Some stories that my dad shared with me

My father died at age 94 last Thursday. It was a blessing to have him with us for so long. 

An obituary for him is published elsewhere in this edition.

Several months ago, he fell down and fractured his lumbar vertebrae No. 5 and since then he had been in the hospital, in rehab facilities or in the nursing home. He also injured his knee and hip in the same fall. While trying to recover from the injuries, he also developed blood clots in both legs, which complicated his recovery efforts.

The day of his fall he had been outside at his home in Garnett, getting around with the help of a rollator (a walker on wheels with a seat), sweeping walnuts from the sidewalk in the front yard.

That evening, while getting out of his chair, he stumbled, fell and injured himself. His chair was a lift chair but apparently he never used the lift feature - not even when he was at home with just my mom. She still lives at home, too.

A friend of mine, upon learning of my dad’s death, said “losing a parent leaves a hole in your heart.’’ That’s the best way to describe the feeling that I have read or heard.

Much of my dad’s worldview was impacted by the fact that he was born and raised in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when 90 percent of the U.S. stock market crashed and economic times were tough for all. My dad’s family was poor as could be but they got by with a strong work ethic and self reliance - just like everybody else did at that time.

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Here’s some stories that my dad told me that he remembered from his childhood and and young adulthood that I want to write down for our family.

*He remembered that, as a boy, he loved running home from from country school at Kincaid, Kan. to be with his father who was walking behind, and directing, a two-horse plow in the field. He would deliver to his dad some cold water to drink that his mother sent with him. On the way home from the field with his dad and the horses, he got to ride on one of the horses.

*He remembered that he had two sets of clothes as a kid - one for school and one for work. Upon returning home from school, he would change his clothes before going back outside to do chores or play.

*Christmas gifts received when he was a kid consisted mostly of new clothes or new shoes - nothing fancy.

*He remembered that his dad, while working as a laborer for the railroad near Kincaid, once traded his shoes to a friend for a more worn-out set of shoes and a couple of dollars that his friend had - because he needed the money. His dad brought the worn-out shoes home and somehow fixed them so he could wear them for several more months.

*He remembered that when he was a child that his family sold milk in metal milk crates every day. The milk crates had to be taken down to the main road for the milk man to pick up on his route. In the winter, when it snowed, my dad and his sister Molly would ride along on the horse-drawn sleigh used to take the milk crates to the main road and back.

*He remembered that the homes that his family lived in were not very good and that when the cold wind blowed the cold wind could be felt in the upstairs bedroom where he and his brother Bill slept. He also said that his family ate a lot of “guinea chickens’’ when he was a kid.

*He remembered standing too close to someone who was chopping wood with a double-sided axe. The result was my dad getting his left cheek sliced open in a terrible accident.

My dad said that while waiting for a doctor to stitch up the wound, someone gave him a chocolate candy bar, quite a treat in those days. He said he tried to eat the candy bar but most of it ended up on his face, having exited his mouth through his wound. The scar on his cheek was visible throughout the rest of his life.

*He remembered that when he and his brother Bill would climb up on the roof of their barn, they had a good view of when their mother would be returning home in the family’s Model T Ford.

*He remembered the time that he was responsible for his dad getting a broken arm because he turned the ignition at the wrong time as his dad was in the process of cranking the Model T.

*He remembered the time he and his brother Bill built a glider plane out of a wooden crate. My dad helped Bill lug the glider plane up a ladder to the roof of the barn. By the time my dad got down from the ladder and raced around to the other side of the barn, Bill and the homemade plane had crashed. Bill survived.

*He remembered that the ice man in Garnett in the 1940s was a black man who delivered ice blocks (often 25 to 100 pounds each) around town to businesses and homes with a horse-drawn wagon. The ice man kept his horse in a barn owned by my dad’s grandparents - Frederick and Florence (Hobert) Lamm on Fifth Street. In the summertime, my dad and other kids would follow the ice man and his wagon around town and the ice man would give them ice chips.

*He remembered delivering The Kansas City Star newspaper twice a day on the west side of Garnett for several years. When it was too heavy to carry them all on his bicycle at one time, his father would deliver half of the papers to a location uptown so he could pick them up along his route. On a drive through Garnett recently, my dad could still remember the names of the people who lived in the houses along his route 80 years later.

*He remembered as a teen being able to rent a horse at the Anderson County Sale Barn to take for a ride around the North Lake at Garnett - about a three-mile ride, he said.

*He remembered that he and some of his buddies had wanted to enlist in military service for World War II, even though they were too young. They planned to take the train from Garnett to Kansas City to enlist and say they were older than their actual ages. 

Having thought he had convinced his parents to go along with the plan, since his older brother Bill was already in the service, my dad asked his mother to wake him up early the next morning so he could catch the train with his buddies. His mother had other plans. She didn’t wake him up.

*He remembered the time that as a young oil driller in the El Dorado fields in the 1950s, a tornado rolled through at night while he and the two roughnecks on his crew were working on a rig. 

The only place to seek shelter, he said, was in the three-to-four feet deep “mud pit’’ at the rig site filled with a mixture of water, bentonite clay, rock shavings and drilling additives.

He and the others survived the tornado and raced home to find that my mom, brother and sister were safe in a community shelter.