Wall Street

I found this sign highly amusing. First of all, for the repetition of “Street St”; secondly, because “Wall Street” conjures up visions of a great banking center. One long-defunct bank does not a great banking center make.

I have no clue about this bank’s history, but, if it’s like many others on the High Plains, it went belly up in the Great Depression/Dust Bowl years. Farmers had no crops, so no one spent money with the merchants. Neither deposited anything in their local bank because they didn’t have money to deposit. As their dreams died, people fled. Grass grew on the sidewalks as communities shrank. But some of us are still here. This is our home and our choice.

Bonnie and Clyde

This shot-out window makes me think of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, whose lives of crime ended in a hail of bullets 75 years ago, May 23, 1934.

I am no student of automobile history, so have no idea whether this junked truck is even the same vintage as the famous bullet-ridden automobile.

Bonnie Parker is said to have been bored with her life in Dallas when she met Clyde Barrow. She certainly got the excitement she wanted. Their crime spree lasted 21 months. They traveled through at least five states, often crossing state lines because law officers could not travel across jurisdictional boundaries in those days.

The country had fallen into the Great Depression. Unemployment in 1932, when their spree began, was at record highs, nearly 25 percent. At first, the Barrow Gang were often seen as people striking back at an uncaring government, latter-day Robin Hoods. They were hoods all right, attacking small-town restaurants, grocery stores and gas stations, as well as small banks. Barrow Gang murdered 12 victims, nine of them law officers.
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After Clyde engineered a breakout from Texas Department of Corrections’ Eastham Prison Farm, Texas officers and the FBI began a massive manhunt. They induced one of the gang members to betray Bonnie and Clyde and set up a trap just over the Louisiana line. The couple died in a hail of 167 bullets.

After years as a sideshow attraction, the bullet-ridden Ford ended up in the rotunda of a Las Vegas casino. The car got off easier than Bonnie and Clyde’s bodies. Souvenir hunters tried to lop off Clyde’s finger and left ear, clipped locks of Bonnie’s hair and pieces of her dress.

Why anyone would want such gruesome articles totally mystifies me, but the car in the casino testifies to their appeal. Funny how two bungling crooks’ lives — one burglary netted them only $1.75 — can be as glamorized as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s were.

Fort Wallace

Saturday, Marilyn, Wendy and I took a day trip to Fort Wallace Museum, Wallace, Kan.

Hubby and I had visited the museum last year, when I took the picture above. I was pleasantly surprised on Saturday when I saw that Pond Creek Station, a stage stop, the red building left of the museum, and Weskan Railroad Depot, the yellow building, were open and had been refurbished. That is such an improvement.

This license plate is very appropriate for its owner, who had made the buffalo sculpture and numerous others at the museum out of recycled barbed wire. Barbed wire is pronounced “bob wire”.

Marilyn takes a closer look at Bob Wire Buff. Fence around it is constructed from post rock (limestone) posts and, of course, barbed wire. These posts are constructed by drilling holes in native limestone.

Marilyn (left) and Wendy try to take a ride on a railroad repair cart, but it refused to take them anywhere. After all, it’s chained to the railroad tracks. Now, how not fun is that? We wanted a joyride!

The museum added a new addition last year for Floris and Viola Weiser’s collection of military, pioneer and Native American artifacts he discovered with his metal detector. The addition holds a diorama of the fort. Nothing exists of it today other than the post cemetery. Building materials were scarce in the area and the abandoned post was shortly turned into other buildings. These soldiers were on the parade ground. When I took their picture, I thought of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. George Armstrong Custer, who would later die with all his men at the Battle of the Bighorn, was court-martialed for his efforts to relieve a siege of Fort Wallace. After being suspended from rank and pay for a year, Custer returned to the Indian Wars. Custer’s rashness and disregard for his soldiers in this instance presaged the mistakes that cost him and his immediate command their lives in his Last Stand. In the movie, Custer laments the loss of his command, but redeems himself by fighting off the evil Pharaoh. If these soldiers came to life after sundown, what would they say about “The Boy General”?

The red box

We rarely can resist stopping at these native stone houses. Next to sod houses, they are the ultimate in make-do building materials, but I had never seen one with a red metal box outside. I was hoping it was a Coke machine of some type.

Instead, it was a Hamilton automatic clothes dryer, billed as “The World’s First Automatic Clothes Dryer”.

In this 1950 ad, women were advised that they could "“Shed the Badge of a Drudge” by buying a new Hamilton dryer.

This machine would have been the latest gadget in 1950, but even the Hamilton name has been put out to pasture now. All that’s left of Hamilton dryers are sheet metal and memories.

Cpl. Noah Van Buren Ness

Ness County, Kan., is named for Cpl. Noah Van Buren Ness, the only corporal to be so honored. His statue was unveiled in 2000, the first Civil War statue in Kansas for 60 years. Ness, who served with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, died in 1864 of battle wounds received in Mississippi.

I could find no actual photograph or other contemporary image of Cpl. Ness in my Google image search, so have no way of comparing his sculpted face to his actual face. I often wonder how artists determine someone’s face with no evidence. I’d love to see any contemporary image of him if anyone has one.

Ness County Courthouse’s signature architectural feature is shown through the statue’s sword handle. More about that tomorrow.

Decoration Day

My grandmother always called Memorial Day “Decoration Day”, the original name for the holiday. Decorating graves was always our family tradition. We cut flowers, put them in water-filled buckets and spent the morning in various cemeteries.

My brother and I always wondered off and looked at the old tombstones. We were especially interested in the veterans’ stones, what wars they had served in, what rank they had obtained. What combat had they seen? What terrible memories did they carry?

What sacrifices had they and their families made for our current freedoms? What would they think of what we had done with those freedoms?

That is not something I can answer, but I hope they would feel that the sacrifice was worth it.

May God bless and keep every veteran and comfort those who have lost the ones they loved for our protection.

Photo is of a cemetery in Parsons, Kan., and comes from Flickr.

Garden of Eden

Unfortunately, I had forgotten to charge my camera’s battery before we left for Lucas, Kan., recently. I had to rely on a disposable point-and-shoot camera for our pictures there.

The town’s signature attraction is “The Garden of Eden”. Hubby is standing in front of it.

Civil War veteran S.P. Dinsmoor began working in Portland cement while he built his home. He first told the Biblical story of Garden of Eden, then Cain’s murder of his brother Abel. He then began to explain his Populist political philosophy in cement.

Murdered Abel is watched over by angels and a demon. The light is in a snake’s mouth. Dinsmoor electrified his house two years before the rest of Lucas got electricity.

Dinsmoor portrayed bankers and the era’s monopolistic trusts as giant octopuses using their tentacles to steal from the common man. His last, unfinished, work shows Labor crucified by preachers, bankers, lawyers and doctors. He built an onsite mausoleum for himself and his first wife. When she died, she was originally buried in the Lucas cemetery. He disinterred her and reinterred her in solid concrete. When he died, he ordered that his corpse remain available for viewing. Tour includes a look at Dinsmoor’s mummy. With our current economic troubles driven by financial “experts’” foolishness, Dinsmoor’s Populist vision continues to resonate today.

A dream comes true

I did not vote for Barack Obama. My yard sign read “McCain-Palin”. I do not agree with Obama’s agenda and I am concerned about what his proposed policies will do to the country I so love. I have rarely disagreed with a candidate as much as I disagree with President-elect Obama.

With that said, I am proud to be an American today. Within my lifetime, we have progressed from legal segregation to electing an African-American man as President. At least part of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has come true.

In 1968, a “George Wallace for President” campaign sign loomed over our grade school playground in Chattanooga, Tenn. I didn’t understand what “segregation” meant. Little white girls didn’t have to worry about such issues.

But I remember the horror of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Some Chattanoogans, along with people in 125 other cities, rioted. The city was immediately put under a dusk-to-dawn curfew. I had forgotten about this incident until I was in Chattanooga again in the summer of 1980, when protesters rioted again over the acquittal of two Ku Klux Klan members. The eerie silence of that curfew took me back to 1968 and my uncomprehending fear. Why did I have to stay inside and why did we have to keep all the curtains closed? Why did Daddy have to stay home from work? I didn’t understand and I was frightened.

The true, shocking meaning of segregation didn’t come home to me until I worked for a school year at Longwood College, now University, in Farmville, Va.

Farmville, county seat of Prince Edward County, was at the epicenter of Virginia’s post-Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka strategy of “Massive Resistance”. Students from all-black Robert Russa Moton High in Farmville went on strike to secure a better high school building. With the help of the NAACP, they sued to end segregation. Their case, Dorothy E. Davis, et al. versus County School Board of Prince Edward County, Va., was combined with Brown.

Prince Edward County responded by shuttering its school system from 1959-64, when the threat of prison forced the County Supervisors to reopen public schools. While the schools were closed, white children took advantage of state tuition grants to attend newly-opened private schools. Black children lost five years of education.

When I lived in Farmville, Farmville High, the old all-white high school, had been turned into a storage building. My boss pointed it out to me and told me the shocking story of a county without a public school system.

And now, 40 years after Martin Luther King’s assassination, an African-American has been elected to the nation’s highest office.

Wow.

I pray that he will be a wise and just leader of our country and am committed to continual prayer for him. He’ll need it.

Remembering 9/11

I am too young to remember President Kennedy’s assassination. I wasn’t born when Pearl Harbor was attacked on the Date Which Will Live in Infamy. Those horrendous events are the only ones I consider comparable to the shock we all experienced Sept. 11, 2001.

Even though I well remember that horrible day, recalling it still has an air of unreality. How could such a bizarre attack happen? How could it have succeeded so well? Partially, of course, the attacks were successful because “who would’ve thunk it!”

The night before, I had finished reading a Tom Clancy novel, probably “The Sum of All Fears”. When the alarm went off, the local radio announcer said that a plane had struck one of New York’s Twin Towers. I thought I was dreaming this, that the book had gotten into my dreams. Surely this was an accident, I thought, but I could not shake the idea that I was dreaming. Finally, I went into the kitchen and turned on the TV. Surely that would dispel this nightmare world I’d fallen into.

Instead, I watched in shock and horror as another plane slammed into the second tower. I remember feeling completely numb. I believed my eyes’ evidence, but how could this be happening?

As I sat there open-mouthed, trying to make sense of what was nonsense, Hubby returned from an early-morning meeting. I said that the second tower had been struck. He fell into a chair. He knew that the first tower had been struck. That had happened before he left for his meeting, but he hadn’t yet learned that Tower No. 2 was a target.

We watched numbly until we had to leave for work. I went on my sales route. No one wanted to buy anything. People brought TVs from home to see what was happening. I missed almost nothing because every business was either glued to TV or radio.

I had the feeling that I had fallen into some movie set. None of this could be real, could it? As the events played out, the feeling of unreality kept growing. Even though I knew full well that planes flown by despicable, evil men had flown into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and that, at the cost of their lives, heroes had prevented that foul gang from flying into some other target, I just could not shake the notion that this was not quite real. The scenario was too far out, too unbelievable, too wicked.

That evening, Hubby and I went outside to enjoy our lawn chairs, hoping to receive a respite from the day’s horrors. The sky was empty of planes. No friendly lights blinked above. Just the Moon, stars and planets shone down. The feeling was beyond eerie. I had felt a sense of violation all day, but those were TV images. As we looked at the sky, my sense of violation, anger and shock broke through the unreality of it all.

That weekend, we attended a show in Copper Mountain, Colo. Many of the vendors who usually packed the hall were trapped at other shows, unable to fly out. Some had rented vehicles so they could fill their booths. Some of the booths had displays but no vendors. Some of the booths had vendors but no displays.

One had been in the sky when the attacks occurred and had ended up at an airport far from his intended destination. The pilot had announced that the Towers had been attacked and that he had to get out of the sky, wherever he could find a place to land. Vendor was still shaken from the experience.

That night, we stood out under the stars holding candles, singing patriotic songs. “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” meant more to me than ever before. Many of us shed tears. Our beloved country had been attacked by cowards who used civilians to wage war. We grieved and mourned. We desired justice for those who had been so brutally murdered.

I will never forget. To this day, I feel relieved every time I look up and see contrails or airplane running lights. Something that meant nothing before is now a source of comfort.

God bless America and protect her from all her enemies.

The cost of freedom

Tintype is likely of Daniel Q. or his eventual brother-in-law Daniel D.

Daniel Q. served in the 36th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which saw a great deal of action, including the Battles of Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, the Siege of Chattanooga, the Battles of Resaca and Atlanta. Daniel Q. was captured somewhere in Georgia or Alabama.

He died Jan. 31, 1864, while a prisoner of war. Family originally believed that he had died in Andersonville Prison, the most notorious of the Confederacy’s prisoner-of-war camps, but War Department files showed that he had died in Danville [Va.] Prison, another terrible place.

Daniel D. enlisted near the end of the war and served for about three months.

Excerpt of poem below was written by Union soldier Andrew A. Wright at Murfreesboro, Tenn., May 17, 1863. Daniel Q., who was in Wright's company, sent home a copy to his sister Annie, my great-great-aunt. She had it published in her local newspaper.

Who Wouldn’t Be a Soldier?

“ … Wherever the Cumberland Army shall go
They are brave soldiers of freedom, the world shall e’er know
The Butternuts [Confederates] find us too much for their mettle;
When brave Rosy [Gen. Rosecrans] moves on, they are sure to skedaddle.
And we’ll closely pursue them with [illegible]
Till the last Reb is vanquished and peace is restored
And the Stars and Stripes fly triumphant again
O’er a land that is purged of disloyal men,

Then ’tis homeward we’ll turn and we’ll sing as we go:
Ho! Friends, we are coming, we have conquered the foe,
The rebellion has ended; secession’s played out!

But oh! There are those who will shed bitter tears,
For the loss in this struggle of brave volunteers;
How many there are who in anguish will mourn
For the bold soldier boys who will never return,

Should it be in my lot in this struggle to fall,
Dear friends in the North, I would say to you all;
Mourn not at the fate which may take me from you;
The patriot’s grave with no terrors, I view.
He who tempers the wind to the lamb that is shorn
Will guide, guard and protect you when I’m dead and gone.

But we hope for the best and sad thoughts dispel,
And trust to the end that all will be well,
That the day will soon come when our friends we will greet,
And that circle of loved ones again we shall meet,

Then keep up your courage ’till rebellion is crushed;
[Illegible, illegible] for our cause it is just.
The above are my thoughts and I send them to thee,
From your ever-true brother now in old Tennessee.

Dust Bowl Blues

Hubby and I watched American Experience: Surviving the Dust Bowl a few nights ago. Grandma's stories of life in the Dust Bowl years returned vividly to mind, made more real by the footage of that time.

Many people fled the Dust Bowl conditions, packing their belongings into whatever motorized transportation they had, then driving off with their house door standing open.
They were "Dust Bowl Refugees".

But many stayed, including my grandparents.

Dust filtered into everything. People caulked their windows with rags. They hung wet sheets in front of their doors. And still the dust filtered in.

Grandma reminisced about hanging wet towels above my aunts' beds to keep dust out of their lungs. They still coughed black phlegm.

When she served meals, she covered each plate and serving dish with wet towels, but they still had to eat grit with their food.

My grandparents' hired men did not get cash wages, just room and board. That was enough in those days. At least they had a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. Many did not.

My great uncle was caught in one of the terrible dust storms and died of dust pneumonia. Pneumonia was epidemic during those years. Aunt Betty never remarried.

No wonder Woody Guthrie recorded "Dust Bowl Blues".

We read "The Grapes of Wrath" in high school, about a family who fled Dust Bowl conditions for "the promised land" of California.

I asked Grandma once why they stayed on the land.

"Why didn't you flee?"

"This is our home," she said.

I Like Ike

Recently I read Ike: An American Hero" by Michael Korda.


I have been interested in World War II nearly all my life. Books on the war take up several feet of my bookshelves. When I picked up this book, I wondered if I'd learn anything new about Dwight Eisenhower.

I did.

Ike was severely criticized for his management of the war in Europe. The British wanted to have a narrow thrust deep into northern Germany, while Ike favored a broad front, attacking Germany from north to south. Ike's decision was second-guessed during and after the war. Would a narrow front attack have ended the war sooner, saving thousands of lives?

Korda says no. In this decision and many others, Korda supports Ike.

He puts Ike into the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, a man who rose from humble origins to exalted leadership. Ike followed in the American military tradition of using American technology and unrivaled firepower to win wars. He followed in Grant's footsteps by seeking to destroy the enemy's military capacity, not capture cities and other geographic objectives. As Grant went after Lee's army instead of Richmond, so Ike went after Hitler's armies instead of Berlin and Prague.

One of the war's great controversies still swirls around the policy that Germany, Italy and Japan must surrender unconditionally. Korda supports this decision. At the end of World War I, Germany had not been invaded, their army command remained intact and they deposed the Kaiser themselves. Germany's complete humiliation and destruction ensured that they would have to learn to cooperate with their neighbors.

Korda also points out that Ike was in charge of the world's two greatest amphibious attacks, the one at Salerno, Italy, and the greatest of all, D-Day.

I also learned that Ike opposed using the atomic bomb on Japan. The Japanese were "already defeated" and using the bomb was unnecessary and would only "shock world opinion."

Ike had great energy, patience, common sense, and the greatest advantage of all, the ability to deal with prima donnas like Sir Bernard Montgomery, the British commander. Korda pulls no punches in describing these prima donnas.

Winston Churchill was definitely on the prima donna list. I had always thought that the British aristocracy kept up impeccable manners. This book shreds that assumption. Churchill is twice said to have had "atrocious" table manners. "… A concern for good table manners was essentially middle class or Frenchified."

I also learned more about Ike's life between the war and the presidency, but I was disappointed in the short shrift Korda gave Ike's presidential years.

Laying aside that issue, I liked "Ike" the book.

Learn more on all things World War II

It Ain't Gonna Rain No More

My grandparents (at the right of this family photo from the period) lived on the outskirts of the Dust Bowl, but they still experienced the drought and dust.

One night during a prolonged dry spell, my grandmother sat down at the piano and began to play, "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More, No More".

This is the chorus:

It ain't gonna rain no more, no more
It ain't gonna rain no more
How in the heck can I wash my neck
If it ain't gonna rain no more?

As she was playing and singing, the sky suddenly darkened and lightning struck the house. All the nails were blackened on that side.

My grandparents' hired men lived with them. One had been napping in the upstairs bedroom on that side. He came down the stairs so fast that he didn't seem to have touched the stairs at all.

"Don't play that song again!" he said. "That song called down the lightning on my head!"

She never again played "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More."

During dry spells, I often teased Grandma that she should break the drought by playing that song. She pursed her lips and shook her head each time.

Several versions of this song exist, and I have no idea which verses she was singing. She would never say.

Dust Bowl house

The light Wednesday morning was just perfect for picture taking. Unfortunately, we had miles to go before we slept. But I still couldn't resist this stop. This house had attracted my attention for years and the light was too good to miss.

I turned the color photos into sepia toned ones using the built-in actions from Photoshop CS3. The sepia tones remind me of the Dust Bowl years.



My grandparents, who lived through those years, would probably prefer not to be reminded.


I also photographed this house in 1991 or 1992. If I find those photos, I'll be interested to see the changes in the house.