them happen.

During the Depression a lot of people were losing their farms and that was distressing to Mr. Hansen.

These were his neighbors, people they did business with, people he went to church with, the whole thing.

So he began to buy farms in the area and then leased them back to the farmers that were losing their homes.

So they didn't necessarily get to keep the property but they got to keep their home and for quite decades those farms were owned by the Hansen Foundation and leased back to the tenants.

Then oil was found on many of those farms in the area and Mr. Hansen really benefited from the fact that he owned that property and so then he used the oil money to again continue to serve the community.

He never lived a fancy life.

He did drive a nice car.

He was very much of a car guy and he always drove a really nice car but other than that he didn't spend a lot of money on himself.

He lived very frugally.

He was known to have three bouts of luxury.

He loved his cigars, he loved cars, and he loved to talk long distance on the telephone which that was quite the thing at that point in time.

It's hard to find a photograph of Mr. Hanson in which he doesn't have a cigar and then we still have his last Cadillac he bought before he passed away.

It's a beautiful navy blue, quite gorgeous but he loved a fine car.

He had one of the first cars in Logan.

He had a 1907 REO and he felt like it was going to revolutionize his father's business because then he could start doing deliveries and things.

I think that he just really enjoyed his automobiles and that was the starting point.

He lived in his family home until his death.

At one point in time he had visited with his mother about building a home but she didn't see any need to and he didn't buck her so you know they lived pretty frugally even though they had much wealth.

Everything he did was for the area, for the community, for his family.

So he was very entrepreneurial but he was also just a very philanthropic person.

He was just a natural.

He was a hard worker and he had that sense of business and he's been said to been quoted to saying that you know he found work fun.

He liked to match whits in the business sense and he found that very satisfying not for the money-making factor but for the challenge.

They were just a multi-talented family.

They had head for for business all of them and then they were all very creative and as a school teacher Mr. Hansen's mother really focused on education with her children.

This is Mr. Hansen's sisters Kate and Alpha's bedroom suite.

It was a gift to them from their father in 1907.

Both of the girls Alpha and Kate were very talented women.

Alpha Florence was born with a form of rheumatoid arthritis and was sickly for most of her life and she spent lots of time convalescing in different hot springs areas.

That was the treatment of the day and so she actually made her own wedding dress.

She was a seamstress and a painter.

These are some of her works here on the wall and a writer as well.

Just didn't have as long of a life.

She passed early and before right before she turned 40 leaving behind the young son Dane Bells and her husband Ellis Bells.

Kate was a beautiful musician.

She taught school but music was her passion and she ended up spending her adult life in Japan as a missionary.

She taught school at first was a girls high school and later became an accredited girls college.

She was a great advocate for the women of Japan.

She found that Western music was a great way to reach them and during her tenure in Japan she collected all of these beautiful artifacts.

Right before World War II Japan got entered into the war and so she got one of the last ships out of Japan.

She looked up an admiral from her days at KU and she told him she didn't know what but something was coming about with Japan and a few weeks later it was noted that Pearl Harbor was bombed.

The Navy did come to Kate and asked for her help and as much as she loved the people Japan she was a patriot.

She was an American first and foremost.

Her father Peter had instilled that in her and she helped the Navy with maps of the coastline of the area where she was and gave any information and we have some letters on our kiosk over here that talk about the Navy thanking her for her help and returning some of her books and maps to her.

She went back and she helped rebuild the school.

When it was time to retire she came home and she lived in the family home with Mr. Hansen and his mother until her death.

A remarkable woman she really was a remarkable woman.

This area is called our central hub and it is all about Hansen family history.

Each of these three kiosks have the same information on them and they're touch screens.

Each of the artifacts in the hub here are somewhere within this matrix and then any photo that you would like to see you could hold your finger on and it blows it up further and it's just a really wonderful opportunity for those deep dive visitors.

Museums typically have three types of visitors you have a streaker a stroller and a scholar and so we aim to please all three of them.

So this is really for that scholar who wants every piece of information.

You can spend as much time or as little time as you would like.

And so from here we go over to Mr. Hansen's area.

We have a lot of his information from his fraternal order and so then we move in here and we have some of his political involvements.

Mr. Hanson spent about two terms as a Logan City Council and one term as a mayor and he did not enjoy having the spotlight.

He remained involved in politics all of his life.

He was a Republican through and through but he decided to work behind the scenes.

He felt like that was more fitting to his purpose.

He just liked that area and one of his proudest moments was he got to be hands-on with Eisenhower becoming president.

In fact we have here a certificate he set on the electoral college so he was able to sign the state of Kansas's certification electing President Eisenhower as the President of the United States.

This is his black bowler hat that he wore to President Eisenhower's first inauguration.

One quote we like from him is that he thinks that being a good citizen is all of us should carry our load.

So he really didn't just think that he lived that as well.

Here we have a replica of his office in the lumber yard.

It was remodeled in the early 30s and Mr. Hansen was very well known for not coming to work until noon.

He would get out of bed at 11 o'clock.

He would have his breakfast and then he would read the newspaper and come across the street to work in the afternoon.

It was such a known fact that telephone operators would not put business calls through to him until after noon because he was just known.

He did not come to work before noon.

He had very odd working habits but then he stayed late into the night.

Mr. Hansen would work until two or three in the morning, go home, go to bed and start all over.

That's how he worked.

Like he said he had a noon metabolism in a 6:30 world.

The museum was not Mr. Hansen's idea.

Mr. Hansen when he became ill and knew that his time on earth was limited, his thought was he wanted to set up a foundation, something to better the people of Northwest Kansas and so he went to work on that actually from the hospital.

Before he died he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer so he knew what that meant and he'd been studying the Duke Endowment and was really fascinated by this concept of permanent legacy giving and support.

So he did a lot of research because that's what he did and instead of working on how he might leave a legacy for his hometown of Logan, Kansas and the greater Northwest Kansas area.

He felt like so much of his success was due to being raised in this landscape.

He wanted to give back to the area so that folks could have the benefit of his wealth and his knowledge in that respect.

Part of the DNA of the foundation from the very first has been to just open up grant applications and people in our 26 county service area can write a grant, send it into the foundation and ask for help with the project and like every funder if the board thinks it's a good project and meets criteria that they establish then it might get funded.

The other thing that has happened the foundation said we want to look regionally and see what kinds of initiatives might we be able to do strategically that would help the entire area.

So in 2017 we had launched a program called Strategic Doing and we went to every county at least in the area and asked them you know what's great about living here what do you need here what would make it better to live here those kinds of things.

We also have delved pretty heavily into economic development because we know that philanthropy and economic development go hand-in-hand to fulfill our mission so we helped establish the Northwest Kansas Economic Innovation Center and they can do things that we can't do because we're a charitable organization and their structure is different so they can actually help support a business with a grant or a loan.

That's been big and probably next to maybe the Innovation Center our largest initiative has been working with community foundations so we've supported either the growth or the development of a community foundation in every county in our 26 counties then we helped with a match program to build their endowed operations and so unrestricted grant programs will forever be available in all of those 26 counties.

Now we think in particular Mr. Hanson would have loved that because he was all about there's a need in the community let's find a way to take care of it and so now his legacy has helped create opportunities in every single county to take care of their own needs.

The museum came about from his niece by marriage Polly Bells it was really her passion she wanted to have a local repository to honor the Hansen family history specifically Mr. Hansen and so this was her idea she took it forward and she really her and her husband made it come to life they got expert help and setting it up but they also got advice to say okay history is great but it's one and done when people come in and view the history portion of the museum there's nothing to keep bringing them back so we suggest that you have an area that has rotating exhibits brought in so that people will keep coming back and each time they come back maybe they'll discover something new about the Hansen family and so that's what they did they built this beautiful building they created an area to house Hanson family history and they created an area to have open for cultural and art experiences that would not normally be available to people of Northwest Kansas and not only would it not be available but now it's available free of charge there's never a mission fee so that is really in a nutshell how the museum came to be about we can thank Polly Bells and her driving passion for this in addition to bringing world-class exhibits to this area the museum hosts a number of different programs throughout the year we have what we call continuing education classes which range from culinary arts to fine art paintings we have quilting watercolor oil painting we launched the reading initiative in 2017 that was our first big strategic initiative and we did support for the Dolly Parton imagination library for every child in our area we did some summer reading grants and a number of things to help support early childhood literacy we also host different programs recently we've been hosting the Wichita children's theater in the area school here invite all of the area schools to come we do enrichment programs for our schools where we looked at all of the the really interesting and exciting organizations in Kansas that some of our kids might not get the opportunity to experience because they're too far away such as the Cosmosphere and Hutchison the Learning Center for Health the Rolling Hills Zoo in Salina and the boyhood home and Eisenhower Museum in Abilene and so we actually visited those organizations and said you've got a lot of great educational programming we'd like to pay for you to bring that on the road to our schools we provide children's programming in the summertime we've started a stem camp which is bringing information to students in our area that isn't readily accessible we have an art camp and for the past two years we've hosted an ex-relation place summer camp as well so we just really try to bring art and culture to the people of Logan and surrounding areas we have a robust scholarship program that's been part of it since the very beginning and so for high school seniors we provide scholarship they take a test and then they have to do an interview so it's it's quite the journey that they have to take to get those scholarships but they're rewarded through a variety of different scholarship levels that are available they do have to stay in the state of Kansas so that's kind of a nod to Mr. Hansen's love of his home state and you know we've looked at how do we help recruit people back to Northwest Kansas how do we not only scholarship these kids to go out and get their education learn but how do we just show them that the opportunities exist back in their home communities I love the idea of rural by choice and I had never heard that really from anyone until I started working for the Hansen Foundation but the people there are fiercely dedicated to their lifestyle and rural Kansas that doesn't mean that they don't do technology it doesn't mean anybody's riding a horse and wagon still in Northwest Kansas it means that they might be an entrepreneur that started a business in a small town maybe they've opened a new coffee shop maybe they're working remotely for a company that's in New York or California or Chicago or wherever I think the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Northwest Kansas and again that ties right back to Mr. Hansen because his family were entrepreneurs before anybody knew what that word meant we like to say at the Hansen Foundation we do the easy part by providing resources it's the people that write the grant or receive the grant that's the hard part they have to really implement the change do the work make things happen so we offer a lot of opportunities and local people have to take those opportunities and turn them into success stories but there's not very many places really that you can find someone that wants to make a grant to a community of maybe less than a hundred people a lot of funders would look at that and say well that's not a great use of our resources but at the Hansen Foundation we might say that's a small community with pride and they want to redo the community park or they want to fix the rural fire station or whatever we get it we get why they want to do that we get why that's important we're happy to help We talk a lot in the foundation about what would Mr. Hansen think and how would he look at the foundation today and the fact that we think he'd be really proud of what he's done and the difference that it's made in Northwest Kansas.

I think the main lesson learned from Mr. Hansen and his life is to not become stale.

He kept pivoting and looking to the next hurdle because he found it challenging.

He wanted to meet needs for the people in the area, but he just didn't stay in one genre.

He didn't stay in one industry.

He kept growing himself, trying to be a change agent.

He didn't just do business.

He was civic-minded.

He was community-minded.

He was political-minded.

He was the total opposite of apathetic.

So many times, we try to stay only in one lane and only accomplish one thing.

It all fits together.

If you increase your reach, you can do so much more, which he was masterful at.

He truly, probably unbeknownst to him, was preparing himself to leave a legacy that would continue to reach generations way beyond his.

Because he wasn't single-minded, because he was hardworking, because he found love in what he did every day, he really did change the world of Kansas for the better.

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