Tom Lesovsky, Cuba, Kansas

Tom Lesovsky: 950 Acres of Community

“Some people think I’m a good speaker,” Tom Lesovsky told me, chuckling as if he didn’t quite buy the compliment himself. “I think it’s just because I’m loud and everybody can hear me.”
— Tom Lesovsky, kitchen‑table interview, Cuba Kansas

The kitchen where Tom and Peg Lesovsky pour coffee is square and utilitarian—formica counters, a stove that has outlived four presidents, and a window over the sink that frames a slice of Republic County prairie. Tom pulls up a chair, braces weathered elbows on worn pine, and begins to talk. The cadence of his voice rises and falls like wheat in wind, and soon the room itself seems to settle, listening.

Sixth‑Generation Roots

“I didn’t get very far,” Tom says, nodding toward the yard beyond the window. He means it literally. The 950 acres that unfurl from his doorstep have carried a Lesovsky name for more than a century—Grandfather, Father, Son, and now, for a final season, Tom himself. He tried college once: “A semester and ten days … last day you could get any tuition back.” After that he came home for good, married Peg from nearby Concordia, and folded himself into the layered history of Cuba Kansas.

Sixth‑generation farmers talk in seasons, not quarters, and Tom’s sentences are stitched with weather and soil: ridge‑till corn, double‑crop beans, the stubborn resilience of wheat that survives a Czech‑country winter. There is little romance in his tone—only stewardship, the plain duty of handing the land forward. 

Church, Then Town, Then Everything

The first formal volunteering, Tom recalls, began at the Presbyterian church on Main. Peg taught Sunday School; Tom ushered, fixed leaky faucets, stacked chairs after funeral dinners. In a town of 130 people you do not wait for permission to pitch in—you notice, you act. Soon the Lesovskys were drafted into the Cuba Booster Club, a homespun civic engine chartered in 1976 (bicentennial year) “to do things the city can’t.” Within months they found themselves chairing subcommittees, herding entertainers, balancing budgets scrawled on yellow legal pads. It never really stopped.

“Pretty soon you’re on this committee and another committee. Hence the Rock‑A‑Thon.”
— Tom Lesovsky

The Rock‑A‑Thon—Forty‑Eight Years of Motion

If Cuba has a pulse, the Rock‑A‑Thon is its heartbeat. Every April the community hall fills with donated rocking chairs—oak ladder‑backs, maple gliders, red‑vinyl relics rescued from farm auctions. For decades the chairs rocked seven straight days and nights, propelled by volunteers who traded shifts like barn dancers changing partners. Onstage: 4‑H fiddlers, polka bands, Methodist bell choirs. Downstairs: fried chicken at noon, chicken‑fried steak in the evening, kolache by the dozen whenever you wander past the bake‑sale table.

Covid clipped the marathon to a long weekend—Thursday through Saturday, doors locked at 10 p.m.—but the spirit holds. Two hundred plates of Czech sausage vanish in twenty minutes. The final auction, conducted by local cow‑country ringmen who accept “supper and a beer” as salary, still hauls in fourteen grand on a good year. Every dime cycles back into Cuba: sidewalk cement, abandoned homes razed and land cleared, roof tin for the community hall.

Tom’s role? President “a couple times,” default emcee always. “Welcoming people,” he says, as though greeting visitors and making them feel at home were no heavier than turning on a hall light. Yet the success of rural fundraisers is rarely measured in dollars alone; it lives in the steady voice at the microphone reminding tired volunteers why they started rocking in the first place.

Restoration as Calling

Money raised forks quickly into projects, each a testament to Tom’s fatal inability to look the other way when a building starts to sag. The 1884 blacksmith shop, roofless and collapsing when I first passed through town years ago, now stands square under tin because Tom badgered the Booster Club—“Doc’s building got fixed, why not this?” Another $20,000 in grants, “fifteen to twenty” more in donated lumber, hundreds of volunteer hours directed by Tom’s insistent laughter.

Same story for the two‑room country schoolhouse hauled a mile into town on cribbing beams. The Heritage Center—Doc McClaskey's former office—was another salvage. When potential visitors call ahead Tom or Peg unlock doors, lead strangers through exhibits, speak of chloral hydrate and forge smoke and one-room arithmetic lessons as though these histories were family heirlooms (because, in Cuba, they are).

The Unpaid Logistics of Belonging

All good small‑town enterprises run on unpaid logistics: the last‑to‑leave crew who sweep floors at midnight, re‑stack folding chairs, wipe spills so elderly church ladies do not return to catastrophe. Tom and Peg are that crew. “We’re the cleanup crew,” Peg laughs, yet there is pride beneath the joke. They do the unnoticed tasks—inventorying toilet‑paper supply, unlocking thermostats before funerals, coaxing the new wireless mic to life before Harvest Festival bingo.

When the aging volunteer fire‑chief stepped down, Tom organized a meeting, phoned young neighbors, convinced them to suit up. New leadership emerged, the station revived. No applause followed—only a quiet reduction in communal risk, measured in faster response times and lower insurance premiums.

Farming Still Pays the Bills

Ask what Tom does “when he’s not volunteering” and he answers without irony: “We farm.” Nine‑hundred‑fifty owned acres, a couple hundred rented. Wheat, corn, beans, some hay. No livestock now—too many meetings. Tractor hours still anchor his calendar; harvest finished last week. Volunteer work expands to fill remaining daylight.

Why keep pushing at seventy? Tom’s reply is soft: “Satisfaction of seeing something saved.” A building repaired, a tradition renewed, a stranger who drives forty miles to photograph a schoolhouse because they read about it in National Geographic.

Tears and the Pandemic Pause

In March 2020 the Lesovskys had fryers ordered, flour delivered, chair‑rockers scheduled—then the virus shut the world. Cancelling the Rock‑A‑Thon broke them open. Peg still tears up remembering the emergency meeting, the phone calls, the scramble to sell perishables via curbside pickup. Tom admits he wept later, too, his eyes welling up now. The town survived; the fundraiser returned in abbreviated form. But the memory lingers, a testament to how deeply the tradition runs.

Mentoring by Example

More gratifying than money, Tom says, is watching younger neighbors shoulder the load: the barbecue contest he and Peg merely supported, the Harvest Festival games planned by adults who once rocked chairs as children. He hopes visibility—seeing Tom and Peg present at every event—breeds imitation. So far, signs are good.

“We take our kids everywhere. Didn’t worry about babysitters. Now our daughter and son‑in‑law are real involved. They saw that’s what you do.”

The sons farm careers elsewhere—Chicago finance, Texas tech—but the land will stay in the family, leased maybe, loved certainly. Legacy is a mosaic; each generation chooses its tile.

Jim Richardson and the Gift of Narrative

Cuba’s renaissance owes much to National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson, born ten miles away, who wandered in thirty years ago convinced he should document the town before it died. Instead Cuba refused to oblige, and the photos—shown during slide shows at Rock‑A‑Thon nights—helped ensure survival. Tom recounts the story with a mix of gratitude and Kansas understatement: “Some of it is luck to have Jim.” Yet luck favors towns that rock chairs for seven straight days.

A Thousand-Dollar Gesture

When the Hope & Generosity Tour rolled back into Cuba in 2024, I carried an envelope marked $1,000. It weighed less than a loaf of bread but felt heavier than a mortgage. I had been told, several times, by women at the café and by men sipping coffee at the co‑op scale house: “You’ve got to talk to Tom. He’s got his fingers in everything.” Now, across the kitchen table, I knew why.

I slid the cash toward him. For once he fell silent; Peg covered her mouth. "Oh no. No, no, no," said Tom trying to push it back—“There are others—Clegg, Lynette—” But the rules of the road are clear: refuse generosity, and you rob two parties at once. Finally he nodded, cleared his throat.

“Well,” he said, voice low, “we’ll make it multiply.”

I believed him.

The Gospel of Doing

Tom Lesovsky will never headline a cable segment or trend on a Thursday hashtag. His currency is volunteer hours, auction items gathered, and chairs rocked through midnight. In a world devoted to pixels and posturing, he practices something older—what he calls “background work,” what I call the gospel of doing.

When the interview ended, Peg sent me off with a plate full of baked goods and a mental picture: Tom, broom in hand, sweeping the community hall stage at 1 a.m. after last year’s auction. The image was utterly perfect. It is the shape of service rendered quietly, long after applause has gone home.

I jumped in Josie and headed out County Road K—fresh gravel, the mid-afternoon sun punching gold through the windshield. In the mirror Tom shrank: a silhouette in a sea of wheat, hand still raised, barn behind him cut sharp against the sky. I drove until the figure blurred, then vanished. Only fields remained.

Somewhere past the county line I realized this meeting wasn’t about the $1,000 at all. It was about the moment Tom decided where to send the money. He recognized need the way a sailor recognizes rip current—instinctive, immediate. Generosity wasn’t an act; it was muscle memory.

I tapped the steering wheel to the beat of some earworm and thought of Steinbeck’s line about people in infinite worlds. Thought how Tom’s world fit inside 950 acres yet touched every loaf of bread baked 1,500 miles away. Grain, roads, shelves. Circles.

The road bent east. I followed and felt the axle of the earth shift a click toward grace.