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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
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