This picture is of my parents on there 50th anniversary.
Having chosen to drop out of school as an eighth grader, my father was not an educated man, but he did understand a lot about life. He always ordered both the morning and evening Wichita newspapers and knew what was going on in the world. Because he had to help his father support his family, he knew how to work hard and take on responsibility. His family were Presbyterians, and his father was very strict with his children. As a result, my father was very strict with his children. In the first half of the twentieth century, the father was responsible for supporting the family and being the disciplinarian. Being the disciplinarian, he was kind of aloof from his children and rarely played with them. (Today, of course, fathers are encouraged to befriend their children and spend time with them.) He assigned the chores to the boys and made sure they did them. Mom assigned the girls chores, but Dad was ultimately the one who made sure the children did what they were supposed to do. Since he didn’t play with us, we were a little afraid of him. I remember getting spanked only once and it consisted of just two swift whacks to my fully clothed bottom. He would never spank the girls. His bark was much worse than his bite, but we didn’t realize this until we were well into our teens. Dad was very religious and took the Ten Commandants seriously and was extremely honest. He would never steal or use bad words. Despite his strictness, he set a good example for his children. I don’t think any of his children appreciated how much he did for us until we were grown.
Because his father was ill much of the time, Dad had become the main supporter of his family by his late teens. However, in 1920, when he turned twenty-one, he told his father it was time for his younger brother, Clarence, to take over the farm because he wanted to go away. (His older brother, Glenn, did well in school and had left for college). His father begged him to stay and promised him everything he had if he would stay, but Dad told him he didn’t have anything except an old house and eighty acres of rocky land, and he wanted to see some of the rest of the world. Before he left, his father gave him a warm coat to wear and wished him well. Dad roamed around Kansas and Colorado getting farm related jobs. The following summer he got a job on a threshing machine crew. Stationary threshing machines were used at that time instead of the mobile grain combines we use today. One morning he woke up and discovered his coat was gone along with one of the crew. When Dad told this story, tears came to his eyes. He then left for Wichita where he met his cousin, George, who had bought a farm southeast of Wichita. They met at the train station near the Arkansas River and loaded a wagon with what would be needed to start farming. As they went down Wichita’s main east-west street the horses were hard to control because of the streetcars. After helping George for a while, he agreed to farm a homestead for a man, but after a violent storm ruined the wheat crop, he moved back to Wichita and got a steady job. Two years later, he met my mother, and they were married in 1923.
