But of what use is knowing all these strange town names?

Some years back, at the WVA Festival at Winfield, Kansas, a band of loonies in one camp were entertaining some "foreign visitors" (rumor has it that they were Brits?) and started a game of naming strange Kansas places. The end result was the assigning of "camp names" consisting of first and last names which had to be Kansas towns to each of the "members" of the campground.

The "tradition" has continued for several years, but by the time we became acquainted with this particlar camp, most of the well-known names were of course taken, so it was a rather difficult task to find good ones we were willing to use, and extensive debate ensued over whether we could use names of towns that once existed but were no longer on the common maps; but success was finally achieved, after I ran the DeLorme Atlas and Kansas Gazeteer index through the scanner, OCR'd, deleted streams and rivers, and made a scholarly presentation to the adjudicating officials of the camp.

There were numerous obvious "good" names, but it didn't take long to use 'em all up.

John