Of pumpkins and peeps: A few thoughts on Kirstie Alley and what she meant to Kansas

In the quarter century I’ve lived in Wichita, I never met Kirstie Alley.

I’m sad to say that because her Hollywood screen debut was in one of my favorite movies of all time, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”

But my wife and kids met her once.

As a family, we attend East Heights United Methodist Church in College Hill, a few blocks down Douglas from Alley’s Wichita home.

For many years, East Heights was known as “the pumpkin church,” because in the weeks leading up to Halloween, we sold pumpkins on the church lawn to benefit the youth program.

Years ago, around 2010 or so when my twin sons Kyle and Braden were in the youth group, they were manning the pumpkin patch with their mom (and my wife) Kathy, on the night Kirstie Alley dropped by.

As Kathy tells it, it was dark and they didn’t immediately recognize her. She was just another Wichitan coming by to pick out some pumpkins.

And even after Kathy did realize she was speaking with the TV star we’d watched for years in “Cheers,” she didn’t “go all fangirl.”

They chatted for a while about the youth group and how the money raised would be used to pay for their mission trips to help less fortunate people in rural Tennessee and elsewhere.

“It was really sweet,” Kathy recalls. “She was really interested in what the church was doing and the community. We loaded the pumpkins in her car and she wrote a really nice check, for more than the pumpkins cost.”

It’s a small story as Kirstie Alley stories go. No doubt many Wichitans have better ones.

But it does illustrate who she was and what she meant to our town.

I was surprised and sad when I found out she’d passed away after a short bout with a late-discovered cancer.

I’m generally kind of indifferent to celebrities. In my first, second and fourth newspaper jobs, I covered Burbank and North Hollywood, California.

Walt Disney, Warner Bros., NBC and Universal Studios were all within shouting distance, and you could hardly go to dinner or the airport without spotting someone you recognized from the big or the small screen. Celebs were just part of life.

It’s different here.

Harrison Ford spends a few days here each year having his plane serviced and it’s a community event with regular updates on where he eats and who he meets along the way.

We have a few famous entertainers who were Wichita born and/or raised. Singer-songwriter Joe Walsh of The Eagles and Don Johnson of “Miami Vice” and “Nash Bridges” fame come immediately to mind.

I searched pages and pages of our archives and didn’t find any stories about Johnson ever returning. Walsh visited on tour with the band several times and put on a concert that raises $25,000 for victims of the 1991 Andover tornado.

But no big-time Hollywood star maintained the kind of connection to this community that Kirstie Alley did. Read through our archives and you’ll find dozens of stories about her.

She salvaged a Santa’s Village set from her 1993 movie “Look Who’s Talking II” and displayed it in her yard, where it’s been a highlight of the annual College Hill Christmas Trolley Tour.

But one story really caught my eye.

It was a 2004 review of a variety show to benefit our historic, but dilapidated, Orpheum Theatre, written by former Eagle movie and stage critic Bob Curtright.

“I’ve stood on a lot of stages in my career,” the story quoted Alley as saying. “But, damn, this is the freaking Orpheum! I’m one of your peeps.” Then, Bob wrote, she launched into an improvised song: “There’s no peeps like Wichita peeps.”

So a final shout out to Kirstie from Wichita: Wherever your career took you, you were always one of our peeps.

And you always will be.