KANSAS CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

Most of my childhood was spent in Norman, Oklahoma which was a great town to grow up in and from all that I hear, still is. Norman will be a story of it's own. But a lot of my childhood memories were made in Hamilton, Kansas and the surrounding Flint Hills where my family went on holidays and in the summer. The Kansas Childhood Memories are a little long and detailed, but that's memories and they are for my great grandkids and beyond.

The Flint Hills are an ecoregion, distinct from the other grasslands of the Great Plains. They were named by Zebulon Pike (Pike's

 Peak) in 1806 for the cobbles of flint-like chert that glinted through the tall prairie grasses. These hills run from about Manhattan, Kansas down through southeast  Kansas and into Oklahoma where they are called the Osage Hills. The Flint Hills contain most of the the last in tallgrass prarie in the world. There are three official tallgrass prairie preserves in the Flint Hills, the largest of which, the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, also boasts one of the largest populations of bison in Oklahoma. 

Because of the chert in the soil, farming was not practical and cattle ranching became the main agricultural activity for the region. Some the largest cattle ranches in Kansas and Oklahoma are still to be found in this area. The Flint Hills were created approximately 250 million years ago during the Permian Period. During this time much of the Midwest, including Kansas and Oklahoma, were covered with shallow seas. As a result, much of the Flint Hills are composed of limestone and shale with plentiful fossils of prehistoric sea creatures. The grass around Hamilton is called Bluestem.

This short history of the area brings back my memories of finding fossils in the yard at my grandfather's farm. We played with pieces of chert with what we called mica sparkling in the rock. The creeks sides were frequently made of shale in fine layers which would chip away and the get smoothed by the running water and make great rocks for skipping across the water pools in the creek. In the summer there usually wasn't a lot of water and we could hike up the creeks and around the pools searching for rocks that looke

d like arrowheads and fossils. 

We made a few necklaces our of fossils that were small circles from some prehistoric stemmed water plant. The creeks were a pretty safe place for kids because most of the year (and especially during the summer) there wasn't much water in them. Many of the roads had what were called low water bridges, which basically was a concrete road laid across the bottom of the creek with a pipe through it in the middle. In the rainy season these bridges would often be unpassable for days or parts of days until the rain subsided and the rain ran off. But with the concrete bottom, trucks could pass across them even with 2 feet of water over them. And they made great places to stand and fish in thesummer time, and when you pulled the fish out with the pole it would land on the bridge and you had a better chance to grab it. We fished always with cane poles and red and white bobbers and single barbed hooks. We caught perch, crappie, blue gills and sometimes small catfish. Both grandmother Bertha and Uncle John helped us get the worms on the hooks and luckily for us Uncle John did all the cleaning and then grandmother would fry the fish the next morning for breakfast. One thing we learned early was that if you wanted to fish in the evening you had to take a nap in the afternoon. They were wise and didn't want crabby kids fishing in the evening.

We spent most Thanksgivings and Christmases in Kansas and then always went for a couple of 

weeks in the summer, often with Mark and me going a week before my parents would come after Dad finished teaching summer school at OU. The trips to Hamilton would always be right up highway 99 and in the early days we would sing college songs like "Fight the Team" and "Carmen Ohio" and "Boomer Sooner" and "I'm a Jay, Jay Jayhawk up at Lawrence on the Kaw" and older songs my parents knew from college like "Good Night, Irene"

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAgJ67j1NUQ&feature=related

and "For it was mary, mary, plain as any name can be; But with propriety, society will say 'marie'" '. But it was mary, mary, long before the fashions came: And there is something there that sounds so fair, It's a grand old name!" 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hno8Qc73dqk 

and "Home on the Range"

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We didn't have portable radios or IPODs or gameboys so we had to do a lot of self-entertaining. Later as the years went by Mark and I began playing the sign game and hoping that Quaker State motor oil and Penzoil would be on our side. Our trip took us through Pawhuska, home of the Osage Hills state park and across the Cimmaron and Arkansas Rivers.

A typical day in Kansas would start at the "crack of dawn" to go to the farm and feed the cattle in the pastures. Grandmother always made a ranch breakfast with bacon, fried eggs, toast and homemade jam (her best was pear honey, which I'm sure had much more sugar than pear). We would ride in the back of Uncle John's dark green Chevrolet pickup with the wind blowing the remnants of the previous hay load into our faces. I don't think he ever drove more than 30 mph and it was only a couple of miles of highway to the farm. 

At the farm we would go into the old farm house, where the Albert, Morey and Violet Hallren lived and they would have a real fire going in the stove in the winter and it would be nice and warm. Morey always smoke d a pipe so there would be the scent of "Prince Albert" from the can. In the yard behind the house was the "storm celler" where Violet kept her canned pickles and jams and where they could go if a storm (tornado) ever came, which it didn't. There was a well outside but no bucket because they had a hand pump to get water in the kitchen. There was no toilet inside because on the other side of the barn yard was a "two holer" behind the chicken house. 

Morey's International Harvester tractor was in the shed and he would give us a ride on occasion. Behind the chicken house was the very tall silo that we would climb once we were big enough and look down inside. When it was full of insulage in the winter, we could jump inside and help throw the insulage down the shoot to the wagon below. (One of my recurrent dreams, as a child feeling out-of-control, was of falling on the inside of the silo and not being able to catch on to anything.) 

The barn was our favorite place. It had all the saddles and the horse collars and pitchforks and hay hooks and the horses in their stalls which we could feed from time to time. Up the ladder was the hay mow with bales of alfalfa hay stacked to the roof. We could rearrange the bales to make forts and places to hide and jump. It was so much fun but not the best place for an asthmatic child, so sometimes I had to pay the price. Of course, that didn't keep me from goingthere.Once we loaded the insulage or the hay, we would drive out into the pastures and drop of the food for the cattle. Usually we would go down the lane in back of the barn, across the country dirt road, through the gate, up the hill past parts of old cars and ice boxes and various other junk that had been discarded in the shallow ditch beside the path, and then on to the cattle on top of the hill. 

As soon as Uncle John would honk his horn the cattle would start mooing and coming toward the truck, knowing that food was at hand. We also drop off blocks of salt for the cattle to lick to get the salt they needed. The cattle made deep tracks across the pasture as they moved to the pond and to other places, and more than once when we drove the car out to look at the pasture and cattle, we got stuck in one of the ruts and had to dig out. Other cattle things that we got to see were the dipping trough which the cattle were run through to cover them with fly repellent and who knows what else. I think at least once we got to see branding of the calves with my grandfather's LAZY T brand. His cattle were herefords and angus mostly and at least twice a year we would take home a butchered side of beef frozen to have at home. I have always said that I ate beef three times a day growing up, which has left me not really wanting to eat beef very often now.

Other than the farm and barn, the most memorable part of Kansas was grandma Edwards big white house in town. It was a two stories and had four bedrooms with a screened-in porch on the front and another wrapping around the back. The basement was dark and dingy and had a steep wooden stairs which we would always go down at least once a trip to see what was down there. Grandmother's bedroom was on the first floor adjacent to the living room with its own bathroom. The stairs going up started just inside the front door and were L-shaped with a small landing. At the very last step at the top there was a wooden plug in a "mouse" hole which always troubled us a little as kids. Upstairs was Uncle John's room, great grandmother Wert's room and the "East room"for guests where we always stayed. It had a double bed and a twin bed so I'm not sure where we all slept. I remember taking turns sleeping with grandmother downstairs at times. 

In the early years there was no TV so we played board games and learned to play canasta and hearts and eventually bridge. Outside we played the usual hide and seek and had a tree swing which consisted of a gunny sack filled with leaves at the end of a rope tide to the big tree outside the back door.

 It seemed like grandmother spent most of her time in the kitchen and since she was a wonderful Pennslyvania Dutch cook, that p

robably was where she found a lot of her value. She was also sort of the family historian. Since she had come into the Edwards family as the second "young" wife of one of the twelve Edwards children, there were those who didn't "take to her" so redily. I think she made her way carefully into the family by quietly finding out and knowing all there was to know about all of them. In the end, she was a treasure of Greenwood county and Hamilton history and the unfortunate thing is that all her knowledge did not get put down on paper. I do have her diaries which are currently buried in storage underneath Michael and Sammy's furniture, and thus I will have more to add in a future entry about the things grandmother Bertha knew.

Additional memories would be of catching "fire flies", the sound of locusts (which is exactly the sound of the ringing in my ears today), making "hand-crank" ice cream and being the one who got to clean off and eat the batter, watching a chicken run around after it's head was cut off with an axe on a tree stump, slopping hogs, collecting eggs at the chicken house, the smell of the hound dogsthat lived in the shed behind the house next to grandmas, the sound of her clock on the top of the china cabinet which chimbed on the hour through the night, thunder and lightning in the East room which had windows on three sides, walking with Uncle John to the grocery store in the warm afternoon to get a cool "Grapette", the once-a-week movie that showed in a tent on the empty lot on main street in the summer, going to the little Ulrich Cattle Co. office on main street to talk to Clark and Tom Ulrich, watching the cattle herded into the large pens by the railroad tracks to be sent to "market" on the train, walking by the blacksmith's shop which later was the welding shop by the gas station at the corner of grandmother's street and main, socials at grandma's Methodist church, which was next door to her house. and walking to the post office downtown to get the mail from the little box with the combination or having Violet give it to us cause we couldn't open the box.

It was a different time but I have a feeling that some of what was then remains in the small towns of the world if kids take the time to turn off the TVs and the gameboys and the IPODS. There may well be some sad downside to not taking time to communicating with each other and with nature around us.