40 Years After Its Only Doctor Died, A Tiny Town Refuses The Same

By C.J. Janvoy, Kansas Reflector

March 22, 2021

In normal times, this past weekend would have been a climactic one for the tiny town of Cuba, Kansas.

The third weekend of March was traditionally their annual Rock-a-Thon, which is not a week-long dance party to classic AM radio hits. It is literally people in rocking chairs 24 hours a day for seven days.

This tradition started in the basement of a laundromat back in the 1970s as something fun to do while everyone waited for spring — and raise a little money in the process, maybe break some world records.

“People would come over from all over Republic County and bring their frying pans and make hamburgers at 3 in the morning until the next crew came over, then go to work. It was that community spirit,” says Jim Richardson, the National Geographic photographer who lives an hour and a half south of Cuba in Lindsborg, where he operates the Small World Gallery.

Richardson spent 40 years documenting the life of Cuba, a project that earned interest from places like CBS Sunday Morning.

After Cuba’s Rock-a-Thon outgrew the laundromat, they started having it at the old Bohemian brotherhood hall, the kind of structure you see in a lot of Midwestern small towns settled by Czechoslovakian immigrants. Eventually, the people of Cuba got a $350,000 grant to restore that building, which is now called Community Hall.

In recent years, funds raised at the Rock-A-Thon helped build a library and a park. They moved the old one-room school downtown to become a museum.

Their latest project involves memorializing perhaps the most well-known and beloved figure ever to live there.

Dr. C.W. McClaskey, or Doc, as everyone called him, arrived in Cuba in 1929, after medical school in Kansas City. By the time he retired in 1981, he’d been Cuba’s only doctor for 52 years. He died just a couple of months after he retired.

“He was always there,” says Richardson. “There was a doctor on main street, somebody who cared for you, knew where to go when you smashed your thumb under the sheet rock. He was there at the football games, there when the babies were born.”

More than 600 babies, according to local lore. Twice as many people who currently live in the town.

In recent years, Doc’s old office building was deteriorating. It was looking as if they were going to have to tear it down, but they saw an opportunity. What if they restored the building and recreated Doc’s office?

“There’s so many people who had a love for Doc McClaskey,” says Lynette Beam, who helped secure grant funding for the restoration.

“From those maybe 600 babies that were delivered by Doc McClaskey, travelers who knew Doc and were his patients, they could reminisce over things they see.”

Many of Richardson’s photos are there, along with a bonus in the newly built back room: A display of rare, century-year-old exercise equipment used by members of the Sokol club — a Czechoslovakian fraternal and cultural organization that promoted physical and mental fitness.

Every day, trainers held youth classes accompanied by piano players and people came to watch. Nearly twenty years ago, workers restoring Community Hall found some of the old equipment. Idan and Doris Kauer, whose father had been the last living member of the Sokol organization, stored it in their garage.

Beam says they had out-of-town offers to buy it, but everyone agreed it should stay in Cuba.

Now, by recreating Doc McClaskey’s office and displaying the Sokol equipment, the town’s main street has a new Cuba Heritage Center.

“It tells an untold story of Cuba,” Beam says. “After searching for months, we finally found the only two photographs of the members of the organization performing their gymnastics.”

Beam says it’s interesting to see what was so important to past generations.

“We don’t look at that in a way that maybe we should,” she says.

For Richardson, considering Doc McClaskey’s legacy inevitably leads him to ponder one of today’s controversies.

“The whole idea of Medicaid expansion, and our responsibility to care for people – even if the actual level of care available was somewhat limited, at least you had this personal connection that somebody was there and would care for you,” he says.

“It’s the loss of the idea that as a community we should provide that.”

Inevitably, the new Cuba Heritage Center will mean different things to different people.

The point is, it’ll be there, open to visitors on May 1.

“Our small town, which has a lot of great volunteers and people who have a passion for small hometown events and projects, we all pull together to make it happen and get things done,” Beam says.

Even without the Rock-a-Thon. That’s canceled for the second year in a row now. Kansas might have begun a slow recovery from COVID, but the folks in Cuba are taking no chances. Life there is already fragile enough.

So, next time you find yourself up in north-central Republic County a few miles from the Nebraska line, stop by and pay them some respect.