KINSLEY, Kan. -- For years, about the only thing that's ever stirred folks to pause here on a seemingly endless trip across the high plains is the big sign at the junction of U.S. 50, 56 and 183.

One arrow points west, reading, "San Francisco, 1561 miles." Another points east, advising, "New York, 1561 miles." As the sign says, Kinsley is "Midway U.S.A," where travelers, relieved to be this far, pose for a snapshot before moving along.

But within a couple of years, folks here predict, tour buses will be pulling into town with regularity and swarms will fill Main Street.

The attraction? The carnival has come to town. Permanently.

Over the past couple of years, Kinsley has set itself up as the country's carnival capital by establishing headquarters for the National Foundation for Carnival Heritage and its Carnival Heritage Museum, which occupies an abandoned downtown department store.

And next to the museum is what for millions of youngsters in tens of thousands of small towns was a consummation of their dreams -- a merry-go-round.

On one hot summer night, the far end of a prairie town would literally come ablaze with light that would illuminate unimagined sights -- snake handlers and sword swallowers, games of chance and shooting galleries, gravel-voiced barkers and scantily dressed women.

The carnival became part of small-town America's mythology.

This past year, evidence of what's ahead for Kinsley was easy to spot -- 10,000 tourists showed up. Museum officials say 1998 was just the beginning. In the next couple of years the museum will expand into three other buildings so it can house its steadily growing collection of carnival memorabilia. More old performers will be inducted into an adjunct carnival Hall of Fame. And in November 2000, there will be the unveiling of Kinsley's piece de resistance -- a Heyn double-decker carousel, built in Germany in 1900.

John Ploger, a member of the museum board, said the Heyn would be the only operating double-decker carousel with original overhead panels in North America.

"The rarity of the Heyn should bring people out of the woodwork," he said. "We expect our yearly numbers to go to 50,000 or more."

Currently, the ancient carousel is in storage. It was brought to the United States in the mid-1980s, but its ornate wooden horses had been sold off to collectors for a cumulative million-plus dollars. It was rescued by Frank Trainer, a Floridian who couldn't bear seeing the frame and innards of the old machine dumped in a landfill.

Trainer overhauled the carousel's machinery, then sold it to Kinsley for $15,000.

The lack of horses is no problem. Kinsley has in its midst a nationally known carver of wooden carousel horses, Bruce White.

"Kids ride merry-go-rounds," Ploger said. "Kids don't care if that horse moving them up or down is new or old."

Kinsley's journey to becoming a town celebrating carnivals has taken some time. For decades, community leaders sought industry -- jobs, manufacturing, plants.

But when that didn't work out, Kinsley looked within. What was here?

Well, there had been a big Indian fight near here. And there was once a jim-dandy train robbery. Yet what people really remembered was that Kinsley had been the home of six carnivals from the turn of the century until the 1980s.

It started about 1901, when Charlie Brodbeck traded some cows for a small merry-go-round. Charlie noticed that folks would ride a horse to where he had set up the contraption, then they'd get on a wooden horse, and pay a nickel to boot.

The proverbial light bulb went on over Brodbeck's head. He, his sons and the men who married into the family left their hardscrabble farms for the carnival business.

In all, that first merry-go-round birthed six carnival companies that would leave Kinsley and travel all over the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains every spring. In good years, they made money. In bad years, it was nip and tuck.

Yet what they got they gave back to generations of people in the form of vivid memories. What the circus was to the bigger towns, the carnival was to so many backwater communities.

"So we had this legacy all around us," Ploger said. "And about 10 years ago we starting putting it together."

People made donations of carnival items they'd squirreled away over the years. Children and grandchildren of the Brodbeck family pitched in, finding old stuff out in barns. Donations came from all over -- swords from a sword swallower, a scale from a guy who made a comfortable living guessing people's weight.

"We're the only one in the country," Ploger said of the museum. "We've heard of other groups who want to start museums, but they just can't seem to get off the ground."

Kinsley has never really had that problem. But then maybe it had an inborn edge. What better place to celebrate the carnival than "Midway U.S.A."?

Pub Date: 03/14/99