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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