I live in town that owes its existence to Ft. Leavenworth, having sprung up two centuries ago surround the oldest military outpost west of the Mississippi. Although the town of Leavenworth’s primary industry is prisons — we have four, along with the City and County jails — the large military and military-support population is far more obvious than the number of prisoners here. Every other car on the road bears a DOD sticker on its windshield, and despite being in Kansas, crew cuts easily outnumber mullets.

Since the war began, the size of our military population has become more evident in other ways, too, as the city and its businesses seek to make life a bit more bearable for our returning service men and women.

Kansas is, as you might expect, quite often a bit slow on things like ADA accommodations. So many of our buildings here, for instance, predate rules and regulations requiring wheel-chair access. True, more modern buildings must comply from the beginning by having ramps and power doors, bathroom stalls with handrails, emergency lights and aisles of a certain width. But as the number of wounded or disabled returning Vets increases, even our older buildings — most of which were granted ‘grandfathered’ exemptions from ADA rules — are striving to catch up.

Recently, one of my favorite little bars added braille exit signs to help guide vision-impaired customers. I found myself wondering, as I watched the signs go up not long ago, just how many people with little or no eyesight find themselves in bars with no one else to point them to the door when they’re ready to leave. How easy is it, I couldn’t help thinking, for a bartender to determine whether a man running his hands over the wall is actually trying to read the exit sign or whether he’s had a bit too much to drink? And, really, just how many vision-impaired people are driving themselves home after a night out on the town?

Still, it’s good to see that older businesses are at least making an effort to help out those in need of additional assistance, even if the business owners don’t give much thought to the effectiveness of the accommodations they incorporate. Like the dance club — recently closed down, as a matter of fact — that added the kind of emergency lighting that flashes to warn of fire or other dangers. How would anyone tell those lights apart from the unending strobe light over the dance floor?

One would think, at the very least, that with all of the military members and their spouses, along with all of the civilian support staff and their families, that businesses around here would have made these accommodations long ago, rather than merely jumping on the bandwagon now to appear friendly to disabled Vets. The sad fact, though, is that it probably was not financially advantageous until recently — and that, too, is a sad sign of just how many wounded have returned home in need of such help.