In this blog I would like to provide some background information by describing my family and my childhood home next to Haysville, Kansas, which, at that time, was a small village six miles south of Wichita. My parents were married in 1923 and from 1924 to 1940 had eight children named (from oldest to youngest) Hugh, Patricia, Margaret, Doris, Dwight. Glenn (me), Gerald, and Carol. From left to right in the 1939 picture they are Patricia, Dwight, Doris, Glenn in front, Margaret and Hugh. Gerald had been born, but died as an infant, and Carol had not yet been born. My father was born second in his family in 1899 and was raised on a small, eighty-acre farm near Girard, Kansas. Among other things, my paternal grandfather bred and raised mules. My dad dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help his father support their family of eight. My maternal grandmother was eighteen and my grandfather was thirty-eight when they married in 1895, a year and a half years after they met while waiting for the opening of the Cherakee Strip. It wasn’t unusual at that time for the man to be much older than his wife because the man needed to be able to support a before he married.
While Dad’s family was poor, Mom’s family was solidly middle class by the time she was a teenager. Mom, who was born in 1997, was the oldest child in her family of six. After working a few years as a secretary, she had saved enough money to attend The University of Kansas (KU) during 1918-1919, where she studied to become a dietitian. After two years she ran out of money and returned to secretarial work and soon married my father. At that time, it was uncommon for women to have any university education. If a woman attended college, it was usually a teacher’s college so they could be schoolteachers. One of my teachers later told me my mother was the smartest woman she had ever known. While at KU. the Spanish flu epidemic was at its worst. She didn’t get the flu, but the streets and medical facilities of Lawrence, Kansas, were filled with sick soldiers returning from World War I. Perhaps one reason she left Lawrence was to get away to somewhere safer. The Spanish flu didn’t kill as many Americans as COVID-19, but worldwide it was devastating. The disease worked so fast, a person could feel fine and then die a few hours later.
Haysville, Kansas, had a population of approximately fifty people. It had two churches, a bank, a grain elevator, a post office, a blacksmith shop, an icehouse, a community hall, and a grocery store. It had a Front Street, which was a county road, and a Back Street and two very short unnamed streets and an alleyway going between them. Also, it had a county road, later named 71st Street when Haysville became a suburb of Wichita, that ran between the two streets on its north side. The Rock Island Railroad marked its west boundary, and our 32-acre farm was along the other side of the railroad. Haysville Grade School was one mile south on the county road that ran through the town and the east-west county road that became 79th Street. The north-south and east-west county roads divide the land into square miles throughout most of rural Kansas. Haysville was on the northwest corner of one of those square miles. Just east of Haysville the county road was replaced by US 81, which also became Broadway Street in Wichita.
