For the residents of some prison communities, the barbed-wire fortresses that sit on the edge of town are best left there. Good for employment, yes, but please, don’t brag about them.
It used to be that way in Leavenworth, a city that promoted its history and military connections, not its reputation as a refuge for the legally challenged.
No longer. For nearly two years, a big-chinned, big-footed convict dressed in black-and-white stripes has graced billboards, buttons and travel magazine ads. Holding his right index finger in the air, the convict beckons: “How about doin’ some `time’ in Leavenworth?”
The pun could be drawing groans among prospective tourists. And Leavenworth’s goofy convict ambassador is hardly fetching. But don’t laugh if it all seems a bit cute. The slogan and logo are working.
Calls to the Leavenworth-Lansing Convention and Visitors Bureau’s 800 number increased from 763 to 1,263 between 1995 and 1996, the year the bureau launched its prison campaign. Last year only four overnight senior citizens tours were booked; 11 tours bringing 512 persons have been booked this year.
Granted, these aren’t numbers like the ones Branson, Mo., racks up. Still, they please Leavenworth officials. And they confirm what seems obvious to Connie Hachenberg, director of the visitors bureau and the campaign’s brainchild: that Leavenworth is best recognized not for its history, but for its prisons.
“When I came in six years ago, there was just a basic ad with a dragoon soldier (a mounted infantryman),” Hachenberg said. “Well, who knows what a dragoon soldier is…? It just didn’t grab people.”
For anyone who has watched war movies and seen a commanding officer threaten to send a disobedient soldier to Leavenworth, or for any Leavenworth resident who has endured a prison joke, building on that prison connection seems so obvious. Why, then, did it take Leavenworth so long to realize that its prison-shrouded name had marketing potential? Why didn’t a catchy phrase Hachenberg has introduced in the ads — “You don’t have to be indicted to be invited” — roll off the tongue of past city leaders?
“I have no idea,” said City Manager Mark Pentz. “There may have been a feeling in the past that there was something of a stigma.”
No more. In fact, Hachenberg would like to see more prison-related attractions. “I’d love to see a restaurant, a Jailhouse Cafe, open up. Think of all the things they could do in that. Tin cups and tin trays and all that.”
As it is, the best a tourist can hope for is a glimpse at the prisons, from the outside.
The large, domed U.S. Penitentiary looks imposing, and, to the morbidly curious, inviting. But forget about a tour. The prison doesn’t give them to the general public. Nor do the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks on Fort Leavenworth, the Lansing Correctional Facility south of Leavenworth or the Corrections Corporation of America, a privately run, 304-bed detention center in Leavenworth that holds prisoners for the U.S. Marshals Service.
Plans do exist for adding to the dozen artifacts displayed at Leavenworth’s First City Museum, but that could be months away.
Hachenberg doesn’t apologize for the dearth of prison attractions. The ads, she said, don’t promise tours or any other activities related to the prisons. They simply use the prison theme to draw attention to those things that don’t work as marketing tools: history and the military.
Still, Hachenberg does her best to bring the prisons to the tourists, greeting them dressed in the same striped outfit her cartoon convict wears, snapping pictures of them as they stand behind a prison door facade.
“My people really did enjoy things, and we have a lot of seasoned tourists,” said tour guide Tommie Krone, who works for Village Tours in Wichita, Kan. Krone recently led a tour of senior citizens to northeast Kansas and northwest Missouri. She said she arranged for a stop in Leavenworth partly because of the ad. She’s glad she did. Her tourists were pleasantly surprised.
Gathered at the Ramada Inn in downtown Leavenworth, many of the tourists said they didn’t know, for instance, that the fort dated to 1827, or that William “Buffalo Bill” Cody grew up near the town, or that Leavenworth was one of the westernmost communities that Abraham Lincoln visited.
Tourist Wilma Wiewel of Derby, Kan., said she had no idea Leavenworth had so much to offer: “I thought it was just a small community with a prison.”
