Kansas town survives tornado of notoriety : The media whirlwind has subsided in Herington. It arose shortly after the arrival of Terry L. Nichols.

HERINGTON, Kan. — For decades, this town on the west flank of Kansas’ scenic Flint Hills has quietly gone about its business--making sure the railroads run on time, planting wheat to help feed the nation and raising its children in small-town tranquillity.

That anonymity was interrupted a couple of months ago when Terry L. Nichols, one of its own, was arrested and subsequently charged in the tragic bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

One of its own? “He’s not Herington, man,” admonishes Danny Dix, 52, a railroad engineer who lives just north of town and grew up here. “He’s only been here a couple of months.”

That point of view is not uncommon among Herington’s 2,800 residents. “What makes me mad,” says 34-year-old Roberta Erickson, who has lived here since she graduated from the local high school, “is that you hear he’s from here. He’s not from here. He’d only been here three weeks. It doesn’t mean we’re all bad people because Terry Nichols lived here.”

Nichols, 40, actually had lived here about five weeks after purchasing a small, one-story frame house on March 10. The house in a modest neighborhood near Herington’s business district was home to Nichols, his wife and child until the April 19 explosion that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people and injuring 500 more.

Two days after the bombing, Nichols turned himself in to Herington police. Many residents found that and subsequent events a bit astonishing.

Herington is a quiet town--and it has gotten quieter. It once had two movie theaters, two weekly newspapers, two hotels and several new-car dealers. Now it has no movie theaters (the nearest one is about 25 miles away), one newspaper, no hotels and no car dealers. The town had two grocery stores a couple of years ago. Now it has one. There seem to be about as many vacant as occupied businesses in the downtown district. Many people travel to larger towns nearby to work and shop.

But an optimistic economic note was sounded recently when heavy equipment began work on an expansion of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s switching yard. Railroads have long been important to the town. (The high school’s athletic teams are dubbed the Railroaders.) Agriculture is the other leg on which the town’s economy stands.

Herington, which once served as a campsite for the Kaw Native American tribe, was founded in 1887 by an ambitious and visionary man named M. D. Herington. He traded his successful Illinois business for Kansas land, coming to the area in 1881 with $2,800 in his pocket. Despite his club feet, he served as the town’s first mayor, founded its first bank and helped lure two railroads here in the 1880s. Herington prospered in those early days, boasting three hotels and an opera house that entertained an opening night crowd of 500 on Sept. 17, 1888.

A journalist of the time wrote of the town founder: “Herington is one of those indomitable, indefatigable, pushing, booming sort of individuals, who while others are praying the Lord for help, goes a step farther and proceeds to help himself. . . . [T]he man is worth over $300,000, and getting richer every 24 hours. A few years back, he was moseying around on this town site trying to keep the brindle calf from sucking the cow and now he owns and operates hotels, lumberyards, banks, opera houses, flouring mills and goodness knows what all, and sits back in his easy chair smoking 25-cent cigars, with a diamond pin on his shirt front as big as a coal scuttle.”

In recent years the town, which is 150 miles west of Kansas City, has been more in the backwater than the mainstream. Nichols, who had served in the Army at nearby Ft. Riley with Timothy J. McVeigh--who also is charged in the bombing and had once lived in a house here with other GIs--brought Herington into the nation’s focus.

Georgia Rucker, 41, the real estate agent who sold Nichols his house and who may have had more contact with the suspect than anyone else in Herington, got a fast lesson in dealing with the press after her client’s arrest.

“At one point you could hardly walk in here,” she says, gesturing around her office. “That first night after [reporters descended on the town], I hid out. But they’d find out all about you, where you lived and what you looked like, and they’d come looking for you.”

Nichols, Rucker says, seemed so normal and so nice that she wonders whether anyone can be trusted and whether her children will be safe in this world.

Life in Herington is back to normal now. And that includes small-town values like neighborliness. Leroy Hodson, a retired farmer who has lived in or near Herington for 75 years, now makes his home across the street from Nichols’ house.

He is keeping the grass mowed in his absent neighbor’s yard. “I can’t stand to have the weeds grow over there. I mow [another lawn] over there and I might as well mow his too. [Only] takes about 15 minutes.”