Thursday, September 4, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Galen's Mother's Father: 1867-1962
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Galen’s 5th Postcard: Introduction to W. K. McCall of Richmond: 08/08/08
Galen Green
8606 Chestnut Circle, #3
Kansas City, MO 64131
816/807-4957
Friday
August 08, 2008
(Mel Tillis’s 76th
Birthday)
Dear Pat –
As you see, I’ve spent my first 4 “postcards” to you and my other Richmond Community Museum friends laying the groundwork for whatever reminiscences may now body forth, as well as introducing the main cast of characters whose lives provided much of the social glue for my earliest memories of Richmond, Kansas (i.e. 1949-1965). To review briefly – for any readers who may just now be joining us – that cast of major characters is made up primarily of my mother, Margaret, and her parents, Phoebe & Will McCall – and my father, Harry, and his parents, Etta & Ira Green. All 6 of these, my closest ancestors, now sleep beneath the hill west of town. I visit them as often as possible.
In the letter you sent to me a week or two after I returned to Kansas City following your wonderful community museum’s grand opening in mid-June, you asked me about the photograph (dated 1961) of my maternal grandfather, W.K. McCall, which appears on page 10 of your equally wonderful 2003 History of Richmond, Kansas, in which he’s wearing a bowler-hat (which he never wore in “real life”) and standing next to a very early “horseless carriage,” with his right hand resting on the elegant old gas buggy’s roof support bar. Specifically, you asked me if W.K. had ever, to my knowledge, had any sort of professional relationship with the Farmers & Bankers Life Insurance Co. whose name is written on the front of the car. The short answer would have to be that, to my knowledge: no, he did not; although, through the miracle of the Internet, other family members will undoubtedly be reading this, my fifth postcard to you, and offering subsequent corrections to my own recollections. My guess is that, as you yourself suggest, Farmers & Bankers simply lent this elegant old gas buggy out to community events such as the 1961 Richmond Free Fair. I’m so glad that that particular photo of W.K., looking so dapper in his white linens and necktie, made it into your 2003 history update. (The obviously oversized suit jacket was definitely not his, any more than the bowler was; it’s a 42 long, and Granddad wore a 36 regular.) That was probably one of the last pictures ever taken of him.
At around 5:30 on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 17, 1961, Harry & Margaret & Kevin & I were just sitting down to our modest supper in our ticky-tacky little box house in Wichita, when the phone rang. Mom answered. She said “yes” several times into the receiver – and then: “It’s going to be alright, Mother. We’ll be there right away.” She then turned back toward the rest of us and burst into tears. Reaching for her little hankie, she blurted out: “It’s Dad. He’s dead.”
Earlier that day, William Keeling McCall (aged 94) had been out on the east lawn of his and Phoebe’s little white house on the corner of Ruth & Rigdon there in Richmond, engaged in one of his favorite late-life recreations of raking up dry leaves and brush into small piles and burning them, when he suddenly simply fell dead, just a few feet outside of that sweet old couple’s bedroom window. Phoebe evidently went outside and found him when he’d failed to come inside for their noon meal. The version I was told had her trying desperately to move him herself (You’ll recall that, in 1962, she was 81 years old, stood 5’ 1” and weighed approximately 110 lbs.), when the neighbors saw her and came over to help. Even though W.K. was already in heaven, an ambulance was summoned from Ottawa – the ambulance which, in those days, as I’m given to understand, also happened to be the station wagon hearse from (in our family’s case) Lamb Funeral Home. Granddad’s body, undoubtedly clad in the cardigan sweater, dress shirt, necktie and woolen trousers which he wore throughout three of the four seasons, was lain out on the living room sofa to await the folks from Ottawa. As much as I loved my granddad and revered him in countless ways, being 12 and all at the time, I could never again bring myself to sleep overnight on that particular sofa, and the family soon got rid of it.
W.K. McCall was one of those lucky people who managed to (as I heard it put recently) “die young at a very old age.” The day before he dropped dead of that heart attack (his first and last), they say he walked downtown and back (another of his favorite late-life pleasures). I remember the last time I saw him alive. It would have been a few months earlier, probably a day or two after Christmas of 1961. At the time, he’d been working for several years as what I like to call “the world’s oldest stock boy.” What this meant in practical terms, as I observed it, was that George & Marguerite Dietrich let him do odd jobs around their general store, for maybe 4 hours a day, maybe 4 days a week. I can recall walking downtown to Dietrichs’ as a boy, visiting with Granddad while he’d unbox and stock a carton of bathroom tissue or of canned vegetables on the lower grocery shelves. (The Dietrich’s watched him tenderly to keep him off of ladders and such.) It was also his job to sweep the aisles and to burn the trash – mostly empty boxes – eons before recycling was even dreamt of.
And, even though W.K.’s hands were (as was also later the case with my own father) always covered with bandaids, bruises, scrapes and half-healed whittling wounds, they were, in fact, quite steady and strong to the very last, so that another of his late-life pleasures was slicing up the bologna in Dietrich’s cool and fragrant meat department at the back of their store. He loved it; I could tell. And it was what he was in the middle of doing when I saw him alive for the very last time – though I had no way of knowing, of course, that it was the very last time.
I remember that Harry & Margaret & Kevin & I were leaving Richmond after our holiday visit – probably in our 1951 tan & gray Hudson Hornet – headed west toward Waverly or Melvern to drop by for quick visits with my dad’s sister, Lizzy, and then this brother, Jesse. We’d just finished hugging and kissing Phoebe “goodbye” at the house, and Margaret had Harry pull over in front of Dietrich’s general store so that she could say “goodbye” to W.K. I remember it all as though it were happening at this very moment. W.K. was standing in his white butcher’s apron and his nifty brown knit 1930’s “stockboy” (or “newsboy”) cap, on the sawdust-covered backroom floor, slicing bologna, there in his wire-rimmed spectacles, his handsome white bushy “Gay ‘90’s” Wyatt Earp moustache, and in what was, most likely, the very same necktie and cardigan sweater he was wearing on that lovely April morning four months later, when he fell dead while raking leaves.
And there in the backroom at Dietrich’s, he said one of the strangest, simplest, wisest things I’ve ever heard – to the girl he’d raised and whose soul was so inextricably bound to his. After my granddad and I had shaken hands (for I was 12 then and too big for hugging and kissing even my closest male family members, at least, according to the cultural norms of that day) . . . Margaret then hugged and kissed her father, then stood looking into his face while holding his hands in hers. It was at that moment that W.K. McCall said to her, in the most comforting, pastoral tone I’d ever heard him use: “Don’t worry, if you hear . . . that something has happened.”
To reiterate, I was 12 at the time, so that my granddad’s euphemism was lost on me – as I’m quite sure that he had intended for it to be. In recently reflecting upon that memorable moment in 1961, I’ve sometimes wondered whether – had I not been present – W.K. might have chosen a more direct phrase than “. . . if you hear . . . that something has happened.”
Anyway, it did . . . happen. And at the open-casket funeral in that lovely old Methodist church (long since demolished and replaced) directly across the alley from Phoebe’s & W.K.’s last (shared) earthly home, it was noted in whispers among the many mourners filing past his earthy remains, following the service (preached by a young, red-headed itinerate Rev. Weatherwax, reputedly a direct descendant of the little brown church in the vale Weatherwax family) . . . noted in hushed tones that the smudge of black on one of W.K.’s cheeks and on one corner of his moustache was from where the fire from the brush he’d been burning had singed him before Phoebe had found him lying there on the ground. To me, these tiny black smudges on his peaceful face only served to lend a final mark of quiet heroism to a life I’d already imagined into an almost mythic proportion.
Among W.K. McCall’s (1867-1962) more enchanting eccentricities was his “fossil collection.” I’m bracketing that term in quotes here because “fossil collection” represented a kind of shorthand used almost universally by our family, as well as by the Richmond and Franklin County community, to refer to granddad’s locally renowned, neatly labeled hodge-podge of fossils, old bones, shards, bric-a-bracs, curiosities, big dead bugs, a dried gar stuffed with old newspaper and mounted, a rusted “pirate’s” saber, and the higgledy-piggledy bits and pieces of what one might find in any number of roadside antique barns nowadays. But most assuredly: not junk. For, each and every curiosity in my granddad’s collection had a story attached to it, not only the story of when and where and how he’d found it, but also of what it represented in the vast gestalt of his considerable understanding of the physical universe.
Some other day, if and when I find the time, perhaps I’ll summon the focused energy to share a few pages of specifics concerning W.K.’s so-called “fossil collection.” For the time being, though, let me just say that this is the very first time in my life (And I’m nearly 60 now.) that I’ve given the least bit of thought to trying to explain to anyone what my granddad’s “fossil collection” meant to him, what it represented to him, in that deeply personal, subjective, interior process with which we’re all familiar – experientially, if not analytically. Admittedly, whatever it meant to him in the overall schema of whom he wanted to be or believed himself to be or wished to present himself to the rest of the human world as being . . . is unknowable . . . and probably always was. Perhaps, when he began “collecting” in the first decade of the 20th century (when he was already approaching middle-age), he had in mind some very different intention than the one at which I, as a small boy (and one of the last of his numerous grandchildren), could only begin to guess.
But, if anyone were to ask me to choose a single object with which I’ve most closely associated my memories of W.K. McCall, I suppose that I’d have to choose his magnifying glass. He loved to read, but, by the time I came along in 1949, both his eyes and his ears were starting to wear out. Therefore, those 1950’s technologies within the family’s budget which could prevent his becoming disconnected from the world of human voices and written words were, naturally, what captivated me, as a boy. And those were, of course, his hearing aids and his “reading glass.” Thus, when I conjure a momentary visual memory of Granddad in my mind’s eye, he’s sitting in an armchair or at the table (his only desk) peering through his big 5”-diameter “Sherlock Holmes” magnifying glass at some news item in The Ottawa Herald or some word puzzle or other in The Kansas City Star. (My mother confessed to me that the main reason her folks took the Star was for the crossword – and other word – puzzles – as well as for the Ann Landers and Billy Graham, of course.)
And, like as not, Phoebe (whom he always addressed as “Fee”) would be right there beside him, in an adjacent armchair, perusing a different section of the Herald or the Star, peering through her own (slightly less powerful) reading glass. Having grown up during General Grant’s Administration, W.K. never took much to television. Nevertheless, the family saw to it that a slightly used B&W tube set (with rather limited antenna reach) was installed in my maternal grandparents’ front room, wedged in between the nose-ticklingly out of tune upright piano and the creaky oversized rocking chair. An image I’m just this very minute dredging up from the dim recesses of my memory is of “Will & Fee” (as each called the other) seated in their armchairs in their front room, one forenoon in 1959 – the year of their 50th wedding anniversary – Fee with “The Secret Storm” or “Search for Tomorrow” cranked up so loud on the tube that the rest of us are compelled to stroll over to the old elementary schoolyard across the street in order to hold a conversation . . . and Will with his hearing aid completely removed, peacefully perusing The Ottawa Herald with his trusty trademark reading glass held up in front of his face.
While such a tableau might tempt wags to recite that tired quip that “his deafness saved their marriage,” I was always under the impression that Phoebe & Will loved one another very much, that they generally enjoyed each other’s company, and that they were well suited to one another in temperament, taste, values and overall chemistry. Throughout the 1950’s, they would take the train to Wichita to visit us for a week or two, from time to time. On one such visit, when I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, my granddad invited me to take a long walk with him. He was very much the “exercise freak,” as we say nowadays, and I always enjoyed our walks together, despite my having to always shout in order for W.K. to hear me. Anyway, our long walk together on this particular day turned out to be to a little neighborhood store, eight blocks or so down 17th street, where my granddad surprised me by purchasing a big box of “Lincoln Logs” ™ and handing them to me with so little ceremony that I didn’t even realize at first what they were or that he’d bought them for me. It was one of those moments of mysterious pantomime in which the boy and the old man seem to go through motions which come from beyond conscious intent, while each revels in the sunshine of a transaction more bafflingly intimate than either could ever begin to parse.
As it would turn out, my granddad and I would share a rather amazingly several such transactions of joyful pantomime, framed within the tiny window of the relatively few years he and I ended up having together. Back then, I recall feeling occasional jealousy toward my Uncle Cecil’s kids in Kansas City and my Uncle Myron’s kids in Ottawa, for living so much closer to Richmond than my immediate family and I – in Wichita – did – and therefore, so much closer to “Fee & Will.” Thinking back on those pangs of jealousy now, a half century later, however, I realize that what I was longing for back then went far beyond my closeness or connectedness to a geographical place called Richmond, Kansas (located at digital coordinates: 38.402512 – 95.252941). If I had a quiet day or two to myself (something I do not have nowadays, nor am I likely to have in the foreseeable future) . . . but if I did, I’d love to compose for you an astutely acutely insightful, soul-searching (Walt) Whitmanesque poem enumerating all that I now believe I was actually longing for as a boy, vis-à-vis Richmond, Kansas.
Part of the answer to this riddle came to me this past week as an epiphany – one of those “ah-hah” moments of sudden realization which most folks have dawn upon them every now and then. A friend of ours who’d retired recently was passing through Kansas City on his way from Des Moines, Iowa to Austin, Texas. He and I have known each other since we were undergraduates together at Wichita State in the late 1960’s & ‘70’s. Anyway, his parents were originally from the town of Taylor, Nebraska, which is almost exactly the same size as Richmond. I was telling him about my recent reconnecting with Richmond and about your exciting new Richmond Community Museum – and asking him about his childhood memories of Taylor, Nebraska. Then, right in the middle of our conversation, he made a statement which triggered the epiphany to which I’m referring. He said to me: “It’s funny, that when I walk around Taylor nowadays, I feel more at home than I ever have in any of the cities I’ve lived in.” (Or words to that effect.)
The epiphany which dawned upon me in that instant, of course, was that that’s exactly how I feel – and have always felt – about Richmond, Kansas. But, as is the case with my old college buddy, my own feeling of being “more at home” in the little town which had been the home of my parents and of their parents and which I’d visited on hundreds of occasions over the years – but which was never “officially/technically” my “hometown” – has always felt to me to be my hometown in a way in which neither Wichita, Kansas nor Kansas City, Missouri ever has. Over the years, when I’ve driven through Richmond with friends (in the capacity of informal tour guide), I’ve found myself saying things to them like: “This is the town where my parents grew up and went to school,” or “This is where my family is from.” It’s only been in more recent years that I’ve heard myself saying things like: “Culturally and spiritually, this is sort my hometown, even though I never lived here for all that long at one time.”
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A half century before my mother’s father, W.K. McCall, was “the world’s oldest stockboy,” he was a schoolteacher. I was never able to get a straight answer from anyone as to where he taught or for how long (back when those who knew the answers to these questions were still around), but I’ve tumbled to the warranted inference that it would most likely have been in Franklin County, Kansas, in one (or possibly several) little one-room schoolhouse(s) out on the prairie, sometime before he met his future wife, Phoebe Evans, in the Franklin County Courthouse in the opening years of the 20th century.
Back before the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune bereft me of most such treasured keepsakes, I owned a photograph of W.K. and his dozen or so students, taken out in front of the one-room country schoolhouse where he taught them. As you’d expect, his students ranged in age from small boys and girls to young men and young women old enough to have been seriously involved in some of the adult chores of late-19th-century farm life. Judging from what we know of W.K.’s date of birth (December 5, 1867) and of the evolution of late-19th-century styles of coiffure and attire, as well as of the social history of rural Kansas and of schoolyard photography around this period, I’d guess that my photograph of Granddad with his crew of future farmers and bankers was taken sometime in the 1890’s, perhaps during the second Presidency of Grover Cleveland. In it, W.K.’s moustache is much darker and much more substantial than it was at the other end of life’s journey, when I knew him – again, not dissimilar from the one sported by the likes of Wyatt Earp (& Grover Cleveland & Rudyard Kipling) during that same period.
According to reliable McCall family sources, in addition to having put in a few years, early on, as a one-room frontier schoolmaster, W.K. also taught calligraphy at Ottawa University for a time, though I have not a clue as to the exact chronology of that gig. My person guess is that it would have been a part-time thing (as have been most of my own teaching assignments). My mom mentioned to me on more than one occasion that her immediate family, when she was growing up (Fee, Will, Cecil, Margaret, Myron [little Uncle Raymond having died of scarlet fever at the age of 4 in 1921]), lived in Ottawa for “a while,” but, again, I could never nail her down on the exact timeframe. She and others of her generation mad reference occasionally to W.K.’s “running” a little grocery story in Ottawa, but the when and the where were never divulged. I’m sure that some intrepid historian with unlimited time and money could track down the facts of such matters, but that description doesn’t fit Galen Green.
Likewise, I lack the resources to get to the bottom of when it was that Granddad served as Justice of the Peace in Richmond. The only material evidence of this particular episode in his past was a heavy nickel-plated, clamping, embossing-style of “notary public” sealing device that my cousins and I used to sit on the floor and play with as small children. Perhaps, if one of the cousins still had a piece of paper they’d embossed with it, we’d have a little something to go on.
As for W.K.’s career as a banker, I do have a few random details filed away in my memory. Specifically, I recall a handful of old photographs, belonging either to Margaret and/or Phoebe, which were taken during the course of Granddad’s ill-fated banking years. I can recall two of them in particular, off the top of my head. The first is of a relatively youngish “Fee & Will,” posing in World War I –era garb outside of some small-town bank. (Or it may have been taken as late as 1928.) The second is of Granddad, standing in an old-fashioned teller’s cage, behind some small-town bank counter – evidently taken around the same period as the first – as though awaiting the arrival of Bonnie & Clyde.
Granddad’s banking career was actually one of the few details from that period which Phoebe would mention to me in passing, every now and then – as would Margaret. The difference was that Phoebe’s tone tended to be one of wistful pride, while Margaret’s tended to be one of bitterness. Mom let it be known to me in no uncertain terms that her father’s bank had gone under during The Great Depression (i.e. between the stock market crash of 1929 and the end of the Dust Bowl era), primarily as a result of his refusal to foreclose on his neighbors who were unable to repay their farm loans and other debts. “He was just too kind-hearted to make it in the banking business,” Margaret would opine to me bitterly, in recounting her version of how her family had been reduced to harassed penury from their previously “respectable” social position among Franklin County’s middle class.
Flipping through the big pages of “Fee’s & Will’s” photograph album as a child, I was always particularly drawn to a snapshot of W.K. standing next to a late-1930’s-style gasoline pump, the kind in which one could actually see the gasoline filling up a large glass tank (which always reminded me of the upper glass compartment of a 1980’s-style kitchen blender), before being pumped on down through the delivery hose into the customer’s fuel tank. (Remember those?) Although it’s been decades since I had that fascinating snapshot in front of me, I seem to recall (Or is it my imagination?) some cute little floatation balls which bobbed around on the top of the gasoline itself, as it filled this glass “pre-fill viewing tank.” A second photograph, adjacent to the first in my McCall grandparents’ album of memories, was shot from across U.S. 59, and reveals McCall’s Service Station as having been about the size and shape of a Mississippi sharecropper’s shack, with a fashionably sloping roof over the pumping area, and a sign proclaiming in big lettering the name of this post-banking venture in my granddad’s long, undaunted career, his creative, courageous journey toward the dotage where he and I met up, after World War II. I can recall Phoebe sitting cozily beside me on their couch when I was a boy and explaining to me, when we’d come to that particular snapshot, in words that would go something like this: “And that was when Will owned a service station over on the highway, across from the Catholic Church. He and Cecil ran it together.”
(Or words to that effect. From the time I came along when she was nearly 70, until the very end of her life, Phoebe almost always spoke to me—and to everyone, I suppose – in the most matter-of-fact, even tone you can possibly imagine. During my childhood, the only time I can recall her stumbling momentarily into an emotional thicket was when she’d try to speak about losing little Raymond in the scarlet fever epidemic of 1921.)
So . . . we can add “service station owner & attendant” to our long and mysterious list of hats worn by my maternal grandfather, W.K. McCall of Richmond, Kansas. I have no way of knowing, of course, when that quaint little building across the highway from the Catholic Church was finally torn down (or fell down), but I do recall noticing it standing there – in one or another of its incarnations – throughout my childhood and on into my adult years, whenever Chance would allow me to visit Richmond for a few minutes, every few years. Granddad himself never spoke of it. But then again, he never spoke to me of any significant episodes – professional or otherwise – in his past. I attribute the vastness of his reticence to his acute deafness.
What W.K. did talk to me about – and this being only on rare occasions in the final few years of his life and only when we were out of the critical hearing of other adults – was science, especially paleontology. I loved to listen to him tell me about dinosaurs, which were still a bit of an esoteric subject back during the Eisenhower Administration, thus making me the foremost dinosaur expert in the 3rd grade back in Wichita -- no small asset!
As much as I’d like to sit here with you today and babble an entire book of memories of my mother’s father, I feel as though I really ought to be winding this up for now. This was, after all, supposed to be no more than “an introduction to” a courageously creative man’s long and multifaceted life. Moreover, I think it’s fair to say that I already seem to have exceeded my usual “postcard” format.
Surely, there will be one or two individuals reading this (mostly accurate) beginning of a reminiscence of my maternal grandfather, W.K. McCall, who knew him – or who were, at the very least, casually acquainted with him. It would be a tremendous source of pleasure to me if any such individuals would be so kind as take a few minutes to share any recollections which they themselves might have of W.K. Admittedly, what I’ve shared with you here today doesn’t begin to do him justice. But it’s the best I can do for now.
When I think of how I might most succinctly summarize this introductory rememb’rance of Granddad, everything that rushes into consciousness seems to come from the perspective of that little boy I was when I knew him. Most of all, I can see him puttering in his garden, out behind the house, stooping down between the rows of carrots and tomatoes, tending to his lettuce and corn, fussing over his beans and musk melons.
Of all the grown-ups populating the two halves of the family into which I was adopted at birth (the Greens and the McCalls), W.K. was easily the one most like me. For one thing, he looked more like me than did any of the others; but more importantly, he operated internally more like me than did any of the others. Our shared passion for science, history and literature was a large part of it. Still, there was something much deeper than that, something I’ve never quiet been able to put my finger on. Yes, there was the wry sense of humor, the relentlessly energetic curiosity about the physical universe, the creative stoicism in the face of remorseless adversity, etc. But there was a bond between W.K. and me which went even deeper than that. However, that’s a mystery I think I might just leave for others to fathom.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
Galen Green
Monday
August 18, 2008
(10 Days Later…..)
Galen’s 5th Postcard: Introduction to W. K. McCall of Richmond: 08/08/08
Galen Green
8606 Chestnut Circle, #3
Kansas City, MO 64131
816/807-4957
Friday
August 08, 2008
(Mel Tillis’s 76th
Birthday)
Dear Pat –
As you see, I’ve spent my first 4 “postcards” to you and my other Richmond Community Museum friends laying the groundwork for whatever reminiscences may now body forth, as well as introducing the main cast of characters whose lives provided much of the social glue for my earliest memories of Richmond, Kansas (i.e. 1949-1965). To review briefly – for any readers who may just now be joining us – that cast of major characters is made up primarily of my mother, Margaret, and her parents, Phoebe & Will McCall – and my father, Harry, and his parents, Etta & Ira Green. All 6 of these, my closest ancestors, now sleep beneath the hill west of town. I visit them as often as possible.
In the letter you sent to me a week or two after I returned to Kansas City following your wonderful community museum’s grand opening in mid-June, you asked me about the photograph (dated 1961) of my maternal grandfather, W.K. McCall, which appears on page 10 of your equally wonderful 2003 History of Richmond, Kansas, in which he’s wearing a bowler-hat (which he never wore in “real life”) and standing next to a very early “horseless carriage,” with his right hand resting on the elegant old gas buggy’s roof support bar. Specifically, you asked me if W.K. had ever, to my knowledge, had any sort of professional relationship with the Farmers & Bankers Life Insurance Co. whose name is written on the front of the car. The short answer would have to be that, to my knowledge: no, he did not; although, through the miracle of the Internet, other family members will undoubtedly be reading this, my fifth postcard to you, and offering subsequent corrections to my own recollections. My guess is that, as you yourself suggest, Farmers & Bankers simply lent this elegant old gas buggy out to community events such as the 1961 Richmond Free Fair. I’m so glad that that particular photo of W.K., looking so dapper in his white linens and necktie, made it into your 2003 history update. (The obviously oversized suit jacket was definitely not his, any more than the bowler was; it’s a 42 long, and Granddad wore a 36 regular.) That was probably one of the last pictures ever taken of him.
At around 5:30 on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 17, 1961, Harry & Margaret & Kevin & I were just sitting down to our modest supper in our ticky-tacky little box house in Wichita, when the phone rang. Mom answered. She said “yes” several times into the receiver – and then: “It’s going to be alright, Mother. We’ll be there right away.” She then turned back toward the rest of us and burst into tears. Reaching for her little hankie, she blurted out: “It’s Dad. He’s dead.”
Earlier that day, William Keeling McCall (aged 94) had been out on the east lawn of his and Phoebe’s little white house on the corner of Ruth & Rigdon there in Richmond, engaged in one of his favorite late-life recreations of raking up dry leaves and brush into small piles and burning them, when he suddenly simply fell dead, just a few feet outside of that sweet old couple’s bedroom window. Phoebe evidently went outside and found him when he’d failed to come inside for their noon meal. The version I was told had her trying desperately to move him herself (You’ll recall that, in 1962, she was 81 years old, stood 5’ 1” and weighed approximately 110 lbs.), when the neighbors saw her and came over to help. Even though W.K. was already in heaven, an ambulance was summoned from Ottawa – the ambulance which, in those days, as I’m given to understand, also happened to be the station wagon hearse from (in our family’s case) Lamb Funeral Home. Granddad’s body, undoubtedly clad in the cardigan sweater, dress shirt, necktie and woolen trousers which he wore throughout three of the four seasons, was lain out on the living room sofa to await the folks from Ottawa. As much as I loved my granddad and revered him in countless ways, being 12 and all at the time, I could never again bring myself to sleep overnight on that particular sofa, and the family soon got rid of it.
W.K. McCall was one of those lucky people who managed to (as I heard it put recently) “die young at a very old age.” The day before he dropped dead of that heart attack (his first and last), they say he walked downtown and back (another of his favorite late-life pleasures). I remember the last time I saw him alive. It would have been a few months earlier, probably a day or two after Christmas of 1961. At the time, he’d been working for several years as what I like to call “the world’s oldest stock boy.” What this meant in practical terms, as I observed it, was that George & Marguerite Dietrich let him do odd jobs around their general store, for maybe 4 hours a day, maybe 4 days a week. I can recall walking downtown to Dietrichs’ as a boy, visiting with Granddad while he’d unbox and stock a carton of bathroom tissue or of canned vegetables on the lower grocery shelves. (The Dietrich’s watched him tenderly to keep him off of ladders and such.) It was also his job to sweep the aisles and to burn the trash – mostly empty boxes – eons before recycling was even dreamt of.
And, even though W.K.’s hands were (as was also later the case with my own father) always covered with bandaids, bruises, scrapes and half-healed whittling wounds, they were, in fact, quite steady and strong to the very last, so that another of his late-life pleasures was slicing up the bologna in Dietrich’s cool and fragrant meat department at the back of their store. He loved it; I could tell. And it was what he was in the middle of doing when I saw him alive for the very last time – though I had no way of knowing, of course, that it was the very last time.
I remember that Harry & Margaret & Kevin & I were leaving Richmond after our holiday visit – probably in our 1951 tan & gray Hudson Hornet – headed west toward Waverly or Melvern to drop by for quick visits with my dad’s sister, Lizzy, and then this brother, Jesse. We’d just finished hugging and kissing Phoebe “goodbye” at the house, and Margaret had Harry pull over in front of Dietrich’s general store so that she could say “goodbye” to W.K. I remember it all as though it were happening at this very moment. W.K. was standing in his white butcher’s apron and his nifty brown knit 1930’s “stockboy” (or “newsboy”) cap, on the sawdust-covered backroom floor, slicing bologna, there in his wire-rimmed spectacles, his handsome white bushy “Gay ‘90’s” Wyatt Earp moustache, and in what was, most likely, the very same necktie and cardigan sweater he was wearing on that lovely April morning four months later, when he fell dead while raking leaves.
And there in the backroom at Dietrich’s, he said one of the strangest, simplest, wisest things I’ve ever heard – to the girl he’d raised and whose soul was so inextricably bound to his. After my granddad and I had shaken hands (for I was 12 then and too big for hugging and kissing even my closest male family members, at least, according to the cultural norms of that day) . . . Margaret then hugged and kissed her father, then stood looking into his face while holding his hands in hers. It was at that moment that W.K. McCall said to her, in the most comforting, pastoral tone I’d ever heard him use: “Don’t worry, if you hear . . . that something has happened.”
To reiterate, I was 12 at the time, so that my granddad’s euphemism was lost on me – as I’m quite sure that he had intended for it to be. In recently reflecting upon that memorable moment in 1961, I’ve sometimes wondered whether – had I not been present – W.K. might have chosen a more direct phrase than “. . . if you hear . . . that something has happened.”
Anyway, it did . . . happen. And at the open-casket funeral in that lovely old Methodist church (long since demolished and replaced) directly across the alley from Phoebe’s & W.K.’s last (shared) earthly home, it was noted in whispers among the many mourners filing past his earthy remains, following the service (preached by a young, red-headed itinerate Rev. Weatherwax, reputedly a direct descendant of the little brown church in the vale Weatherwax family) . . . noted in hushed tones that the smudge of black on one of W.K.’s cheeks and on one corner of his moustache was from where the fire from the brush he’d been burning had singed him before Phoebe had found him lying there on the ground. To me, these tiny black smudges on his peaceful face only served to lend a final mark of quiet heroism to a life I’d already imagined into an almost mythic proportion.
Among W.K. McCall’s (1867-1962) more enchanting eccentricities was his “fossil collection.” I’m bracketing that term in quotes here because “fossil collection” represented a kind of shorthand used almost universally by our family, as well as by the Richmond and Franklin County community, to refer to granddad’s locally renowned, neatly labeled hodge-podge of fossils, old bones, shards, bric-a-bracs, curiosities, big dead bugs, a dried gar stuffed with old newspaper and mounted, a rusted “pirate’s” saber, and the higgledy-piggledy bits and pieces of what one might find in any number of roadside antique barns nowadays. But most assuredly: not junk. For, each and every curiosity in my granddad’s collection had a story attached to it, not only the story of when and where and how he’d found it, but also of what it represented in the vast gestalt of his considerable understanding of the physical universe.
Some other day, if and when I find the time, perhaps I’ll summon the focused energy to share a few pages of specifics concerning W.K.’s so-called “fossil collection.” For the time being, though, let me just say that this is the very first time in my life (And I’m nearly 60 now.) that I’ve given the least bit of thought to trying to explain to anyone what my granddad’s “fossil collection” meant to him, what it represented to him, in that deeply personal, subjective, interior process with which we’re all familiar – experientially, if not analytically. Admittedly, whatever it meant to him in the overall schema of whom he wanted to be or believed himself to be or wished to present himself to the rest of the human world as being . . . is unknowable . . . and probably always was. Perhaps, when he began “collecting” in the first decade of the 20th century (when he was already approaching middle-age), he had in mind some very different intention than the one at which I, as a small boy (and one of the last of his numerous grandchildren), could only begin to guess.
But, if anyone were to ask me to choose a single object with which I’ve most closely associated my memories of W.K. McCall, I suppose that I’d have to choose his magnifying glass. He loved to read, but, by the time I came along in 1949, both his eyes and his ears were starting to wear out. Therefore, those 1950’s technologies within the family’s budget which could prevent his becoming disconnected from the world of human voices and written words were, naturally, what captivated me, as a boy. And those were, of course, his hearing aids and his “reading glass.” Thus, when I conjure a momentary visual memory of Granddad in my mind’s eye, he’s sitting in an armchair or at the table (his only desk) peering through his big 5”-diameter “Sherlock Holmes” magnifying glass at some news item in The Ottawa Herald or some word puzzle or other in The Kansas City Star. (My mother confessed to me that the main reason her folks took the Star was for the crossword – and other word – puzzles – as well as for the Ann Landers and Billy Graham, of course.)
And, like as not, Phoebe (whom he always addressed as “Fee”) would be right there beside him, in an adjacent armchair, perusing a different section of the Herald or the Star, peering through her own (slightly less powerful) reading glass. Having grown up during General Grant’s Administration, W.K. never took much to television. Nevertheless, the family saw to it that a slightly used B&W tube set (with rather limited antenna reach) was installed in my maternal grandparents’ front room, wedged in between the nose-ticklingly out of tune upright piano and the creaky oversized rocking chair. An image I’m just this very minute dredging up from the dim recesses of my memory is of “Will & Fee” (as each called the other) seated in their armchairs in their front room, one forenoon in 1959 – the year of their 50th wedding anniversary – Fee with “The Secret Storm” or “Search for Tomorrow” cranked up so loud on the tube that the rest of us are compelled to stroll over to the old elementary schoolyard across the street in order to hold a conversation . . . and Will with his hearing aid completely removed, peacefully perusing The Ottawa Herald with his trusty trademark reading glass held up in front of his face.
While such a tableau might tempt wags to recite that tired quip that “his deafness saved their marriage,” I was always under the impression that Phoebe & Will loved one another very much, that they generally enjoyed each other’s company, and that they were well suited to one another in temperament, taste, values and overall chemistry. Throughout the 1950’s, they would take the train to Wichita to visit us for a week or two, from time to time. On one such visit, when I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, my granddad invited me to take a long walk with him. He was very much the “exercise freak,” as we say nowadays, and I always enjoyed our walks together, despite my having to always shout in order for W.K. to hear me. Anyway, our long walk together on this particular day turned out to be to a little neighborhood store, eight blocks or so down 17th street, where my granddad surprised me by purchasing a big box of “Lincoln Logs” ™ and handing them to me with so little ceremony that I didn’t even realize at first what they were or that he’d bought them for me. It was one of those moments of mysterious pantomime in which the boy and the old man seem to go through motions which come from beyond conscious intent, while each revels in the sunshine of a transaction more bafflingly intimate than either could ever begin to parse.
As it would turn out, my granddad and I would share a rather amazingly several such transactions of joyful pantomime, framed within the tiny window of the relatively few years he and I ended up having together. Back then, I recall feeling occasional jealousy toward my Uncle Cecil’s kids in Kansas City and my Uncle Myron’s kids in Ottawa, for living so much closer to Richmond than my immediate family and I – in Wichita – did – and therefore, so much closer to “Fee & Will.” Thinking back on those pangs of jealousy now, a half century later, however, I realize that what I was longing for back then went far beyond my closeness or connectedness to a geographical place called Richmond, Kansas (located at digital coordinates: 38.402512 – 95.252941). If I had a quiet day or two to myself (something I do not have nowadays, nor am I likely to have in the foreseeable future) . . . but if I did, I’d love to compose for you an astutely acutely insightful, soul-searching (Walt) Whitmanesque poem enumerating all that I now believe I was actually longing for as a boy, vis-à-vis Richmond, Kansas.
Part of the answer to this riddle came to me this past week as an epiphany – one of those “ah-hah” moments of sudden realization which most folks have dawn upon them every now and then. A friend of ours who’d retired recently was passing through Kansas City on his way from Des Moines, Iowa to Austin, Texas. He and I have known each other since we were undergraduates together at Wichita State in the late 1960’s & ‘70’s. Anyway, his parents were originally from the town of Taylor, Nebraska, which is almost exactly the same size as Richmond. I was telling him about my recent reconnecting with Richmond and about your exciting new Richmond Community Museum – and asking him about his childhood memories of Taylor, Nebraska. Then, right in the middle of our conversation, he made a statement which triggered the epiphany to which I’m referring. He said to me: “It’s funny, that when I walk around Taylor nowadays, I feel more at home than I ever have in any of the cities I’ve lived in.” (Or words to that effect.)
The epiphany which dawned upon me in that instant, of course, was that that’s exactly how I feel – and have always felt – about Richmond, Kansas. But, as is the case with my old college buddy, my own feeling of being “more at home” in the little town which had been the home of my parents and of their parents and which I’d visited on hundreds of occasions over the years – but which was never “officially/technically” my “hometown” – has always felt to me to be my hometown in a way in which neither Wichita, Kansas nor Kansas City, Missouri ever has. Over the years, when I’ve driven through Richmond with friends (in the capacity of informal tour guide), I’ve found myself saying things to them like: “This is the town where my parents grew up and went to school,” or “This is where my family is from.” It’s only been in more recent years that I’ve heard myself saying things like: “Culturally and spiritually, this is sort my hometown, even though I never lived here for all that long at one time.”
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A half century before my mother’s father, W.K. McCall, was “the world’s oldest stockboy,” he was a schoolteacher. I was never able to get a straight answer from anyone as to where he taught or for how long (back when those who knew the answers to these questions were still around), but I’ve tumbled to the warranted inference that it would most likely have been in Franklin County, Kansas, in one (or possibly several) little one-room schoolhouse(s) out on the prairie, sometime before he met his future wife, Phoebe Evans, in the Franklin County Courthouse in the opening years of the 20th century.
Back before the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune bereft me of most such treasured keepsakes, I owned a photograph of W.K. and his dozen or so students, taken out in front of the one-room country schoolhouse where he taught them. As you’d expect, his students ranged in age from small boys and girls to young men and young women old enough to have been seriously involved in some of the adult chores of late-19th-century farm life. Judging from what we know of W.K.’s date of birth (December 5, 1867) and of the evolution of late-19th-century styles of coiffure and attire, as well as of the social history of rural Kansas and of schoolyard photography around this period, I’d guess that my photograph of Granddad with his crew of future farmers and bankers was taken sometime in the 1890’s, perhaps during the second Presidency of Grover Cleveland. In it, W.K.’s moustache is much darker and much more substantial than it was at the other end of life’s journey, when I knew him – again, not dissimilar from the one sported by the likes of Wyatt Earp (& Grover Cleveland & Rudyard Kipling) during that same period.
According to reliable McCall family sources, in addition to having put in a few years, early on, as a one-room frontier schoolmaster, W.K. also taught calligraphy at Ottawa University for a time, though I have not a clue as to the exact chronology of that gig. My person guess is that it would have been a part-time thing (as have been most of my own teaching assignments). My mom mentioned to me on more than one occasion that her immediate family, when she was growing up (Fee, Will, Cecil, Margaret, Myron [little Uncle Raymond having died of scarlet fever at the age of 4 in 1921]), lived in Ottawa for “a while,” but, again, I could never nail her down on the exact timeframe. She and others of her generation mad reference occasionally to W.K.’s “running” a little grocery story in Ottawa, but the when and the where were never divulged. I’m sure that some intrepid historian with unlimited time and money could track down the facts of such matters, but that description doesn’t fit Galen Green.
Likewise, I lack the resources to get to the bottom of when it was that Granddad served as Justice of the Peace in Richmond. The only material evidence of this particular episode in his past was a heavy nickel-plated, clamping, embossing-style of “notary public” sealing device that my cousins and I used to sit on the floor and play with as small children. Perhaps, if one of the cousins still had a piece of paper they’d embossed with it, we’d have a little something to go on.
As for W.K.’s career as a banker, I do have a few random details filed away in my memory. Specifically, I recall a handful of old photographs, belonging either to Margaret and/or Phoebe, which were taken during the course of Granddad’s ill-fated banking years. I can recall two of them in particular, off the top of my head. The first is of a relatively youngish “Fee & Will,” posing in World War I –era garb outside of some small-town bank. (Or it may have been taken as late as 1928.) The second is of Granddad, standing in an old-fashioned teller’s cage, behind some small-town bank counter – evidently taken around the same period as the first – as though awaiting the arrival of Bonnie & Clyde.
Granddad’s banking career was actually one of the few details from that period which Phoebe would mention to me in passing, every now and then – as would Margaret. The difference was that Phoebe’s tone tended to be one of wistful pride, while Margaret’s tended to be one of bitterness. Mom let it be known to me in no uncertain terms that her father’s bank had gone under during The Great Depression (i.e. between the stock market crash of 1929 and the end of the Dust Bowl era), primarily as a result of his refusal to foreclose on his neighbors who were unable to repay their farm loans and other debts. “He was just too kind-hearted to make it in the banking business,” Margaret would opine to me bitterly, in recounting her version of how her family had been reduced to harassed penury from their previously “respectable” social position among Franklin County’s middle class.
Flipping through the big pages of “Fee’s & Will’s” photograph album as a child, I was always particularly drawn to a snapshot of W.K. standing next to a late-1930’s-style gasoline pump, the kind in which one could actually see the gasoline filling up a large glass tank (which always reminded me of the upper glass compartment of a 1980’s-style kitchen blender), before being pumped on down through the delivery hose into the customer’s fuel tank. (Remember those?) Although it’s been decades since I had that fascinating snapshot in front of me, I seem to recall (Or is it my imagination?) some cute little floatation balls which bobbed around on the top of the gasoline itself, as it filled this glass “pre-fill viewing tank.” A second photograph, adjacent to the first in my McCall grandparents’ album of memories, was shot from across U.S. 59, and reveals McCall’s Service Station as having been about the size and shape of a Mississippi sharecropper’s shack, with a fashionably sloping roof over the pumping area, and a sign proclaiming in big lettering the name of this post-banking venture in my granddad’s long, undaunted career, his creative, courageous journey toward the dotage where he and I met up, after World War II. I can recall Phoebe sitting cozily beside me on their couch when I was a boy and explaining to me, when we’d come to that particular snapshot, in words that would go something like this: “And that was when Will owned a service station over on the highway, across from the Catholic Church. He and Cecil ran it together.”
(Or words to that effect. From the time I came along when she was nearly 70, until the very end of her life, Phoebe almost always spoke to me—and to everyone, I suppose – in the most matter-of-fact, even tone you can possibly imagine. During my childhood, the only time I can recall her stumbling momentarily into an emotional thicket was when she’d try to speak about losing little Raymond in the scarlet fever epidemic of 1921.)
So . . . we can add “service station owner & attendant” to our long and mysterious list of hats worn by my maternal grandfather, W.K. McCall of Richmond, Kansas. I have no way of knowing, of course, when that quaint little building across the highway from the Catholic Church was finally torn down (or fell down), but I do recall noticing it standing there – in one or another of its incarnations – throughout my childhood and on into my adult years, whenever Chance would allow me to visit Richmond for a few minutes, every few years. Granddad himself never spoke of it. But then again, he never spoke to me of any significant episodes – professional or otherwise – in his past. I attribute the vastness of his reticence to his acute deafness.
What W.K. did talk to me about – and this being only on rare occasions in the final few years of his life and only when we were out of the critical hearing of other adults – was science, especially paleontology. I loved to listen to him tell me about dinosaurs, which were still a bit of an esoteric subject back during the Eisenhower Administration, thus making me the foremost dinosaur expert in the 3rd grade back in Wichita -- no small asset!
As much as I’d like to sit here with you today and babble an entire book of memories of my mother’s father, I feel as though I really ought to be winding this up for now. This was, after all, supposed to be no more than “an introduction to” a courageously creative man’s long and multifaceted life. Moreover, I think it’s fair to say that I already seem to have exceeded my usual “postcard” format.
Surely, there will be one or two individuals reading this (mostly accurate) beginning of a reminiscence of my maternal grandfather, W.K. McCall, who knew him – or who were, at the very least, casually acquainted with him. It would be a tremendous source of pleasure to me if any such individuals would be so kind as take a few minutes to share any recollections which they themselves might have of W.K. Admittedly, what I’ve shared with you here today doesn’t begin to do him justice. But it’s the best I can do for now.
When I think of how I might most succinctly summarize this introductory rememb’rance of Granddad, everything that rushes into consciousness seems to come from the perspective of that little boy I was when I knew him. Most of all, I can see him puttering in his garden, out behind the house, stooping down between the rows of carrots and tomatoes, tending to his lettuce and corn, fussing over his beans and musk melons.
Of all the grown-ups populating the two halves of the family into which I was adopted at birth (the Greens and the McCalls), W.K. was easily the one most like me. For one thing, he looked more like me than did any of the others; but more importantly, he operated internally more like me than did any of the others. Our shared passion for science, history and literature was a large part of it. Still, there was something much deeper than that, something I’ve never quiet been able to put my finger on. Yes, there was the wry sense of humor, the relentlessly energetic curiosity about the physical universe, the creative stoicism in the face of remorseless adversity, etc. But there was a bond between W.K. and me which went even deeper than that. However, that’s a mystery I think I might just leave for others to fathom.
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
Galen Green
Monday
August 18, 2008
(10 Days Later…..)
Galen's Father's Parents' Time In Richmond, KS
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Galen’s Postcard #4: The Farm Greens in the Town of Richmond, Kansas
Galen Green Monday
8606 Chestnut Circle, Apt. 3 July 21, 2008
Kansas City, MO 64131 (Ernest Hemingway’s
(816) 807-4957 109th birthday)
Msmith2210@aol.com
Dear Richmond Friends --
I was raised by old people who were, themselves, raised by old people. When I was a child, I noticed one day that the parents of most of my friends were significantly younger than my own parents, so much younger, in fact, that my own parents were closer in age to my friends’ grandparents. In turn, both my mother and father had been raised by parents of an exceptionally advanced age. My grandparents on my mother’s side, for instance, were products of what we as children used to call “the wild west,” while my grandparents on my father’s side were products of an even earlier era, both having been born prior to the American Civil War.
It is about my father’s (and, again, as always, I mean my adoptive father, Harry P. Green)’s mother and father, Etta (1861-1958) and Ira (1858-1946) Green, that I’ve come here today to reminisce with you. To review briefly what I said about them to you earlier: I know that they’re buried up there on the hill overlooking Richmond, Kansas, side by side; and I know that the very last house they ever lived in was there in Richmond. I even used to know exactly which house it was in which they – specifically Etta – last lived. But it’s been a bit more than a half century since I was last inside that house. My father and his siblings (all of them much older than Dad) had to move her out of that house and sell it, sometime around 1953. Etta would have been 92 at the time, and I’d have been 4. My best (semi-reliable) recollection nowadays is that Etta & Ira Green’s last (shared) earthly home was a tiny old wooden bungalow which stood on the southeast corner of Ruth & Baldwin there in Richmond, just a couple of blocks west of Phoebe & Will McCall’s last (shared) earthly home.
To the best of my knowledge (and this is a phrase with which I’m going to needs preface a huge percentage of the statements I’m about to make), no one still alive (and with whom I have any means of contact) possesses any more relevant, reliable information than do I concerning my paternal grandparents’ connection with the community in and around Richmond or their origins back East or , indeed, most of the facts of their lives -- including the locations and ownerships of the various farmsteads and village houses they inhabited through their lives. When one considers how long ago they lived and died and within what cultural, sociological, historical context, it’s a wonder that anything is known about them at all. Certainly, the bulk of my knowledge of them and of their journey through this world (as it was, between 1858 and 1958) has been imparted to me as oral history by the “baby” of their brood, my father, Harry.
When I was a small boy growing up in Wichita in our tiny gray ticky-tacky house on North Lorraine with Harry & Margaret & Kevin & Lois, a professionally-tinted photograph of Ira & Etta Green stood eternal vigil in its gold-colored metal frame atop my parents’ polished maple-wood bedroom dresser. In it, the elderly couple is seated in rocking chairs on the north lawn of the aforementioned little house on the southeast corner of (probably) Ruth & Baldwin there in Richmond. This 5x7” portrait (clearly a cherished keepsake of my father, their baby) must have been taken sometime during the Second World War, since Ira died in 1946 at the age of 88. To any but the informed observer, Harry’s parents appear to be just another fairly typical retired farm couple of that era – sun-baked, windblown, worn-out, stoic, and glad to be sitting down for a few minutes. Ira, of course, had been gone for three years when I came into the world in 1949; and by the time I had reached the age of awareness, Etta had lost all lucidity, living out her final years in a series of (mostly pre-modern) nursing homes in and around Ottawa. I haven’t seen that modestly iconic photograph of Etta & Ira for at least 20 years, and yet I can easily recall it at this moment in my mind’s eye – particularly Ira’s bushy white moustache and wavy white mane and Etta’s square jaw, long peasant Sunday dress and long silver tresses wound tightly up into a neat topknot. I wouldn’t fault the casual observer who might naturally, innocently enough mistake this unsmiling old farm couple for their 19th century European counterparts – or even for a pair of Russian serfs.
But they were, in fact, my father’s ancient parents, and they were, in fact, posing for what must surely have been their final formal portrait, there on the side lawn of their last (shared) earthly home in the little town of Richmond, Kansas . . . while far away, America battled the forces of fascist tyranny.
As a writer, I consider myself blessed to have been adopted into a family consisting of both farm people and townspeople, just as I’ve been blessed with the psychological and cultural balance between Planet Wichita and Planet Richmond. Having taught college English from time to time over the years, I suppose that I could give myself the inescapable freshman composition assignment to “compare & contrast” the McCalls & the Greens. But I’m afraid that trying to hammer the round peg of my reminiscences into the square hole of any such format would only serve to cramp my style; and my style gets cramped more than enough nowadays, as it is – what with my job at the Kansas City Missouri School District (KCMSD) and all the other demands of life as a grown-up. Instead, I think I’ll just “wing it,” as the young folks might say.
As I’ve already suggested in my first three “postcards,” my mother’s people would definitely represent the townspeople in any graph of my ancestry, in rather stark contrast to my father’s people who would definitely represent the farm people. [Side note: Etta’s maiden name was Looney, not that it matters all that much, since neither she nor Ira appear to have brought any of their blood kin with them when they moved to Kansas from (evidently) Jefferson County, Iowa, in (just an educated guess here) the 1880’s.] While all available evidence points toward the McCall-Evans side of my ancestry aspiring to enter successfully into what we’ll call “the mercantile class,” (examples of which I’ll be happy to provide at some future date), the Green-Looneys appear to have aspired almost single-mindedly to enter onto a higher rung on the ladder of successful family farmers. I’m confident that we can all agree on the fact of both of these aspirations being admirable, attainable and epidemic, throughout America’s Heartland – whether in 1880, 1900 or 1920. Unfortunately, however, all available evidence also points toward both my father’s people and my mother’s people meeting with only minimal fulfillment of their goals, within the timeframe in which I’m attempting to weave today’s reminiscence (i.e. 1858-1982) – a bitter fact they share, as we all know, with tens of millions of other American families of that era – as well as of our own.
I wish that I could provide my friends there at the Richmond Community Museum with at least as substantive a basket of basic information concerning my father’s people as I did concerning my mother’s. But I can’t. As I’ve already said, Etta & Ira Green appear to have moved to Kansas from Jefferson County, Iowa, probably around 1885, when they were still a young married couple. In the summer of 2005, a friend and I spent an afternoon in the oldest sections of the cemeteries in Fairfield, Iowa (the county seat) and the (now non-existent) hamlet of Perlee, Iowa, reference to which had shown up in some Green family documents I’d heard about. This bit of graveyard research, along with a phone conversation with the retired Jefferson County historian, followed up by my purchasing of sundry photocopies of public records she was kind enough to mail to me in Kansas City, have led me to hypothesize that young Etta Looney and young Ira Green had arrived with their respective families of origin to farm the soil of Jefferson County, Iowa, sometime during the Grant Administration, swept up in that tidal wave of westward migration so ubiquitously celebrated and replicated in every art form known to our species – most lavishly in literature and cinema.
My father and other credible family sources I’ve interviewed over the years have arrived at a sufficiently plausible consensus in their oral history of Ira’s & Etta’s people having migrated to Iowa from either/and/or/both (most likely) the Pennsylvania/Ohio region of the new republic that I feel comfortable in going along with this hypothesis. Certainly, a handful of family recipes and traditions which survived into the mid-20th century, along with a smattering of regionalisms and figures of speech which have filtered from them, through my father, into my own lived culture, would seem to support this theory concerning the generally obscure Looney-Greens’ antebellum roots.
One significant characteristic which my mom’s dad and my dad’s dad seem to have had in common was that each of them tried his hand at a variety of trades, each within the practical boundaries of his “skills set.” In my next installment, I hope to return to the more familiar ground of Will McCall in his various professional roles; but today I’m going to try to sketch for you here as briefly as I can the vague set of impressions my father left me of his father’s “career.” My sketch here will be fragmented and brief because absolutely everything my dad ever imparted to me concerning his parents, his own early life with them on “the” (various) farm(s), or anything else worthy of my remembering was fragmented and brief. Fortunately, my task today is not to weave for you a whole-cloth seamless tapestry of Harry P. Green and his parents and their life in and/or around Richmond in the 1920’s & 30’s, but rather something more akin to a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, spread out on the dining room table, with 90% of its pieces missing. By comparison, piecing together The Dead Sea Scrolls must have been a snap.
According to the bits and pieces of impressions and facts handed down to me by Harry, his parents arrived in Kansas in the 1880’s, most likely by train. He seemed to think that, by the time of their arrival, at least the two eldest of their offspring had entered upon the scene. Those would have been my Uncle Nelson (b. 1880) and my Aunt Elizabeth [whom Harry called “Lizzy”] (b. 1882?). The fact of Harry’s own entry upon the stage at the comparatively late date of 1908 (when Ira was 50 and Etta was 47) produced a sort of good-news/bad-news effect in the oral history department. The good news was that, by 1908, most of what I wish that I knew to tell you about here today had already happened – was already history. The bad news was that Harry was the only member of Ira’s & Etta’s brood who, as the baby of family, hadn’t been present when all that important family history of the 1890’s was taking place. Moreover, according to every source available to me, Ira & Etta were even more taciturn than my dad. It therefore seems that the sum total of extant data regarding the whereabouts and disposition of Etta & Ira Green and their characteristically sizable farm family, throughout most of the span of their lives together, might be expressed thusly:
They came to Kansas to farm. They were devout Protestant churchgoers all of their lives. Whenever the farm they were renting didn’t work out, they'd move to a different one or try a different line of work for a while -- until that didn't work out either. But they always confined their to-ings and fro-ings to the counties of Franklin, Osage and Coffey. (Harry was born in or just outside of Waverly.) For a while, according to Harry, Ira had a blacksmith shop in Richmond and, later, a butcher shop in Ottawa – or else it was the other way around. On more than one occasion, in the 1960's, when Harry & Margaret & Kevin & I were driving from Richmond to Waverly or Melvern, Harry would slow the car down from 35 MPH to 20, on whatever dusty gravel road, and point over to the left at the tumbled-down ruins of some little farmstead and say to us kids: "My folks used to rent that place; Dad and I used to plow them fields you see over yonder, with nothin' but a mule and an ol' Ford tractor." And then he'd drive on, with less display of sentimentality than what an ex-con might show toward his prison cell.
When it came time for Etta & Ira to retire, it seemed only natural that they'd choose Richmond. I could tell, just from walking down the main street of Richmond with Harry (and sometimes with either Cecil or Myron, as well) when I was a boy in the 1950's & 60's, that Harry's parents and siblings were still quite well remembered by the old guys on the benches outside the farmers' co-op, as well as by the local merchants -- George & Marguerite Dietrich, John Roeckers, Clive the barber, and so on.
For me, especially at that age, there were many important lessons to be had in such walks with my dad and his generation. Perhaps the lesson most relevant to the theme of today's "postcard" might go something like this:
The world didn’t begin on the day I was born. Nor did these grown-ups here in this little town of Richmond, Kansas become aware of me or of each other only at the moment when I became aware of them. Something worthy of my attention had been going on here with these folks for a very long time – even since before Pearl Harbor or that big war which followed it, even since before these grown-ups became grown-ups. Not only had these living, breathing grown-ups, walking here beside me, once been as young and small and mystified as I am now, here, today in 1959, but they, too, had once moved through a world of grown-ups of their parents’ generation – now mostly gone, sleeping beneath that lovely hill off to the west there. And each of those sleepers beneath that hill had once walked these same streets, once sung and prayed in these same polished church pews, had once inhaled the intoxicating fragrance of these sweet old catalpa trees shading these lawns and sidewalks, had once pensively strolled the aisles of Dietrich’s and Roeckers’ general stores, had once heard the whistle and the clatter of the southbound train on winter nights (back before they tore up the tracks and tore down the depot) . . . and had once even stood in the afternoon sunshine and the prairie breeze, atop that same lovely hill beneath which now they sleep, and gazed off to the east – over the roofs of the houses and the tops of the trees – back toward that old world from whence they and their people had come to this place, long before any of our parents were born.
Galen Green
Kansas City, MO
July 28, 2008
Galen’s Postcard #4: The Farm Greens in the Town of Richmond, Kansas
Galen Green Monday
8606 Chestnut Circle, Apt. 3 July 21, 2008
Kansas City, MO 64131 (Ernest Hemingway’s
(816) 807-4957 109th birthday)
Msmith2210@aol.com
Dear Richmond Friends --
I was raised by old people who were, themselves, raised by old people. When I was a child, I noticed one day that the parents of most of my friends were significantly younger than my own parents, so much younger, in fact, that my own parents were closer in age to my friends’ grandparents. In turn, both my mother and father had been raised by parents of an exceptionally advanced age. My grandparents on my mother’s side, for instance, were products of what we as children used to call “the wild west,” while my grandparents on my father’s side were products of an even earlier era, both having been born prior to the American Civil War.
It is about my father’s (and, again, as always, I mean my adoptive father, Harry P. Green)’s mother and father, Etta (1861-1958) and Ira (1858-1946) Green, that I’ve come here today to reminisce with you. To review briefly what I said about them to you earlier: I know that they’re buried up there on the hill overlooking Richmond, Kansas, side by side; and I know that the very last house they ever lived in was there in Richmond. I even used to know exactly which house it was in which they – specifically Etta – last lived. But it’s been a bit more than a half century since I was last inside that house. My father and his siblings (all of them much older than Dad) had to move her out of that house and sell it, sometime around 1953. Etta would have been 92 at the time, and I’d have been 4. My best (semi-reliable) recollection nowadays is that Etta & Ira Green’s last (shared) earthly home was a tiny old wooden bungalow which stood on the southeast corner of Ruth & Baldwin there in Richmond, just a couple of blocks west of Phoebe & Will McCall’s last (shared) earthly home.
To the best of my knowledge (and this is a phrase with which I’m going to needs preface a huge percentage of the statements I’m about to make), no one still alive (and with whom I have any means of contact) possesses any more relevant, reliable information than do I concerning my paternal grandparents’ connection with the community in and around Richmond or their origins back East or , indeed, most of the facts of their lives -- including the locations and ownerships of the various farmsteads and village houses they inhabited through their lives. When one considers how long ago they lived and died and within what cultural, sociological, historical context, it’s a wonder that anything is known about them at all. Certainly, the bulk of my knowledge of them and of their journey through this world (as it was, between 1858 and 1958) has been imparted to me as oral history by the “baby” of their brood, my father, Harry.
When I was a small boy growing up in Wichita in our tiny gray ticky-tacky house on North Lorraine with Harry & Margaret & Kevin & Lois, a professionally-tinted photograph of Ira & Etta Green stood eternal vigil in its gold-colored metal frame atop my parents’ polished maple-wood bedroom dresser. In it, the elderly couple is seated in rocking chairs on the north lawn of the aforementioned little house on the southeast corner of (probably) Ruth & Baldwin there in Richmond. This 5x7” portrait (clearly a cherished keepsake of my father, their baby) must have been taken sometime during the Second World War, since Ira died in 1946 at the age of 88. To any but the informed observer, Harry’s parents appear to be just another fairly typical retired farm couple of that era – sun-baked, windblown, worn-out, stoic, and glad to be sitting down for a few minutes. Ira, of course, had been gone for three years when I came into the world in 1949; and by the time I had reached the age of awareness, Etta had lost all lucidity, living out her final years in a series of (mostly pre-modern) nursing homes in and around Ottawa. I haven’t seen that modestly iconic photograph of Etta & Ira for at least 20 years, and yet I can easily recall it at this moment in my mind’s eye – particularly Ira’s bushy white moustache and wavy white mane and Etta’s square jaw, long peasant Sunday dress and long silver tresses wound tightly up into a neat topknot. I wouldn’t fault the casual observer who might naturally, innocently enough mistake this unsmiling old farm couple for their 19th century European counterparts – or even for a pair of Russian serfs.
But they were, in fact, my father’s ancient parents, and they were, in fact, posing for what must surely have been their final formal portrait, there on the side lawn of their last (shared) earthly home in the little town of Richmond, Kansas . . . while far away, America battled the forces of fascist tyranny.
As a writer, I consider myself blessed to have been adopted into a family consisting of both farm people and townspeople, just as I’ve been blessed with the psychological and cultural balance between Planet Wichita and Planet Richmond. Having taught college English from time to time over the years, I suppose that I could give myself the inescapable freshman composition assignment to “compare & contrast” the McCalls & the Greens. But I’m afraid that trying to hammer the round peg of my reminiscences into the square hole of any such format would only serve to cramp my style; and my style gets cramped more than enough nowadays, as it is – what with my job at the Kansas City Missouri School District (KCMSD) and all the other demands of life as a grown-up. Instead, I think I’ll just “wing it,” as the young folks might say.
As I’ve already suggested in my first three “postcards,” my mother’s people would definitely represent the townspeople in any graph of my ancestry, in rather stark contrast to my father’s people who would definitely represent the farm people. [Side note: Etta’s maiden name was Looney, not that it matters all that much, since neither she nor Ira appear to have brought any of their blood kin with them when they moved to Kansas from (evidently) Jefferson County, Iowa, in (just an educated guess here) the 1880’s.] While all available evidence points toward the McCall-Evans side of my ancestry aspiring to enter successfully into what we’ll call “the mercantile class,” (examples of which I’ll be happy to provide at some future date), the Green-Looneys appear to have aspired almost single-mindedly to enter onto a higher rung on the ladder of successful family farmers. I’m confident that we can all agree on the fact of both of these aspirations being admirable, attainable and epidemic, throughout America’s Heartland – whether in 1880, 1900 or 1920. Unfortunately, however, all available evidence also points toward both my father’s people and my mother’s people meeting with only minimal fulfillment of their goals, within the timeframe in which I’m attempting to weave today’s reminiscence (i.e. 1858-1982) – a bitter fact they share, as we all know, with tens of millions of other American families of that era – as well as of our own.
I wish that I could provide my friends there at the Richmond Community Museum with at least as substantive a basket of basic information concerning my father’s people as I did concerning my mother’s. But I can’t. As I’ve already said, Etta & Ira Green appear to have moved to Kansas from Jefferson County, Iowa, probably around 1885, when they were still a young married couple. In the summer of 2005, a friend and I spent an afternoon in the oldest sections of the cemeteries in Fairfield, Iowa (the county seat) and the (now non-existent) hamlet of Perlee, Iowa, reference to which had shown up in some Green family documents I’d heard about. This bit of graveyard research, along with a phone conversation with the retired Jefferson County historian, followed up by my purchasing of sundry photocopies of public records she was kind enough to mail to me in Kansas City, have led me to hypothesize that young Etta Looney and young Ira Green had arrived with their respective families of origin to farm the soil of Jefferson County, Iowa, sometime during the Grant Administration, swept up in that tidal wave of westward migration so ubiquitously celebrated and replicated in every art form known to our species – most lavishly in literature and cinema.
My father and other credible family sources I’ve interviewed over the years have arrived at a sufficiently plausible consensus in their oral history of Ira’s & Etta’s people having migrated to Iowa from either/and/or/both (most likely) the Pennsylvania/Ohio region of the new republic that I feel comfortable in going along with this hypothesis. Certainly, a handful of family recipes and traditions which survived into the mid-20th century, along with a smattering of regionalisms and figures of speech which have filtered from them, through my father, into my own lived culture, would seem to support this theory concerning the generally obscure Looney-Greens’ antebellum roots.
One significant characteristic which my mom’s dad and my dad’s dad seem to have had in common was that each of them tried his hand at a variety of trades, each within the practical boundaries of his “skills set.” In my next installment, I hope to return to the more familiar ground of Will McCall in his various professional roles; but today I’m going to try to sketch for you here as briefly as I can the vague set of impressions my father left me of his father’s “career.” My sketch here will be fragmented and brief because absolutely everything my dad ever imparted to me concerning his parents, his own early life with them on “the” (various) farm(s), or anything else worthy of my remembering was fragmented and brief. Fortunately, my task today is not to weave for you a whole-cloth seamless tapestry of Harry P. Green and his parents and their life in and/or around Richmond in the 1920’s & 30’s, but rather something more akin to a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, spread out on the dining room table, with 90% of its pieces missing. By comparison, piecing together The Dead Sea Scrolls must have been a snap.
According to the bits and pieces of impressions and facts handed down to me by Harry, his parents arrived in Kansas in the 1880’s, most likely by train. He seemed to think that, by the time of their arrival, at least the two eldest of their offspring had entered upon the scene. Those would have been my Uncle Nelson (b. 1880) and my Aunt Elizabeth [whom Harry called “Lizzy”] (b. 1882?). The fact of Harry’s own entry upon the stage at the comparatively late date of 1908 (when Ira was 50 and Etta was 47) produced a sort of good-news/bad-news effect in the oral history department. The good news was that, by 1908, most of what I wish that I knew to tell you about here today had already happened – was already history. The bad news was that Harry was the only member of Ira’s & Etta’s brood who, as the baby of family, hadn’t been present when all that important family history of the 1890’s was taking place. Moreover, according to every source available to me, Ira & Etta were even more taciturn than my dad. It therefore seems that the sum total of extant data regarding the whereabouts and disposition of Etta & Ira Green and their characteristically sizable farm family, throughout most of the span of their lives together, might be expressed thusly:
They came to Kansas to farm. They were devout Protestant churchgoers all of their lives. Whenever the farm they were renting didn’t work out, they'd move to a different one or try a different line of work for a while -- until that didn't work out either. But they always confined their to-ings and fro-ings to the counties of Franklin, Osage and Coffey. (Harry was born in or just outside of Waverly.) For a while, according to Harry, Ira had a blacksmith shop in Richmond and, later, a butcher shop in Ottawa – or else it was the other way around. On more than one occasion, in the 1960's, when Harry & Margaret & Kevin & I were driving from Richmond to Waverly or Melvern, Harry would slow the car down from 35 MPH to 20, on whatever dusty gravel road, and point over to the left at the tumbled-down ruins of some little farmstead and say to us kids: "My folks used to rent that place; Dad and I used to plow them fields you see over yonder, with nothin' but a mule and an ol' Ford tractor." And then he'd drive on, with less display of sentimentality than what an ex-con might show toward his prison cell.
When it came time for Etta & Ira to retire, it seemed only natural that they'd choose Richmond. I could tell, just from walking down the main street of Richmond with Harry (and sometimes with either Cecil or Myron, as well) when I was a boy in the 1950's & 60's, that Harry's parents and siblings were still quite well remembered by the old guys on the benches outside the farmers' co-op, as well as by the local merchants -- George & Marguerite Dietrich, John Roeckers, Clive the barber, and so on.
For me, especially at that age, there were many important lessons to be had in such walks with my dad and his generation. Perhaps the lesson most relevant to the theme of today's "postcard" might go something like this:
The world didn’t begin on the day I was born. Nor did these grown-ups here in this little town of Richmond, Kansas become aware of me or of each other only at the moment when I became aware of them. Something worthy of my attention had been going on here with these folks for a very long time – even since before Pearl Harbor or that big war which followed it, even since before these grown-ups became grown-ups. Not only had these living, breathing grown-ups, walking here beside me, once been as young and small and mystified as I am now, here, today in 1959, but they, too, had once moved through a world of grown-ups of their parents’ generation – now mostly gone, sleeping beneath that lovely hill off to the west there. And each of those sleepers beneath that hill had once walked these same streets, once sung and prayed in these same polished church pews, had once inhaled the intoxicating fragrance of these sweet old catalpa trees shading these lawns and sidewalks, had once pensively strolled the aisles of Dietrich’s and Roeckers’ general stores, had once heard the whistle and the clatter of the southbound train on winter nights (back before they tore up the tracks and tore down the depot) . . . and had once even stood in the afternoon sunshine and the prairie breeze, atop that same lovely hill beneath which now they sleep, and gazed off to the east – over the roofs of the houses and the tops of the trees – back toward that old world from whence they and their people had come to this place, long before any of our parents were born.
Galen Green
Kansas City, MO
July 28, 2008
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
The "Houses" of Evans & McCall: An Introduction
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Galen’s Third Postcard to Pat in Richmond, Kansas
Ms. Pat Vining, Secretary
Richmond Community Museum
Box 284
Richmond, KS 66060
Tuesday
July 8, 2008
KC, MO
Dear Pat,
Sorry that I’ll miss the Richmond Fair again this year. But I’ll be with you in spirit. I have many fond memories of the fair from my younger days, back in the 1950’s & 60’s. Someday I hope to find time to share a few of them with you. As I may have mentioned at the museum’s grand opening last month, I wrote a short-story entitled “Jeremy’s Parade,” based on my personal experiences and observations (and wildly fanciful fictionalizations) of the Richmond Fair, as it was back then, for a Creative Writing Workshop when I was an undergraduate at Wichita State. Even though “Jeremy’s Parade” didn’t exactly qualify as great literature, the editors of the university’s annual literary magazine, Mikrokosmos, did publish it in (I believe it was) the 1971 issue. Sadly, I’ve been unable to locate either of my two contributor’s copies of the Mikrokosmos with my short-story in it.
But it’s my maternal grandparents about whom I’ve come here today to chat. Although I’m given to understand that Phoebe & Will McCall resided in various parts of Franklin County, Kansas – both before and after they were married in the very early 20th century – the only house they lived in during my lifetime (and on the shaded north lawn of which Will had his fatal heart attack in April of 1962 at the age of 94) stood on (and still stands, as of this writing) on the southwest corner of Ruth & Rigdon, there in Richmond. As I’m sure you’re well aware, however, most of the streets in Richmond were still unmarked (and perhaps unnamed) in the 1950’s & 60’s. I remember asking my mother, when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old and mailing my first letter to my grandparents, what street they lived on; she replied that she wasn’t sure of its name, but she thought it might be Cherry. I find her confusion to be mildly fascinating, considering the fact that she’d spent much of her youth in -- and, indeed, had been married in – that modest little two-story house on the southwest corner of those streets with such relatively irrelevant names.
Phoebe was, as she herself would have put it, “an Evans.” Her parents, Lena & George Evans, are buried in a handsome (and remarkably informative) family plot near the very back of the Peoria Cemetery, out on the Tennessee Road. On the sunny afternoon following your wonderful community museum’s grand opening, I drove out there to pay my somewhat overdue respects (not having been there in roughly 40 years). Besides my trusty Kansas Atlas & Gazetteer (an indispensable tool of the intrepid back road genealogist), I relied on my uncanny spatial memory which replayed for me on my inner movie screen an afternoon way back in the Johnson Administration, when I was in my late teens and riding along with Phoebe in the backseat of Harry & Margaret’s old ’56 Packard. It was most likely a Memorial Day weekend, because Peoria’s cemetery was only one of several we visited that day. Will had been dead for 5 or 6 years by then, and the house on the corner of Ruth & Rigdon in Richmond had been sold. As just one of many indicators of how spry Phoebe would remain, right up into her hundredth year, she’d moved into a second-floor walk-up apartment which was actually the remodeled upstairs of another elderly lady’s large house on one of Ottawa’s shady brick-paved streets.
Not knowing that she still had many lucid, active years ahead of her, Phoebe had evidently asked Harry & Margaret to take her out on this “one last” daytrip to the cemeteries in Berea, Richmond, Imes, Rantoul, Peoria, etc., that day 40 years ago, as well as to what was left of the farmstead where she’d grown up in the late 19th century and had continued to live with her family, while riding her pony sidesaddle to and from her schoolmarm gigs in and around Peoria. According to Phoebe, she was in her mid-20’s and working for her father, George Evans, one summer in the Franklin County Courthouse in Ottawa where he was some sort of public official, when she first met William Keeling McCall, who was 13 years her senior and who came in one day on official business. Their first child, Cecil Eugene, was born on Shakespeare’s birth in 1910. (I mention this mostly because my Uncle Cecil – who died at home here in Kansas City in 1998 – was the one member of my family known by nearly everyone with whom I had an opportunity to visit at the grand opening last month.) Their second child, a daughter, was born in Wellsville on March 2, 1912. That child was Margaret Lena McCall Green, my adoptive mother. (She died in Wichita on August 4, 1990 at the age of 78.)
Among the dominant images which my memory was replaying for me on my inner movie screen as I steered my old green Ford Taurus off the Tennessee Road and onto the gravel driveway of the Peoria Cemetery were that of a hollow metal obelisk slightly taller than myself and that of an abundance of longstanding evergreen trees not far from the tall hollow metal obelisk. With these images stuck in my brain, it took me only a matter of minutes to locate the Evans family plot to which I alluded earlier when I said that Phoebe’s parents, Lena & George Evans, “are buried in a handsome (and remarkably informative) family plot.” What I meant by this has mostly to do with whom else is buried in that Evans family plot and the dates indicating when they were born and died. By “informative,” however, I did not necessarily intend to imply that the names and dates I read there on that recent June afternoon supplied me only with answers. As you know, some of Life’s most valuable information comes to us in the form of questions and puzzles and mysteries. Since we don’t have time today for me to share with you the details of any such which my recent visit to the Evans family plot raised in my mind, let me say only that what I found there includes an all too typical tale of rampant infant mortality among the good folks who settled Franklin County, Kansas in the 19th century – as it was across the entire globe at that time. It struck me as being comparable to the infant mortality rate in, say, 21st century rural India.
To the socioeconomically inclined anthropologist within the writer in me, the tall hollow metal Evans obelisk, in and of itself, provided a significant set of clues as to the origins and financial decline of the branch of the extended family (the tribe, if you will) into which I was adopted at birth in 1949. Without trying to tell you more than you probably care to know at this juncture, my attention was drawn to the stamp at the base of the obelisk signifying that it had been cast in Detroit, Michigan. My second clue was the fact that it showed absolutely no weathering nor any other such damage from the elements, despite the fact of its having been left outside through more that 130 brutal Kansas winters and 130 blistering Kansas summers. It was obviously made from some proto-spaceage alloy which must have cost a pretty penny; I’m going to venture a semi-educated guess of roughly 20,000 current (2008) American dollars. Finally, the earliest death-dates in the Evans family plot are around 1875, leading one to reasonably infer that the obelisk was most likely placed there no later than 1880, the year that Phoebe was born; whoever purchased the obelisk and the considerable plot for the Evans graves surrounding it would appear to have brought with them to Kansas after the Civil War (I believe their immediately previous homestead had been in Iowa.) a far more substantial “chunk of change” than was ever evident in my own lifetime – nor at any period following The Fall of the Houses of Evans & McCall in The Great Depression of the 1930’s.
All of this, in turn, would seem to furnish forth its own set of even more pertinent clues as to why and how it was that all of the remnant Victorian Evanses & McCalls with whom I personally had any contact, there in Franklin County throughout my childhood, left me with the distinct impression of their having been what I’ve sometimes heard referred to as “ruined aristocrats,” a term I’m choosing to apply here in the full knowledge that “aristocrats,” as conventionally defined, probably overstates the case. Here, I mean it only as a kind of shorthand caricaturing of what I’ve just referred to as The Fall of the Houses of Evans & McCall. Thus, factoring in the set of clues I found in the Peoria Cemetery last month with the myriad other clues provided me by a plethora of informed random sources over the course of my life, I’m only hypothesizing here that the churchmouse gentility, the exquisite manners, the flawless diction and grammar, the unaccountable remnant Edwardian finery predating The Great Depression of the 1930’s, the uncharacteristic sense of noblesse oblige, the keenly sardonic wit, the petite bourgeois traditions of impeccable personal hygiene, and the nimble facility with complex abstract concepts, modern science, civil law, the works of Shakespeare and Longfellow, etc. . . , probably didn’t converge by mere coincidence in the behavioral repertoire of these remnant Victorian Evanses & McCalls who where so very old when I was so very young. Rather, they may well have been what was left of “earthly possessions” of a once prosperous tribe, after the hurricane of misfortune had swept through, leaving them in the state of relative penury in which I found them (and joined them), when I entered upon their stage (in medias res, as ‘twere) following the single most violent global cataclysm in all of recorded human history, World War II.
Or maybe not. Could it be, instead, that my mythopoetic imagination is feebly attempting to do for the culture into which I was adopted at birth what Homer did for the ancient Greeks? – or what Garrison Keillor continues to do for the good people of small-town Minnesota? Whatever the case may be, the passing years and the continuing influx of information (both helpful and useless), find me puzzling, more by more, over the paradoxical picture I have of Phoebe & Will McCall – two of the sharpest knives in the drawer in which I lived my boyhood – also being among the most penurious. And, while this postcard is not intended to be not so much about me, I cannot resist adding here that the fact of my growing up witnessing this glaring paradox of their Christian Stoicism continues to inspire and mentor me, as I find myself (now on the cusp of 60) sliding into an astonishingly similar paradox.
The moving hands on the aging face of this Grandson Clock tell me that it’s time to go – for now. Next time, I’ll try to begin telling the story of my father, Harry’s, parents, Etta (1861-1958) & Ira (1858-1946) Green and their connection to Richmond, Kansas. I can tell you that they’re up there on the hill, side by side. And I can tell you that the very last house they ever lived in was there in Richmond.
For today, however, I think I’ll conclude on an entirely different note. I believe that it was during my junior year at East High School in Wichita that I was first introduced to several excerpts from Edgar Lee Masters’ magnificent Spoon River Anthology. At the time, nothing was said about the fact that Masters was born in 1868 in Garnett, Kansas – a mere 20 minutes south of Richmond. Despite the fact that his family moved from Kansas to Illinois when Edgar was too young to have taken in much of Franklin County life, including any incidental visit he may (or may not) have made to the crest of any hill overlooking what would eventually become Richmond, Kansas (this being several years before Richmond was even there) . . . I cannot nowadays read the thought-provoking little dramatic monologues which comprise Spoon River Anthology without fantasizing the lives (and deaths) of its huge cast of “turn of the century” characters all taking place in my imagination’s reconstruction of Richmond, Kansas (and vicinity).
But then, the same can be said for a number of passages in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Even though my reason tells me that the Mississippi River is nowhere near Franklin County, Kansas, Twain’s re-creation of that frontier hamlet, its houses and commerce and unpaved streets and cast of characters (like costumed “re-enactors” at some 21st-century Richmond, Kansas theme park) cannot but put me in mind of frontier life as my Grandfather Will described his own rough & tumble boyhood to me, when I myself was a boy.
I’m sure that you can see as clearly as I can that, if I were to let myself follow this sentimental tangent, I might never get back on track. When I return with my next installment, therefore, I’ll make every effort to be back on track. Until then, I hope that this overgrown “postcard” find you in excellent health – and that the same holds true for everyone there in Richmond, including (hey ho!) all those returned exiles who’ve come to the fair.
Stay Well,
Galen
P.S.
I’m attaching another handful of photos in jpeg here. I apologize for sending so many, in case this is making downloading more tedious. Please let me know if I should change the way I’m doing any of this. OK? Thanks for your interest! /gg
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Galen’s Third Postcard to Pat in Richmond, Kansas
Ms. Pat Vining, Secretary
Richmond Community Museum
Box 284
Richmond, KS 66060
Tuesday
July 8, 2008
KC, MO
Dear Pat,
Sorry that I’ll miss the Richmond Fair again this year. But I’ll be with you in spirit. I have many fond memories of the fair from my younger days, back in the 1950’s & 60’s. Someday I hope to find time to share a few of them with you. As I may have mentioned at the museum’s grand opening last month, I wrote a short-story entitled “Jeremy’s Parade,” based on my personal experiences and observations (and wildly fanciful fictionalizations) of the Richmond Fair, as it was back then, for a Creative Writing Workshop when I was an undergraduate at Wichita State. Even though “Jeremy’s Parade” didn’t exactly qualify as great literature, the editors of the university’s annual literary magazine, Mikrokosmos, did publish it in (I believe it was) the 1971 issue. Sadly, I’ve been unable to locate either of my two contributor’s copies of the Mikrokosmos with my short-story in it.
But it’s my maternal grandparents about whom I’ve come here today to chat. Although I’m given to understand that Phoebe & Will McCall resided in various parts of Franklin County, Kansas – both before and after they were married in the very early 20th century – the only house they lived in during my lifetime (and on the shaded north lawn of which Will had his fatal heart attack in April of 1962 at the age of 94) stood on (and still stands, as of this writing) on the southwest corner of Ruth & Rigdon, there in Richmond. As I’m sure you’re well aware, however, most of the streets in Richmond were still unmarked (and perhaps unnamed) in the 1950’s & 60’s. I remember asking my mother, when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old and mailing my first letter to my grandparents, what street they lived on; she replied that she wasn’t sure of its name, but she thought it might be Cherry. I find her confusion to be mildly fascinating, considering the fact that she’d spent much of her youth in -- and, indeed, had been married in – that modest little two-story house on the southwest corner of those streets with such relatively irrelevant names.
Phoebe was, as she herself would have put it, “an Evans.” Her parents, Lena & George Evans, are buried in a handsome (and remarkably informative) family plot near the very back of the Peoria Cemetery, out on the Tennessee Road. On the sunny afternoon following your wonderful community museum’s grand opening, I drove out there to pay my somewhat overdue respects (not having been there in roughly 40 years). Besides my trusty Kansas Atlas & Gazetteer (an indispensable tool of the intrepid back road genealogist), I relied on my uncanny spatial memory which replayed for me on my inner movie screen an afternoon way back in the Johnson Administration, when I was in my late teens and riding along with Phoebe in the backseat of Harry & Margaret’s old ’56 Packard. It was most likely a Memorial Day weekend, because Peoria’s cemetery was only one of several we visited that day. Will had been dead for 5 or 6 years by then, and the house on the corner of Ruth & Rigdon in Richmond had been sold. As just one of many indicators of how spry Phoebe would remain, right up into her hundredth year, she’d moved into a second-floor walk-up apartment which was actually the remodeled upstairs of another elderly lady’s large house on one of Ottawa’s shady brick-paved streets.
Not knowing that she still had many lucid, active years ahead of her, Phoebe had evidently asked Harry & Margaret to take her out on this “one last” daytrip to the cemeteries in Berea, Richmond, Imes, Rantoul, Peoria, etc., that day 40 years ago, as well as to what was left of the farmstead where she’d grown up in the late 19th century and had continued to live with her family, while riding her pony sidesaddle to and from her schoolmarm gigs in and around Peoria. According to Phoebe, she was in her mid-20’s and working for her father, George Evans, one summer in the Franklin County Courthouse in Ottawa where he was some sort of public official, when she first met William Keeling McCall, who was 13 years her senior and who came in one day on official business. Their first child, Cecil Eugene, was born on Shakespeare’s birth in 1910. (I mention this mostly because my Uncle Cecil – who died at home here in Kansas City in 1998 – was the one member of my family known by nearly everyone with whom I had an opportunity to visit at the grand opening last month.) Their second child, a daughter, was born in Wellsville on March 2, 1912. That child was Margaret Lena McCall Green, my adoptive mother. (She died in Wichita on August 4, 1990 at the age of 78.)
Among the dominant images which my memory was replaying for me on my inner movie screen as I steered my old green Ford Taurus off the Tennessee Road and onto the gravel driveway of the Peoria Cemetery were that of a hollow metal obelisk slightly taller than myself and that of an abundance of longstanding evergreen trees not far from the tall hollow metal obelisk. With these images stuck in my brain, it took me only a matter of minutes to locate the Evans family plot to which I alluded earlier when I said that Phoebe’s parents, Lena & George Evans, “are buried in a handsome (and remarkably informative) family plot.” What I meant by this has mostly to do with whom else is buried in that Evans family plot and the dates indicating when they were born and died. By “informative,” however, I did not necessarily intend to imply that the names and dates I read there on that recent June afternoon supplied me only with answers. As you know, some of Life’s most valuable information comes to us in the form of questions and puzzles and mysteries. Since we don’t have time today for me to share with you the details of any such which my recent visit to the Evans family plot raised in my mind, let me say only that what I found there includes an all too typical tale of rampant infant mortality among the good folks who settled Franklin County, Kansas in the 19th century – as it was across the entire globe at that time. It struck me as being comparable to the infant mortality rate in, say, 21st century rural India.
To the socioeconomically inclined anthropologist within the writer in me, the tall hollow metal Evans obelisk, in and of itself, provided a significant set of clues as to the origins and financial decline of the branch of the extended family (the tribe, if you will) into which I was adopted at birth in 1949. Without trying to tell you more than you probably care to know at this juncture, my attention was drawn to the stamp at the base of the obelisk signifying that it had been cast in Detroit, Michigan. My second clue was the fact that it showed absolutely no weathering nor any other such damage from the elements, despite the fact of its having been left outside through more that 130 brutal Kansas winters and 130 blistering Kansas summers. It was obviously made from some proto-spaceage alloy which must have cost a pretty penny; I’m going to venture a semi-educated guess of roughly 20,000 current (2008) American dollars. Finally, the earliest death-dates in the Evans family plot are around 1875, leading one to reasonably infer that the obelisk was most likely placed there no later than 1880, the year that Phoebe was born; whoever purchased the obelisk and the considerable plot for the Evans graves surrounding it would appear to have brought with them to Kansas after the Civil War (I believe their immediately previous homestead had been in Iowa.) a far more substantial “chunk of change” than was ever evident in my own lifetime – nor at any period following The Fall of the Houses of Evans & McCall in The Great Depression of the 1930’s.
All of this, in turn, would seem to furnish forth its own set of even more pertinent clues as to why and how it was that all of the remnant Victorian Evanses & McCalls with whom I personally had any contact, there in Franklin County throughout my childhood, left me with the distinct impression of their having been what I’ve sometimes heard referred to as “ruined aristocrats,” a term I’m choosing to apply here in the full knowledge that “aristocrats,” as conventionally defined, probably overstates the case. Here, I mean it only as a kind of shorthand caricaturing of what I’ve just referred to as The Fall of the Houses of Evans & McCall. Thus, factoring in the set of clues I found in the Peoria Cemetery last month with the myriad other clues provided me by a plethora of informed random sources over the course of my life, I’m only hypothesizing here that the churchmouse gentility, the exquisite manners, the flawless diction and grammar, the unaccountable remnant Edwardian finery predating The Great Depression of the 1930’s, the uncharacteristic sense of noblesse oblige, the keenly sardonic wit, the petite bourgeois traditions of impeccable personal hygiene, and the nimble facility with complex abstract concepts, modern science, civil law, the works of Shakespeare and Longfellow, etc. . . , probably didn’t converge by mere coincidence in the behavioral repertoire of these remnant Victorian Evanses & McCalls who where so very old when I was so very young. Rather, they may well have been what was left of “earthly possessions” of a once prosperous tribe, after the hurricane of misfortune had swept through, leaving them in the state of relative penury in which I found them (and joined them), when I entered upon their stage (in medias res, as ‘twere) following the single most violent global cataclysm in all of recorded human history, World War II.
Or maybe not. Could it be, instead, that my mythopoetic imagination is feebly attempting to do for the culture into which I was adopted at birth what Homer did for the ancient Greeks? – or what Garrison Keillor continues to do for the good people of small-town Minnesota? Whatever the case may be, the passing years and the continuing influx of information (both helpful and useless), find me puzzling, more by more, over the paradoxical picture I have of Phoebe & Will McCall – two of the sharpest knives in the drawer in which I lived my boyhood – also being among the most penurious. And, while this postcard is not intended to be not so much about me, I cannot resist adding here that the fact of my growing up witnessing this glaring paradox of their Christian Stoicism continues to inspire and mentor me, as I find myself (now on the cusp of 60) sliding into an astonishingly similar paradox.
The moving hands on the aging face of this Grandson Clock tell me that it’s time to go – for now. Next time, I’ll try to begin telling the story of my father, Harry’s, parents, Etta (1861-1958) & Ira (1858-1946) Green and their connection to Richmond, Kansas. I can tell you that they’re up there on the hill, side by side. And I can tell you that the very last house they ever lived in was there in Richmond.
For today, however, I think I’ll conclude on an entirely different note. I believe that it was during my junior year at East High School in Wichita that I was first introduced to several excerpts from Edgar Lee Masters’ magnificent Spoon River Anthology. At the time, nothing was said about the fact that Masters was born in 1868 in Garnett, Kansas – a mere 20 minutes south of Richmond. Despite the fact that his family moved from Kansas to Illinois when Edgar was too young to have taken in much of Franklin County life, including any incidental visit he may (or may not) have made to the crest of any hill overlooking what would eventually become Richmond, Kansas (this being several years before Richmond was even there) . . . I cannot nowadays read the thought-provoking little dramatic monologues which comprise Spoon River Anthology without fantasizing the lives (and deaths) of its huge cast of “turn of the century” characters all taking place in my imagination’s reconstruction of Richmond, Kansas (and vicinity).
But then, the same can be said for a number of passages in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Even though my reason tells me that the Mississippi River is nowhere near Franklin County, Kansas, Twain’s re-creation of that frontier hamlet, its houses and commerce and unpaved streets and cast of characters (like costumed “re-enactors” at some 21st-century Richmond, Kansas theme park) cannot but put me in mind of frontier life as my Grandfather Will described his own rough & tumble boyhood to me, when I myself was a boy.
I’m sure that you can see as clearly as I can that, if I were to let myself follow this sentimental tangent, I might never get back on track. When I return with my next installment, therefore, I’ll make every effort to be back on track. Until then, I hope that this overgrown “postcard” find you in excellent health – and that the same holds true for everyone there in Richmond, including (hey ho!) all those returned exiles who’ve come to the fair.
Stay Well,
Galen
P.S.
I’m attaching another handful of photos in jpeg here. I apologize for sending so many, in case this is making downloading more tedious. Please let me know if I should change the way I’m doing any of this. OK? Thanks for your interest! /gg
%%%%%%%
Galen's Second Postcard to Richmond Museum Friends
A Second Postcard to Pat Vining in Richmond
Ms. Pat Vining, Secretary
Richmond Community Museum
Box 284
Richmond, KS 66080
Sunday
June 29, 2008
Dear Pat,
Weeks will go by when I don’t get five minutes to write. So the fact that I’m following up my initial postcard to you with a second one so soon after is merely a coincidental stroke of luck. I trust that you received Friday’s e-mail in relatively readable form. If not, please let me know right away. My cell phone number is 816/807-4957. Feel free to call and leave a voice message anytime. I seldom answer directly, but I promise to get back to you ASAP. (This goes, of course, for anyone reading this “postcard.”)
You were kind enough to ask about my childhood impressions and reminiscences of Richmond, Kansas. When time allows, I hope to jot as many of these down for you as seems apt. Let me say at the outset, however, that it might be helpful to any reader to bear in mind that I was born in Kansas City, MO in 1949 and spent the bulk of my childhood in a rather rundown ticky-tacky working-class residential neighborhood in the northeast quadrant of Wichita, KS, a middling city of 250, 000 souls, back then. Thus, for little Galen, our family’s quarterly (or so) visits to Richmond, KS represented (particularly in earliest childhood) something akin to visits to another planet – one on which even the commonplace objects of everyday life struck me as exotic and otherworldly, and where even those human beings who shared our family’s names of Green & McCall impressed me as being eerily alien in many respects from the human beings with whom I interacted on a regular basis back home on the humdrum Planet of Wichita.
That was during the Eisenhower Administration. By the time JFK was elected when I was 11, the sociological realities of the situation were gradually coming into focus for me. And jumping ahead to nowadays, here in the 21st century, I’ve made an effort to drive through Richmond every year or so and to pay a meditative, wistful visit to the graves up on the hill, to help remind me of where I came from – and where I’m going.
Until last summer (during Franklin County’s historic flood), when I had the good fortune to hear about the museum that was then taking shape and to subsequently meet up with Phyllis & Nadine, I had no one to talk with about that magical little town where we’d visited my mother’s parents so often when I was a boy. It had become, for me, a place of fond memory and of sentimental myth – as well as the setting for occasional snatches of my nightdreams. By contrast, this new phase of my connection to Richmond is proving to be marvelously therapeutic; it seems to have reinvigorated an entire dimension of my mind and memory and artistic imagination.
Are you at all familiar with Garrison Keillor’s weekly NPR (radio) program, “A Prairie Home Companion?” (My partner, Marie Smith, and I introduced Margaret & Bob Hadsall to several two-hour cassette tapes of it a few years ago.) Anyway, the program revolves around Keillor’s fictional hometown of Lake Wobegon, MN. I first heard a broadcast of “APHC” back in 1978 and fell in love with it immediately, probably because, in my mind’s eye, as Keillor spins his yarns, Lake Wobegon emerges as a sort hybrid of Richmond and Ottawa, Kansas (where both of my parents spent much of their own youth in the 1920’s & 1930’s and where we still had numerous relatives, back during the Eisenhower Administration and the Kennedy-Johnson Years. Any understanding of Galen Green’s understanding (and/or misunderstanding) of small-town America needs must be filtered through an understanding of Keillor’s “little town that time forgot” – as he refers to it.
Please forgive the fragmented nature of my response to your recent letter. I have so very much to say and so precious little time to say it. You asked about weddings and wedding pictures. Prior to my life’s most recent catastrophes, I had several snapshots of my parents’ wedding day there in Richmond in June of 1941, showing the wedding party posing out in front of Phoebe & Will McCall’s little two-story frame house, in the parlor of which Harry & Margaret had been wed a few minutes earlier. Elsie (nee Atwood) & Cecil McCall served as bridesmaid and best man, with Charlotte Atwood (later Brown) as maid of honor and Frances McCall (later Kimball) as flower girl. (If I got any of that wrong, I trust that either my brother Kevin or cousin Jay Plumb will correct me.)
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that my most (potentially) valuable function in the forward movement of your amazing Richmond Community Museum project might turn out to be in the role of “Resident Outsider.” I mean that my lifelong affection for and fascination with the people and culture and unique charm of Richmond, KS, in tandem with my having always been fated to view it from the vantage point of an admiring “city slicker” native son, forever looking in from outside . . . has provided me with a unique perspective – and one which might prove paradoxically useful to (at least certain aspects of) the future planning and development of you Richmond Community Museum project – as well as to the coming to fruition of any broader long-range vision for civic development planning in and around Richmond.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to close for now. But before I go, I just want to say that I hope that no one reading this particular “postcard” to Pat Vining and all my other new friends in Richmond, KS will be put off by my earlier use of the phrase “eerily alien.” My intent was to dramatize the great distance I’ve traveled in my understanding and appreciation of Richmond’s very special flavor as a community, as well as its very special place in America’s history – and, of course, in my own history. (When I was a child . . . etc. etc. . . . [see: I Corinthians 13] . . . but “when I became a man” . . . etc.)
In the pretty little cemetery overlooking Richmond, besides the graves of my parents and all four of my grandparents (and my own waiting grave, with the little stone maiden to mark it until I finally arrive), you’ll find, in the northeast corner (as though to symbolize their origins in Abe Lincoln’s Illinois), the final resting place of W.K. McCall’s own parents, John & Margaret, my maternal great-grandparents. The older I get, the more inextricably I find myself drawn to that spot. When John McCall (1830-1900) was still quite young, he’d served with Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature, and family legend claims that W.K.’s older sister once sat on Lincoln’s knee. I’m not sure when they emigrated to Richmond, but I’ll venture an educated guess that it would probably have been around 1875. Someday I hope to find time to write a few words of reflection on John & Margaret McCall. As with so many others of my future writing projects, however, this one will simply have to wait.
I hope that these first two “postcards” will prove helpful. I look forward to hearing back from you soon – and from whomever else feels moved to contact me – either by e-mail, snail-mail, or phone – here in Kansas City.
Stay Well,
Galen
P.S.
Would it be possible to share these two postcards with both Dorothy Dunbar and with that charming lady named Betty (whose last name I didn’t catch) who was chatting with Dorothy and me at the round table at the grand opening? (She’d been close friends with Charlotte [Atwood] Brown when they were girls.) Please let me know.
Thanks/ gg
P.P.S.
As with the 5 pictures I attached last time, I’ll explain today’s attachments at a later date. /gg
Ms. Pat Vining, Secretary
Richmond Community Museum
Box 284
Richmond, KS 66080
Sunday
June 29, 2008
Dear Pat,
Weeks will go by when I don’t get five minutes to write. So the fact that I’m following up my initial postcard to you with a second one so soon after is merely a coincidental stroke of luck. I trust that you received Friday’s e-mail in relatively readable form. If not, please let me know right away. My cell phone number is 816/807-4957. Feel free to call and leave a voice message anytime. I seldom answer directly, but I promise to get back to you ASAP. (This goes, of course, for anyone reading this “postcard.”)
You were kind enough to ask about my childhood impressions and reminiscences of Richmond, Kansas. When time allows, I hope to jot as many of these down for you as seems apt. Let me say at the outset, however, that it might be helpful to any reader to bear in mind that I was born in Kansas City, MO in 1949 and spent the bulk of my childhood in a rather rundown ticky-tacky working-class residential neighborhood in the northeast quadrant of Wichita, KS, a middling city of 250, 000 souls, back then. Thus, for little Galen, our family’s quarterly (or so) visits to Richmond, KS represented (particularly in earliest childhood) something akin to visits to another planet – one on which even the commonplace objects of everyday life struck me as exotic and otherworldly, and where even those human beings who shared our family’s names of Green & McCall impressed me as being eerily alien in many respects from the human beings with whom I interacted on a regular basis back home on the humdrum Planet of Wichita.
That was during the Eisenhower Administration. By the time JFK was elected when I was 11, the sociological realities of the situation were gradually coming into focus for me. And jumping ahead to nowadays, here in the 21st century, I’ve made an effort to drive through Richmond every year or so and to pay a meditative, wistful visit to the graves up on the hill, to help remind me of where I came from – and where I’m going.
Until last summer (during Franklin County’s historic flood), when I had the good fortune to hear about the museum that was then taking shape and to subsequently meet up with Phyllis & Nadine, I had no one to talk with about that magical little town where we’d visited my mother’s parents so often when I was a boy. It had become, for me, a place of fond memory and of sentimental myth – as well as the setting for occasional snatches of my nightdreams. By contrast, this new phase of my connection to Richmond is proving to be marvelously therapeutic; it seems to have reinvigorated an entire dimension of my mind and memory and artistic imagination.
Are you at all familiar with Garrison Keillor’s weekly NPR (radio) program, “A Prairie Home Companion?” (My partner, Marie Smith, and I introduced Margaret & Bob Hadsall to several two-hour cassette tapes of it a few years ago.) Anyway, the program revolves around Keillor’s fictional hometown of Lake Wobegon, MN. I first heard a broadcast of “APHC” back in 1978 and fell in love with it immediately, probably because, in my mind’s eye, as Keillor spins his yarns, Lake Wobegon emerges as a sort hybrid of Richmond and Ottawa, Kansas (where both of my parents spent much of their own youth in the 1920’s & 1930’s and where we still had numerous relatives, back during the Eisenhower Administration and the Kennedy-Johnson Years. Any understanding of Galen Green’s understanding (and/or misunderstanding) of small-town America needs must be filtered through an understanding of Keillor’s “little town that time forgot” – as he refers to it.
Please forgive the fragmented nature of my response to your recent letter. I have so very much to say and so precious little time to say it. You asked about weddings and wedding pictures. Prior to my life’s most recent catastrophes, I had several snapshots of my parents’ wedding day there in Richmond in June of 1941, showing the wedding party posing out in front of Phoebe & Will McCall’s little two-story frame house, in the parlor of which Harry & Margaret had been wed a few minutes earlier. Elsie (nee Atwood) & Cecil McCall served as bridesmaid and best man, with Charlotte Atwood (later Brown) as maid of honor and Frances McCall (later Kimball) as flower girl. (If I got any of that wrong, I trust that either my brother Kevin or cousin Jay Plumb will correct me.)
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that my most (potentially) valuable function in the forward movement of your amazing Richmond Community Museum project might turn out to be in the role of “Resident Outsider.” I mean that my lifelong affection for and fascination with the people and culture and unique charm of Richmond, KS, in tandem with my having always been fated to view it from the vantage point of an admiring “city slicker” native son, forever looking in from outside . . . has provided me with a unique perspective – and one which might prove paradoxically useful to (at least certain aspects of) the future planning and development of you Richmond Community Museum project – as well as to the coming to fruition of any broader long-range vision for civic development planning in and around Richmond.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to close for now. But before I go, I just want to say that I hope that no one reading this particular “postcard” to Pat Vining and all my other new friends in Richmond, KS will be put off by my earlier use of the phrase “eerily alien.” My intent was to dramatize the great distance I’ve traveled in my understanding and appreciation of Richmond’s very special flavor as a community, as well as its very special place in America’s history – and, of course, in my own history. (When I was a child . . . etc. etc. . . . [see: I Corinthians 13] . . . but “when I became a man” . . . etc.)
In the pretty little cemetery overlooking Richmond, besides the graves of my parents and all four of my grandparents (and my own waiting grave, with the little stone maiden to mark it until I finally arrive), you’ll find, in the northeast corner (as though to symbolize their origins in Abe Lincoln’s Illinois), the final resting place of W.K. McCall’s own parents, John & Margaret, my maternal great-grandparents. The older I get, the more inextricably I find myself drawn to that spot. When John McCall (1830-1900) was still quite young, he’d served with Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature, and family legend claims that W.K.’s older sister once sat on Lincoln’s knee. I’m not sure when they emigrated to Richmond, but I’ll venture an educated guess that it would probably have been around 1875. Someday I hope to find time to write a few words of reflection on John & Margaret McCall. As with so many others of my future writing projects, however, this one will simply have to wait.
I hope that these first two “postcards” will prove helpful. I look forward to hearing back from you soon – and from whomever else feels moved to contact me – either by e-mail, snail-mail, or phone – here in Kansas City.
Stay Well,
Galen
P.S.
Would it be possible to share these two postcards with both Dorothy Dunbar and with that charming lady named Betty (whose last name I didn’t catch) who was chatting with Dorothy and me at the round table at the grand opening? (She’d been close friends with Charlotte [Atwood] Brown when they were girls.) Please let me know.
Thanks/ gg
P.P.S.
As with the 5 pictures I attached last time, I’ll explain today’s attachments at a later date. /gg
Galen's First Postcard to Richmond Museum Friends
Ms. Pat Vining, Secretary
Richmond Community Museum
Box 284
Richmond, KS 66080
Friday
June 27, 2008
(Harry Green’s Centenary)
Dear Pat,
It was the pleasantest sort of surprise to find your letter in yesterday’s post. If I had more time this weekend, I’d sit right down and dash off a 10-page detailed response to your queries. As it is, however, I’m afraid that this little “postcard” will have to suffice for the time being. Even so, please accept my pledge that more will follow in as short order as is feasible.
To make some kind of beginning toward addressing the agenda you expressed: my family did visit Richmond pretty frequently when I was a pup. Between 1949 and 1965, we’d drive up from Wichita perhaps four or five times each year – at least once over the holidays, usually twice each summer, etc. My dad, Harry, was a toolmaker at Boeing from 1941 to 1969, so that his schedule was the chief determining factor.
I was as close to my McCall grandparents as was doable. W.K. was, of course, already in his 80’s when I was born and grew quite deaf in his final years. More of him, anon. Phoebe and I, however were blessed with a remarkably nurturing bond which endured until her death at 100 in 1982 – in the “home” there in Richmond. Much much more of Phoebe, anon.
It was an honor and a genuine thrill to be present for the grand opening of the Richmond Community Museum, back on June 14th. I kept thinking to myself how incredibly delighted (and, frankly, surprised) Phoebe & Will & Harry & Margaret & all my other ancestors buried up there on the hill overlooking Richmond would have been to receive the news that Richmond possessed such talented, focused, dedicated, visionary, energetic folks, able to pull off such a magnificent project.
It saddens me to report that most of my own pictures and memorabilia have been destroyed over the years by fires and natural disasters. But my mind is filled with more memories of Richmond, Kansas than I’ll ever have time to get written down for posterity. Meanwhile, I do have this little something to offer you:
Over the past few years, I’ve been writing my memoirs. But they’re more about my times (my culture, my context, my surroundings) than about me, me, me. Of late, I’ve begun constructing 37 chapters of a blog. Of these 37 chapters, I strongly recommend that you – and anyone else at all interested in a smattering of my past writing fragments touching upon my connection to Richmond – get online and type into your “browser space” (google, for example) these 6 recent bloggish chapters of my book (whose working title is The Toolmaker’s Other Son):
“The Story of Our Story”
(type in: thestoryofour.blogspot.com)
“The World You Knew is Gone Forever”
(type in: worldknewgone.blogspot.com)
“Why I’m Here, Doing This”
(type in: whydoing.blogspot.com)
“Randomnalities”
(type in: randomnalities.blogspot.com)
“Candor Vendor”
(type in: candorvendor.blogspot.com)
“Chestnut Circle Diaries”
(type in: chestnut-circle.blogspot.com)
Admittedly, these six aren’t all about Richmond. But they’ll provide a context, a background, a backdrop for whatever I end up talking with you about in the coming months and years. These blogs are extremely easy to “navigate;” all you do is scroll up and down and click occasionally. For instance, when the title picture pops up on your computer screen, simply scroll down. When you come to the end of my little “bio,” just click on “View My Complete Profile,” if you’re interested in viewing the entire “menu” of all 37 “chapters.”
Please don’t feel obligated to read all the way through every single one of these six blogs I’m recommending to you. And, as I’ve said, all 37 blogs are still under construction. I’ll be eager to hear your feedback. Please feel free to share any and all of this information with Dorothy Dunbar or anyone else who seems at all interested.
My Cingular (AT&T) cellular plan has oodles of minutes, so let me know a good time to talk and I’ll phone you. Thanks again for your lovely letter. And please say hello to all the friendly people I got a chance to meet at the grand opening.
All the Best, Always,
Galen
Richmond Community Museum
Box 284
Richmond, KS 66080
Friday
June 27, 2008
(Harry Green’s Centenary)
Dear Pat,
It was the pleasantest sort of surprise to find your letter in yesterday’s post. If I had more time this weekend, I’d sit right down and dash off a 10-page detailed response to your queries. As it is, however, I’m afraid that this little “postcard” will have to suffice for the time being. Even so, please accept my pledge that more will follow in as short order as is feasible.
To make some kind of beginning toward addressing the agenda you expressed: my family did visit Richmond pretty frequently when I was a pup. Between 1949 and 1965, we’d drive up from Wichita perhaps four or five times each year – at least once over the holidays, usually twice each summer, etc. My dad, Harry, was a toolmaker at Boeing from 1941 to 1969, so that his schedule was the chief determining factor.
I was as close to my McCall grandparents as was doable. W.K. was, of course, already in his 80’s when I was born and grew quite deaf in his final years. More of him, anon. Phoebe and I, however were blessed with a remarkably nurturing bond which endured until her death at 100 in 1982 – in the “home” there in Richmond. Much much more of Phoebe, anon.
It was an honor and a genuine thrill to be present for the grand opening of the Richmond Community Museum, back on June 14th. I kept thinking to myself how incredibly delighted (and, frankly, surprised) Phoebe & Will & Harry & Margaret & all my other ancestors buried up there on the hill overlooking Richmond would have been to receive the news that Richmond possessed such talented, focused, dedicated, visionary, energetic folks, able to pull off such a magnificent project.
It saddens me to report that most of my own pictures and memorabilia have been destroyed over the years by fires and natural disasters. But my mind is filled with more memories of Richmond, Kansas than I’ll ever have time to get written down for posterity. Meanwhile, I do have this little something to offer you:
Over the past few years, I’ve been writing my memoirs. But they’re more about my times (my culture, my context, my surroundings) than about me, me, me. Of late, I’ve begun constructing 37 chapters of a blog. Of these 37 chapters, I strongly recommend that you – and anyone else at all interested in a smattering of my past writing fragments touching upon my connection to Richmond – get online and type into your “browser space” (google, for example) these 6 recent bloggish chapters of my book (whose working title is The Toolmaker’s Other Son):
“The Story of Our Story”
(type in: thestoryofour.blogspot.com)
“The World You Knew is Gone Forever”
(type in: worldknewgone.blogspot.com)
“Why I’m Here, Doing This”
(type in: whydoing.blogspot.com)
“Randomnalities”
(type in: randomnalities.blogspot.com)
“Candor Vendor”
(type in: candorvendor.blogspot.com)
“Chestnut Circle Diaries”
(type in: chestnut-circle.blogspot.com)
Admittedly, these six aren’t all about Richmond. But they’ll provide a context, a background, a backdrop for whatever I end up talking with you about in the coming months and years. These blogs are extremely easy to “navigate;” all you do is scroll up and down and click occasionally. For instance, when the title picture pops up on your computer screen, simply scroll down. When you come to the end of my little “bio,” just click on “View My Complete Profile,” if you’re interested in viewing the entire “menu” of all 37 “chapters.”
Please don’t feel obligated to read all the way through every single one of these six blogs I’m recommending to you. And, as I’ve said, all 37 blogs are still under construction. I’ll be eager to hear your feedback. Please feel free to share any and all of this information with Dorothy Dunbar or anyone else who seems at all interested.
My Cingular (AT&T) cellular plan has oodles of minutes, so let me know a good time to talk and I’ll phone you. Thanks again for your lovely letter. And please say hello to all the friendly people I got a chance to meet at the grand opening.
All the Best, Always,
Galen
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