Richland, again

What a strange trip it's been!

Kennewick

Havoc
Brian visits
RLOC

Teri et al

19th St.
Totaled by the Lampsons

Arrowhead
Austin
Corbin

Richland

Cedar Street

Austin, the city

More Dorm Hijinks
Cautionary tale about dope
Tunnels
Crane collapse
Best music scene in the world
walking distance
OU weekend consequences
Particle accelerator
Hippie Hollow
Across the river
Protein tablets
Days of streaking
William F. Buckley
Elm street,  Eeyore's birthday party
Melinoma
Back to the Church
Menzies
Married student housing
Graduation

Meeting Susan
First and only sports car
First married apartment
First house
First child
Texas politics
Backpacking in the Rockies
Touched by a murder
ABL
Eagle Signal
Church responsibilities

Lamoni

Cold but warm
Nuclear explosion
Bruce Jenner
Riding the Rails
Herman the Coat
First beard
Deadly Milk Can
Flooding the Dorm
Losing the girl
More theater
Back in the dish room

Temple

City of my youth
Football spectator
Living the 60's in a Czech community
Band, band, and national TV
Camp Sionito
Flowered Rambler
My first car of my own (after having driven the other into the ground)
Boat Construction and Sailing
Renting, then buying
Stupid human trick,  leaping a brick wall, almost
Wasting ammo
War games
Pyrotechnics
VW Camper
Lifeguarding and Newspaper delivery
Learning guitar
Introduction to theater
Best Teacher (only lasted one year)
Joys of being shot down
Punjab
Live oak trees

Abilene

The house we rented in Abilene had been constructed by family that owned the local brick company.  Needless to say it was an all-brick house, including the interior walls.  The bedroom walls painted cinder block.  The floors were all concrete.  There were even some decorative walls made of glass blocks.  The obvious durability of that house gave me the idea that it would be nice for all houses with children to be constructed that way.  Cinder block wall, concrete floors, with a drain in the middle.  Just hose the bedroom down every now and then.

Dad cut a couple of trees out of the back yard.  Then there were these big stumps to remove.  Every day after school, I would go out there and dig around them.  When it got where I couldn't get a shovel into the hole anymore, I started digging with my hands.  I would dig out enough dirt to make a ball and toss it over my shoulder.  I learned then what persistence could do.  Just one handful at I time, I mad an enormous hole around each stump.  Dad was able to easily cut the stumps out below the ground level and fill in the holes.

Read, read, read,  Reader's Digest
Buffalo Gap scouts
Up all night, not-so-magic bus

Big Spring

City of my childhood
Park Hills elementary
Working in cafeteria
Last chosen on playground
Not lost in the ravines
Rattlesnakes and horny toads
Falling wall and tumbleweed holocaust
Fat Tire bike, crashing Ellen
gun ownership
kittens on the bed
Mom's organ habit and continuing education
Piano lessons
Band practice
Church in Stanton, again.
Jets overhead
Building forts
Lake J.B. Thomas
Boy Scouts, Buffalo Scout Ranch
My one shot at living on Pennsylvania Avenue
Foxy teacher and the death of a president
Both condemned and saved by my temper
My first car
Camping and travelling,  New York World's Fair  (I will always hate that song)
White Sands,  bear in the woods
Trips to Grannie's,  death of Ralph
The Ball family

Brownfield

Birth of Brian
Family Studebaker wagon
Gas explosion
Chocolatta
Old records
Beginning of school
Church in Lubbock

How He Met My Momma

Church Reunion in Racine
Motorcycles
School at Graceland
School in OSU in Stillwater,  Go Cowboys.

Vallee died just as Dad went off to the Merchant Marine. Wayne died about that time also. His family was known to the church community and many had sympathy for them. The twins were still infants. Madaleen had helped care for them at the reunion just before all that went down. So she knew of Bill but he was actually interested in another gal at that time. While Dad did his Merchant Marine service, he always arranged his sailings such that he was able to get back to Racine for reunion. that was his way of dating church girls. Eventually, he became acquainted with Mom just as she was about to head off to D.C. for her stent in the secretarial pools there. He wrote to her while she was there and they met up again at a later reunion. They got married it 1948. (I think after a stint at Graceland.) Then they went to OSU as a married couple so Dad could finish his degree. Unlike his peers, Dad didn't have GI Bill so Mom had to get a job to pay for school and support him.

Mother, Madaleen Miller

Fairland girl

Oka Jewel Boren
Ralph Montgomery (Truman's story)
Sister Mabel
Brother Vern
War years in DC

At the age of nineteen, Mom had taken a typing test and as a part of the war effort, she was asked to join the pool of clerical workers being assembled in D.C. As she started her trip at the train station in Miami, she met another young woman who was going to D.C. on the same program. They traveled together and roomed together for the year they were in Washington. She strongly remembers standing at the Lincoln Memorial looking out over the Reflection Pool. She also remembers taking a trip with her roommate and some friends to New York. She worked in the Navy Department. They were there about a year. After they returned home

Music, music, music
Always a broadway musical fan.  Was an Oklahoma gal in DC during WWII when the musical was the hottest thing in NYC.  Was able to actually see a Broadway show when in NYC in 64, the King and I.  Her interest enticed and encouraged me into theatre for which I will be eternally grateful for the richness it brought to my life.

Newton, Kansas

When Dad graduated from Oklahoma State with his bachelors degree he went to work for US Department of Agriculture.  The government posted him in Newton, Kansas.  I suppose that Mom and Dad now figured they were on their way so the time was right to start a family.  I was born on December 7, 1951, at the Mennonite hospital there in Newton.  The Mennonites had their own ideas about how a baby should be born and they allowed Dad to be in the room with Mom through the whole process.  Later, Mom and Dad discovered how lucky they were for that first birth.  When my sisters came along, they had moved back to Oklahoma.  The "modern" practice in the Miami hospital was to keep the dads in the waiting room until after the baby was born.  As Dad would say, that really chapped him to have to just wait.

The story goes that my name came from the Kendall Oil signs that were common along the roadways in those days.  They liked the sound of that name, so I got it.  Most of the time I relished the idea of having a unique name.  I never could abide having the name shortened to "Ken".  To me, that was short for Kenneth and that wasn't my name.

I have no memories of the time in Newton because shortly after I was born, the family moved to the farm at Lone Star. We celebrated my first birthday in Newton, but we moved a few months after.

Lone Star

My earliest memories are of the farmhouse at Lone Star.  Lone Star isn't a real town.  It is more of an area northeast of Fairland.  Here's a link to a satellite shot of the where I think the farmhouse was.  Evidently the well is still good and the current owner runs cattle on the place.  After we moved away, a new owner picked up the whole house and moved it into town.  [Maybe with Mom's help on locating it, I'll try to get a satellite shot of it as well.  But something in the back of my mind tells me that the house was torn down later even in Fairland.]  It was the house where I learned to walk.  Mom tells the story that walking in that house wasn't trivial.  It seems every room was on a different level and you had to always step up or step down as you went from room to room.

The satellite shot shows the typical Great Plains geography and road plan.  The entire countryside is divided up into "sections" (as opposed to city blocks) that are a mile on a side.  Of course, all the roads run North-South or East-West.  If you want to travel NW to SE, it's drive-turn, drive-turn, drive-turn.  Only major highways like US routes or turnpikes go "as the crow flies".  State and county roads followed the right-of-ways along the section lines.  And even the US routes and interstates will sometime do a jog out in the middle of nowhere because the right-of-way "grew up" along a section line.

I don't  really many early memories of the place.  I suspect I may have invented a few from looking at a photo album that had some pictures of me at the house.  It was while I lived there that Mom found me in the crib rehearsing all my words before I went to sleep.

The story is also told about how I would sometimes go out into the field that Dad was plowing and Dad would stop the tractor, pick me up, and keep plowing with me in his lap.  But one day I wandered a little further than usual and became lost as far as my folks were concerned.  They eventually found me crying in a neighbor's field while I watched him plow.  I was upset because he wouldn't stop and pick me up.

I remember watching a tortoise cross the dirt and graver road next to the house.  I was fascinated as a road grader came by, caught the turtle in its blade and rolled it to the edge of the road with the other rocks and dirt.  The turtle just came out of its shell and went on its way.

The house was heated by a big gas or oil stove in the center of the house.  I like to stand with my back side to it to warm up my pants, then bend my knees to feel that warm cloth on the back of my legs.  One day I stood there long enough to scorch the pants.  Mom was mad.

Alison and Ellen were born while we lived there.  Alison was big enough to play with before we left but Ellen was just a baby and not much fun.

I remember a time that really scared Alison and I.  One evening Dad had been out in the barn dehorning cattle.  It seems that cutting a horn off is not much different that trimming a toenail as far as the cow is concerned, so it doesn't hurt them.  But a horn does have a blood supply, so the process can be a bit graphic.  When Dad came up from the barn, his hands were all bloody and we thought something terrible had happened.  Ah, the things you miss out on, living in the city.

We moved from the farm because Dad figured he could make better money working for Uncle Sam using is hard-earned degree.

Lamesa

Ellen as a baby.
Catbox sandbox
Needlenose Studebaker
Duplex on highway
Alison grass allergy
Neighbor oil patch worker


Church in Stanton

Father, William Mark Miller

Born September 18, 1925, to William Lester Miller and Vallee (Williams) Miller on a farm near Oronogo, Missouri (north of Joplin).  He went to school in Alba.

My father had an older brother, Wayne.  Wwayne was lost in WWII.  He was a pilot on a DC-3 flying supplies to the Chinese resistance.  He flew "over the hump", the Himalayan mountains, from India to western China.  His plane went out one day and never came back.  There's a crash site in the mountains that has probably never been found.

His mother, Vallee Williams.  Her father was Mark Williams. Mark was the youngest child of Utah Mormon pioneer, Alexander Williams.  At one time Alexander was the sheriff of Provo County.  But he had a personality conflict with Brigham Young that led to him leaving Utah with his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Dack.  They first moved to Montana and eventually settled in Missouri.

For some reason, the Williams farm was inherited by Vallee and that is where my grandfather and grandmother lived with their children Wayne, William, Eleanor, Patty, and the fraternal twins, Robert and David. 

My grandfather, William Lester Miller, worked in open pit coal mine within walking distance north of the farmstead.  Dad remembers going down in the mine once.  It may have been when his Mom was sick to fetch him out.  After Vallee died, Grandpa Miller didn't work in mines anymore.  Eventually they moved a few miles away to a house that Grandpa built in the nearby unincorporated community of Galesburg.  Grandpa wasn't much of a farmer and preferred work as a carpenter.  Galesburg existed because of a nearby water-powered grain mill on the Spring River.

By the time the family moved there, Dad had gone off to support the war effort by joining the merchant marines.  He was an oiler in engine rooms of freighters that were the occasional target of German U-boats.

My father's older brother, Wayne was lost in WWII.  He was a pilot on a DC-3 flying supplies to the Chinese resistance.  He flew "over the hump", the Himalayan mountains, from India to western China.  His plane went out one day and never came back.  There's a gravestone in a militiary cemetery in Illinois(?) but I'm not sure that the crash site in the mountains was actually found and remains recovered.

There is a chest of drawers built by Mark Williams in the house at Fairland.  Vallee died of appendicitis when Dad was young [when?].  There may be a picture of her around but I may have seen it only once.

Dad's stepmom was Grace Boone Miller.  Grace is the only Grandma Miller I knew.  She worked as a nurse in the hospital at Webb City.  The house at Galesburg was the only Miller grandparents house I ever knew.

My grandfather's brother, Clifford, was married to Vallee's sister.  So both the William Miller and Clifford Miller families were descendants of Alexander Williams.

In my earliest memories of visiting the Miller grandparents house, it was pretty rustic.  There may have been an indoor toilet but the outhouse was still in use.  The water from the kitchen flowed through a ditch out to the garden.  They burned coal in a pot-bellied stove to heat the whole house.  The coal bin was in the basement so we kids were forbidden to ever go down there.  In all my life, I don't think I went into the basement of the house more than a couple times.  Upon visiting the house recently, it's clear that it was quite a modest house.  But in my childhood memories, it had plenty of room.

In September, 2012, Heidi and I were able to visit the private disused overgrown cemetery where Alexander and Elizabeth were buried.  Alexander died at 73 years of age and Mark was just a baby at the time.  The farmstead lies just east of highway 43.  The cemetery doesn't lie on farmstead land but just southwest of it in a grove of trees.  Someday, it would be nice if the family could work with the current landowners, who have graciously respected the burial site, to build some sort of durable structure around it to help preserve it for future generations.  These private cemeteries are just forgotten and plowed over when there is no one around that cares for them.