Poets have long celebrated, in ringing verse, the love of the sailor for the sea, the love of the Hillman for his hills. No less intense and satisfying in its enjoyments is the love of the plainsman for his prairies; the wide, unbroken levels, laced with the shadow-patterns of passing clouds; the wide, unbroken levels where the winds hold uninterrupted sway, roaring the cruel, ridden with swirling snow, or with scudding dust in the summer sun, or soft and sighing, sweet with the perfume of ten thousand blossoms, as its vagrant mood may be; the quiet, mystic levels, at night, when slow purple shadows gather and thicken till all the land is dark…

John Joseph, banker and oil producer, is a plainsman by birth, and by family tradition. He loves the plains as the sailor loves the sea, as the Hillman loves his hills. He loves the kind of life the prairies offer; the silence, the freedom, the wide vistas, the immunity from human intrusion. Of choice he would elect to live, not in towns or cities, with “the poor little street-bred people that vapor and fume and brag,” but on the plains or the gently-rolling prairies where herds graze, and the blue stem waves in the wind. He would elect to live where he can watch, with quiet eye, “the clouds that gather round the setting sun” on the far edge of the sleeping prairies.

For he is a cattleman, this John Sidney Joseph, happy in that his business in life can be carried on under conditions which meet his heart’s desire – life in the open. He lives in Potwin, but Potwin is only a hamlet, as they would say in England. The life of the village scarcely interrupts the silence of the surrounding prairies, and offers none of the disadvantages of a large town or city. His home is the most ‘modern” home in potwin, convenient, artistic and comfortable, but you notice it is not built in “the crowded hives of men.” It is within calling of the prairies he loves.

John Sidney Joseph was born May 5, 1871, in Richie County, West Virginia, a long, long way from the prairies and hills that he now knows so well. His paternal grandparents were Waitman F. and Sarah (Cox) Joseph, good Southern Democrats. His father, Sidney Smith Joseph, was a prosperous farmer and stockman of Richie County, widely known and respected. Little John Sidney knew the simple pleasures of farm life in the Seventies, when farm life, all over the country, was more remote from urban influences than it is now. Today the car, rural free delivery and the radio have made farm life into suburban likeness-almost!

Little John Sidney and his brother, Charles were the kind of farm boys of whom Whittier, himself a grown-up farm boy, wrote with such sympathy and understanding:

                       “Blessings on thee, little man,

                        Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!

                        With thy turned-up pantaloons,

                        And thy merry whistled tune;

                        With thy red lip, redder still,

                        Kissed by strawberries on the hill;

                        From my heart I give thee joy;

                        I was once a barefoot boy!”

But Whittier’s boyhood on a New England farm in the ‘Teens of the last century was far from all pleasure, and the Joseph boys’ life on the West Virginia farm was far from all pleasure, even on so good a farm as the Joseph farm in Richie County. There was plenty of hard work for men and boys, and it is recorded that John and Charles did their share of the hard work, for boys were not made domestic pets of, in those strenuous days. They learned all about stock, and planting, and reaping and storing – the hard, patient learning of the farm. And fifty years ago farming in the United States was not so easy as it is now, with the mechanical devices that save time and labor, though perhaps the rewards were surer and safer in the old days. Nor was stock raising subject to regulation by young college men, anxious to experiment in theoretical facts.

When John was nine years old his father decided to take Horace Greeley’s advice and go West, and let his little sons grow up with the new country. From Indiana and Illinois, from Iowa and Ohio, even from states east of the Alleghanies, people were moving westward; in long, white, slow processions, thousands of people, braving hardships to seek homesteads and the opportunities offered by a newly opened country. In 1880, then, Mr. Joseph moved his family to Kansas; to Milton Township, Butler County. “There, boys,” he said, when the family was settled, “There, boys, now see what you can do in this fine new country!”

So the two West Virginia boys “dug in.” They were used to hard work, they knew about stock and crops, and were eager to do their best. Farming, stock raising, buying land, saving what money they could, but always working hard, brisk and hopeful, they grew to manhood, making an honorable place for themselves in the community.

Grown up, Charles married Miss Annie Branine, of Newton. They have one son, Charles, Jr., now a student in the University of Kansas. John married Miss May Shuman Hughes, the wedding ceremony being performed in Wichita, May 5, 1905. Of late years Mrs. Joseph has divided her time between Potwin and Wichita. A successful business woman in Wichita, her smart roadster is frequently seen dashing between the two towns, from her pretty home in Potwin to her business office in Wichita again., and back again, like a huge humming bird. She is known as the kindest neighbor and the most sympathetic friend in the world. She organized Old People’s day, in Potwin; an annual dinner, attended by folks over sixty-five years young, as Elbert Hubbard always insisted upon saying. Each year about two hundred attended the dinner, an occasion that is eagerly looked forward to, until dinner time comes round again.

The John Josephs have one child, a daughter, now grown to brilliant womanhood, Myrtle Thelma, who is now on the stage in New York, an actress of acknowledged ability. Her stage name is Thelma Marsh, for her paternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Eliza Marsh. Thelma is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Art, in New York. A hard-working and ambitious student of her art, she is rapidly becoming favorably known in her profession. In 1924 she was chosen Queen of the Butler County Kafir Corn Carnival.

John Joseph, who came with his father to Kansas, the new land of opportunity, in 1880, a little country boy of nine, is today one of the best known and most successful stockmen in this section. He knows the cattle business better than any man hereabout, is enthusiastic about it, and contented in it. “Blessed is the man who found his work,” says the wise man. John Joseph has found his work. He and his brother Charles, still comrades as they were in their boyhood days “back home” in West Virginia, are together, day after day, companions in work and in leisure, in plans and in hope.

Also, Mr. Joseph is interested in banking, and has had long experience in that business. For ten years he was a director in the Stockyards National Bank, in Wichita, and a director in the Citizens State Bank of El Dorado, and vice president and a director of Bank of Whitewater. For some two years his residence was in Wichita, in the fashionable College Hill district. For the last twenty years he has been president of the Potwin State Bank.

So he has been a busy man, with plenty of variety and interest in his life. He has carried many responsibilities to successful issue. Looking at his accomplishment and at his standing in his community as a man of integrity and square dealing, and thinking of what his father said, in 1880, when he turned his two little sons loose in Milton Township, Butler County, telling them to see what they could make of themselves in the new country; contemplating John Joseph, after the work of years, one decides that he has done well indeed in the fine new prairie country spread before his eager eyes.

And he has the faculty of making and keeping friends. To make friends is not so difficult; to keep them is something else again. Money a man may have, and position and the power thereof; but if he hasn’t friends, firm and believing friends, his success is Dead Sea fruit. Mr. Joseph has many, many friends, the hearty friends who calla man by his first name; men who believe in him, in his integrity, and in his intention to deal justly with his fellowmen. Any man of whom this can be said is a success.