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.