Stop and Smell the Flowers

His first soda pop was strawberry and he didn't even finish it: Chapter 2, Part 8

Cutting alfalfa hay was an exciting time for young boys on the farm.  The mower always started around the perimeter of a field, cutting in ever narrowing circles until reaching the center.  As the mower continued its constricting circles, rabbits who dwelt there became more and more restive until, one by one, they would make a break for the safety outside the field.  Sometimes, we could catch the younger bunnies. 

One day as I was following the mower around the field I spied a full grown rabbit crouched just inside the unmown hay.  The rabbit was hunkered down, facing to one side of my approach.  With stealth I crept up to him, pounced and grabbed tightly with both hands.  That was one armful of rabbit, wiggling and kicking with great force.  But, I held on to my prize.  Then I looked the rabbit over and saw that he was blind in the eye on the side from which I had approached.  He couldn't see me and the noise from the mower was so loud that he hadn't heard me either.  When I saw that he was blind, my pity for the unfortunate thing made me release him.

***

John Hall, a man who had boarded with our family, served a stint in the military occupation of Germany following The Great War.  While in Germany, he bought me a fifty-dollar Liberty bond, in my name!  It was an unimaginable sum.

(Here's a $10 Liberty Loan Bond. Does anyone know how to figure out how much that $50 bond would be worth today if it was still around?)

I deposited it in the Silverdale bank safe and every six months I would go and withdraw my accumulated interest: $1.03 ($11 today).  With all that money in a seven-year-old's pocket, I was the envy of other kids.  I kept that bond until I was in high school when I needed to replace my cheap, nickel plated coronet.  I bought a first class Conn trumpet, silver plated and all.  It was a good use of the money but I hated to lose my only income.  From now on, all of my money would have to come from my own labor.

***

When I was seven-years-old we moved to another farm, about six miles east of Silverdale.  There was a little town, Otto, just down the road that had a small grocery store with a post office and one or two houses.  Calling it a town is probably an overstatement.

At that little store I had my first bottle of soda pop at a cost of seven cents per bottle.  Pop treated Bill and me.  Mine was strawberry, which seemed to be powerful stuff, its bite being so strong!  We sat on the porch of that country store drinking our pop.  I pretended it was whiskey, not daring to reveal any such pretense to my father who was always dead set against all forms of drinking.  It was such a strong drink that I didn't finish the last third of the bottle.  But what an experience it was.

***

One time, an uncaring horse decided to walk under a high clothes line, where the wire caught my chin.  We were moving slowly but with the hourse completely out of control.  As the line grew more taut, I hung onto the saddle horn even more tightly.  Eventually the wire became so taut it snapped me back off the horse, where I landed on my back on the ground.  Other than knocking the wind out of me, I suffered no real harm.  I was wearing a heavy leather jacket fastened at the neck and the wire didn't injure my throat.  I have no idea how many times I have been thrown off horses and never once suffered a severe injury.

The only total eclipse of the sun I have ever witnessed occurred that year.  (June 18, 1918) It grew darker and darker until all the chickens went to roost.  It continued until almost total darkness fell in a strange pall over the landscape.  After a few minutes, it started to grow light and the roosters began to crow, which demonstrates that chickens have no internal clock.

***

I was glad after one year to move back to our old farm, which seemed like a cherished friend. 

Did you ever smell fresh-cut alfalfa hay or the pungent odor of earth fresh turned by the plow or experienced the fresh softness of early morning, making you glad to be alive?  That is the way I remember that old farm.  Almost all of my early memory is from that familiar place. 

In the summer of 1921, Pop secured a contract to build a rather nice house for some distant cousin of Grandma's in Arkansas City.  During that transition period, Bill and I stayed with Grandma Harvey, enrolling in a 2-room school in Silverdale.  Grandpa had died the year before and Grandma doted on us.

Surgery on the farm in 1918, Chapter 2, Part 7

Sometime when I was about seven or eight, an uncle of sorts (Grandma's half sister's husband) arrived in Silverdale, fresh out of medical school.  In that day, tonsils were thought to only have negative qualities and the sooner out, the better. 

The entire family was assembled at Grandma's house, and a mass assembly line was set up to relieve all the children of their tonsils and adenoids.  The dining room table was used as an operating table, where each child took his turn.

No apprehension appeared to be attached to the anesthetic and surgery, no doubt due to the faith we had in a freshly attained medical degree.  As my turn came, Grandma held my feet as the chloroform was administered.  I remember feeling badly about it at the time, and I loved my grandmother dearly, but I couldn't help kicking her as I went under. 

Following surgery, the practice was to carry the child into the bedroom and place him on the bed, alongside others who hasn't recovered enough to make it on their own.  Sometimes, two or three would be stretched out, simultaneously, recovering from the anesthetic.

When I finally roused, I ran out to the backyard, joining the others who were playing and having fun, until we were called in for supper.  The fried chicken smelled good and I was ravenous.  All was well as I chewed that delicious chicken, until I tried to swallow.  To this day, when getting a physical examination, physicians comment on how someone certainly got all my tonsils. 

The way they make that comment gives me the impression that they new doctor may have excavated a bit more than necessary.

Chapter 2, Part 6: The Box Pie Event

In 1919 I saw my first airplane.  It was probably an old Jenny left over from The Great War. (That's what World War I was called, for we expected it to be the last war of such magnitude).

(It looks kinda...rickety, doesn't it?)

It happened down on the farm on a Sunday afternoon when all the relatives had gathered for Sunday dinner. (We called the main meal at noon dinner and the evening meal supper.)  The airplane's appearance raised considerable speculation as to where the world was going next.  As it turned out, we were preparing to witness explosive change.

***

The Box Supper or Box Pie event was held annually at the school to raise money.  It was one of the few social functions held outside church.  Only males did the bidding and a successful bidder had the privilege, or duty, to sit and eat with the woman that had brought the Box.  At one such Box Pie affair, I had my eye on a particular box brought in by an attractive woman.  There was probably ten downright ugly women for every attractive one and that meant an absolute maximum of two pretty ones for the evening.

Pop had given me a silver dollar to buy my pie.  Usually the bidding started at twenty-five cents and went up by increments of five or ten cents, seldom exceeding one dollar.  When the box I had my eye on was offered for auction, I lost control in my eagerness to get the right box and immediately shouted,

"ONE DOLLAR!"

That outburst was followed by snickering and considerable aside comment, but no one raised my bid, so I got the pie.  The reason no one else was interested in raising my bid soon became evident; I had gotten the boxes confused. 

I was not to eat a pie with an attractive woman that night; the one I sat with might have rated a one on a ten-point scale.  On the other hand, she was obligated to eat with a snotty nosed seven-year-old kid, which she may have deemed less than interesting.

Life on the Frontier was Hell For Women, Chapter 2, Part 5

1917-ish, still on the farm in Silverdale, Kansas.

Among all the people of economic marginality in Silverdale, Mrs. Alson was, undoubtedly, at the bottom. 

She was a rather large, homely woman with two children, but no husband.  The only income she ever had, as far as I know, was from doing other people's laundry.  She received about twenty-five cents for an average wash and likely made only about fifty cents for an entire day of work.

Her two girls attended Sunday school with me and I remember them as always having dingy, lace-trimmed slips which hung about two inches below the bottom of their dresses -- no doubt cast-offs from some family only slightly better off then they.  They were a bedraggled lot and I have often wondered what became of them.  Their outlook for marriage was certainly unpromising and single women in those days had few prospects unless they were fortunate enough to have relatives willing to look after them.

When people today decry programs such as Aid to Dependent Children, I always think of those girls, wishing they could have had some support from the more fortunate ones of society.  (Aid to Dependent Children is part of the Social Security Act of 1935, aimed at providing support to "all children whose mothers lacked the support of a breadwinner, no matter how they had got to that position.") Charitable support was almost non-existent, although we did give our clothes away.  But, when we finished with a piece of clothing, it was of little value to anyone else.

President Roosevelt established the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in 1935.  The period I'm describing now is around 1917, and even twenty years later only one in ten farms had electricity.  Silverdale wasn't included in that ten percent.  Human drudgery and long hours were common practices on those farms.  Women wearied under the brunt of heavy labor and became old before their time.  Given the choice between a good-looking woman and one who was healthy, strong and practiced industry, there was little doubt as to what a man's choice for a wife should be.

As mentioned before, hard work was almost of a religious nature in Silverdale.  It is by no accident that this virtue is at the core of the Protestant Ethic and it held high pragmatic value on the frontier.  After all, you were confronted more directly with the consequences of a lack of effort out there.

Although a willingness to work hard sometimes found little reward, failure to find any employment always led to dire consequences.  There was no Workman's Compensation, so Social Security, no minimum wage.  The family as an economic unit had to make its own and the absence of a male head of household spelled disaster.  Should any outside assistance be forthcoming, it would be meager and only of the barest subsistence.

Life was hard in those days, yet mother never complained.  For 16 years after she married, she cooked, sewed, washed and ironed clothes, tended the garden, canned vegetables, fruit and meat for off-season consumption, cleaned the house and bore and reared children.  Early mornings, while my father built a fire in the wood burning stove in the dining room, my mother built a wood fire in the kitchen range.  As Pop milked the cow, mom made biscuits and prepared the rest of breakfast.  Afterward, Pop went off to work building a house or barn and mom continued her daily duties. There was no gas, electricity or running water.  Mom probably worked 80 hours a week.

Not only was labor divided among members of the family, when those tasks were performed was often fixed.  As children, we learned this song:

This is the way we wash our clothes, wash our clothes, wash our clothes,

    this is the way we wash our clothes, so early Monday morning.

This is the way we iron our clothes, iron our clothes, iron our clothes,

    this is the way we iron our clothes, so early Tuesday morning.

This was not just a song. That's the way it was done. 

Strong emphasis was laid on the EARLY morning part.  At a fairly young age I caught on that great virtue was attached to early posting of the laundry on the line to dry.  Neighbors competed to see whose wash was up first, thus signifying early rising followed by industry - the Protestant Ethic at work!  Sloth was considered a very nasty trait, one of the more serious of the Seven Deadly Sins.

There was nothing easy about washing clothes.  Water had to be brought in and heated in a large boiler on the wood burning stove.  Soap had been previously prepared when the hogs were butchered.  Fat from the belly, along with lye and I don't know what else, was cooked in a large iron kettle in the open yard over a wood fire.  With this crude but effective soap, laundry was hand scrubbed on a wash board in hot water.

Remember, all that water didn't flow, effortlessly, from some faucet.  It was hand pumped from a well, or more likely a cistern where rain water was stored, then carried to the boiler on the stove.  After scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing, the clothes were soused in hot water then wrung out by hand.  Next came a cold water rinse and another wringing out before hanging on the line.  But what a glorious, and perhaps smug feeling to look across to the neighbor's line and find that yours was the first displayed.

Saturdays were reserved for the week's baking.  At our house this meant several loaves of bread and a few pies.  I tried to be on hand when the bread came out of the oven, because Mom always sliced off the heel and put a little butter on it for me while it was hot.  There was a saying, "Man works from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done."  Something always needed her attention.  Stockings had to be mended.  They were not discarded simply because of holes.  Little was thrown away.  Years later I had a history teacher say, "the frontier was hell on women," and we were near enough to it that it wasn't much different in Silverdale. 

There wasn't a great deal to be joyous about.  Until the time I left home I never had a glass of beer, played any game with cards or even said, "damn."  As noted previously, Mom was very religious and took to the Hell and damnation parts more than the Gospel and Good News.  She took more solace in her religion than Pop and I think she missed much of the joy of life.  I often wish Mom could have had an easier and happier life.

Mother, (Ethel Rowena) died of leukemia in 1952. She was 66 and is buried in Arkansas City, Kansas, not many miles from the farm.  Beyond her household duties, she did embroidery work, liked music, played the organ and was very good at transposing keys. 

Two months before she died, she wrote this letter on Christmas Day, 1951:

This is a wonderful day in the sight of all Christian people.  We have many things to be thankful for, but first of all the birth of our savior.  For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him shall have everlasting life.  Then too, He has been especially kind to our family in allowing us so many years together. 

We are grateful today to Bo and her helpers for the wonderful dinner they have prepared today.  It surely was grand of her.  The future of our family looks even brighter than the past, and may our motto be: "Be of service to others and to God."

God bless you Mom, and may you rest in peace while waiting for your great reward.

Prejudice, War and Pandemic in a Small Town -Chapter 2, Part 4

So!  Where were we?  Oh yes, Jess was living on the farm, occasionally using corncobs for toilet paper, trashing the Catholics with the rest of the local Methodists and had just completed a hell of a road trip to New York to visit his grandmother.

February 1918, On the way back from Cattaragus, New York to Silverdale, Kansas

I don't know whether grandmother got sick and tired of so many many people in her house after three months, or whether our parents grew homesick, but I was enjoying myself immensely without a pang of homesickness when we decided to come back home to Kansas.  We started home ahead of BM and his family.  It was February 1918 when we returned to Silverdale on the train.

There were railroad bridges across the large rivers and I recall one morning when we crossed the Mississippi, Bill and I had gotten up early.  Just as the sun was coming up, our train crossed the river, which was frozen over.  We ran up and down the train from one end to the next, probably out of control, though nobody seemed to mind.  Our parents and Emma were still asleep in the Pullman beds  When we arrived back at home, a new school house has been completed which I attended the next four years.

During World War I, there was an increase in KKK activity around Silverdale.  Pop didn't believe men should go around, incognito, creating mischief.  Furthermore, he heard some ugly talk about the "Huns," a peaceful old German-American couple, of good patriotic inclinations, that lived on the farm next to ours.  He still spoke with a German accent and some of the more virulent members of the community were talking about "stringing up old Fred."  The KKK didn't have any Blacks or Jews to pick on in our area, but the War provided a group to hate - the people of German extraction.

A meeting was called to lay plans for their evil affair, so Pop put on a sheet and hood and infiltrated the meeting.  He wanted to know exactly who the men were, especially the leaders.  It worked.  He sat around, keeping quiet, listening to the various voices, most of which he identified.  Sure enough, they laid their dirty plans.  The next day he confronted the leaders, singly, saying he had heard rumors that the KKK was planning to hang Fred, and that he didn't think it was a good idea.  Furthermore, should anything happen to Fred, the community was bound to find out who was responsible.  Moreover, the man had been a good neighbor for years, had given evidence of being a loyal, patriotic American and he, personally, would hate to see anything bad happen to him.  Other than bearing the brunt of the ugly talk, Fred came to no real harm.

There was considerable prejudice in our small community, mostly expressed in terms of ethnic jokes.  Irish jokes had Pat and Mike exchanging ignorances, much like the Aggie jokes in Texas today.  Polish jokes were employed to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Anglo-dominated society.  Catholics were thought to be sinister people, up to no good.  Fortunately, none lived in Silverdale -- at least none owned up to that evil faith.  Occasionally, books of cheap paper were circulated, reminding us of the horrid things Catholics did.

Scapegoats are sought by insecure people who project their doubts onto other, defenseless people imagined to be inferior.  In that community, there was a goodly supply of people barely hanging on economically, religiously and socially, creating fertile grounds for prejudice,  I was part of it, immersed in the sub-culture, thinking all those jokes and prejudice were acceptable good humor.

World War I ended in November, 1918, one year and seven months after the United States declared war.  The day the Armistice was signed we went into Arkansas City to join in the jubilation.  Thousands of people were on the streets celebrating.  Some of the celebrants got carried away and hung the Kaiser in effigy.

I came down with the flu in 1918.  My father was extremely sick with influenza as was more than half the community.  All of our immediate family members caught it and Grandma Harvey came down to the farm and looked after us.  This was part of the world wide epidemic which took so many lives that world demographic charts show a sharp mortality blip for that year.  It was a pandemic outbreak causing some 20 million deaths.  (Wikipedia says that between 50 and 100 million people died; the largest ever natural disaster.)

Several people died in Silverdale.  Pop almost did.  Nothing like that disaster, in terms of numbers of deaths from pestilence, has happened worldwide again to this day. 

I just thought this photo was kind of awesome. No idea who they are, where they are or why.  Just some really awesome outfits going on there.

***

So, a few thoughts here.  I find it interesting that Jess sort of glosses over The Great War.  Granted, he was awfully young (about 6 or 7) but it appears that he has no memories of significance regarding the war, people from Silverdale fighting in it, hardship, sacrifice, scarcity, etc.  Same with the flu pandemic.  It was a HUGE deal and even in retrospect, almost 100 years later it's still stunning to think of that many people dying in a single year.  

And yet, he just says a bunch of people got sick, himself included, Pop almost died and then life went on.  In fact, the next paragraph is about how his family did laundry. 

I think both of these anecdotes (or lack thereof) are really indicitive of the kind of information they had available in rural America in 1918: probably not much.  He wrote this book in the early 90's and while he WAS the first person I ever knew to have email, the internet as we know it most certainly did not exist.  It's an interesting reminder of the information and news vacuum that people used to live in - happily and effortlessly. 

There aren't any stories in his autobiography about listening to the radio, so I can only assume they didn't have one on the farm.  I wonder how often Pop read a newspaper?  Or maybe most of their news was word of mouth? I have a feeling that the amount of content I consume in a day is more than they saw in a month.  Unbelieveable.

New York at last! Life in Cattaraugus and a visit to Niagara Falls in 1922 - Chapter 2, Part 3

Autumn/Winter, 1917 and 1922

After 18 days of rain, muddy roads and flat tires, we finally arrived in Cattaraugus, New York and our family moved in with my Great Grandmother Kysor.

This is Grandmother Kysor's home in 1908.

We children were placed in the local school system.  Once, it snowed and on the way home from school I became disoriented because the landscape appeared to have completely changed.  Dusk came early and I wandered around, crying, until a man trimming the gas street lamps found me.  (Remember, he was only about 6 years old.)  He looked at me and said he knew where I belonged.  Straightaway he took me to Grandmother's house.  Even as a small child, I resembled my father so much that he knew where I belonged.  It did help that it was a small town - about 500 people.

This is a photo of Jess (left) and his father (Pop, right) standing, Pop's father sitting (my great-great-great grandfather!), and Jess' first son as a baby.  Jess is obviously older than 6 in this picture, but I wanted to put it here because you can really tell how alike they looked.

On that trip we also spent several days in Buffalo at Grandfather Lord's house.  I remember little of him, but I do recall one finger was missing about halfway up.  My brother and I speculated about how neat it looked and we viewed it with considerable awe; it was healed over all slick and nice.  We didn't consider it an infirmity; it was something to be proud of -- a badge of courage!  For some time thereafter we went around bending one finger at the joint and showing the back of our hand, as if the finger were cut off and neatly healed over.

The second time we visited Grandfather Lord in Buffalo I was ten and Bill (my brother) was thirteen.  (1922)  He and I were always making things, some of which turned out well enough.  While there we built a little wagon.  Since we couldn't find any wheels we sawed some wood into circles.  Then we would go in the wagon, one riding and the other pulling, around to the opposite side of the block where a grocer sold delicious grape jaw breakers for a penny each.

While visiting Grandfather Lord in Buffalo we were only about 30 miles from Niagara Falls.  Although my father had been raised in Cattaraugus, 80 miles from Niagara, he'd never been to see the falls.  

(Niagara Falls didn't become much of a tourist destination until after The Great War and automobiles became more accessible.  The fact that Pop hadn't made it out there until 1917 isn't surprising.)

We went in the dead of winter, and an unusual winter it was.  The falls were frozen over from top to bottom.  I think that has only happened one other time since that winter.  It is difficult to imagine how such a force of falling water could freeze over, although water did continue to flow beneath the outer coating of ice.

His dates don't match with history here.  The falls froze once in 1906 and again in 1932.  I can't find anything documenting a freeze or even semi-freeze during both of these mentioned trips to New York in the winters of 1916/1917 when he was six, or 1922/1923 when he was ten.  Perhaps the falls were frozen over on top but not recorded as an official freeze in the history books since water continued to flow beneath.

This photo is an aerial from 1922.  The horseshoe-shaped falls on the right are the Canadian side and the straight-line falls on the left are the American side.  The American falls also include the 1/3 of the horseshoe-shaped falls that juts out a bit, on the visual left of the horseshoe. The international line bisects those falls, as shown below in the screenshot from Google (just use your imagination and flip it around to match the perspective of the 1922 shot).  Bridal Falls are the smaller fall on the far right of the straight-line American Falls

At that time, the rim of the falls on the American side bowed out in the middle, as an arc extending outward at the center.  A thick stratum of hard limestone at the top resisted wear as the thunderous torrent poured over the edge. Underneath, softer layers of rock eroded, leaving a space at the bottom of the falls, behind the roar of the falling water.  We could actually walk from one side to the other behind the falls - a frightening experience.  Now, erosion has worked its way up the middle until there is a reverse curve.  Huge chunks of hard limestone piled up in the bottom and eliminated the passageway behind the falls.  Those rocks now discourage all but the most foolish in trying to go over the falls in barrels, which occasionally took place with some success back in those days.

The space he's referring to is a natural cave behind Bridal Falls on the American side. For $1, you could walk behind the falls in a space about 150 feet long.  In 1954 a rock fall destroyed the cave.  Today there's a behind the falls tour on the Canadian horseshoe side that has concrete reinforced tunnels with electric lights. Much more civilized, but probably less thrilling.  My brother took that tour as a child.

Incidentally, and because it's kind of a funny read, the King and Queen of Belgium toured the natural cave behind the falls in 1919 - read the full article at The New York Times archives here.  Apparently, it was an event "not in the program" and after a spirited discussion of it over breakfast, the King announced, "I am going."  Then the Queen announced that if HE was going then she would and Prince Leopold piped up that he'd not be left behind either.  

After the trip through the cave, the King said of the Queen, "Well, she's a mighty game little woman!" 

Ha!

On the Canadian side in a curio shop, Pop bought something and paid for it with a gold coin.  Although use of gold coins was not uncommon in that day, the woman took the coin, looked it over, turned behind the counter, raised her skirt and slipped it under her garter.

This is a 1915 $10 gold coin. I don't know which denomination Pop used or what he purchased, but I found $2.50, $10 and $20 examples at several sites.  This particular coin is worth about $10,000 today. I feel certain that whatever Pop bought with that coin in 1917 is NOT worth $10,000 today. Kind of a cool looking coin though.

 

***

(This is me talking now, but I won't put you through the pains of italics since it's difficult to read for long text.)

My family went to Cattaraugus in 1986, when I was seven, and I remember being THOROUGHLY unimpressed by the whole thing.  This old house is important WHY?  You want me to pose in a CEMETERY?  Um, NO THANKS MOM, THAT'S CREEPY. 

We also made what seems like a THOUSAND trips to Niagara Falls while we lived in New York in the early 80's.  Any time ANYONE came to visit we would load up the car and head to the falls.   My brother and I grew to hate Niagara Falls.  It got to the point where we asked if we could stay in the car and read books while everyone else walked up to the edge and gaped at the water.

Here's me and my brother at the falls:

 

We also made it to Cattaraugus one time.  The blue house behind me in the picture below?  That's Grandmother Kysor's house where Pop grew up, same one as the 1908 black-and-white photo up top!  It's still there; I was able to even find it on Google Maps and see from street-view this afternoon.  It's blue and looks pretty much the same.  I wonder if the current residents know just how old it is or anything about its past occupants?

 

Here we are posing in the cemetery.  I cannot tell you how UNCOMFORTABLE my brother and I were while doing this.  First, we were in a cemetery, which was creepy enough, but now the adults wanted us to TOUCH the headstones and POSE with them?  AND SMILE? With the dead people RIGHT THERE?

It should be noted that this is the only photo that we are smiling in.  The rest of them show us sporting some pretty serious scowls.

My brother is with Grandmother Kysor's grave, below. (Our great-great-great-great grandmother.)  That's her husband, Archibald next to her, but he died a year before Jess was born in 1911.

 

Chapter 2, Part 2: Ten people in a car, 1,200 miles, 18 days.

In the autumn of 1917, BM (Pop's friend that came to Kansas with him from New York in 1904) bought a new Dodge Touring Car.

(The Dodge Touring Car was, in 1917, the #2 selling vehicle in the United States, behind the wildly popular Ford Model T. It was positioned as slightly more upscale: it had a steel frame when many others were made of wood and a 12-volt electrical system when most cars had 6.  It cost about $800 new in 1917 which is about $13,267 adjusted for inflation to 2009.)

(This isn't BM's car, but rather something Google so graciously served up to me.)

Our family and BM's took a trip to New York to visit our respective grandparents.  Altogether, there were ten people, counting children and infants.  (Ten people in that car?!  OMG  How?)  John and Laura of the Smith family were the same ages and Bill and I, eight and five years old.  The four of us enjoyed a harmonious relationship throughout the trip.  I don't recall any territorial problems within the close confines of that small car.  In addition to the 4 parents there was my sister Emma and an infant daughter, Maxine.  She was a pleasant baby, never becoming an annoyance to us older children.  Nowadays, so many being crowded into one car would be considered an extreme hardship.

Of course, there was the usual division of labor, with the women doing the cooking and the traditional household chores and caring for the baby.  The men pitched the tents, gathered wood for the fires, fixed flat tires, discussed money matters and administered occasional discipline to us children.

The car was heavily overloaded (How could it not be with TEN PEOPLE IN IT? Looking at that picture, I don't even understand where the suitcases went, much less all the people), far beyond the load capacity of the tires, and they became the greatest expense of the trip.  One tire blew out when we crossed a railroad track as we left the very town it had been bought in.  It was several years later before tires would be expected to last as much as two thousand miles.  Even then, carcasses of tires were cotton cord.  it was not until after World War II that nylon (a much stronger fiber) replaced cotton in tires.

It is difficult to fathom the United States in 1917.

We found only thirty or forty miles of paved roads and the pavement was only 8 feet wide.  If there were 2 cars approaching from opposite directions, one had to pull over and get off the pavement while the other passed.  When the dirt alongside the narrow pavement was muddy, as it often was, only the most gracious of gentlemen gave way to other motorists by driving off into the mud, allowing others to pass.  I imagine a few misunderstandings occurred, maybe even a few bad words.  (Bad words!  To fundamental Methodists from Kansas!  OH MY!) Most roads were dirt, with only a minor portion of them being topped with gravel. They were little more than improved wagon trails.  (Which were in heavy use as few as 35 years ago when Grandma Harvey came to Kansas in a wagon.)

Some forty years before the trip, bicycling clubs began publishing maps in some parts of the country.  Road maps for motorists did not appear until just prior to that trip and inaccuracies were common.  As a rule, we depended on verbal instructions from people along the way and, when available, the primitive road signs.

At that time there were only two major highways across the United States, and we traveled on both of them.  They had bridges out, muddy roads and poor road signs.  One was called the Lincoln Highway, marked by red, white and blue horizontal,  stripes, painted haphazardly on telephone poles and fence posts or wherever the painter happened to paint them.  The other was the Cannon Ball, marked by a black cannon ball placed over a white background.  (I Googled for a while, but wasn't able to find more than passing reference to this highway; no images or maps.)  Sometimes we followed one sign and at other times the other sign.  Occasionally the two ran congruently along the same route.

 

There were no highway bridges across the Missouri or Mississippi rivers.  A ferry we used to cross the Missouri was down a steep hill to the river.  The road was muddy and slick from a recent rain.  I remember being afraid we would start sliding on the down-slope, be unable to stop and continue to slide across the and plunge off the other side into the muddy, flood-stage river.

About nine o-clock one October morning, near Galesburg, Illinois, on a dirt road, we came to a small creek about ten feet wide where the bridge had been washed out during the previous night.  Pop and BM found two planks about three by twelve inches, long enough to span the small creek and placed them so that the wheels of the car could be driven over.  All got out of the car except BM who drove slowly over to the far side.  The rest of us walked across the planks, got into the car and went on our way.  That took place on the Lincoln Highway.  For all I know, we may have been the only travelers to pass that way the entire day.  I was five years old.

It wasn't until 1924 (seven years later) that any serious attempt was made to develop a system of highways in the United States.  Even the streets of cities were paved with wooden blocks, brick or cobblestones.  Frequent rains made most interurban roads muddy, necessitating a shift to second or first gear.  It seems that at least half of the trip in 1917 was driven in lower gears.

Back home, anytime we went to another farm or to town, we had to open and close several gates. Rarely did we travel more than a mile without having to stop to open/close a gate.  I marveled that all the way to New York, we didn't have to open a single gate.  I found that astounding.

After starting out with $400 ($6,633 in 2009 dollars), the men had to wire home for more money to complete the trip.  Finally, after 18 days of rain, muddy roads and flat tires, we arrived in Cattaragus, New York. (Very near Buffalo.)  Our family moved in with Great Grandmother Kysor, who had raised my father.

(The trip from Silverdale, Kansas to Cattaraugus, New York is about 1,200 miles according to Google, but I can't help but think it must have been a longer distance before actual highways.  Google also says that this drive, that took them 18 days, would take a little more than 18 hours now.  What a difference about a hundred years makes.)

Chapter 2, Part 1: Early Memories (Oh, you must have known that an outhouse story wasn't too far off)

With the first cold snap of fall we young ones put on socks and shoes as well as long underwear.  We hated those encumbering clothes and shed them as soon as possible when spring came.  The sheer joy of getting out of those is beyond the comprehension of people who never had the experience.  There were drawbacks to going barefoot, but they were worth it.  Being in the country, bare feet picked up lots of splinters and stickers.  At night our parents laid us on the kitchen table and, with the kerosene lamp close by, picked stickers from our feet.

Having no inside plumbing, the required privy was located some distance out back of the house, necessitating long, cold trips during the wintertime.  At that point, the timber industry hadn't realized the enormous market for paper products, so we resorted to old catalogues and even, at times, corncobs (a bit abrasive, but effective). 

(Corncobs? Really? OUCH.)

All old Sears and Ward catalogues found their way to the outhouse and it was considered real deprivation when no pages remained but the slick ones.  They were terribly inefficient, although they did fulfill another rather important function.

The slick pages provided about the only pornographic material for us boys, perhaps for some of the men also.  Although there were no actual photographs of women in such scanties as bras and panties, there were some pretty sexy, colored pictures of them wearing only slips and that was sufficient to turn on any red-blooded boy.  More wealthy and sophisticated families who subscribed to National Geographic had already been treated to actual photographs of topless women for thirty years.  Understandably, those photos were never of white subjects, but always of dark skins, indigenous to strange and exotic lands, all under the guise of science.

Later, I came to learn of a furtive practice where women, as a hedge against the day that only slick pages remained, hoarded old dress patterns and stray tissue paper. In secret, they consumed their treasured supply, using it sparingly, with a mixture of luxury and apprehension, as when a scarce and highly prized commodity is consumed.

Usually we took one bath per week, in a washtub on the kitchen floor, ordinarily on Saturday night.  We did dress up, putting on our "Sunday" clothes for Sunday school and church.  This ordeal was also required on Wednesday evenings for attendance at prayer meetings.  Less frequently, "dressing up" was obligatory for other occasions, probably only three or four times a year.  Following church, we could hardly wait to get home and shed those awful Sunday clothes.  All that dressing and undressing was time consuming and moreover a tedious bore.  Mom must have grown weary of our complaints.

When I was five years old I started first grade at a one-room school.  On average, there were twelve to sixteen students, scattered unevenly among grades one through eight.  In front of the teacher's desk was a bench where one grade at a time gathered for their "recitations."  After the teacher finished with the first grade then the second, third, etc, took their turn until all were finished.  Students who were bright enough took advantage by listening in on other recitations and received a somewhat accelerated learning experience.

On Friday afternoons we often had ciphering matches, where children at the blackboard competed in arithmetic problems.  The loser had to sit down and a fresh contestant came forward.  Spelling matches were held under the same format.  Starting with the lower grades and working up provided the possibility for a lower grade student to stay at the board, putting down students several grades higher than himself.  This was always an ego booster, but I later wondered what damage was done to the older ones, being put down by some upstart kid several years their junior.

That scholastic arrangement seemed to benefit me, for when I was in the middle of fifth grade we moved to Arkansas City, and after testing the school administrators wanted to place me at least one or two grades ahead.  Fortunately, my parents objected.  Socially I was so immature it would have been a disaster.

Chapter 1, Part 2: A Fundamental Community (Gee, Darn and Heck are not allowed)

I had one advantage over many others.  I knew what God looked like.  There was a picture of him in the front of  our bible.  There He was lying on a cloud, with white skin and whiskers, and what I took to be a rather malevolent look on his face.  He was peering down and watching what we were doing, every minute of the day and night, judging us. 

His personality projected jealousy, anger and revenge, all of which seemed to dominate his predispositions.  He also like to be worshiped.  Recognition would do for most of us mortals.  Of course, God being much more powerful could be expected to handle worship.  I failed to understand that if He were so omnipotent and we were of such despicable unimportance, why He would be so concerned as to how we felt about Him.

Oh!  We did sing, "Jesus loves me, this I know."  There was mention of even God, Himself, loving the world.  But, that seemed to be of relatively minor comfort when accompanied by all the threatening implications which appeared to dominate His relationship with us.

We applied all sorts of rationalizations to sweep away biblical inconsistencies which conflicted with our secular concepts.  Drinking was taboo, therefore the wine Jesus produced from water was in actuality non-alcoholic.  It was grape juice, just like we used in communion.  Surely that was what our Lord offered in the cup at the last supper.  When real sticklers were encountered, as Joshua commanding the sun to stand still while he disposed of the enemy, we could always fall back on miracles.  Anything is possible with God. 

But, sometimes that explanation left an uneasy doubt.  Because of all the human and institutional meddling which has occurred along the way, I now think of revelation as the basis for accepting something as truth risky ground.

To me the fundamental, literal interpretation of the Bible is somewhat like a notion expressed in "Alice in Wonderland," where one is asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast.  The implication that there was no rainbow before the Flood, asks us to believe that refraction of light from water particles in the air was invented as a sign promising no more big floods, and that this phenomenon never occurred prior to the Flood.  Possibly, the incorporation of these old myths in the Bible detract from the tremendous store of theological wealth. 

We not only received a goodly dose of religion at Sunday school and church, but a steady stream of it from my mother at home.  We were not allowed to say "Gee," for that was a substitute for saying, "Jesus."  "Darn," really meant damn and "heck" stood for hell.  All were forbidden.  Some of my earliest memories are of her reading the bible stories and trying to teach us the values in which she so strongly believed.  There was a dreadful sense of impending danger in her presentation.

All of this was serious business to a four-year-old.  (Which makes the year 1915.)  My nightly prayer was:

Now I lay me down to sleep. 

I pray the Lord my soul to keep. 

If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

To me, this implied that I might not make it until morning.  I must always be prepared, for there were dire eventualities hanging over daily existence.  The control of my destiny was not in my hands, but according to the whims of some inscrutable god.

I suppose had I remained in such a closed society for the rest of my life, those beliefs, which made up the cornerstone of my early years, would have remained the same.  But, I didn't.  Certainly for my own life, and for most of the rest of our society, the days of old and rural traditional society were numbered.  I'm not going to speculate at this point regarding the advantages and disadvantages attending such change. 

But be assured, the changes in store were beyond the wildest imagination of the most perceptive soothsayer.

Chapter 1: A Fundamental Community (Or, as I like to call it, "Those Crazy and Sober Methodists")

Okay!  I figured the format out!  (You were stressing about that, weren't you?)  I'm going to use Stop and Smell the Flowers as basic framework and sometimes we'll do a bit of a flashback to Grandma and Grandpa Harvey or maybe even before then, just to spice it up a little.

And now, back to the book.

***

Chapter 1

A Fundamental Community

When I was born in 1911 Silverdale had gone through its rough-and-tumble, railroad boom days of open saloons and general degradation.  The state of Kansas had enacted, on its own, alcohol prohibition laws thirty years before I was born.

Elsewhere, there seemed to be broad contempt for such legislation, as was the general attitude of the public following the 18th Amendment (ratified in 1919).  Those prohibition laws were largely ignored throughout Kansas.

Not so in Silverdale.

The Women's Christian Temperance Union was active, with Grandma Harvey, slender and full of purpose leading the pack.  It was not really temperance or moderation they were after, it was total and absolute abstinence.  There were no town drunks visible, although certainly there may have been some hitting the bottle in secrecy.  I never remember seeing anyone take a drink, yet alone being drunk.  With so little evidence of drinking, I wonder why so much activity and resources were devoted to an apparently nonexistent problem. 

Probably as an overreaction to  compensate for its period of sin during the railroad boom days, Silverdale had metamorphosed into a "fundamental community" centered around two churches: Methodist and Baptist.  We were Methodist. 

There was no straddling: you were either one of us or you weren't.  Catholics weren't.  Democrats weren't.  Baptists barely were.  All such people were transgressors of our ideological domain and tolerated at best.  Ours was the true religion, not to be improved upon or tampered with.  I was glad we belonged to the Methodist and not the Baptist variety because Methodist's were God's preference, I knew.

This assumption was verified some time later when lightning struck the Baptist church and burned it to the ground.  Those poor Baptists were so destitute they couldn't rebuild, so they joined us Methodists.  It must have been bitter gall to pay for getting into God's favored congregation.  I suspect we held an ill-concealed smugness toward our less fortunate brethren.  They were never granted full membership.  They had initially cast their lot with the Baptists when they could have chose to be Methodists.  That choice demonstrated some inherent basic fault of character.

In Sunday school, we children sang, "I'll be a sunbeam for Jesus."  As I sang, my heart would swell with pride, for I was going to do something wonderful for Jesus.  I was on the right track.  I was a little True Believer.

In this small, closed society of fundamentalism, sin was largely, almost wholly, relegated to the closet.  Surely it existed, but nowhere was it visible.  Mental illness and alcoholism, both taints on family character, were out of sight.  We children never thought to ask whether other families had any crazy people or drunks hidden away.  I assumed that everything and every one was normal, other than those democrats, Catholics and yes, even the Baptists.

The official function of our church was the salvation of our immortal souls.  Probably not recognized as such, its primary social function was providing a meeting place for the regular interaction of its members.  For many, those church gatherings were the only opportunity to meet and talk with persons outside their immediate families and farms.

Born into this social environment, my early concepts of the world about me were being formed -- ingrained concepts and feelings which I have had to deal with all my life.  It included the ethic of hard work and sobriety, part and parcel of the Protestant Ethic, which was certainly a pragmatic quality in quasi-frontier society.  However, if I had it to do all over, I would have preferred a bit less fundamentalism, with its heavy emphasis on the negative aspects of Christianity. 

At about six or seven (1917 or 1918) I started being "saved" every year at the annual revival.  The constant threat of hell was held over our heads, taking much joy out of our lives.  The statistical probability of ending up in down there was given such heavy emphasis that even at that early age I could estimate the high probability of all that bad news.  The preacher went to great lengths explaining how hot hell was going to be and how long eternity was.  The probability of ending up in that amount of heat, for that length of time was staggering.  It was easy enough for those evangelists to get me to the altar. 

With such a preponderance of heavy negativism, I failed to catch the viewpoint of the "good news" of the Gospel.  The bad news was so overwhelming.