Continue to March

By Robert G. Lay

This is a story of duty, honor and country; a story of young love gone wrong, betrayal, crushing emotional pain, and a man's struggle to survive. Hospitalized, near fatal illness. Everything lost, but always picking himself up and "Continuing to March." Born to an off-the-grid poor farm family in the middle of the great depression. Finding true love, a love that has survived over half a century, surviving through many painful goodbyes, long separations, and raising five children. Sgt. Lay goes off to war, twice to Vietnam. But his greatest good fortune….meeting Delores, a classy, very pretty and powerful lady. Semper Fi!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543993479

Book preview

1

In the Beginning

The year 1935 marked the middle of a decade of misery for millions of people around the world. While the winds of war blew across Europe and China, blinding, choking dust storms blew across the heartland of America. Adding to America’s misery was the aftermath of the stock market crash in October 1929, which left millions of Americans jobless and many banks and giant corporations bankrupt. Soup lines became commonplace in America’s cities, while thousands of impoverished farmers from Kansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle streamed westward to find work—their crops having burned up by drought and the soil literally blown away by the wind. While Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini consolidated power in Europe, Senator Huey P. Long, the Kingfish, imposed a virtual dictatorship in Louisiana—in both instances abrogating the rights of millions of people. The Kingfish was assassinated in September 1935, and history shows that the world would have been a better place had Hitler and Mussolini met the same fate.

I was born in the middle of this anguished decade on Sunday, September 22, 1935, in Bourbon County, Kansas. The old home place was four miles west and one-half mile north of Fulton, Kansas, on the north side of the Little Osage River. I was the third of six children born to Glen Filmore Lay and Nellie Mae (Chaney) Lay. Their first child, Betty, was born in 1929. A second child, a girl, was born in 1930 and died at birth. My younger sisters were Margaret, Dorothy, and Judy.

Betty remembers me as a very mischievous little brother whose primary purpose and joy in life was teasing her and making her life miserable. Happily, in our adult life we became very close friends and found much solace and comfort in one another when tragic times fell upon our family. Betty clearly recalls the day of my birth. She says that I was born late in the afternoon on a gloomy, cloudy day, which probably accounts for my mischievous ways. I was born at home, as were my sisters. A doctor from a nearby small town came to assist in the deliveries.

I was a healthy baby at birth, but at two months old I caught whooping cough and very nearly died of that disease, which swept across the country that year. It’s always been said by my family that I would have certainly died had it not been for the great love and determination of my maternal grandmother, Lydia Chaney. Grandma Chaney sat by my side, night after night, to keep me from choking to death during the frequent coughing spasms. According to records kept by the Kansas Historical Society, there were fifty-three reported deaths from whooping cough in Kansas alone that year. The records also indicate that there were likely many more unreported deaths. Betty recalled that Momma and Grandma Chaney were constantly worried that I was going die as a baby.

Maternal grandmother Lydia Chaney, Momma Nellie, Melinda, Me (five months old) and Betty. 1936

After the whooping cough episode, the great dust storms rolled in again the next spring. Betty remembers Momma and Grandma Chaney soaking bed sheets in water and hanging them on the inside of the windows to keep the dust from coming into the house. No matter what they did, the dust still managed to find its way inside. It came in around the windows and formed little sand dunes on the windowsills. Dust floated through the air in the house. It got into the water and food and left a gritty feeling in our mouths. There wasn’t anything that anyone could do during those dust bowl years except to try to survive. It was just another one of the miseries people back then had to endure.

I recall very little of these early years, and by the time I was old enough to remember things like that, the dust storms had subsided, and by 1939-1940 the farmers were beginning to recover and see some fruits of their labors.

The old home place was on about twenty-five acres of Osage river-bottom land. The small wood-framed house was situated about a quarter of a mile from the banks of the river that snaked its way through the timbered bottomland. Dad had built our house himself from used lumber saved from an old barn. A neighbor had given him the lumber in exchange for Dad’s help with tearing down the barn. He hauled the lumber about a mile to our home site with a wagon and a team of horses and built the house on a foundation of cement and stones picked up from the fields and along the riverbank.

The house had four rooms: a kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms. On the south side was a screened-in porch that ran the width of the house. Dad kept a couple of tables on one side of the porch on which to lay the meat for winter. Every year, he would wait until late fall to butcher a fat hog. After a day of butchering, he would cut the hog into smaller portions for curing. Rubbing the meat with a curing salt prevented it from spoiling. The cool temperatures and the curing salt insured that the meat would keep for as long as it was needed.

Inside, the plaster walls of the house were covered with wallpaper, and the wood flooring had been overlaid with linoleum. Although the rock foundation was held together by cement, it failed to completely block the winds of winter that swept in from the northwest, rattling the empty cornstalks still standing in the field west of the house and blanketing the river, the small streams, and the pond with a thick coating of ice. There was no insulation in the walls or beneath the floor. Sometimes the winter winds, swirling around and under the house, would cause the linoleum to rise slowly up and down like a huge beast, breathing heavily. A glass of water on a table by the bedside would often develop a thin glaze of ice by morning because the wood burning stove in the living room was our only source of heat.

Momma cooked on a small wood cook stove in the kitchen, and in the winter we could always find a big teakettle of hot water sitting on top of it. Calls of nature were responded to at an outdoor privy about fifty yards from the house, which we simply called the toilet. That situation was bad enough in mild weather, with the smell and the flies, but it took a lot of grit and much discomfort to force a body out of a warm bed at night in the dead of winter to go out to that toilet. In fact, a slop jar, or chamber pot, was allowed on the coldest winter nights for the women, but no self-respecting man would dare to stoop to that level! In the outhouse, an old Sears and Roebuck or Montgomery Wards catalog were the usual substitutes for real toilet tissue.

Gathering the materials and building the house must have taken my Dad many hours of hard, grueling work, especially considering that he had no power tools but only basic hand tools. For water, he dug a well and lined it with native stone. Water was drawn out with a bucket and rope. When I last visited the old place in the late summer of 2008 with my son Mark, the old well was still there, but the concrete covering and rock lining had long since cracked and fallen in. The old house, having stood empty for many years, had burned down in the mid-1960s.

When I last visited the old place in the late summer of 2008 with my son Mark, the old well was still there, the concrete covering and rock lining having cracked and fallen in. The old house, having stood empty for many years, burned in the mid 1960s. Rose bushes, purple and white irises, and yellow daffodils, which Momma planted in the 1930s, still bloom every spring on the old place. I wasn’t there at the time, but the family said that Momma cried when the old house burned. None of us could fully understand then how many of her memories went up with that smoke. Though later owners have farmed the surrounding land, for some reason the place where the house stood and the yard and garden area remain intact, though overgrown with weeds and brush. Mark wrestled around in the tangle of vines and brush and found a piece of the old mingled cement and stone from the original foundation. We each took a stone for a souvenir of the old home place.

My very earliest memories of childhood are centered on this old home place. I was a skinny kid, with brown eyes and light brown hair that rarely saw a comb, and I probably looked as if a cow had licked me at the hairline of my forehead. Wearing my bib-overalls, no shirt, and deeply suntanned, I remember going barefoot in the summertime, walking down the old dirt road, and watching the thick dust puff up between my toes. I remember running as fast as I could across the pasture, hurdling milkweeds and thistle, thinking that I surely must be the fastest kid in the whole world!

I remember Grandma Chaney taking me fishing down on Lost Creek. We’d often come home with a catch of perch and bullheads strung on a forked stick. Grandma would clean the fish, roll them in cornmeal and flour, and fry them up for supper.

Another good memory is one of walking with Grandma Chaney a mile or so across the fields and down a couple of hedgerows, taking a shortcut to the home and camp-meeting grounds of a local holiness preacher. I remember everyone getting down on their knees in the preacher’s living room and praying for a long time about something. The loud praying was sort of scary for me, and I remember hoping that God would never get mad at me!

I’ll always remember Grandma Chaney as a saintly, quiet, mild-mannered, white-haired woman. Always wearing her old apron, she was constantly busy about the house or out doing chores. She lived with us most of the time, but sometimes she would go stay for a while with her other daughter, my aunt, Melinda Newcomb, in Fort Scott, which was the county seat of Bourbon County.

I still have an old black-and-white photo of Dad hauling wood on a winter day, and I remember him looking just like that from when I was a little boy. Standing there, with a team of mules and an old wagon, he’s dressed in a heavy, old woolen coat with his collar turned up against the wind, and the earflaps of his cap pulled down around his ruddy, whiskered face, as he blew plumes of breath into the frigid air.

I remember Mama working in the garden in the summer, cleaning vegetables in the back yard and chopping the heads off a couple of chickens to fry up for supper. Even today, the smell of ham and beans cooking brings back images of a big pot of simmering goodness on the old wood burning cook-stove. It seemed like I could never get enough of those beans and cornbread suppers! I’d eat until I felt I would surely burst.

Sometimes my Grandma Lay (Iva [Wilson] Lay) would come up from Neosho, Missouri, to visit for a few days. Grandma Lay was a thin, angular, spirited woman, with long, graying black hair. Her husband—my grandfather, Amos Hueston Lay—died in 1938. I only saw my grandfather once, and that was just before his funeral. He was laid out on a daybed in the home for viewing and visitation. I will always hold this picture of him in my mind. He looked like he was sleeping peacefully, still a handsome figure of a man, wearing a suit, a vest, and a mustache in the style of the day.

Grandma Lay was born and raised on the border of Kansas and Indian Territory, long before Oklahoma became a state. She was a lively, outgoing woman, tidy and meticulously clean, I remember how she always made us kids wash our hands before supper. She liked to tease, and she enjoyed either telling or hearing a good joke or story. Her tales of the hardships that she had lived through were indeed hair-raising. Grandma Lay lived to the ripe old age of ninety-three.

The banks of the Osage river near our house were lined with cottonwood, elm, walnut, hickory, and oak trees, which served as home and playground for numerous squirrels, raccoons, opossums, owls, and a great many other birds and small animals. There was an abundance of cottontail rabbits, which we hunted as a food source in the winter. Dad had an old single-shot .22 caliber rifle with the rear sight missing.

When I was maybe only four or five years old, I recall sloughing through the snow, following Dad as we went out hunting rabbits in the hedgerows and brush piles. Even without that rear sight on his rifle, he always took pride in shooting the rabbit in the head. Dad said he didn’t want any gut-shot rabbits to eat. Later, in my early teens, when I was trusted to go hunting alone, I knew that I would be admonished if I brought home a rabbit or squirrel that wasn’t killed with a clean headshot.

My family was very poor when I was a kid, and I don’t recall things getting much better as I grew into adulthood. By the same token, though, I don’t remember that we suffered much or ever felt deprived—probably because practically everybody else we knew was just as poor (although I believe we were much closer to the bottom of the economic ladder than most).

In spite of that, my childhood memories are happy ones, and many years later, after having lived in and around several big cities and experiencing modern freeway traffic, air pollution, and high crime in the city, I’ve come to believe that I was truly blessed to have been born and raised on a farm in rural Kansas. Unlike thousands of people in the cities at that time who depended upon soup lines for food, we seemed to always have enough to eat. Most of our food was raised on the farm, with vegetables from the garden, which Momma canned for the winter months, and a hog, which dad butchered in the fall. We also ate a lot of rabbits in the fall and winter. Believe me, when I tell you that rabbit parts, rolled in flour, fried golden brown, and served with biscuits and gravy, makes for a savory, delicious meal!

Dad and Momma were robust, tough, hard-working people, accustomed to hardships and rough times. Though I don’t recall either of them ever attending church, they certainly lived by Christian principles and the Ten Commandments. Those were the days when a man’s word was his bond. Contracts and agreements were usually sealed with a handshake, and sometimes even that wasn’t necessary. If a man said he would do such-and-such, he’d do it, and that was that. Being honest is a principle I learned early on and I tried to practice it as much as possible for the rest of my life.

The same behavior was expected from us kids. If we said we were going to do something or be somewhere at a particular time, that was what was expected, and we had better follow through with it! There was also just a normal expectation that you’d never tell a lie. I remember as a kid getting several good spankings for either trying to lie or hiding the truth about something. Getting a spanking from Dad was a brutal experience, and I learned my lesson very early in life about such things.

I honestly believe that these kinds of expectations served me well throughout the rest of my life. My goal was always to try to build and maintain a reputation in my adult life of a being a man of my word.

The Lay Family, Osage River Valley Home, 1941. Dad, Mom, Betty, Bob, Margaret and Dorothy.

Chapter 2

Family Heritage

I can trace my dad’s family all the way back five generations to my great, great, great grandfather, Isaac Lay, who was born somewhere between 1759-1767. We have no records that identify the parents of Isaac or that state exactly where he was born. However, there are land records stating that he and his wife, Catherine (Bradley) Lay, raised a large family in Burkes County, North Carolina. At some point they moved to Scott County, Virginia, where Isaac died in 1810. Isaac Lay’s descendants migrated to Eastern Tennessee, and then later into Missouri, where my dad was born in 1902 in Newton County. Though we can find no record of Isaac’s ancestors, family tradition has always held that his parents migrated from Alsace-Lorraine, a French-German province. Catherine Lay was Irish and was believed to have descended from one of the earliest American families.

My paternal grandfather and grandmother, Amos and Ivy Lay, my father Glen and his sister Fontella. 1904

Dad was a tall, lean, handsome, rawboned man, with long, strong, sinewy arms. Over the years, his skin took on a leathery appearance, tanned from a lifetime of hard work in the fields and on bridge construction crews as a young man. He had dark brown, deep-set, steady eyes and black hair that had just begun to turn gray when he died at age eighty in August 1983. Dad always wore bib overalls and a denim or flannel shirt. He preferred a straw hat in the summer and a bill-cap with earflaps in the winter. He loved to hunt, but he made it very clear that although he loved the activity of hunting, he always hunted for food or for fur, not just for sport. He loved hunting rabbits in the snow, but the form of hunting he loved the most was raccoon hunting at night during the fall and winter months.

My dad always owned a coon dog, whether it was a Black and Tan or a Blue Tick hound dog, or some combination of both. At that time in rural Kansas, a good coonhound was counted among a man’s most prized possessions, and during coon-hunting season, those dogs were the center of most of the conversations whenever and wherever men would gather. Coon hunters were prone to brag about their dog’s ability to trail a coon, and they also admired the dog’s persistence in pursuing the chase. A dog’s ability to trail a coon has to do with its sense of smell, i.e., how good of a nose does it have? The coon hunters we knew loved to tell stories of particular chases—stories that were greatly embellished, perhaps even invented, that demonstrated how good a nose their dog had.

My dad had a dry sense of humor, and he loved a good joke or story. He was known to spin a few stories of his own from time to time. For example, several years after Dad had died, my sister, Dorothy, then a home healthcare nurse, had as a patient an old gentleman who had known Dad for many years.

He told Dorothy of a time years ago at the rural country store in Mantey, Kansas, when he, Dad, and several other guys were standing around the pot-bellied stove warming themselves on a cold winter day. He said that Dad kept shuffling and stomping his feet until one of the men asked him, What’s wrong? Did you freeze your feet out coon hunting?

Very seriously, my dad said, Yes, I did freeze my feet last night.

When the man asked him how he’d done it, Dad said he had frozen them standing in the snow holding a flashlight so that Nellie could see while she was chopping wood!

Dad taught me how to hunt, how to recognize animal signs in the woods, and how to aim and shoot a rifle at a really early age. He was very adamant about how to handle a weapon properly, how to safely climb through a fence while carrying a rifle, and how to carry the gun with its muzzle always pointing in the air or at the ground. He told me never to load or unload a gun in the house, nor to keep a loaded gun indoors. I remember him telling me over and over again to never play with guns as if they were toys, and to never, ever point a gun at anything you don’t intent to shoot.

Dad also taught me how to recognize the different species of trees and wild berries, and sometimes he’d use a story or joke to teach me a lesson. I recall one time when we were out hunting in the woods, and we sat down on an old log to rest. Dad brushed away some dead leaves to make a little clear spot on the ground. He took a small stick and punched two identical holes in the ground, side by side. He said, Now, boy, listen to me. He pointed at one of the holes and said, That is a hole in the ground; do you understand?

I said, Yes.

Then he pointed at the other hole and said, That is your butthole, you understand?

I nodded, yes, I understood. Dad waited a few seconds then asked me, Now, where is your butthole?

I pointed to the hole in the ground that Dad had said was my butthole. With his trap now laid, Dad leaned back, laughed, and said, Boy, you sure are dumb! You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. Now, where is your butthole?

A light slowly came on in my head, and I sheepishly pointed to my backside. Dad then said, Now, let that be a lesson to you, boy, don’t believe everything people tell you!

I’m so thankful for my dad! Dad taught me a lot about life and hard work. He was the best man I’ve ever known. I worked side by side with him throughout my childhood and adolescence. I followed him many miles though the fields and timber, hunting rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons at night. I can still clearly recall the stark beauty of a cold, crisp, moonlit winter night, so silent you could hear the falling snowflakes as they landed softly on the dry leaves that were still clinging to the scrub oak trees. Sometimes we would just stop where we were, listening to the sounds of the night or waiting to hear the bellowing of the coonhound when he picked up a scent on a fresh trail. I can still picture the ice on Lost Creek, glistening like quicksilver in the pale moonlight. The creaking sounds of the branches on the leafless trees as they bent gently with the wind, casting flickering shadows on the sparkling ice, created the illusion that the ice was flowing.

A warm bed never felt so good as it did after a long walk in the woods on a winter coon hunt, especially after a big slice of Momma’s homemade bread and butter and a glass of fresh whole milk just before bed. Hunting raccoon at night taught me not to fear the dark. This confidence served me well throughout my life, especially during my years in the Marine Corps and while serving in Vietnam.

Momma was a stoutly built woman, with large arms and legs, and I think she always felt she was too heavy. She was very strong, with an indomitable spirit. Her peaceful, gentle disposition revealed a touch of class not expected from someone raised in such an impoverished, rural environment. Momma was a classy lady.

Momma and Dad. 1928

Born in 1910, Momma had been raised on the banks of the Little Osage River, about a half-mile from where I was born. Her dad, Addison T. Chaney, died when she was only six. Her youngest sister, Opal, died tragically the following year from burns received when her dress caught fire while she was playing with matches. It was only a year later that the family house caught fire and burned to the ground, destroying nearly everything they had. Grandma Chaney, Momma, and her little sister, Melinda, moved into a small building they had used as a granary and set up housekeeping. There was a small loft that they used for sleeping. They lived in that granary all summer and through the next winter, while Grandma pleaded in vain with the insurance company for funds to rebuild the house. Eventually, they moved into a small house in Fulton, but Grandma still retained ownership of the old property.

My maternal Grandmother Lydia Chaney, with Momma (left) and her sisters Opal and Melinda. 1913

Momma had to work hard to help her widowed mother scrape together a living for herself and little Melinda on the seven acres of land owned by Grandma Chaney. These seven acres were bordered on the south by the Osage River, and the nearby shallow crossing was known in those times as the Chaney Ford. They had a garden, along with some chickens and pigs. Grandma Chaney worked as housekeeper, a field hand, and whatever other work was available. It was a hardscrabble life that really didn’t change much as Momma grew into adulthood and eventually had a family of her own.

My mother was a very pretty woman, with dark brown hair and eyes, and a natural, easy smile. She had a pleasant, engaging personality and always projected sincerity and compassion. She was one of the most positive people I have ever known. I never heard her say a bad word about anyone. During times when some unfortunate thing would happen, such as when the river flooded and washed away the pumpkin patch, or a valuable milk cow died, or a hail storm destroyed the cornfield, and my dad would be discouraged, cursing his hard luck, Momma would gently say, Now Glen…, as she softly touched his arm, and would then go on to offer words of encouragement.

Raising five children on a small farm in Kansas during those times was no easy task, and it’s no exaggeration to say that Momma was engaged in hard labor all her life, except perhaps during the later years, after they had retired, sold the farm, and moved into the small town of Fulton.

This may have been one of the happiest times of her life, as she had many lifelong friends who would frequently stop by to visit or call to chat on the phone. Momma loved to write letters. She had beautiful penmanship and frequently corresponded with her many family members and friends. She never failed to send out cards on birthdays, anniversaries, Easter, and Christmas. After I left home to make my own way in the world, no matter where life took me, I always wrote to Momma or sent a post card. I don’t believe I ever failed to send her a nice card for Mother’s Day and for Christmas. I found several of these cards among her possessions after she passed away.

After Dad died in August 1983, Momma’s health began to fail. She suffered constantly with severe pain in her legs and feet. It was especially hard for her when she had to give up driving. She hated to have to depend on others to take her shopping or to doctor appointments. Three years after Dad passed away, she was forced by circumstances to give up her home in Fulton and move to a small h ouse in Fort Scott, Kansas, so she could be closer to my sister, Margaret, who helped care for her.

Momma tried her best, but she didn’t do well in Fort Scott. Although she kept her little house clean and neat and continued to fix her own meals, she missed her home in Fulton and being close to her old friends. She became very lonely and depressed, especially during her last winter in the little house. She tried to hide her loneliness and act bravely, but she always cried when we’d visit and it came time to leave, or when we had to say goodbye on the telephone.

In September of 1988, my Momma was hospitalized by a sudden heart attack. She was in serious condition. Within hours, we children had gathered at her bedside. The doctor informed her that she had to either consent to go to St. Luke’s hospital in Kansas City, where she could get a pacemaker, or remain where she was—and likely die. The doctor said that he needed a decision by early the following morning.

All of us kids talked and prayed with Momma that evening, encouraging her to have the surgery, but she said that she had lived a long, happy life, and she didn’t want the pacemaker. We all told her how much we loved her and that we wanted her to live as long as she possibly could, but that we would leave the decision up to her.

Momma knew that having the surgery and a pacemaker would mean giving up the little house and what independence she had left. She would have had to live with one of us children or go into a nursing home. She said that she just preferred to go peacefully now, but that she would consider and pray about it overnight. At some point during the night, she changed her mind and decided to go through with the surgery and get the pacemaker.

The next morning, she was transported by ambulance to St. Luke’s hospital in Kansas City. She didn’t do well. They told us that her heart was too weak and too damaged. Momma died six days later at St. Luke’s. I believe that she had just lost her will to live and couldn’t face another long, lonely winter, being what she probably considered a burden to us kids. And perhaps she just wanted to go and be with Dad.

I believe that a person never fully recovers from the loss of one’s mother. I know I never have, and to this day, when I think of my sweet Momma, my eyes still fill up with tears.

Chapter 3

Starting School

Going back to my childhood, when I was six years old, I began my education in a rural one-room schoolhouse simply named White School. Momma had also attended White School for several years when she was a child. The school was nearly two miles from our house, and Betty and I walked there every day. It was an easy, fun walk when the weather was nice, and a couple of other farm kids joined us along the way. When the frigid winter days set in, the walk wasn’t nearly as much fun! I recall on at least a couple of occasions Dad hitching a horse to a homemade wooden sled and taking us to school through the deep snow.

As with many rural schools at that time, we had one teacher for all eight grades. There was a large chalkboard at one end of the room, along with the teacher’s desk, and a big pot-bellied stove at the other end. Several bookshelves were attached to one side of the rear wall, which served as the school library. A small building near the entrance was used to store coal, which was necessary to heat the school in the winter. A farmer who lived across the road from the school had somehow acquired the duty of starting the fire in the stove early every morning and making sure that it was shut down in the evening. On opposite sides of the schoolyard were two outhouses, one for the boys and one for the girls. All the buildings were painted white, I suppose in keeping with the name of the school.

I think that recess must have been my favorite time in school, because I have almost no recollection of studies or classes. I do remember when I was in the first grade that a simple coloring assignment revealed that I was colorblind, though I was never officially diagnosed until years later. The teacher gave me a drawing of a horse to color and I colored the critter orange! She asked why I had colored it orange, and I said it was because my dad had a horse the same color! She smiled at me, and said that she didn’t think so.

In the spring of 1944, when I was eight years old, we moved to another farm just a mile west of the place where I’d been born. Our new home was situated on about seventy acres that were almost equally divided between pastureland and cultivated land. A small tree-lined stream named Lost Creek ran through the middle of the property and emptied into the Osage River about a mile downstream. Two years later, Dad bought an additional fifteen acres of mostly timbered land that bordered the property on the east. The new place had a house, a huge old barn, and two other smaller buildings, one of which became our chicken house.

This house was pretty unusual. The former owner had built it himself. The story goes that he had begun to build the house with the intention of making the whole thing completely underground, but he ran into bedrock about four feet down, which forced him to modify his plan. He built forms and poured concrete to create a rectangular structure with about four feet underground and four feet above ground level. He topped it with a gabled roof and piled dirt around the outside walls until only about two feet of wall was visible. Inside the structure, an adult had to stand up to see out through several small windows that were positioned just above the top of the dirt berm. There was a front entrance and a side entrance, both of which required going down four or five steps.

Overall, from a practical point of view, the house wasn’t too bad of an idea. It stayed cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It was also a safe place to be in the event of a tornado, which was always a concern in Kansas in the early spring and summer. However, in addition to being the ugliest house in that part of the country, the walls inside were often damp and had a musty smell. During rainy weather, water ran down the entrance steps and puddled there, or it ran into the house. In the downstairs, or underground part of the house, was the kitchen and dining area, a living room, and a bedroom. Three bedrooms occupied the upstairs, and, as with our former house, there were no toilet facilities, nor a bathroom of any kind, nor even running water. Our light source consisted of a single kerosene lamp. Dad and Momma always feared that someone would accidentally knock it over and start a fire. It wasn’t unusual in those days for houses to burn down due to fallen or broken kerosene lanterns.

The property directly west and south of the house was fairly flat, cultivated land that was bordered by hedgerows of Osage orange trees. To the north and east was rolling pastureland. Across Lost Creek, one could see more cultivated land, an alfalfa hayfield, and more timberland. I spent most of my early days and throughout high school exploring every square foot of the territory on both sides of Lost Creek for a couple of miles. I think I knew every brush pile, hedgerow, and hollow tree where a squirrel, rabbit, or raccoon may be hiding.

Chapter 4

The Teenage years

My teenage years were spent doing what most boys who grew up on a farm do. Whether winter or summer, there were always chores to deal with every morning and evening—jobs like helping feed the chickens, hogs, and horses, and helping with milking the cows. In the fall and winter, I would split and carry in the evening’s wood supply. When it was summer, I helped Dad haul hay and store it in the barn, and I hoed weeds from the cornfields and garden. My sister Betty recalled recently that when we were kids, she and I and got into a fight over something, and, as punishment, Momma fixed us a mason jar of water and sent us both to the cornfield to hoe weeds. In fact, I mostly recall summer as a time of work, even though we always seemed to find time to swim in Lost Creek or in a neighbor’s pond on those hot summer days.

In early summer, Dad and I hunted young squirrels to eat (the meat of adult squirrels was too tough to be eaten easily). Momma would roll the squirrel parts in flour and fry it like chicken. Then she’d make a thick gravy from the drippings to pour over mashed potatoes or biscuits. It was definitely a Sunday meal that we looked forward to.

I recall that some of the Frank Chaney family (Frank was Momma’s half-brother) would sometimes come over for a Sunday morning squirrel hunt, which would be followed by a big feast of fried squirrel, biscuits, and gravy.

The Chaneys were a large family of six big, tough boys and one pretty little girl. Their next-to-youngest boy, Gene, who was about two years younger than I, was one of my best friends, and we spent a lot of time hunting together and doing all the ornery things boys do! Gene had somehow acquired a pretty good set of boxing gloves, and there were many times when he and I would put on those gloves and fight. We’d fight until we were exhausted, and then we’d sit under a shade tree to rest, only to get up and go at it again.

Although I was a bit older and taller, Gene was really tough and always gave me a hard time. I think we both envisioned ourselves becoming famous boxers someday. In fact, a boxing career was something I often daydreamed about. In the summer I’d pack an old gunnysack with hay, hang it from a tree in the yard, and fight that bag like a boxer in training. Dad would laugh at my silliness, and once he jokingly remarked that when he was a kid he used to hang up a bag like that, except that he filled his bag with rocks instead of straw!

When I was about twelve years old, my Uncle Elmer, Dad’s youngest brother, taught me the basic chords on the guitar. I remember being absolutely thrilled when Uncle Elmer would visit and bring his guitar and play and sing for us. He was a pretty good guitar player and singer, and he even played several times on a local radio station in Pittsburg, Kansas. I would always pester him to teach me more on the guitar. I didn’t have one myself, so I borrowed one from a neighbor for a while.

I finally saved up enough money to buy a cheap guitar through the Sears and Roebuck catalog. I somehow acquired some sheet music to several popular country western songs of the time. After I got that guitar, I spent much of my leisure time learning to play and sing along. When I was in the eighth grade, I won first place in the school’s community talent contest, playing and singing a popular hillbilly song, as country music was called at the time. Thus began my lifelong love of the guitar and music in general.