It’s going on about 30 years now that radio listeners have been tuning in to a show called “A Prairie Home Companion.” For two hours a week, they listen to Garrison Keillor spin yarns about Lake Woebegone, a ‘little town that time forgot, and the decades cannot improve.” The citizens there are a sturdy lot, with names like Nils and Lars, and they’re usually connected to farming somehow. Lake Woebegone, Keillor says fondly, is a place “where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average.”

There’s another community on the prairie—right here in our Kansas City metropolitan area as a matter of fact—that could inspire some tall tales, except that everything you hear about it is true. The antithesis of Lake Woebegone, it’s too dynamic to be contained in one town, so we just call it Johnson County. Often described as “God’s country” by its citizens, it is a place where the women are smart, the men are successful and the children are darn-near perfect.

Half of Johnson County’s 477 square miles comprise a patchwork of 21 incorporated cities, and the other half offers room to grow. Unlike the homogenous existence of Lake Woebegone, it’s a little tougher to pinpoint a single Johnson County lifestyle because of the variety of neighborhoods that fill the space from Westwood in the northeast corner of the county to Edgerton in the southwest. Driving down State Line, you can see the mansions of Missions Hills turn into the neat cottages of Prairie Village to the rambling ranches of old Leawood back to the mansions of Hallbrook. Traveling I-35 from north to south, you can watch vibrant urban living meld into suburban ease then into small-town rural life in a matter of minutes.

One thing is certain about Johnson County—with a sustained population growth approaching 10,000 people a year, a per-capita income that ranks above 98 percent of the nation’s counties, and a relatively low cost of living, there’s plenty of discretionary income. The area’s strong demographics attract retailers like ducks to a June bug from the entrepreneurial establishments in the Fairway shops to the national chains at Oak Park Mall. Stores and restaurants are moving south at a rapid rate, but the densest band of new retail development lines 135th Street from Leawood to Olathe. Of course, retailers are not the only ones to compete for discretionary income—this same stretch of road is also becoming known as Bankers’ Row.

When the judge asked the crook why he robbed banks, the criminal answered logically, “Because that’s where the money is.” To follow that logic would lead to the conclusion that Johnson County’s wealth must attract crime, but nothing could be further from the truth. In most large metropolitan areas, crime rates are typically higher than the national average in counties with larger populations. This is true of Platte, Clay, Wyandotte, and Jackson counties in Kansas City’s core five counties. Johnson County’s crime rate is the only one lower than the national average despite it’s 2000 population of 451,000, second only to Jackson County’s 655,000.

Low crime rates and superior education have contributed to Johnson County’s recognition as one of the best places to raise a family. Another factor is the number of kid-friendly attractions the county offers. Children and adults alike can visit the Deanna Rose Children’s Farmstead at 13800 Switzer to understand what it was like to live on a family farm at the turn of the century—the 20th century, not the 21st. Demonstrations and hands-on activities with crops and farm animals foster an appreciation for a disappearing way of life.

Another family-oriented asset of the county and the entire Kansas City region is the Overland Park Arbor-etum and Botanical Gardens on 179th Street west of U.S. Highway 69. The 300-acre arboretum currently has eight different ecosystems that have been identified with rare or unusual plant species. The remainder of the project will be developed over the next 20 years and will eventually include traditional botanical gardens, an education center, a visitors’ center and an 8,000-square-foot conservatory.

The arboretum is just a fraction of the green space being planned for Johnson County. In September of 1999, the Johnson County Park and Recreation District developed a Master Action Plan—MAP 2020—that will guide new park development. Of the district’s 6,396 acres of parkland, only 20 percent have been developed for recreation activities so far. That development includes athletic fields, aquatic facilities, marinas, beaches, nature centers and, of course, golf courses.

Johnson Countians love their golf, and they have 25 courses to choose from, both public and private. Courses include designs by Tom Watson, Jim Colbert, Tom Fazio, Robert Trent Jones II, and Tom Weiskopf. The newest is the Nicklaus (as in Jack) Golf Club at Lionsgate.

The county offers not only outdoor sports, but outdoor culture as well, including Art in the Woods, the Corporate Woods Jazz Festival and the Shawnee Mission Park’s Theater in the Park. Not all Johnson County culture takes place out of doors, however. The area provides a number of attractions from Broadway – style shows and musicals at the New Theatre to performances by local, national and international artists at Johnson County Community College’s exceptional Carlsen Center.

Johnson County has museums, too, even if it does seem to be a place with more in its future than in its past. As if to emphasize how young the county is, relatively speaking, the Johnson County Museums are surveying all pre-‘50s structures in the county as part of a larger project to document historical architectural resources in the state of Kansas. Not pre-1850 structures, mind you, but pre-1950. One of the attractions at the Johnson County Museum of History at Shawnee Mission Parkway and Lackman Road is the 1950s All-Electric Model House. The house, originally built by the Kansas City Power and Light Company in Prairie Village to exhibit all-electric living, is one of the few surviving exhibition homes that were popular in the 1950s.

Just as it was in the 1950s, everything is up-to-date in Johnson County in the 21st century. Predictions call for continued growth over the long term in population, wealth and educated work force. Johnson County truly is a place where the women are smart, the men are successful, and the children are darn-near perfect.