Photo by Tom Campbell

John Janssen lost his home to the tornado, but not his sense of humor. Until he lost his re-election bid, Janssen’s voice mail message said: “You have reached his homeless highness, the mayor of Greensburg, Kansas.”

In 2003, Janssen helped convince his friend, Lonnie McCollum, the retired head of the Kansas Highway Patrol, to run for mayor.

Janssen joined the political fray as well, paying the $5 to get his name on the ballot for city council. A $15 newspaper ad in the Kiowa County Signal was all he spent on his successful campaign for an at-large seat.

“I figure that if you aren’t willing to kick in and try to help fix things, then you shouldn’t complain about anything,” Janssen says.

He wanted to clean up some of the run-down homes that had become eyesores in Greensburg. He never counted on a tornado making all of Greensburg an eyesore.

“Everything that anchors you to the world,” Janssen says, “cars, your house, church — they were all gone. We lost everything that makes a town a community and that makes a community a home. Gone, all gone.”

And Greensburg lost its mayor, too.

As McCollum’s wife climbed out of their basement after the tornado, she tore an Achilles tendon. For three weeks following the tornado, McCollum lived in his pickup truck parked at the Kiowa County Courthouse while his wife lived in their camper outside of town.

The job and separation took its toll on each. This was no way to ease into the golden years, they thought.

McCollum resigned as mayor and moved his wife to nearby Pratt. Janssen, as president of the city council, reluctantly accepted the role of interim mayor.

“I’m not a politician, but I thought I could help. I thought I could help change things for the better.”

Most citizens of Greensburg were born there. Janssen was an outsider, born in Kentland, Ind., and educated at Purdue. He had never seen Greensburg until 1973, when he left grad school at Kansas State University in Manhattan after just 18 months.

He interviewed for a job with the Farm Credit Bank in Springfield, Mass. It was nothing like Manhattan, or for that matter, Kentland.

“Too many people,” Janssen figured, and not enough farm ground. “I really wanted to farm,” Janssen says. “I wanted to get as close to production agriculture as I could, then work out the details from there.”

Greensburg was famous for two things: a big hole and a big rock. The city is the home of the world’s largest hand-dug well, completed in 1888, to provide water to steam locomotives that stopped in town long enough to take a deep drink.

Its other attraction is a 1,000-pound meteorite, dug out of a nearby farm field in 1949. Farm ground, they had plenty of, stretching out in all directions from Greensburg. “I thought Greensburg looked a lot like Kentland, so I figured I could live there,” Janssen says.

He took a job as a farm management field man for Kansas State University, serving farmers in a five-county area with Greensburg as its hub.

“They told me I’d last either six weeks or live there the rest of my life,” Janssen recalls. “Well, it’s been 35 years and I’m still here, so I guess I’m committed.”

Two years later (in 1975), while still working for Kansas State, Janssen started renting farm ground 30 miles south of town. He now farms more than 800 acres of irrigated ground producing corn, beans and wheat.

Janssen quit his Kansas State job in 1981. Lana quit her job as a speech therapist. They opened their own financial planning business (Z-J Inc.) in the basement of their Greensburg home.

And now fate, and a Category 5 tornado, had thrust him into the position of mayor of Greensburg, commuting daily from a motel room 30 miles away in Pratt. On his voice mail, Janssen jokingly referred to himself as “his homeless highness, the mayor of Greensburg.”

The job took over his life.

“Being mayor is not intentionally a full-time job,” he says. “But you throw in a tornado and it becomes full-time.”