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…..)