THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

T.B.D.B.I.T.L.
I became a band nerd as a result of having music very much in my blood (and being a very auditory person, which I didn't realize until much later in life), and not by chance, the next path in my life took us from the high school band in Garnett, Kansas to The Best Damn Band in The Land.

In the early months of 1947, my father became very ill with pneumonia and was hospitalized in Kansas City. Following his recovery he realized that he was tired of always being responsible for performances and  programs.  Together my parents decided (maybe my mother decided) that he should not go into the cattle business with Grandfather Edwards, but should return to graduate school and get a degree perhaps in school administration. They first thought of K.U. but also looked toward the University of Michigan (because my father had met the director of music, Rivelli, at festival with his bands) and also Ohio State where good navy friends were living. They moved our furniture back to Hamilton and Uncle John furnished a farm trailer to pull the necessities to wherever we were going. We arrived in Columbus to visit the Olsens and left the trailer on their drive while going to Ann Arbor to survey the scene.

 It turned out that the housing was much less desirable and my parents returned to Columbus, where we moved into Buckeye Village (military barrack-like graduate housing for GI bill students) and settled in at 2670 Defiance Drive. Buckeye Village was filled with families who had children and one parent in graduate school at OSU. 

There also was a University laboratory school where Mark and I attended preschool. In the second semester of 1949(at the time Ohio promoted on the half year), I started kindergarten at 9th Avenue School and road a big yellow bus to school. I remember

 that our bus driver was a black lady who had us singing all the way to school and back, probably for her sanity more than ours. 

                                                     

I remember several stories from Columbus. I can remember going to watch the band practice by the stadium and I can remember marching in our apartment with my baton to the sound of Buckeye Battle Cry on our 78 record player (I still have the records). I remember trying to pedal rapidly away from a bully who was trying to take my bike and running smack into a milk truck. I also remember taking that bike with my friend to the little creek nearby and discovering clay in the bank. So I pushed my "new" bike home with a big g

lob of wet clay to make some creations. My mother failed to see the wonder of it all and I was chastised for getting my new bike dirty. And I can remember riding my bike with my friend out a road to see the steam engine train come by in the afternoons. Can't forget either my Roy Rogers cup and going to Lazarus to see Elsie and Beauregard, the Borden's cow and her son.

I became a Pittsburgh Pirates fan because of living in Columbus when Vic Janowitz won the Heisman Trophy in 1950. His last game was in the "Snowbowl" against Michigan, which my parents attended and I listened to on the radio. Janowitz subsequently played for the Pirates instead of professional football and I  became a fan. 

http://library.osu.edu/sites/archives/OSUvsMichigan/snowbowl.htm

Funny how sometimes we have to live geography to get it. For most of my live I envisioned Three Rivers stadium as being somewhere on the East coast, until my daughter, Vanessa, and I drove from Toronto back to Kansas and when we got to Erie, Pa. I realized that Pittsburgh was straight south. We also got to stop in Columbus overnight and visit Buckeye stadium and 2670 Defiance Drive, where Buckeye Village barracks housing had been torn down and rebuilt in brick buildings, still university housing.

My father finished his masters degree and decided to continue and obtain a PhD. This was completed in 1951 and the next path took us back to where my father had been discharged from the navy, Norman, Oklahoma. Mark and I went to Kansas to stay with Grandmother Edwards and Uncle John while Mom and Dad finished his dissertation. Our stay was prolonged because a flood on the Mississippi and throughout Kansas and Missouri made their trip from Columbus with the trailer take over a week. 

Additional Photos:

Santa at Lazarus

Nice hats, Dudes!

                              

                                

 

Mark and me and the Matriarchs

Easter with baskets (and cool hats)

A FEW EARLY PHOTOS

Having a cluttered life has allowed my to have in my possession all these amazing photos. My thought is that all first children are set up to have cluttered lives because we are given too much stuff. Some of the stuff might be valuable later.

My grandfather Edwards was one of twelve children of John E. and Ester Edwards. In this photo he is seated on  the far right in the second row. My aunt Mertie (my mother's older half-sister) is in the lap of my greatgrandmother Ester in the center of the second row.

My greatgrandmother and greatgrandfather Edwards on their 50th wedding anniversary.

My grandfather W. H. Edwards (my mother's hero)

Original Edwards farmhouse 

where my mother was born (later lived in by three orphan children that my grandfather took in in their late teens who worked the farm, Morey, Albert and Violet Hallren. Violet later became postmistress of Hamilton)

W.H.Edwards and Bertha (my grandmother) in front of the house 

Hamilton to which I came home from

the hospital. (and the focus of most of 

my childhood summer and vacation memories occurred - I once dreamed while sleeping in the east room upstairs that the house diagonally across the street burned; when I told my grandmother, she said that in fact it had years before - spooky)

Helen Shannon and her mother Bertha portrait

My greatgreatgrandmother Shannon

My grandmother and grandfather Shannon

Gail, Norman and Lois Shannon

KANSAS BEGINNINGS

KANSAS BEGINNINGS

Growing up I didn't know what I found out later "growing up"

I was born in Emporia in the flint hills of southeastern Kansas at 6:38 p.m. of April 18, 1944.

(For those who don't know, Paul Revere made his famous ride on the 18th of April in '75, a few years before) I was delivered by Dr. F.D. Lose of Madison, who had delivered my mother, Helen, and was the Edwards family physician. 

As you will read, I was the first child of two first children. What a perfect set-up to be the "PERFECT FIRST".

My mother, Helen Lorraine Edwards, was the much younger first child of 

the second family of my grandfather William H. Edwards, after whom I take my middle name. W. H. Edwards was a successful 

farmer/rancher in Greenwood county and his first wife, Maud, died in childbirth with the second child, my mother's half-brother John. The firstchild had been born three years before. My grandfather subsequently married a 16 year younger school teacher from Gridley, Bertha Mudge; and when my mother was born she had a half-sister, Mertie who was 13 and John who was 10. Thus no surprise that she grew up with essentially four parents as what I would later describe as the "Princess of the Prairie". (as in photo)   

She was the darling of her father's eye and I'm sure of her other three family members as well. Photographs of her throughout childhood show her always dressed in the

 "style" of the day. Probably the first real disappointment of her entire life came just as I was born when her father was committed to a mental hospital in Topeka for what was I'm sure Alzh

eimer's disease. She was very angry with her mother for a long time for "putting him away", but stories of my grandfather, the gentleman rancher, walking naked along country roads sound like it was a necessity. Aside from this event and his death two years later, my mother won almost all of the contests in her life, including the last time she played duplicated bridge at the age of 90 about 6 months before her passing. This probably had something to do with her wanting her sons to succeed in all that we did.

My father, Gail (no middle name is recorded on his birth certificate, although he says in his autobiography that he was born Gail Robert after his fathers middle name; the Navy insisted that he have one and gave him back Robert), came from a completely different upbringing, the son of an ice delivery man with an interest in farming. He was likewise born in a small town near Kansas City and had a 16 month-younger sister Lois and an almost 5 year-younger brother Norman. (Of interest is that all three siblings would later come to the end of life within 18 months of each other.) He remembered helping with the growing of crops on the small plot beside their house and delivering papers twice a day in high school on foot and with a wagon for the Sunday papers. He also worked at a local drug store as a "soda jerk" to save money for college since his parents were not able to afford anything beyond high school. In Emporia, where he and my mother attended Emporia State Teachers College, he continued to work at Cole's cafe and where he could get a meal each day.

In my father's family the men either died early (my grandfather, Frank Shannon at 51) or left the family as in the case of my great grandfather who left his family when my grandfather was only six years old. As a result the Shannon families were in general run by Matriarchs. It always bothered me growing up that my mother always seemed to make the decisions, but I guess that had probably been set up in my father's life.

Since my father was in the navy at the time of my birth, the second place i lived (shortly after birth in Greenwood country) was Corpus Christi, Texas, where my father was assistant to the chaplain and in the Navy band. His undergraduate education had been in music and he was working as a band director in a town west of Emporia when WWII broke out. I remember being told about my parents being in Emporia with Dad's band at a festival, when the director of the festival came out on stage 

to announce that Pearl Harbon had been bombed. After the war we returned to Kansas and he became the high school band director at Garnett, Kansas. My earliest memories (I think I remember) are of the bandstand in the city square in Garnett, a set of alphabet blocks that I got for Christmas there, sparklers on the 4th of July, and getting into trouble with my mom for talking the grocery man into pulling my wagon home with the groceries - my mom had sent me to the store just over the tracks at the ripe old age of 4. Of course it was different times.

My brother, Mark, was born on March 26, 1946, while we were still living in Garnett. At exactly the same time, my mother's hero (her father) died from pneumonia in the mental hospital. My parent's left Mark in the hospital and took me to the funeral in Hamilton. There is no chance my mother could have had happy eyes for months thereafter.