Hello everyone and welcome to listening to America with Clay Jenkinson.

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks to go to travel to Elva, Oklahoma, which is sort of east of the

panhandle of Oklahoma.

It's a couple of hours south of Wichita, Kansas.

It's on the Great Plains. I'm, of course, was familiar with the Great Plains as it's possible to be and yet it's a very remote place and it's the home of Northwestern Oklahoma State University.

I've been there before, not to perform as Theodore Roosevelt.

This time they wanted me to come out of character and to talk with their political scientist,

Aaron Mason, about Jefferson in the West. So of course that's an intriguing subject to me

and I love going to places like this. I don't travel as much as I once did.

There was a time in my life after the bicentennial of the Constitution, so around the year 1990 to 2005, let's say, when I

traveled 200 or more days per year and gave hundreds and thousands of performances around the country.

It usually was the way I lived and made my living for much of that time.

And since then I backed that away some. It's pretty exhausting to travel that much and after 9-11 traveling, as you know, is not very fun, very much fun anymore.

And there's a lot of frustration built into the whole world of travel.

And if you haven't noticed recently,

the airlines have been getting grimmer and grimmer so that they not only

charge for luggage which makes everyone try to do a carry-on bag in which the carry-on bins

fill and there are fights and all sorts of problems the systems have gotten more

efficient in terms of profit and less comfortable and pleasant in almost every possible way for the

traveler. But it is, as they say what it is, I would have loved to have driven from

Bismarck North North Dakota, through South Dakota, and then Nebraska, and then Kansas, and down to

Elva, Oklahoma, but it would have taken at least a full day, maybe two, and then of course to come back.

...