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Homegrown celebration Page 12 TEG MONDAY, JULY 25, 2016 V V V PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING FAMILY OWNED SINCE 1895 V V V Good Evening VVV There’s no place like home. WWW.EMPORIAGAZETTE.COM ‘MISSION’ ACCOMPLISHED By Zach Hacker “People always say it takes a village to raise a family. It takes Lisa Keith couldn’t help but get a whole community plus some to a little emotional Saturday when raise an exhibit at the zoo.” discussing the grand opening of [email protected] “Mission Madagascar.” “It’s a dream come true,” the zoo director at David Traylor Zoo of Emporia said as she choked back tears. “To see the smiles on people’s faces and to see the happiness of the lemurs — it is a dream.” Hundreds of excited guests made their way to the zoo Saturday morning for the grand open- P H O T O S B Y Z A C H LISA KEITH, Zoo Director ing of “Mission Madagascar,” a massive upgrade to the lemur exhibit that has been in the works for nearly a decade. The new facilities include both an outdoor and a temperature-controlled indoor area for the lemurs that can be viewed by the public year-round. It also allows for breeding and raising young lemurs; a process that is already underway as twin ring-tailed lemurs were born in April — a first for David Traylor Zoo. According to Keith, the idea came about when the Emporia Rotary Club saw a need for upgrades in the old lemur exhibit, which only allowed the creatures native to Madagascar — a small island nation off the southeastern coast of Africa — to be viewed for a Please see Zoo, Page 3 H A C K E R Wynonna makes ‘Big Noise’ at Granada COLYER GIVES POSITIVE MESSAGE AT ANNUAL PICNIC By Zach Hacker [email protected] JAN BUCKMAN/SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE W ynonna and The Big Noise were a huge hit Sunday evening at the Granada Theatre. People were dancing, cheering and yelling during many of her songs. She talked a lot about growing up poor with her mother, Naomi Judd, and her actress sister, Ashley Judd, in the Appalachian mountains. After playing for almost two hours she left the stage, but the crowd gave a standing VOL. 125, NO. 20 ovation and cheered for almost five minutes until she returned for an encore.  Kansas Lieutenant Governor Jeff Colyer reminded Lyon County Republicans that “the rest of the world is watching us” on Sunday. Colyer was the keynote speaker at the 2016 Lyon County Republican Picnic held at the Emporia Senior Center. A plastic and craniofacial surgeon by trade, he has been the Lieutenant Governor under Sam Brownback since 2011. He has traveled the world volunteering with the International Medical Corps, providing medical care in places such as Syria, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Rwanda, among other places. Those trips abroad, he told the crowd of about 100, have given him perspective on how not only the United States, but even Kansas is viewed on a global scale. He exemplified this with a story from a trip to South Sudan, where he said he was the only American working alongside doctors from places all over the world. There, he said the people he was working with didn’t know he’s the Lieutenant Governor of Kansas, but only as “Dr. Jeff.” “There was a TV on in one of the areas we could go and it was on a feed from the BBC,” Colyer said. “There was a crawl going across the bottom and it said ‘Kansas.’ One of the people there said, ‘Kansas, that’s the real America. It’s not New York or Hollywood, but the real America.’ The rest of the world is looking at us and is trying to see what we’re going to do.” Colyer said they are watching because there are some difficult decisions that will need to be made in the near future. Though he said there has been a lot of doom and gloom coming out of Topeka in recent years, there have been a lot of Please see Picnic, Page 3