Hays, Russell Randolph, 1904-1989

Russell Randolph Hays was born February 19, 1904 on his father’s family farm near Black Jack (Douglas County), Kansas, near present-day Baldwin City, Kansas. His parents were Harry Herbert and Estelle (Cowgill) Hays. He attended schools in Oklahoma Territory and Washington State, and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1927. In that same year, he married college classmate Adele Weidner. From 1929 to 1934, Hays lived in California where he wrote pulp magazine westerns and railroad adventures as well as science fiction, supplementing his income as a professional wrestler. From the 1930s to the 1980s, Hays engineered and patented many mechanical inventions, including rotor improvements for helicopters and autogiros, and hydraulic devices for oil well drilling.

Upon his father's death in 1935, Hays returned to his family farm at Black Jack, where he raised livestock, drilled oil wells, and established the Tauy Oil Company. During the 1940s and 1950s, he worked part-time for the Kansas Geological Survey as a ceramicist, locating and evaluating clay deposits in eastern Kansas. In farming, Hays practiced land conservation and environmental protection--propagating, documenting, and photographing native prairie grasses and wildflowers. He donated land to the state of Kansas for a roadside park commemorating the historic Battle of Black Jack and sold to Douglas County, for purposes of a nature preserve, an adjoining twenty acres of original prairie containing historic Santa Fe Trail wagon ruts. Hays died at Lawrence (Douglas County), Kansas on June 4, 1989.