Around four in the afternoon on March 31, 1969, a welder's spark touched off a grain dust explosion at Circle E Ranch, a large-scale cattle feeding company near the town of Potwin in south-central Kansas. The force of the blast lifted the concrete roof on the lot's grain elevator and twisted the steel buildings that housed the feed mill at the heart of the operation. The accident injured four workers, three of them moderately. The fourth, Ted Pope, worked in the elevator that had borne the brunt. Fire shot up the lift that raised employees to the top of the structure, engulfing Pope in flames and leaving him with third-degree burns over 80 percent of his body. The only places not burned were those protected by leather: his hands, his feet, and his waistline. Twenty-one years old at the time, Ted lay in an El Dorado, Kansas, hospital for months, undergoing repeated surgeries to reconstruct his body, especially the facial features that had been removed by the conflagration. After he recovered from his injuries, Pope returned to the feedlot, working a few years before crashing his motorcycle on a curve near town, a final accident that ended his short life.

I had not known Ted before the explosion. I met him in the summer of 1972, when I worked at Circle E, as I would most summers growing up on the Kansas plains.