A Single Life

By Judy Bishop

The book began as a quick journal to share her humble beginnings and great adventures with her grandchildren. However, as writing often does, it morphed into something else. It evolved into a personal evaluation of how she has spent her first eighty-two years--the choices she made and her satisfaction with those choices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891570849

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A Single Life

Judy Bishop

Copyright © 2024 Judy Bishop

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89157-072-6 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89157-084-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

This book is dedicated to my children and grandchildren.

Life is an adventure. Thank you for being a part of mine. I am so very proud of each of you.

My Story

Earliest Memories

District 69

Burlington

Lyndon

Sedalia

California

California Phase II

Fort Ord

Sedalia I

Tempe, Arizona

Fort Sill

Panama

Leaving Panama

Warrensburg

Bermuda

Ketchikan

Men

England

Greece

Africa

The Farm

What Have I Learned?

About the Author

This book is dedicated to my children and grandchildren.

Life is an adventure. Thank you for being a part of mine. I am so very proud of each of you.

My Story

You could say I was born in a cornfield. The day I arrived, my mother was in her own bed, in her parents' little farmhouse, surrounded by cornfields. This was a little square house with four small rooms and a front porch. It just happened to be the same little house my mother was born in eighteen years prior. However, at that time, the house was located several miles away in a small town called Strawn.

Apparently, when my grandfather bought the farmland, it had no house. So he did the logical thing—he loaded up the little family house in Strawn, Kansas, onto a flatbed trailer and towed it to the new location. Thus, on September 21, l94l, my l8-year-old, 120-pound mother gave birth to a 9.5-pound baby girl in her own bed, in the same house she was born in now located on a farm in the middle of a cornfield.

I was told it was harvest time, and most of the males in the family were in the field. So not only my father, but all my uncles had their version of how the peaceful day was interrupted by my wailing want of attention.

I'm not sure how old my mother was when her parents made this move to the country. She told stories of walking with her brother to a district school. That would have been a one-room building, first through eighth grades. She also told how much she hated the long stockings her mother made her wear. She said, As soon as I was outside my mother's watchful eyes, I rolled those hateful things down to my ankles. I know she graduated high school from Burlington High and am pretty sure that's where she met my dad. She and Dad were married when she was seventeen and Dad was twenty-four years older. I saw a lot of my grandparents the first ten years of my life, but I was too young to ask the questions I'd like to have the answers to now, such as where the Akers and Paxsons originally settled in the United States.

My mother's parents seemed to me to be more transplanted to farming when compared to my dad's parents who seemed homegrown to farming. By that I mean my grandmother Annie (Landers) Akers had a large family connection in Kansas City. She had and liked nice things and protected them from rowdy children. Around the house, she wore the usual print dresses with an apron and heavy sensible shoes, like most other farm women, but she had pretty things like fancy hats, crystal glassware, etc., that she valued and protected.

She wasn't particularly warm and fuzzy either, but there was always homemade ice cream in her ice-cube trays when we came to visit. I also know she collected dimes in a jar in her closet. I know this because I took one of those dimes, and I've been ashamed of myself my whole life.

The feeling I had that she wasn't very warm and fuzzy may have had to do with her age. I believe she was in her forties when Mother and her brother were born. My grandparents lost their first born, a son, who was buried in Arizona. I don't know what they were doing in Arizona. Probably working for the water tower construction crew he was with. She had medical problems with that pregnancy, which led to the belief she wouldn't be able to carry another child to term. So when she delivered my mother, my grandfather was so happy, he gave her a pair of diamond earrings. She wore them until my mother turned fifty, then my mother wore them until I turned fifty. Now I'm wearing them until my granddaughter graduates college, then I'll pass them on to her.

Grandad Akers was similar in his dress. For the farm, he usually wore overalls, a blue shirt, and lace-up boots, but he had nice suits and shirts and hats too. He also had a few talents other than farming. For instance, at noon he always came into the house for a sit-down hot lunch and to listen to the noon news on the radio. When we were there, he'd get out his Jews harp and twang a few tunes to our delight. Peggy and I would show off our new tap-dancing steps, while he made music and kept time stomping his boot.

He also had a dark, dank, toolshed that was loaded with every conceivable kind of tool, usually topped off with a new batch of kittens. I loved snooping around in there, then following grandad around while he mended things. It was, of course, my favorite place—outdoors, in the dirt, doing men's work, fixing things. The stuff tomboys are made of.

There were also stories of Grandad going away to Louisiana to work with the company that build water towers. Probably during a time when farming was stressed or maybe to accumulate funds for pricy farm equipment or maybe it was the war. I also got the impression Louisiana was another family connection on my grandmother's side.

I think my dads' parents first settled somewhere north of Kansas. How and why they came to the little town of Burlington, Kansas, I do not know. My guess is that it had something to do with acquiring land. My granddad was a dream-filled dirt farmer. I don't think he finished high school for two reasons: first, he would have been needed on the family farm from planting 'til harvest, and second, he was married at sixteen. In spite of the humble beginnings, he and Grandmother worked hard, invested well, and ended their lives fairly prosperous.

My dad's parents were probably in their mid to late forties when my cousin Larry and I were born. We were the oldest of several grandkids. We all loved to go to their house. There was always a pie on the table and probably cookies. There was also a very old man sitting by the potbellied stove in the kitchen. He was always asleep, but to a six- or seven-year-old, he looked dead. My grandmother would usually try to shoo us outside so he could rest, and she could get her noon meal ready for the hands, but if Grandad was there, and we crept up to look at the ole man real close, we'd hear some scary noise or a quick movement that would scare the bejabbers out of us. That would have been my grandfather's father. I believe he lived into his late nineties.

My grandmother was a happy, energetic woman. She wore cotton print dresses with a full apron with pockets, most of which she probably made for herself. She wore the blocky black lace-up shoes that were popular at the time and opaque roll-down cotton stockings held up with garters she rolled down to the top of her knees. She wore her hair in a knot on the back of her head, and she whistled or sang to herself wherever she went. We could almost always find her if we got quiet enough to hear her humming or singing or whistling. She had an old upright piano and would take a little break from her work and pound out some hymens. I think she played at church sometimes. She also had an old treadle sewing machine. Yes, you had to peddle it to make it work. I was mostly a tomboy, but I did like to make things, and she was patient enough and generous enough to teach me to sew. She made tons of quilts, mostly from gently used clothes and some from feed sacks. At that time, flour and sugar, and maybe salt, came in cloth bags with a pretty floral print, perfect for quilt pieces. I'm happy to say I wrote her a letter when I was thirty something and thanked her for our childhood fun at her house and for teaching me to sew.

She and Granddad grew up together, went to school together, and married when she was seventeen and he sixteen. They were married for over sixty-five years, and I never heard her say a negative thing about him or vice versa. They did play little jokes on each other though. At least when there were kids around. Grandmother might lock the porch screen door so he couldn't get in for lunch. He'd make a big scary monster deal out of it banging on the door and threatening to skin us alive. Then grandad might hide some kitchen utensil he knew she used often and shoosh us not to tell on him. Both my grandparents were physically small. Grandmother kept her girlish figure her whole life. Five foot three, maybe 120 pounds. Grandad was short and stocky, wore khaki pants, long-sleeved blue work shirts, work boots, and an old beat-up Fedora hat. The most unusual thing about them, to me, is through my whole life they never changed. They didn't change styles, and they didn't appear to age. Grandad was usually in the fields, but if he happened to be fixing something or feeding something around the barn, he would let us hang around. He smelled of tobacco, liquor, suet, and line-dried laundry.

There was always so much for a kid to do at their house. The gate to the backyard had a chain with a block of concrete strung on it to close the gate. That gate gave hours of rides to the smaller kids. When you opened the gate, the block would lift you up; when you closed it, the block would lower you down. In the field behind the garage was a train car, a caboose, I believe. Granddad kept grain in it, but we had cowboy and Indian chases in it, shooting out the windows with finger guns, racing away on our invisible horses. In the front yard, there were two metal horse ties leftover from the horse and wagon days. We spent hours doing gymnastics, spinning around, hanging upside down, tightrope walking across the top bar. Endless fun.

These grandparents had five children, two girls and three boys. Both girls married for life. One moved to California, and one moved to a farm just down the road from her parents. All three boys served in WWII, and all three came home alcoholic and all three lost their families to divorce.

This farm made a special impression on me. The farm I lived on was thirteen miles from town, which made going to town a planned event. My grandparents' farm butted up to the city limits. When you drove down the drive to leave, if you turned right, you