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