Colorado entrepreneur wants to use Internet to lure small town natives -- and their money -- back to farm country

By Roy Wenzl
The Wichita Eagle

PRATT -- To understand why the good people of Pratt did not run Greg Smith out of town, even after he uttered a complete sentence linking their annual Miss Kansas scholarship pageant with the Pratt Livestock Inc. cattle auction, you need to know that people here like him.

Some say he might even have an idea so good it holds the key to their economic future.

Others don't understand what on Earth he's talking about.

And there are days when Smith himself says maybe he's just dreaming.

Two years ago he sold his house and moved to Kansas, gambling his savings on the idea of turning a small Kansas farm town high-tech by making it known and attractive on the Internet.

So far he's got little to show for it.

"Thank you for reminding me of that," he said, with a laugh. "Yeah, as rolls of the dice go, this is quite a roll of the dice."

He's giving it another 10 months.

But now that they know him, townspeople don't want him to go.

And it's not just because he coaches the girl's summer softball team, the Stealers. Or just because he teaches 4-H kids Internet skills for free. Or only that he's a nice guy, even if he is from Colorado.

"Greg is one of the brightest and most generous people ever to come to our town," said Janet McEntarfer, who works at The People's Bank. "I hope to goodness that we can keep him."

They like his idea for saving their community, where 450 county farmers outside town now get a pathetic $2.18 a bushel for wheat, and where rumors swirl that the Union Pacific is about to pull its switching station out of town, along with 100 jobs and families.

The locals were cautious at first.

But Jerry Bohn the manager out at the big feedyard, and Porter Loomis the banker and Stenson Clontz the livestock auctioneer, enjoyed hearing about how he could sell cows live on the Internet. Clontz isn't ready to do business that way yet. But he likes Smith, and he's paying attention.

"He's opened some eyes around here," Clontz said.

Smith says that if his idea works, it could be the biggest boost to rural Kansas development since the discovery of oil, or since the introduction of Turkey Red winter wheat.

So even though Smith is from Colorado, and even though the Miss Kansas Pageant is _ yes, we'll say it _ a sacred cow in this town, and even though he really did compare the contestants with cows, they let it pass.

They didn't hang him from one of the town's twin antique water towers, one labeled "Hot" and the other "Cold." They didn't tack him upside down to one of those big old bald cypress trees overhanging the Ninnescah River down in the shade of 117-acre Lemon Park. They didn't pry up any of Pratt's miles and miles of old red paving bricks and stone him outside his office a few steps east of Third and Main.

Not even the new Miss Kansas was offended.

"For one thing," said Leah Darby, with a good-natured grin, "I know I'm not a cow."

That's a reasonable statement, coming from the woman who on Sept. 18 will represent our state in the Miss America Pageant.

For another thing, she likes Smith, loves working on her home computer and thinks Smith has an idea that's good for the whole state.

"Greg is great," she said. "What he said about the pageant was just another example of how he can look at two different things and see possibilities."

What he said about the pageant was... Well, hang on a minute. We're getting to that.

A guy with a dream

Four years ago business people like Porter Loomis were thinking hard about Pratt's economic future and looking for new ideas.

They'd heard of a guy out in Fort Collins, Colo., a former college professor named Smith, who had grown bored of teaching and had taken up consulting, offering up his high-tech expertise. Smith had started a computer consulting business called Rural Health Futures, which does research and consulting work for rural communities.

In March 1997, after Pratt had hired him to do research for their community, Smith talked with local leaders about his idea.

He pitched his idea to do two things: Teach an entire town how to use the Internet, and then light new fire in it's economic engine.

After long talks with Pratt's economic development group, Mr. Smith sold his house, gathered his savings, and moved to Kansas.

He opened for business in the town's old Jett's department store building, vacant since Jett's moved out in the 1980s.

To show hard-working Pratt locals that he wasn't here just to play office, he hefted and stuck up 356 man-sized sheets of drywall in the upstairs, nearly all by himself.

"I wasn't much good at drywalling, but I learned," he said.

And then he began to work, 10 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, teaching local folks about the Internet.

Last August, he got another idea.He took a video camera and a computer to an American Legion baseball game, and put hundreds of pictures fetched out of the camcorder onto the World Wide Web.

Last October, he began doing it for the Pratt Greenbacks football team. Then he did it for boys' and girls' basketball.

Pratt kids appearing live on the Net.

Many townspeople were thrilled. Many former townspeople were thrilled, too.

"I couldn't believe it," said Brian Hommertzheim, a 26-year-old computer analyst who graduated in 1991 and now lives in Denver.

"I never would have thought anyone in Pratt had the technology to put the hometown on the Web."

Not everyone was thrilled. At least not at first.

"Some people on the local booster club worried that someone from New York or some place might see our kids and come out here to bother them," Smith said.

That got Smith thinking.

"In a small town like this, you've got to be pretty sensitive to people's concerns," he said.

"What if we put a photo of some kid talking to a cheerleader, and the kid is NOT the cheerleader's boyfriend? What if we shot into the stands, and photographed some guy sitting by a woman, and it's not her husband?

"We didn't want to start any fights," Smith said. "So we shoot only the players... I've heard that the cheerleaders actually want to be on the Web," he said with a grin.

Pratt, Kan., world famous

So now, in a little town stuck out in the middle of wheat fields and oil wells 75 miles west of Wichita and many miles in the middle of nowhere, the local high school athletes, nicknamed for frogs, have become world known.

"We had some Germans come by the other day and stick their heads in the Telecommunity Center. They'd seen us on the Web, and they said they wanted to see where this place was," Smith said.

That's not all.

"We had Australians writing emails to us when we did the same thing to the Miss Kansas Pageant.

"We've heard of at least one grandmother from Nebraska who never got to see her grandson play football. Now she's seen him play. I'm told she cried."

So Smith keeps at it.

For more than a year now, Smith, has been dragging himself out to Pratt Greenback football and basketball games, town baseball games, wrestling tournaments.

He has helpers videotape the action, shooting a few minutes, then dumping hundreds of still images onto www.futurekansas.com. It's called "almost live," and allows Greenback fans to watch from anywhere, via the Internet.

"It's not quite like being there in person," Smith said. "But if you like Greenback football or basketball, it's pretty good."

There's a larger purpose to this. And it starts with winning over the people of Pratt, who are pretty much nuts about their Greenbacks, and sports in general.

Jeff Taylor the printer, and currently mayor of the town, is typical. When he went to Pratt High _ he graduated in 1972 _ he went out for basketball, track, football AND cross country." We really enjoy having the games on the Internet," he said.

Broadcasting games on the Internet isn't all Smith has done for the town.He's taught so many people how to go online that he and local business leaders estimate that little old Pratt, Kan., has 2,000 Internet users. No small number in a rural town of 6,800. The Web sites he's built for local businesses includes one for Pratt Feeders, which finishes out 36,000 cattle out west of town, and another for Pratt Livestock Inc., the auction east of town that sells 6,000 cattle a week, 325,000 cattle a year.

"Our whole livestock industry is moving toward using the Internet," said Clontz, the Livestock Inc. auctioneer. "It's becoming more complicated, and there are even operations now that sell and buy on the Internet.

"We've got to keep up with the times, Greg has been very helpful to us in doing that."

It was with Clontz's livestock auction that Smith committed his Miss Kansas Pageant heresy.

Two legs, four legs

Last month, as he thrilled this town by putting the women of the Miss Kansas Pageant on a worldwide Internet stage, Mr. Smith watched the contestants sing and dance.

And he thought about cows.

He sat there banging away on his keyboard, a skinny 43-year-old college professor going gray, an Internet pioneer with tired eyes, going boldly where no pioneer had ever gone before _ covering a pageant as a news event, almost-live on the Web.

And while he was doing it, while he was slappin' those hundreds of photos of young Kansas women in swimsuits almost instantaneously on the Web, and typing in a pageant play-by-play, and while guys all the way out in Australia were looking in on www.futurekansas.com on the Web and emailing the ladies appreciative notes from 7,000 miles Down Under, Mr. Smith was sitting there at his computer terminal at stageside. He was thinking about how he could use this same technology to help Pratt Livestock Inc. sell cows live on the Internet.

It's the same, he thought. Technologically, it's the same. Bodies moving around a stage; bodies moving around a pen, except on four legs.

I could do this, he thought. I could sell more heifers for Pratt. I could sell them to the world, in almost real time, live on the Internet. There's money in those heifers.

"It was just an idea," Smith said, with a sheepish grin.

But boy, howdy. If you know anything about Pratt, you know that this is the sort of local heresy that if you say it out loud, it could draw puzzled, pained and disappointed looks from folks who usually make a point of helping neighbors and waving even to strangers passing by along those red brick streets.

The whole town helps put the pageant together every year. Jeannette Siemens from the Pratt Chamber of Commerce says the event pulls nearly $1 million and 2,000 to 3,000 people into the town each year.

"He didn't really make that comparison, between the pageant and the auction, did he?" Siemens asked.

Yep, he did. But he's not hurting anyone's feelings.

Townspeople say it's been clear to them for some time now that Smith has their best interests at heart.

So pageant officials were not offended.

"He's trying to help the town's economic development, so he does have to think of these things," said Lisa Perez Miller, vice president at the community college and co-executive director of the Miss Kansas Organization.

They like Smith here.

Go, Frogs.

He has a dream

Now, you might ask: What exactly IS this big dream Greg Smith conceived? How is making Pratt famous on the Internet gonna GROW the town?

It's simple, Smith says.

He smiles.

"I thought, for what I wanted to try to do, that I have maybe a built-in audience on the World Wide Web."

Smith theorized that there are thousands of people who grew up, graduated from Pratt High, and went out into the world, leaving the hometown behind.

Some of them, Smith says, are now living in big cities like Denver or Los Angeles, or Chicago, living in big-city problems.

And those children of Pratt have families, and children they love and worry about in the big cities.

And some of them, now 10 or 20 years after they left Pratt, are running small Internet-based companies, Smith figures.

And webmaster Greg Smith knows that in an Internet-based economy, you don't need to live in a big city to run a company these days.

So if you're tired of the big city schools and the gangs and the problems, maybe you'll remember what it was like, to grow up with Lemon Park, and the Miss Kansas Pageant, and Pratt High, and the Fightin' Frogs.

Smith wants the pride of the old Greenbacks to pack their bags, and come home.

And bring their families and their Internet-based companies with them.

It would help the town.

And for himself, Smith would earn fame, and hopefully fortune, by subleasing the empty spaces in the his building, by selling ads for his Web site, and by creating a market for his services -- Web site construction, video conferencing, document scanning and computer classes.

So Smith decided to try to make old Greenbacks homesick.

And nothing would do that better, he said, than to put the Pratt Greenbacks almost live on the Internet. With advertisements to help them feel the tug of home.

No place like home

Jeremy McEntarfer sat there on his island far from home last fall, staring at a computer screen, shocked, amazed, yelling happily.

Go Greenbacks!

There he sat, rifle squad Cpl. McEntarfer of the U.S. Marines, stationed at the Marine Corps base at Kaneohe Bay on Oahu, Hawaii, 3,665 miles from Pratt, watching the Pratt Greenbacks bang heads almost live in a high school football game in Pratt, right there on his computer screen.

Go Big Green!

McEntarfer was thrilled. He was cheering. He was banging out email on his keyboard as the game played out, sending messages to some guy named Smith, the guy who made it possible to let this homesick 21-year-old Marine from Pratt watch Coach Anderson and the green boys whup serious butt on a world stage.

Go Fightin' Frogs!

"Oh, my, was he happy," his mother Janet said. "Once you're a Greenback, you're a Greenback for life."

And Jeremy wasn't just any Greenback. When Hiawatha threw that last desperate game-ending pass back in the fall of 1995, in the state 4A Kansas state football championship game, it was all-league middle linebacker Jeremy McEntarfer who snagged it out of the air.

Final score, 13-6, and Pratt went nuts, and the boys called themselves champions. The Frogs stood mighty tall that day.

And now there Jeremy sat, three years later, 3,665 miles out, watching Coach Rich Anderson and the boys teach out-of-towners how to play Greenback football. Unbelievable.

"What Greg has done for my son and for other former Pratt kids is a great gift," Janet McEntarfer said. "All those kids who left Pratt over the years get to look into a computer screen from anywhere they happen to be. And they see home."

Still, they listen

So far, none of the thousands of ex-Prattans, who grew up in the town and still love it, have moved back to the town and brought Internet companies and their families with them.

"I love the town," said Hommertzheim, the former Prattan now working as a computer analyst for Kroger Foods in Denver.

"But to be frank about it, I wouldn't move back. You get used to a certain lifestyle in a larger city.

"Maybe if I had kids I'd feel different. But I don't know. I liked growing up there, but if we ever wanted to do anything, we had to go to Wichita."

Few people are buying advertising on the futurekansas.com Web site, either.

And many local townspeople remain confused about what the Pratt Telecommunity Center is about.

"I don't know anything about the Internet, and I'm scared of it," said Lois Davis, 67, a lifelong Prattan found watering geraniums and snapdragons in her yard just one door down from the antique water towers.

But town leaders are not giving up on Smith yet.

"It's still too early," said Jerry Bohn, chairman of the Pratt Chamber of Commerce, and general manager of Pratt Feeders LLC. "We need to give this more time. I think it will work."

Seimens of the Chamber said Smith could do better financially if he would charge more.

"He's such a good guy that sometimes people ask for his help or advice down there and he just gives it to them."

Kelli Schneider, Smith's business partner in Fort Collins, Colo., said it's been frustrating, waiting to see whether Smith's idea will work.

"Sometimes we've wondered. But we're going to hang in there."

At least until Smith's lease in the former Jett's department store downtown runs out in 10 months.

Pratt business leaders, who thought Smith's idea was a little strange when he showed up two years ago, no longer think so. They think he's on to something

But on the more practical side, few investors and businessmen from Pratt or elsewhere, have signed up to partner with him.

"It's not resistance so much as it is being puzzled as to how their business can use this technology," Taylor said.

Laying a new cornerstone

Out on Highway 54, a few blocks northeast of the Pratt Telecommunity center, stands Pratt Presbyterian Church with its walls of native stone, and carved gargoyle heads on the corners of the tower, and the ornate stained glass windows.

Its cornerstone says it was built in 1913, when people took time building things _ structures intended for permanence, built for a world where change comes slowly, where people and plans and churches were made to last.

It's beautiful to look at. But it is no longer of this time. Like it or not, Smith said, we are all about to move to an Internet world, whether we live in Wichita or Denver or Pratt, Kan.

And the rules of life will never be the same.

It is that lesson that businessmen like Jerry Bohn and Stenson Clontz and Porter Loomis say their town must learn if it is to adapt to the new world.

Even if Smith's own business does not last, they said he's taught many people that lesson already.

"He's served our community well," Loomis said.

"Greg is trying to teach us," Bohn said. "And we need to pay attention."