All My Ancestors

Despite the difficulty of choosing just one photograph for the 4th edition of Smile for the Camera, I decided to choose this one of my grandfather, on the left,  and his as yet unidentified compadre.

What in the world were these guys doing? I was very surprised when my dad’s cousin gave me this picture of her “Uncle Thad.” I’d never seen anything remotely like it in all the family pics I’d perused.   I love the seam down the front of his left leg–looks like it was sewn with twine.  This makes me know for sure he wasn’t married at this time because my grandmother would have mended this cut? tear? rip? so that it would have been invisible. They married in December 1913 in Lubbock, Texas.

My grandad was a character, I think.  When I knew him in the 1950s and 1960s, he smoked unfiltered Old Gold cigarettes, drank black coffee, and walked across two rooms to kick the television if it wasn’t getting good reception.   And liked it just a little too much if my brothers and I, or even my parents and I, got into any sort of disagreement. 

I think part of the attraction of this photo for me is that this is a part of my granddad’s life I never knew about, but he looks like such a guy–posing with is cane knife (I think) with a rip in his overalls.  As I’ve blogged about previously, there are formal studio photos of all of his siblings, but not of him.  Clowning around with a knife was evidently what it took to get him into the studio.

This is a photo of my great aunt and uncle, Inez Osborne and Noah Parker.  Noah died in 1946, before I was born, so I didn’t know him.  I always heard he was a big man and this picture certainly proves that.  Aunt Inez was probably only about 4′10″–they must have been quite a pair.

Aunt Inez lived to be over 100, dying in 1978.  This picture must have been taken around the time of their marriage in October 1913, in Lubbock, Texas, though I have no way of verifying that.  In 1916, they had a son named Raphael Winfield Osborne.  Raphael must have been named for Inez’ brother Raphael who had died as a 2 year old, in 1877, the same year Aunt Inez was born.  The older Raphael is referenced in their father’ Charles’ letter in an earlier post.  The Winfield is for Inez’ father’s middle name–he was Charles Winfield Osborne, author of the letter mentioned.  The Raphael named for his uncle also died young, in 1927 at age 11.

Part of the reason I blog is to write up what I know about my family.  Until I started working on this installment, I don’t think I ever realized that Aunt Inez was 35 before she married.  Interesting.  So now I go to investigate the rest of her siblings, and I find her next younger sister, Becky, married late as well–age 42.  Inez and Becky’s older sister never married.  The youngest sister married at age 23.  Most of the brothers married in their 30s–I knew the men in this family usually married “late.”  On the other hand, this may have been typical of the time.  Interesting to consider.

Noah and Inez’s daughter Mary is the person who helped me the most with this family’s research.  Mary grew up in Pampa, Gray County, Texas, where her grandparents, my great grandparents Charles and Gertrude, moved sometime between 1913 and 1920.  My dad, who was Mary’s cousin, grew up in Perryton, Ochiltree County, Texas, about 65 miles north of Pampa.  I’m still working on why my branch of the family didn’t seem to have much to do with the part of the family that was in Pampa–at least not in my lifetime.  It may be that everyone was just so busy making a living and rearing their families, there wasn’t time to socialize.   But I think there might be something more than that.  At any rate, I appreciate Mary’s giving me some pictures, some stories and some insight into the family.  I miss having Mary to ask.

Mary, her husband Ben, Noah, Inez, Raphael, Charles and Gertrude are all buried in Fairview Cemetery in Pampa.

I’m writing this as a response to Bill West’s invitation to a Geneablogger’s Picnic.  Bill blogs at West in New England. 

He provided these questions as starters:

• *What food does your family serve at picnics?
• *Are there traditional foods or family recipes?
• *Is there one particular relative’s specialty you wish you could taste again or one perfect picnic day you wish you could go back and relive?

At the risk of being as welcome as a herd of ants at the picnic, I have to say there really weren’t any picnics in my family. 

I passed up writing on Miriam’s AnceStories2 prompt about summer because I didn’t want to be too negative.  Summer is my least favorite season because I don’t like being hot.  As my brother says, “We come from a family that doesn’t like to sweat.” 

I think the root of this “problem” derives from the part of the country we’re from and the fact that our livelihood came from working outdoors.  It is just too hot in the Texas panhandle to enjoy a meal out of doors.  Most years, it gets hot in April and stays hot through October.  Here’s picture I have of some of my family making the attempt–doesn’t it look like fun? 

NOT.

The woman in the white dress on the right is my grandmother Rachel Cooper Osborne.  I believe the man just behind her whose face is hidden may be my grandfather–I’m basing my guess on the way he’s wearing his hat.  It looks familiar.  The women are her sisters-in-law–married to my granddad’s brothers, some of whom are in the background nearer the cars. 

I just don’t think this looks like a good time.  I don’t know the circumstances of this gathering–my guess is that it’s near Pampa since that’s where these couples lived at this time in their marriages.  It looks like they’re maybe getting ready to roast some marshmallows–can’t believe this crew would roast weiners.  I don’t know, but you can see how the surroundings just aren’t conducive to picnicking.

My dad wasn’t really a grouch, and he didn’t insist on many things, but he was adamant about not eating out of doors.  His view was that he worked outside all day and when he came home for a meal, he did not want to go back outside.  And don’t get me started on what he thought about picnic fare such as wieners or bologna.  He was a farmer to the core–he didn’t mind being outside dawn to dusk to do that work, but he certainly didn’t want to have a meal out of doors.  And his view of meat definitely didn’t include anything other than the standard cuts of beef he’d learned from his stock-raising relatives and his own experience.  We always had beef in the freezer and that’s what we ate.  (Those were the days before we were aware of the health and social consequences of raising and eating so much beef.)  My mom, with her German roots, occasionally sneaked some bologna into the house but trust me, it never appeared on my dad’s plate.

So my theory is that this is an important piece of info to record about my family.  I think we didn’t picnic because we didn’t live in a part of the country where picnicking was a part of the culture–the outdoors were part of our work life but not a big part of our recreational life. 

We had long hot summers–the closest to a picnic we had was when my mom and I would take dinner to the field during wheat harvest.  That was usually early June and it was often 100 degrees–we had the hot meal we’d spent the morning cooking loaded into the trunk of the car, we parked into the wind so the car wouldn’t overheat, and the men came in on their combines and trucks and used the shade the vehicles cast to eat.  (My mom had on gloves and wore long sleeves because she was so fair-skinned.)  My Uncle Pete always requested my mom’s smothered steak and there was always a lot of iced tea.  We served it unsweetened though nearly everyone put in varyig degrees of sugar.  There was always dessert–usually a cake or a cobbler.  It was too hot for ice cream–it wouldn’t have lasted a minute under those circumstances.  The men were grateful for the break and the meal and they put their dirty dishes back into the trunk and we were off, back to the house to clean up.  No paper plates or plastic utensils for us.  :-)  And, in response to Bill’s prompts, I’d only like to repeat this experience if I could be with my family for the event. 

In South Dakota, my grandmother usually fixed lunch at home for Granddad to come in for–which he didn’t need much of because Gran had fixed eggs, fried potatoes and pork chops for breakfast.  His fields were closer to the house than my dad’s were back in Texas.  The one thing I remember, too, about my South Dakota grandmother is that she had sewed some layers of fabric around some quart jars that she used for a “thermos” when she took tea or water out to Granddad in the field.  I don’t remember any of us ever having any official ice chests or picnic baskets. 

It really was a different world. 

Here’s my response to Miriam’s AnceStories2 prompt for this session, “The Doctor”  

*Who was your doctor or health practitioner when you were growing up?

When I was a child, my doctor was “Dr. Roy.” At that time, there were only 2 doctors in town, I think.  Dr. Kengle had his own hospital and had delivered me, but I found in the county history that he started practicing in 1929, so I think he was probably retired shortly after my birth.  I rdo emember being in that hospital as a child–one of my aunt’s worked there.  I don’t remember why I was there, I don’t think it was for an appointment.  But I remember that it was built more like house.  It had wooden floors.  The building was later the local USDA office–pretty appropriate for the small rural town I grew up in.

Dr. Roy’s hospital was on Main Street and was a 3-story building.  I can still smell what it was like.  One of my brothers now has an office in the basement of that building–a few weeks ago we went up to the first floor.  It really still looked the same–the pharmacy, the waiting room, the two halls that the receptionist sat in front of.  It was all office space now but I could still see the hospital there.  We rode up to the first floor on the elevator–probably the first one I’d ever seen as a child.  I remember going to visit my dad in that hospital–he’d had to have an appendectomy.  Hospital rules prevented me from visiting him, but for some reason, they brought him down on the elevator and I got to see him.  He was in a hospital bed and I don’t remember getting to be very close, but somehow just getting to see him and have him speak to me made me feel better.  It was amazing being in that space again–somewhere in the late 1960s the county built a new hospital on the outskirts of town–probably about the time Dr. Roy retired.

So with that move to a new hospital, we could no longer tell by driving down Main Street whether someone was having a baby.  On the top floor on the north end of the building was the labor and delivery room, according to my mom, who ought to have known.  If the lights were on, we knew there would soon be another citizen of our area.  It was one of those rituals we always went through when we drove down Main Street.

*How often did you go to the doctor? Every year for a check-up, or just when you were ill?

I remember going only when I was sick, which wasn’t very often, and when I had to get vaccinations for school.

*Did you have a lot of illnesses as a child? Or were you fairly healthy?

I must have been fairly healthy.  The only childhood illness I can remember having is the mumps in the second grade–I still have the “get well” cards my class made, drawn on that thick now-crumbling paper we used for art in our classrooms in those days.  Earlier, I know I also had the chickenpox and have the scars to prove it, but I don’t remember having them.  The family story is that I got them from my brother who’d been hospitalized with the croup–he came home with chickenpox.

*Did you have any injuries (broken bones) or surgeries? Have you ever had to be hospitalized?

Not as a child, and it’s a miracle, really.  My brother built tree houses and I would help him and then sort of take them over for my own purposes–usually reading.  And we would walk the top of the corrall fence, which was essentially a 2″ x 4″ several feet in the air.  Grandad’s barn was always fun, too–despite dire warnings, we climbed to the top of the hay bales stacked to the top of the barn.  And if he was in the field for the day, we ventured onto the roof of the barn.  I only had brothers and there were only boys in my neighborhood so playing rough was part of my growing up.  My brothers ended up with stitches but I managed to escape with neither stitches nor broken bones.

*What specialists did you have to see?

I never saw a specialist of any type and I don’t remember anyone else having to see one.  Except maybe my cousins might have seen one because they had to wear special shoes.  I’m not sure that as a child I was aware of specialists.

*Did you have to see an optometrist and/or wear glasses?

We always had health screenings at school.  I remember the year I couldn’t read the eye chart–I was in the fifth grade.  So off to Dr. Nowlin’s.  His son was in my class and the last time I checked, he was the town optometrist, following in his father’s footsteps.  My first glasses were pink cat frames.  So cool.

*Was going to the doctor a pleasant or unpleasant experience? Share both your most unpleasant and your favorite medical memories.

I was always scared when I had to go to the doctor.  Probably because it wasn’t any sort of regular event.  My most unpleasant childhood medical memory is getting my diphtheria vaccination.  Those were the years when they stuck your arm repeatedly and then an awful scab almost the size of a dime appeared.  I still remember thinking the nurse wasn’t ever going to stop sticking me and I find myself checking the upper arms of people about my age for a similar scar.

I don’t remember any particularly pleasant experiences, except I do have this vivid image of sitting in the waiting room at Dr. Roy’s hospital, reading magazines.  I think the floor was those green tiles of linoleum and the chairs were red vinyl–it was the 1950s after all.  In my mind, I think I remember reading an article about Twiggy, but she was hot in 1966 and that was kind of late for me to have been at that hospital.  I don’t know–I just remember there were always lots of interesting reads in the waiting room.  We always had the newspaper at home and we went to the library, but there weren’t the glossy magazines that were in the waiting room.  It was a peek into a world I didn’t have much access to.

*As an adult, how do your current medical experiences compare with those of your childhood?

Probably the biggest difference is that I try to do “preventative maintenance” with fairly regular visits to the doctor.  I’ve had surgeries, including knee replacements and a couple of C-sections, with two healthy sons to show for it.  I use health insurance which is not something my parents dealt with until I insisted.

*Do you still see the same doctor?

Dr. Roy is long deceased and I am long gone from my home town.  About 8 years ago, my physician of 30 years retired–much to my distress.  :-)  He certainly deserved some time with his family without the stress of his practice, but I felt pretty abandoned.  I shopped around until I found a good replacement–I was careful to look for one younger than me (easier and easier to do these days) so I don’t have to go through the retirement trauma again.  

*What kinds of health problems are prevalent in your family? Are there any genetic diseases of which your relatives should be made aware? How have you attempted to avoid these risks or diseases?

The two diseases I know of that may be genetic are arthritis and heart disease.  I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis at a fairly young age (35) when I weighed what I should.  I had to have my first knee replacement 20 years later–again, a bit young for such an intervention.  My weight is more than it should be, but I also know that my dad and many of his cousins had knee and/or hip replacements.  Both of their grandmothers were in wheel chairs because of arthritis.  When I first visited him for my knees, the osteopath asked me if there was some sort of cartilege disease in my family–there very well could be but as far as I know, it has never been diagnosed.

My paternal grandmother’s family has strokes and my paternal grandfather’s family has heart disease.  That said, my grandmother lived to be 83 (she did have a stroke a few years before her death) and my grandfather lived to be 93.  And my grandfather smoked unfiltered Old Gold cigarettes until his late 80s. 

And then there’s my mother who had breast cancer despite there being none in the family.  Her mother lived to be 92!

So I eat healthy and attempt to be active.  I’m not as active as I should be but I’m doing better since my knees no longer hurt.  My weight is more than it should be, but my “numbers” are good–no high blood pressure and decent cholesterol.  I cannot discount fate’s role in my health.

*Are there any doctors, surgeons, specialists, nurses or other health practitioners in your family, or in your ancestry?

I have a sister-in-law and a niece who are nurses–they do not currently practice, but it’s nice to have them available as “resources.”

My fourth great-grandfather was evidently a country doctor.  William Greene Ball was born about 1808 in New York City, trained for his medical career in Clark County, Indiana, and practiced for many years in Warren County, Iowa until his death in 1881.  He’s referred to in the family as “Dr. Ball.”  :-)  I have a couple of his “recipes” for various ailments.

*Are there any stories about certain medical problems or injuries, or about interactions with medical practitioners that have been handed down through the generations?

My dad was always proud to have had Dr. Denton Cooley (whom his staff called “LJ” for “Little Jesus”) do a valve replacement on his heart.  My mother’s family didn’t have much use for “doctoring.”  My grandad on that side had a pacemaker implanted and never went back to the doctor–until about 25 years later when the battery was apparently run down.  And the other family story is of “Ol Doc Smith” who came to the family home in Beaver County, Oklahoma, in the early 1930s when my great-grandmother drank carbolic acid.  He left a signed death certificate there because he didn’t think she’d live until morning but left instructions to try feeding her raw eggs to cause her to throw up the acid.  She lived through that episode but was untimately successful in taking her life.  I don’t know where Doc Smith was based, but I do know my grandparents lived several miles out in the middle of nowhere, so he must have truly been a country doctor who made house calls on those dusty roads.

Thank you again to Miriam Midkiff for her prompt down another memory lane.

This post is written in respnse to Miriam Midkiff’s prompt at her AnceStories2 site.

I have bad teeth.

Who knows why?  My dad had terrible teeth–he said they were “chalky.”  Supposedly he didn’t assimilate calcium.  I don’t know who made that diagnosis but I do know he didn’t have good teeth.  He had dentures fairly early.  I don’t know if he went to the dentist as a child, but I doubt it.  He was one of 8 children, born in 1929, and reared in a fairly rural area.  I just don’t think he would have been taken to a dentist–there may not have even been one there.  (Isn’t it amazing what you don’t know about your own parents and hometown once you start this sort of a project?)

I do remember being taken to the dentist as a child.  I guess somehow my mom got the word that it was important–I happen to know her own mother didn’t go until she was well into her 70s.  And then the dentist pulled the wrong tooth!  I’m pretty sure she didn’t go back.  My aunt, another daughter of my grandmother who didn’t go to the dentist until she was 70+, was also an adult before she went to the dentist.  When he told her to spit, she didn’t realize she needed to lean over the little bowl at the side.  I’m sure that dentist wondered where this rube had come from.  My mom inherited her own mother’s good teeth but she didn’t pass them down to me. 

I do remember Mom taking my brother and I to the dentist’s office–it was across the street from the library–probably my most important landmark in my hometown.  I really don’t remember anything about the visit except that the dentist was a youngish family man, new to town, and his name was Kelso.  This would have been in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  I started school in 1956, so maybe I went as a part of getting ready for school, though I’m not all that sure he was there that early.  Perryton was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else–there were generations of families there and of course the “new dentist” was a novelty in town.

This prompt has been rolling around in my head since I first read it.  I had to think long and hard about how I wanted to address this posting.  The difficult part is that what I remember most about my dental history is that Dr. Kelso and his entire family–his wife and their two children–were killed in a plane crash.  I had somewhere in my memory that it happened during a holiday but I had no idea of a precise date. 

I started looking to see what I could find to document my faint memories.  Imagine my surprise when I found the 4 Kelso death certificates indexed as 27 November 1963 for the date of death–just 4 days after the JFK assassination.  No wonder the memory from that time is blurred and dark.  I was in the 7th grade in November 1963,  12 years old going on 13.  

I didn’t go back to the dentist until I was in high school, by which time I had 16 cavities!  I remember the dentist sounding pretty shocked when he delivered that news–as was I.  He filled those teeth, 4 at a time, over the next few months.  I ended up with a mouth full of silver fillings.  Shortly after that, I had to have my wisdom teeth out.  That same dentist took them out, two at a time, the first pair while I was still in high school and the last two after I was in college.  (As I recall, the reason mom didn’t take me there to begin with was that he was an older practitioner and had a reputation for being kind of rough.  But he did so much to preserve my teeth, I’ve always been grateful.  I don’t remember him being hard on my mouth–I think I had a fairly realistic understanding that filling 16 cavities wasn’t going to be a cake-walk.  I’d already been on too many of those.)  I remember steeling myself for having my wisdom teeth pulled, but it really wasn’t bad.  I begged my mom to let me go out the evening after I’d had the first 2 removed–I think I won that one and don’t remember any ill effects.

As it happens, I went to the dentist today and he reminded me that I have one more of those “old silver fillings.”  I started going to my current dentist, whom I love, in the mid 1980s–he was fresh out of dental school and he was amazed that those fillings from 1967 or so were still in there and doing as well as they were.  The worst tooth, one of my molars, which ended up with more filling than tooth, plus 3 others, now have crowns.  And there was a root canal or two along the way.  But one of those fillings, now 40+ years old, is still serving the purpose. 

I don’t mind going to the dentist–I guess I just made up my mind that I was going to spend lots of time in the dental chair and I might as well deal with it.  Nothing will ever be as bad as going to that dentist who found 16 cavities.  My dental hygienist today asked me if I drank coffee, and if I flossed.  I do drink coffee–lots of it, so my teeth show it.  And I try to floss but my crowns are so tight it usually breaks the floss.  So I brush religiously and use tartar control toothpaste and do pretty well.  I haven’t had a cavitiy in years–course, it’s sort of difficult to get cavities in those crowns.  Thank goodness.

As I’ve said here before, I grew up in the Texas panhandle. Needless to say, the region is not known for its recreational water spots.

Here’s my mom on an outing with her girlfriends–they’re wading–barely. This is about the extent of the water in the area of the panhandle I know.

There is a picture somewhere in my family of me, my brother and my aunt when we were about 5, 4, and 9 (respectively). We all have on swimming suits that are way too huge for us. I certainly don’t remember the occasion, but I do know that both my granddad and my uncle carried that photo for years. We were standing in the driveway of my South Dakota grandparents’ home–South Dakota was the only place we ever swam.

More frequently we fished.

There was the truly old-fashioned swimming hole down the road from my grandmother’s country store. We often spent entire afternoons in that lake–the Hilmer kids from next door to the store could usually be persuaded to come along, or vice versa, and we had a lot of fun there. (That’s Doug H. with my brother Thad in the photo above.)

Someone had rigged up a diving board–I, of course, was too chicken to jump. And if you got to close to the underside of the board, you were at risk of getting leeches. I suppose it was actually a fairly clean lake as it was spring-fed, but when I think back on it now, I’m surprised we survived. There was a very small island a few yards out–I wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to make it out there except floating in my inner-tube. And in those days, it really was the inner tube from a tire that we used. If we could wrangle a tube from a tractor tire, we’d hit the big time! There was gravel in the bottom of the lake so it really wasn’t a bad place to swim.

Here’s the best picture I have of someone in my family in a swimming suit:

It’s my mom, and I think this photo was taken on her honeymoon. Mom and Dad married 21 May 1950 in Beaver County, Oklahoma, and came to Oklahoma City for their honeymoon. I suspect that’s Lake Overholser in the background.

My mother had red hair and the palest skin you can imagine. She really really didn’t like water–she’d never learned to swim and it terrified her. It’s just as well my brothers and I did most of our swimming in the summers we spent with grandparents. She also sunburned through her clothes so this picture is pretty amazing. But it was her honeymoon, and she was very young, so I’m sure allowances can be made.

But I love this picture of her–I’d saved it as “Bathing Beauty Mom” in my files. I’m really surprised it survived her culling of the family pictures, but I’m really glad it did.

Written for the 49th Carnival of Genealogy.

This is my great Uncle Lloyd. I feel so fortunate to have gotten to get acquainted with him in the last years of his life. I’d always heard about Uncle Lloyd who’d done a stint in a prison camp during the war. But he and Aunt Marge lived in Houston and then retired to Oregon so I didn’t get to see them all that much when I was growing up. Aunt Marge was my (paternal) Grandmother Osborne’s youngest sister, and she was married to Uncle Lloyd.

Uncle Lloyd was the only survivor of his B-17 bomber group. They were on their 4th mission, flying over Holland when they were shot down.

Recently, Footnote.com put up Missing Crew Reports as part of their holdings. I searched on Uncle Lloyd’s name, not knowing what to expect, but up came the report for his crew. All the names are there as well as Uncle Lloyd’s account of the 11 January 1944 incident. Perhaps the most poignant portion of this packet of materials is the “Individual Casualty Questionnaire” that Uncle Lloyd had to complete for each of his crew. He had to write “I think he was killed by enemy gunfire in ship” 9 times, once on each form for each crew member. Once it is crossed out and replaced by “He probably was killed when ship crashed.” This last was about the navigator who had opened his chute by mistake in the nose of the plane and couldn’t be persuaded to jump when it was time to go.

This packet of materials was evidently sent to him about 2 years after he returned home. His letter is dated 15 March 1946 from Blanco, Texas. He and Aunt Marge went to the Hill Country of Texas to a sheep ranch for some recovery time. Aunt Marge has written about the healing time they spent there in her own memoirs.

In 1979, Uncle Lloyd responded to another grand-niece’s request for an interview of a combat veteran. It was the impetus that let Uncle Lloyd finally talk to us about his war experiences. He eventually wrote Every Twenty-Nine Seconds which tells of his experiences during World War II. He said one of the first things he recalled was being in the nose of the B-17 before daylight. There were about 6 of the big birds ahead of his on the runway awaiting take off, and they were supposed to clear the runway every twenty-nine seconds. He tells about seeing the Zuider Zee as he was floating down out of his “ship,” and the Dutch woman whose thatched roof he landed on giving him gingerbread and milk before some of Goering’s Youths took him into custody.

He included some correspondence he had with some of the crew members’ family members and with a Dutch researcher. The researcher asked Uncle Lloyd if he would go again. Here’s his reply:

As terrible as it was, it was the price that we had to pay to keep America free. Yes, I would go again. If we had not gone, this present generation would probably not be allowed to ask questions to search for the truth.

The freedom to ask those questions was really really important to Uncle Lloyd. He was a gentle, funny, loving man. This Memorial Day I’ve been thinking about him a lot.

It was a 1963 Chevrolet Impala SuperSport convertible, with a 409 engine. It was navy blue with a baby blue interior. I think the top was white.

I suppose as a female I shouldn’t have cared much about cars. But I did. I had a girlfriend whose brothers were proud of their mechanical skills and their restored antique cars, and I picked up some car knowledge from them. Plus this was the era of the original Mustang and the GTO, so there was a lot of car talk going around.

Additionally, I grew up in the Texas panhandle, where the highways are seemingly never-ending, disappearing off into those unreachable horizons, and vehicles are important. It goes without saying that the cars had to be powerful because things aren’t close together out there, and when you had to go to the neighboring town, like maybe sneaking off to see your boyfriend, you wanted to get there and back home in a reasonable amount of time. Amarillo, the nearest town of any size, was 2 hours away–we didn’t measure in miles, it was too depressing. Rather, we used time.

My grandad bought that car for my brother and I. I asked my brother once why he thought Grandad took us squirmy, loud kids fishing–understand that our grandad wasn’t the stereotypical warm, fuzzy grandpa–he swore like a sailor and he was probably more than a little bipolar. My brother said, “I think he liked us.” Leave it to my brother–a man of few words. So I guess Grandad bought us the car for the same reason.

I’ll never forget walking across the big round gravel driveway, out to the granary, and around to the back to see the car. There it sat out in the middle of the South Dakota prairie, a sort of enigmatic picture. The granary was ancient and held my great-grandfather’s carpentry tools. And then there was this gorgeous car. I still wasn’t clear on how I got so lucky, but I was willing to deal with the ambiguity.

I don’t remember how we got the car home to Texas. I guess we must have driven it all 640 miles home, but I don’t remember that as well as driving it back and forth to college. You couldn’t have a more impractical car than that one in this part of the world–it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Riding with the top down was almost an impossibility because you risked baking. Anytime it rained, of course, if you were driving at any speed, it leaked. But who cared? We were young and the car was fast.

My brother and I were driving home from college one night–actually early morning– through the back roads in rural Texas. From nowhere, there was a sheriff or a highway patrol–my brother got a ticket for going 121 mph! The thought of that gives me cold chills now, but at the time, we were pumped about beating our time driving home from school. That car could fly.

There are other special cars in my memory–the 1959 Bel Aire sedan I drove when I first got my drivers license at 14! And used it to break a guy’s ladder that was sticking out the back of his pickup the first time I drove it to the grocery store. I think this was the car that we had air-conditioning put in–it was a unit under the dash in the middle–it froze your shins if you were riding in the middle, but what a luxury we thought that was.

About 3 months after I went to college, Dad bought me a used Chevy of some sort–one time having to come pick me up at school and get me back somehow impressed on him that he needed me to have a car. When I graduated from college in 1973, he bought me a new car–the first new car I’d ever owned. I think he was a little disappointed that I wanted a Toyota Celica, but he got it for me since that’s what I wanted. My high school boy friend’s 1956 Olds 88 (the tales that car could tell!), my Grandad’s ‘48 Ford pickup I learned to drive in, with an in-the-floor shift, my brother’s first car that was a really a pick-up, a family Buick that kept catching on fire, my Uncle Larry’s’57 Chevy with Hank Williams songs on the radio, my grandmother’s circa 1954 purple Pontiac–all cars that are strong in my memory.

But they can’t top the Chevy SS convertible–I loved that car.

OK, so we’ve got the Carnival of Genealogy and now we have a Genealogy Parade. Bill West has challenged us to enter a band or a float. Since it’s a virtual project and I really don’t have to stuff kleenexes through chicken wire (trust me, I’ve worked on my share of actual floats!), I’m entering a float.

When I was growing up, I was part of the school band that marched every year in the annual celebration parade in August. This was at the top of the Texas panhandle, and it was HOT!! The only uniforms our band had were wool, but we were at least exempted from wearing the heavy jacket–we could wear a white shirt. The main street is part of state highway 83, and it is long. It was always a big deal. Imagine my chagrin when after college, I heard the husband of another hometown girl describe the parade as the “tractor parade.”

However, he was probably right. I only knew my little part of the parade, and we were having a great time. But being an agricultural area, there were lots of tractors–the implement dealerships used the occasion to showcase their new products and lots of the floats were also pulled by tractors.

So all that to say, my float has to have a tractor, and it also has to have wheat. The area where I grew up now raises other crops–maize, or milo, and soybeans. But in the 50s and 60s, most of the crops were wheat. And I also descend from the Germans from Russia who brought turkey red wheat to the Great Plains. So there’s gotta be wheat.

The music has to be old-fashioned country-western. One of my uncles played in a western-swing band–maybe we’ll use his recording as part of the music But Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb and Ray Price and Skeeter Davis are the people who are singing when I think of my family history. I also have relatives who are accomplished musicians in other genres, an organist who also installs and re-builds organs, for example, but I think the country-western respresents the most people.

That about covers it.

My only non-rural, non-Southern family originated in New York City. But even the descendants of that family ended up in Arkansas–he was a physician, but he also was a founding member of the Agricultural Society in Warren County, Iowa. So we have wheat and country music and a tractor. Not all that exciting but very representative. I suppose I could try to put in some fire and hail to liven things up–we did lose a wheat field and a truck one year to a fire and it was always touch and go as to whether we would be “hailed out.”

I’ll have to work on the weather issue. It might liven things up a bit.

I’m late this week doing Miriam’s “assignment.” I think I spent too much time worrying about the prompt from last week–about diversity. From reading her blog, it looks like I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t particularly comfortable writing about my family’s views on social diversity and civil rights. It’s not a pretty picture and I like to think I’ve moved past those opinions.

So I am writing about games because we played lots of them.

*Did you have a regular game night or family night?

No. Our family of 5 didn’t play games all that much, but when we got together with other family members, we always played cards (with grandparents) or dominoes or Monopoly (with cousins).

*What games (board, card, dice, or acting out) did your family enjoy? Was there a favorite you played time after time?

I wish I had a dime for every game of Pitch, Gin, and Spades I’ve played. We had such fun–my husband had never played cards and when he got acquainted with my grandparents, he learned to play. My grandmother thought he was unnaturally lucky and would throw salt at him or back around his chair to make him think she could break his luck. The rest of us were usually collapsed on the table with laughter and my husband was just amazed that my grandmother could be that crazy.

We also played Yahtzee a lot, Aggravation (marbles), Sorry, and also dominoes. I remember learning to play Clue and playing it obsessively one South Dakota summer with my friend Lois. We’ve also played our share of Trivial Pursuit. This past Thanksgiving, we played a game called Apples to Apples which was great fun–I gave it to a couple of people for Christmas.

*Did your family have a family or game room? What was it like? What kind of game equipment did it have (foosball, pool table, etc.)?

No game room. We just set up the card tables in the living room or den–my brother has made an Aggravation board, and he’s also made this cool 8 sided, felt covered topper for a card table for cards or dominoes.

*Do you have any funny stories or a particular memory (good or bad) that stands out of game-playing time?

See the story about my grandmother and my husband above.

*Were there any games you disliked? Why?

To this day, I don’t like to play Monopoly because of bad memories. The great aunt and uncle we lived near by had one daughter and 8 grandkids. Those grandkids knew how to rumble, and when they came to visit, I inevitably got roped into playing Monopoly with the boys (there were only 2 girls in the bunch) and my brothers. I was sure they were cheating–which, translated, probably meant I was losing. Later, my husband and sons played Monopoly–I wouldn’t play–and the same level of emotion often “erupted” from that game. So I avoid it. Let’s face it–I work for non-profits.

*Were there any games that were not allowed to be played? Why?

The only thing I can remember is that my grandmother went through phases of thinking it wasn’t “ok” to play cards. It sort of depended on what preacher she’d heard recently. As she got older, and also as we begged her, she would play with gusto.

My husband had never played cards nor had he played any game with dice. He said his mother would make a spinner for any game that required the throw of dice to move ahead. He soon mastered both cards and dice. Don’t tell his mom.

*Did your parents have a regular night when they would play games or cards with friends or extended family?

No, though I do have a very early memory of going to some people’s house who were high-school friends of my parents. They played cards, but I only remember that happening once.

*Did you ever have game nights with groups, clubs, or neighbors on a regular basis?

No.

*Was game playing associated with certain annual events, like holidays, birthdays, or vacation times?

Our game playing tends to be centered around the holidays when we were all together. The past few years, it is Thanksgiving.

*What kinds of snacks and beverages were enjoyed during game playing?

The times we played with grandparents, we often had popcorn. (See my story about popping corn with my grandfather and friend here.) My granddad was also particularly fond of ice cream, to “cool your belly.” My sisters-in-law usually have some yummy snacks–almonds, M&Ms, and those butter-soaked crackers with chocolate chips melted on top and sprinkled with nuts.

*Were there prizes awarded to game winners or even to losers? What kinds? Did everyone chip in towards purchasing the prizes?

No prizes. Just bragging rights.

*Did your family or you ever do jigsaw puzzles? What’s the largest–in terms of number of puzzle pieces–jigsaw puzzle you’ve completed?

We don’t do this so much any more but we used to. I remember having one one year that was too big to fit on the card-table. One of the doctor’s office I go to often has a jig-saw puzzle out on a table–I often find myself working on it and thinking about the times we used to do them as a family.

*What did you do with completed puzzles? Did you display them or simply put them away?

They went back in the box and probably then to the thrift shop.

*What about puzzles such as crosswords, cryptograms, or others found in puzzle books? Are you a Sudoku fiend?

My mom and I used to race to see who could get to the crossword puzzle in the newspaper first. And it was a standing joke in our family that Dad knew the most esoteric things. When I asked my own husband some question about a long-ago political party, and he knew the answer was “Locofoco,” I knew the torch had been passed.

One of my brothers likes crosswords and the other likes cryptograms. One of my sons does Sudoku–I’ve avoided them as I’m afraid of getting another obsession.

*Did you ever go to an arcade and play pinball machines or other arcade-style games? Or did you ever shoot pool?

There were pinball machines at the bowling alley in the little town where I grew up, and the bowling alley was one of the approved places to go. I liked playing pinball. I don’t remember playing pool until I went to college, and then it was at the home of the dean of the fairly conservative college I attended. fun!

*Do you remember seeing your first video game, either in an arcade or on a television (Pong, Atari or early Nintendo games)?

I remember playing Pong on an early Apple personal computer. We had one in the department where I taught–it was out for anyone to play so we could “get over” any anxiety we had about computers. What a good idea.

*What kinds of video games did you like to play, if any? Do you play any now (gaming station or handheld)?

I quit playing video games a long time ago–I used to play Mario Brothers–on my computer. Those games have long out-stripped my abilities. This past Christmas holiday, I was laying in bed, listening to my now adult sons out in the living room playing Wii–they were having a good time and I was having a good time listening to them.

*What was your first computer game? Do you ever play computer games now, either on your computer or online?

I think my first computer game was probably Pong. I do occasionally play Bejeweled, Text-Twist, Freecell, Solitaire, and Zuma–mostly games my son installed on my computer and got me hooked on. I don’t play online. Too chicken.

*What about the present? Does your family or do you personally play games or do puzzles? Do you participate in game nights with others, such as poker or Bunco?

We tend to play games only at holidays when we’re all together. My oldest son and I occasionally do crosswords–

*Here are some other game ideas to write about: lawn games (horseshoes, croquet, badminton); kid games (marbles, jacks); betting, casino games, and bingo; party games (pinata, pin the tail on the donkey), etc.

I loved playing jacks as a kid. I can still smell the heat coming off the building and sidewalk where we sat in second grade playing game after game of jacks at recess. I was pretty good–I think I had fairly good hand-eye coordination. I can remember playing horseshoes occasionally in South Dakota–I could never get the hang of it. I did master shuffleboard–the best minister at our little church when I was a teen put a shuffleboard game and a ping-pong table in the church basement. I wonder how I kept from letting loose with the swear words then?

*What do you know about your parents’, grandparents’, or perhaps even great-grandparents’ game playing? Do you remember them saying anything about games they played when they were young?

My maternal grandparents played cards. And they also talked about playing baseball and basketball at their country school. My grandmother was supposedly pretty good–or maybe it was just my granddad’s romantic memories. He always talked about how good she was. Somehow I don’t think my paternal grandparents would have played games–but I just don’t know.

*Do you have any photos of either your present or your childhood families playing games? What about ancestral photos?

I have lots of pics of us playing cards and various other games. Here’s one from last Thanksgiving–Aggravation on the homemade board. Sadly, no ancestral photos.