PITTSBURG, Kan. — In the mid-1950s when Gary Gleason was seven years old, his father Bill moved the family from Parsons, Kansas to nearby Pittsburg, taking a job at the new Mid States Manufacturing plant just outside of town. “And it wasn’t too well-known,” Gleason says of his father’s nondescript place of employment. “There was one other person that we knew out there and that was dad’s best friend Jim Brown.” The Browns lived just a block away from the Gleasons.