My First 56 Years

When I was a little girl around the age of 3, I remember we lived in a big 2 story house on country hwy 371.The small town of Faucett was about 5-7 miles to the north and Wallace was a few miles to the south and east with Dearborn about 3 miles south and 5 miles to the west. The house was tall and white with peeling paint and big tall trees all around. My first memories are outside playing with the kittens and trying to potty train them as I probably was being trained at that time as well. The only problem with that was I was holding them over the barrels of pop bottles my brothers and sisters had collected along the highway and other country roads. My brother Clyde who was about 20 yrs older than me caught me and yelled something about not doing that so I ran into the house to my mother's waiting arms screaming and crying because Clyde had yelled at me. To say I was a spoiled brat was putting it mildly and my brothers and sisters didn't hesitate to point that out to me and anyone that would listen, as if my actions didn't give it away anyway. I had heard stories that the old house was haunted and that drunks would wander along the road wanting a hand out or their car had broken down. We didn't have a telephone or a TV then so we couldn't have called anyone to help them even if they weren't "unsavory" as Daddy would have said.
We lived in the old house about a year before moving but I remembered another older brother Orville who was younger than Clyde had asked the landlord's son if he could give us kids a ride on his horse. The horse was big and shiny black and the most beautiful animal I'd ever seen in my short 3 yrs of life. Orville picked me up and sat me on the back of him and told me to hold on tight. I did and closed my eyes the whole time we were flying all around the property. When we got back I was still alive as miracles would have it and I remembered saying to my brothers and sisters still on the ground, “Wow, he went fast!" All my life we memorized the order of when all the kids were born, first there was Audrey, born in 1925 and when she was 17 had run off with a man about 40 yrs older than herself. Mama said she couldn't keep her home when Dud Deets came around. She had 3 children all older than me, Pete the wild unmanageable, then came Charley whom Audrey called Sugar, he was the nice one, sweet and skinny like Pete but not as mean and onerous. Then came Cindy, a daddy’s girl, and spoiled like me. They lived in Kansas City around Riverside. Next there was Donald, he too was gone and married with a daughter named Donna Mae, later he had another daughter named Suzie who was 3 yrs younger than me who said "Uh huh Donna Mae!" all the time. My sister and I used to mock her just to make her mad. Donald was the oldest son and thought he knew it all and was entitled to just for that reason. He was stubborn and hot headed just like Daddy and when those two would get into an argument sparks and a stick of wood would go flying! He came over one day to show Daddy that new chain saw he'd bought at Sears and Roebuck, of course they had to start it up right there in the living room. I was afraid of loud noises and I hated that thing. I screamed and cried to make them stop it but of course they had to take it apart to see how it ran, the awful smell of gas fumes and burning oil filled up the place and I didn't stop screaming until they shut it off. Donald also had two sons that came after Suzie, Donnie Jr. and Stephen, the baby. Thelma was the next in line. She had met a trucker when the family lived in Horton, Ks. She moved to Papillion, Nebraska and bought a new house. We went to visit one time and saw all the modern conveniences, kitchen cabinets, appliances etc. Some things we never had or would have for many years to come. Thelma had 4 children, Larry was the oldest and one year older than me, then came David, Karen and Steve. She was married to Bob Burke and only came to visit a few times a year.
Clyde, I've already spoken about, was born in 1932.He is also hotheaded and stubborn and has a mean streak, thinning black hair that only lasted to the end of his twenties. He stayed single until 1961 when he met and married a girl named Mary, still in high school and pregnant with his first child a girl they named Pamela Ann. Pammy was a cute little girl with long curly dark brown hair and the biggest blue eyes. I played with her and made her laugh. I always got to go with them when they wanted Pam's picture taken because I could get her to laugh by making a face and saying, "Duh"! Mary and Clyde got along like cats and dogs. One day when they were driving to KC in their convertible they were arguing as usual and Pammy was sitting between the bucket seats riding like she was atop a horse. They didn't have seatbelt laws or car seat laws in the early 60's.Clyde slammed on the brakes at a stop sign or light no one ever really knew the whole truth of the story but Pammy fell in the back floor board flat on her back where the transmission hump rose up from the floorboard. She said she couldn't move either arms or legs. She was rushed to the hospital somewhere in KC then sent to Columbia Mo to a treatment center there. She finally regained the use of her legs after many months in that hospital but arms were left limp at her side and her hands and fingers limp and claw-like. Today she works and types! I cannot tell you how she does it because I haven't seen her for at least two decades but we see her mother every once in a while. Clyde and Mary divorced in 1967 when he found her with another man she'd met in a bar. Clyde went on to remarry a girl named Barbara who was our next door neighbor and my best friend. She was only three years older than me. She too was pregnant but had a miscarriage. She went on to have two more children David and Brenda who Clyde rarely saw and I wouldn't know them if I saw them on the street. She couldn't take his temper either and they divorced in 1969 or 1970.
Orville is next in line behind Clyde. He met a girl named Betty Lou when we moved from the big old house on 371 to Wallace. She too was pregnant and named their first born Orville Jr. But Orville just called him "Snake".They had seven or eight children all together and Orville had a nickname for them all. I don’t think I ever knew their real names.
Floyd, I was told was a handful. He kept running away from home and they'd notify the police and they'd bring him back and he'd just run away again. He married a girl from Platte City, a town just a ways north of KC. Her name was Delores, just like my first name, although I always went by the name of Darlene which is my middle name. Floyd worked for the 7-up company driving a truck delivering 7-up to stores etc. He liked to go hunting deer with his buddies from work. He and Delores had three sons, Mike, Bruce and Kenny in that order. When I was fifteen or so I would stay with them over summer vacation and baby sit. Michael being the oldest was a handful like his daddy. He was tall and skinny with blond hair. He was always pulling and grabbing at me until I told his Mom. That took care of that. Bruce seemed ok when he was little. He was quieter than Mike, the middle child. I had heard about twenty or thirty years later alcohol and drugs took his life. To this day I haven't heard what happened to Kenny. Delores died a few years back from heart problems. I remember when I was about two years old she was studying to be a hairdresser and Mom and Daddy took us to their apartment when they were first married so Delores could fix my sister's hair.Delores yelled at me to stay away and as usual I kept going around and around the chair making her a "nervous wreck" as I remember it. The victim in the chair was my sister Floy Mae.
Bobby Loren was my favorite brother because he was the youngest boy and stayed the longest. He always was prone to accidents. One day when the family was cutting wood to heat the house, Bobby was sitting in the back of the wagon holding a big glass water bottle in his lap. He was sitting on the edge of the end of the wagon and daddy hit a bump in the road and out flew Bobby. The glass broke and sliced him in the abdomen. He required quite a few stitches but since this was before I was born the details are a little sketchy. He also has a heart anomaly where his heart is close to the skin. You could just watch his heart beat every time he'd raise his shirt I'd look at it and watch it beat. He was told if he was hit there it could kill him. Although getting hit in the heart area couldn’t be good for anybody. He went to the army, signed up, he and our cousin Alvey. Alvey was one brick short of a load and didn't pass the physical but of course Bobby did. He left in 1963 and wrote letters from Soul Korea. He said he liked Tokyo and said it was just like the states! He married Barbara Ann when he got out. Daddy wasn't too keen on Barbara Ann because her grandfather had come from Mexico and could hardly speak English. Daddy was definitely a bigot but he was born in 1900 and was raised that way with the times. Bobby and Barbara had a boy named Timmy and a girl after Barbara's mother Patricia. They had another son named Russell. A Few years’ back Bobby had had a heart attack and needed angioplasty. He was pretty pale when I went to see him in ICU but Bobby was always a joker and made some remark when I asked him "what are you doing here?" Bobby was kind of quiet and Mama would get so mad when Orville and Clyde would take him to the Sunset Inn. That was a little bar about a mile from our house. I don't think Bobby was much older than eighteen and not allowed to drink by law and by Mama's rules. I remember Bobby telling me a story about coming home late one night and running over something in the road. The next day one of the town's drunks, there were many, had decided to lie down in the road and sleep it off. One car before Bobby had run over him and then Bobby had come along and hit him, not realizing it was a person. He was alright though but his legs were broken and had to be amputated. He lived the rest of his life in a wheel chair. No one ever knew who did it, or why he was in the road in the first place.
After Bobby's angioplasty his wife Barbara found out she needed one too. She thought it would be simple since Bobby came through it ok and she was several years younger than he. Barbara died on the operating table. There was a lawsuit and many things had gone wrong, too gruesome to mention here. Kathryn Lorene was the next child born to Mary and Cecil Dennis. Talk about stubborn and quick to temper! Always dressed like one of the boys. She had long flowing dark hair and blue-green eyes. Built muscular, was feminine when the time called for it. She married Johnny Warren I believe in 1963.I was only ten years old. I liked Johnny he was so nice but he could tick Kathryn off just by looking her way. Of course anyone could. She had two sons little Johnny and James whom she called Jaime. Theresa came along before James a year or so later since Johnny and Theresa were about 9 months apart. Johnny decided the secretary was easier to get along with so he didn't come home for about a week and left Kathryn and the kids to starve in their home in KC. Kathryn was forced to go door to door to ask for food and milk for the kids. The two littlest ones were still in diapers. She couldn't pay the bills. I don't think Johnny ever came home again after that, they were divorced and Johnny married Ann. Kathryn moved in with Audrey in the trailer park in Riverside. There was a small house just barely big enough for two people let alone a mother and three little kids. There were rats and one bit Johnny on the finger. James ended up with a huge ring worm on the top of his head; the doctor had to shave it and gave her some ointment to put on it. She met a man named Marvin and he finally took her in but he had six kids of his own. He had told her if she gave her kids back to Johnny then he would give his kids to his ex-wife and they could live together and he would marry her. Johnny had been calling and trying to coax her to give her kids up but she didn't want to. Marvin finally convinced her it was the only way they could survive because she wasn't working and couldn't, with taking care of her kids and his kids too. His kids were older and could take care of themselves at home and her kids were little and couldn't. She decided that maybe the best thing for her to do would be to give Johnny the kids, he was more able to take care of them than she was, the man she had planned to marry said he would give his kids to his ex-wife didn't he? So the pick up was scheduled and Johnny came and took her kids never to be seen or heard from again after he had promised to bring them back on regular visits and during summer break. Her kids grew to hate their "fictitious mother" as they couldn't remember her and only heard what Johnny and Ann chose to tell them. Marvin had met another and had no intentions of giving up his kids at all. We, Mama and I got the phone call in 1972 that she had to come home. She had no place to live and Marvin was kicking her out. Ronnie and I, Floy Mae's husband, went down to pick her up and she lived with me and Mama on Nebraska St in the city of St Joseph.
Mary Ann is nine years older than me born in 1944.Two years younger than Kathryn, tall and thin with brownish blond hair and a slight buck to her upper teeth. She also has a stubborn streak but not as quickly to anger as Kathryn. She met a stock boy at the grocery store in Dearborn and fell in love in an instant. Kathryn and Floy Mae also had a crush on him, Bobby, who they later found out, his father owned the store. Nickle's Market was a small grocery which they eventually sold and opened an even smaller store in Faucett. He had two sisters, Barbara and Nancy the youngest. Nancy was a year older than me and was a cheerleader at the school at Faucett I attended. She was much more approachable than her older sister Barbara whom Mary Ann said was so stuck up and so much "better" than we were since we were so poor we couldn't pay attention. Mary Ann and Bobby dated off and on about a year when in 1962 they married. A big fancy wedding they paid for and I was not allowed to attend because "I had no manners and was too dirty to live".They tried for the next year to get pregnant and finally on September 24th 1963 little Debbie was born. Little Debbie was a Tom Boy and didn't care to do much else but read books which her mother thought was a waste of time. When little Debbie went to kindergarten I babysat almost every weekend. When Debbie went to bed at night she would sleep walk and scare me to death by sneaking up behind me making no sound and reenacting scenes that had happened during the day at school. I was in the bathroom in their apartment in Faucett fixing my hair or what not, I was a teenager at the time and Debby came in and started to pull down her underwear to pee in the floor. I screamed at her "What are you trying to do!"Mary Ann came in and said "You're not supposed to yell at sleepwalkers, they could die!” Bobby and Mary Ann fought constantly and he started to turn to other family members for his comfort, so to speak but when he started after me I ran and told everyone that would listen. After the first few times no one believed me and because in the 1900's no one talked about such things Daddy called me a liar and Mary Ann wouldn’t hear of it. She finally took me and Mama to Westab where he worked and embarrassed him by confronting him at his work in front of all his peers. He of course emphatically denied everything and she took him back. I got so I was afraid to be alone at the house because he knew when I got out of school and had followed me to the outhouse and tried to raise the hook on the door that I had in place to keep the door locked. I of course being only twelve years old at the time was flattered that he was paying attention to me in such a grown up way. As soon as I got it through my head that he was not really flattering me or giving me a real compliment in any way shape or form that’s when I told him what and where he could go and that I was going to tell! It didn’t seem to slow his tries down however. Lord knows he tried but I was a feisty spoiled little brat you remember and I would have kicked him to Dearborn and back! As it happened I didn't have to do anything. He finally quit coming after me, found someone else and they divorced after 28 years of marriage.
Floy Mae was born in 1947 six years before me. She was the baby until I came along in 1953.We fought and argued but I usually had Mama on my side. Floy Mae was in the sixth grade when I started first grade at Faucett. She had long hair, dish water blond. I was told that before I was born they had chickens and a rooster that always chased her around the yard. He caught her one day and attacked her face with his long spurs. That rooster became dinner that day. Her face was bleeding it left some scars that disappeared over the years. But if you looked real close you could almost see them along with tale tell signs of where the glass cut through her forehead when she was in a car wreck when she was little and went through the windshield. She was mean and hateful and spiteful to me after I was born because now I was the baby and she felt tossed aside like an old shoe. She helped me get on the bus for school and showed me where my classroom was, knowing I was scared to death. There was no kindergarten then or preschool so when you turned six you started first grade. I used to watch her fix her hair and ratting it up high like Jacqueline Kennedy did and she was very good about makeup, putting it on and putting her hair up on rollers. Sometimes Audrey and Dud would come up from K.C. and we would play with Cindy, Pete and Charles. We lived on rte 116 in a ranch style house with a huge fenced in yard with big barns and cattle and sometimes pigs. We always had cats and dogs. Clyde had brought with him a big dog named Copper that would only listen to him and would only let him pet it. Anytime anybody else got near it would growl and threaten to bite. They said it was half coyote. Daddy had put rat poisoning out for the mice and Copper had gotten into it. He was running around like a crazy wild thing until Clyde came home from working at the manufacturing plant that would later be known as Snorkel, got a shotgun and killed it by the road where I29 is now. Floy Mae and I were friends on and off as most sisters are. I remember her tormenting me over something I don't remember what it was now and I threw a lid from a can that had been taken off with an old fashioned can opener and hit her in the face with it. That left a scar too. Kathryn took up for me when she ran to tell Mama and Mama said not to worry about it. Kathryn had saved some money working at the Nickle‘s supermarket in Dearborn where they had met Bobby Nickles and bought a bicycle. She'd had it on layaway and Floy Mae tried to ride it one day and ran into the side of the house with it. Mama was so afraid Kathryn was going to "kill" her when she got home from work but she just yelled and sulked. Kathryn was good at sulking. Floy Mae had more boyfriends than she could count and two weeks before she graduated from high school she found out she was pregnant. She quit school because in those days, late sixties, you couldn’t go to school if you were pregnant or married. On December 26th 1966 Stacey was born, father's identity was questionable but in 1968 she married a boy she met at an apartment house in St Joseph who was three years younger than herself. They are still married to this day with sons, .Ronald Wayne, Brian and Ronald Gene Jr. Her mother-in-law talked her into naming her last child after her son because they called Ronald Wayne, Wayne, Ronald Gene, JR. She wanted her to name one of her sons after Ronnie her son. JR went on to join the army at the start of the Iraq war in 2003.He wants to make a career out of it; we just want him to come home safe.
My name is Delores Darlene the last born of eleven Dennis children. My story starts where it began at that two story house on hwy 371.We moved from there to Wallace where Orville met Betty. It was a two story house but it wasn't as big as the old house on 371.It had a big heart shaped cement swimming pool but it was always kept empty. We were told to stay out of it, but we were kids and we played in it anyway. Charles and Pete played with their cars and trucks in there and we played hide and go seek. We played out there after dark and the landlord was afraid someone was going to get hurt. Betty's friend had a little brother who was two or three years younger than me and he was having a birthday party. Mama had gone to the store at the corner where Clyde always bought his butter brickle ice cream and bought him a toy drum for me to take to the party. I didn't want to go, I of course wanted to keep the drum for myself and I was afraid of other little kids. I didn't like them and they didn't like me. I hadn't associated with anyone else except my family and I didn't trust anyone else. Not even daddy. I slept with Mama and Daddy until I was five years old. Mama would get up at six o'clock am and fix breakfast for Daddy. It would be dark as pitch in that bedroom and frankly Daddy scared me. He was always yelling and grouchy. We all knew to just stay out of his way and not argue with him about anything because no one could argue as good as Daddy. I was afraid of the dark but laying there in the darkness with this evil old man ready to yell at me for no reason except the joy of yelling and controlling everybody to do things his way. DO NOT DISTURB DADDY! That has been the rule for as long as I can remember, the next fourteen years anyway.
Well I didn't go to that party, mostly because I was scared to death of other people and other peoples' children. I just sat there on the steps and pouted and sulked, (I was pretty good at sulking too!)Betty's Mom came over and sat down beside me and said "You don’t have to go if you don’t want to! But I don't understand why you wouldn't want to go; there will be ice cream and cake and party hats. You'll have a good time!" I told her I was afraid and she told me to stay there and she'd take the drum to the little boy. So I gave her the drum and felt like such a bad little girl and so ashamed of my behavior. She actually made me feel guilty and that just made me want to be worse than ever. I knew Floy Mae was afraid of June bugs so I'd scare her with them and she would scare me. It was a long time before I could look a June bug in the eyes again!
When I was five years old in 1958 we got the news that we were going to move again. Mama and Daddy took me with them to Dearborn and showed me the new house with the big yard and the big white tobacco barn and other out buildings. The yard had hog wire fence all around the biggest part of the yard and a well down at the barn where we had to haul water up to the house. It had a pump handle and it was rusty looking. It had to be primed first. You had to have water first to get water. I carried a two and a half gallon bucket in each arm to balance it out yard had small hills, passed the outhouse. The outhouse had to be dug anew when it got full and we always kept an Alden's catalog close by for tissue. We didn't have toilet tissue or any of the amenities we take for granted today such as tooth paste or tooth brushes. You rinsed your mouth out with water and used your fingernail to scrape off what you could. I didn't know what toothpaste was until a social worker came by to check on us and we had to go to Patee Hall, which was a free clinic for poor families that lived in Buchanan County. We'd make an appointment to see a dentist and we'd, (Floy Mae and I) get our teeth cleaned by a mean grumpy old dentist who hated children and his job, obviously. After several people complained about him he went to KC to work and we got a new Dentist who liked little kids and his job. He gave us toothpaste and toothbrushes. I’ve had every tooth in my head filled. Believe me I brushed my teeth every day after that.
I had watched Floy Mae get up every morning in the fall and winter to get ready for something they called school and was informed after my sixth birthday which fell on April twenty fourth in 1959 that in the fall I, too, would be getting up and going to school with her. I would be in the first grade and she would be in the sixth grade. We would ride the big yellow school bus together and she would show me where to go and introduce me to my teacher etc. When the day came at the end of August I really didn't believe I would actually go. I thought I would stay home with Mama as I always had and watch Daddy sleep on the couch or follow him down to the pond where he would spend the day fishing. I had to be quiet and not move or run on the bank because I was always told I would scare the fish. He took me fishing with him one day when I was little I don't know how old I was but it rained and rained and Daddy had a poncho in his tackle box that he put on and I shared it with him. We always went to the Little Ozarks fishing lake north of St Joseph somewhere, I couldn't tell you to this day how to get there but they had a swinging bridge that was fun to walk across. It scared Mama to death to walk over it but sometimes Daddy wanted to fish on the other side and the only way to get there was across that bridge. It would swing and sway with every move you made and Mama was afraid of heights. They fished almost every chance they could and when they would go Floy Mae was supposed to watch me. She would. She would inform me that as soon as Mama and Daddy left we were walking to Dearborn. Dearborn was approximately four miles from where we lived on rte 116.We had to cross over the I29 Bridge that was just put in after we moved there. It stretched from as far north as Council Bluff Iowa or further since I haven't been that far north and passed KC to the South, connecting to 71 hwy south. We walked over railroad tracks and passed Bee Creek. We make it to the Y intersection and turn south toward Dearborn, passed the grave yard where friends had died like Leonard Sickle who was so handsome and young and his family was good to us by giving us old hens to kill so we would have something to eat on Sundays. Unfortunately I made friends with those chickens and treated them like pets. I spent a lot of time in that shed in the middle of the yard where the chickens were kept. Trying to keep the dogs from killing them before Daddy could was a challenge but we didn't have any money to feed ourselves let alone chickens and we had to let them out to feed during the day.
On Sunday morning Mama would have the clothes hanging out on the line which stretched out next to the wood pile where the ax was. I would beg Daddy not to kill my friends since they were the only friends I had at the time. We got to eat so he'd stretch their necks across a stump and wham, headless and flopping all over the ground. Mama would curse him for killing chickens so close to the clothes line.
Leonard Sickle died of cancer in the early sixties and Cindy and Floy Mae were devastated. He had teased them about actually going out with him, as if! We'd make it to Dearborn and I was so tired. That's a long way for a small child to walk. Lee Lunsford worked at the gas station on the south end of town and Floy Mae was crazy about Lee Lunsford. So much so that she told him Stacy was his but when Stacy was born she looked exactly like Jimmy Huntsman another boy that she had gone out with. That was it! She still said it was Lee's but she could see the resemblance herself after a while and stopped saying Lee was the father. She had moved in with Kathryn and Johnny in Kansas City before the big break up there. Then she moved in with Audrey in Riverside.
Sometimes Lee would take us home if he was able to leave the station or we would just walk home and hope someone would give us a ride, most of the time someone would, like Shelby Singleton or Darryl Nye. We usually always made it home before Mama and Daddy came home from fishing and we always had to clean the fish. I hated that part because the smell was terrible and the mess was even worse than the smell. The dogs loved it though. Daddy would cut out the bubble and give it to me to burst on the cement. Fun times!
Daddy used to go hunting with the boys but he started having strokes even though he was only in his sixties. That was really old back then. He had a stroke at the Little Lake of the Ozarks and started vomiting up blood. He had what was called bleeding ulcers and the only way they had to get home was if Daddy drove them in the old 1953 Plymouth. Mama had never learned to drive and there were no cell phones back then and we didn't have a regular phone at home. The only convenience we had was electricity and propane gas to run the kitchen stove. Before that Mama cooked on an old wood stove that was considered a kitchen stove back in its day. Daddy almost drove off into the lake that day. Mama had run to the concession stand to tell the owner and I think he called someone. I really don't remember because Floy Mae and I were in school that day and we didn't have any money for doctors and ambulances. Daddy wouldn't have gone to a doctor anyway. They made it home anyway somehow and told the tale to us when we got home from school.
Daddy had a little rat terrier that Donald had given him in 1952.The only person she would let hold her was Daddy and he bought her store bought dog food while we wondered where our next meal was coming. Mama was jealous of Skippy and said he thought more of that dog than he did her. She stayed in the house with us. That was more than he ever let any other dog.
One day Clyde and Bobby were out in the driveway working on cars and Clyde moved the car for some reason or another and everyone heard a yelp! When they checked to see which animal had been hit everyone turned a pale green sick color when they saw that it was Skippy. Her left leg had been broken and Daddy wasn't home at the time. No one had enough money to take her to the vet and St Joseph was about twenty miles away. Skippy suffered and bit her leg and it finally turned green and she was able to chew it off. She lay in the closet in the dining room and whined and cried and suffered for two weeks at least. Daddy laid on the couch his usual spot and cried with every whine and scream. Clyde didn't come around much around that time. I think Daddy knew deep down that he didn't mean to do it but she always laid under the cars to be in the shade. He thought he should have looked for that before moving the car. She wouldn't have let anyone touch her but Daddy anyway so I don't know how he would have gotten her out from under there. She would bite anyone just like Copper. She recovered and every time there were family pictures Daddy would keep his hand over her left front leg so no one could see she had no leg there just a stump. I remember how sad I felt for her and for Daddy. I remember when she would play with a rag and play tug of war, before she got too old to play. When we moved from rte 116 it wasn't long before she couldn't control her bowels anymore and Daddy had to take her to the pound to be put to sleep. He shed a few tears that day too. That was the only time I remember Daddy crying except the time when he had another stroke right after we moved to “A” hwy and had insisted on helping with moving the refrigerator. We had lived on rte 116 for nine years when the landlord kept the light on in the stripping room of the big tobacco barn and the bill went on our house line so we had to pay it. We were all heartbroken that day. We loved that house even if we had to haul water in buckets in the dead of winter and get up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom in three feet of snow. We didn't think Daddy would leave that pond and all the fish he had stocked it with. The trees I had climbed before I became afraid of heights just like Mama. The barns and the woods I played in and gathered greens with Mama in the morning so we would have something to eat that day. The rabbit and the duck we had kept in the hog house next to the big tobacco barn that Clyde painted for Bill Foster for 100.00.He was painting that barn the day that Mama got sick in 1961 and I had to go down and tell him that Mama wanted to go to the hospital in St Joseph. She was afraid she was having a heart attack. It turned out she was. She got better though and we moved out of that house. We had wallpapered the front room, played ball down by that big old barn. I learned to mow the grass with the new lawn mower Daddy had gotten at Sears and Roebuck. I was five years old when we moved there in 1958 and I was fourteen years old when we moved to “A” highway. The landlord wasn't as forgiving when I ran through the woods and explored the property. He owned dairy cattle and also had Herefords pasturing there. Daddy said he told him to tell me not to be climbing over his fences! At the other house we had a big oak tree in the front yard and a big swing on one side for me and Floy Mae and a small one for him to sit in on the other side. On A hwy we had a small tree with a small swing. The house was a three room shot gun house. One bedroom, so I slept on the couch. The kitchen was only big enough for one or two people at a time. It did have a sink and when Kathryn was living with Marvin he was a plumber and he brought us a water pump that fit in the cistern. As long as we had water in it we had running water. We even got a phone courtesy of Donald. We were so excited! Daddy didn't know how to use the phone and held it upside down sometimes or he held it so far from his ear he couldn't hear anything. It was mostly because of the strokes he'd had. I remember when he had a stroke one time while he was lying on the couch and he had a green film come over his eyes. I asked him if he could feel it come over him and he could barely speak but he said "yes" he could. Audrey came and insisted on taking him to the hospital he actually went because he was afraid of dying. He stayed in the hospital a day or two when Dr Dumont said he was dying and there was no more they could do for him. We took him home and then the landlord said his oldest son Steve was getting married and he wanted to build a house on the property and we had to move again. We contacted housing authority in St Joseph. They found us a house on Clayton Street. I would have to go to a city school. They said I could go to any one of the schools in the district so I chose Benton because my best friend Carolyn Shimer from Faucett was going to Benton. The school district annexed their area so she had to quit going to Faucett high school and start going to Benton high school. I had to walk to the next street over and catch a ride with some friends of hers who were Jehovah’s witnesses as she was and their dad took me to school for awhile. Then some reason they weren't able to take me anymore, probably because of their religious beliefs. I probably said something I shouldn't have I don't know, I don't remember now.
School was about over for my junior year. It was spring of 1970. In June I had my senior pictures taken and Mary Ann and Bobby, her husband Bobby, took me and paid for them. I started working at Henry's Drive in on Cherokee St a few blocks from where we lived. I got paid every two weeks getting less than a dollar an hour. I worked there a month was fired for too many over rings. I didn't really know what I was doing anyway. Drunks came in on Friday and Saturday nights. Mothers would send their children in to place orders and the kids wouldn't get it right and the mothers would come in and throw food in your face. If you had to do an order over because a customer would change their mind about an order it would cause an over ring. I had eleven over rings in one night. I tried to explain if they had ordered it and got what they ordered the first time the amount of money would have been the same. That didn't help so I lost my first job.
The first part of June was stormy. There was a puppy hanging around the house and I wanted to keep it but we lived in town and Daddy said he would take it to the pound tomorrow if he could get someone to take him there. The rain got worse and the thunder roared like a beast from beyond. The puppy whined and howled most of the night. The lightning lit up my room like broad daylight. About three o'clock in the morning Mama came into my room in a panic and shouted "its Daddy I think he's dying.” You have to come in and look at him and tell me what you think!" I argued back at first because after all I was still half asleep and it was three o'clock in the morning. She was so insistent that I crawled out of my nice warm bed and told her he was just trying to get attention. He'd been saying he was going to die for years. When I went through the dining room and into the kitchen, the door was open to their bedroom and I could see him rising up and falling back down then up and back down. He was making this horrible breathing sound. When we tried to talk to him he acted as if he couldn't hear us. He just kept rising and falling back onto the pillow. Finally he stopped making that deep guttural breathing noise and he stayed down on the pillow. His eyes were wide open and it seemed like he was staring at me. I, of course was on the phone as usual. Daddy and I had many arguments about the phone. I had a "boyfriend" who worked at the local radio station. I'd call in and he'd talk to me for hours on end. We actually went out on a date once. He took me to the Pizza Hut. I'd never had Pizza before. I was in love! But this time I was calling Brother Bobby who lived in the south end with his wife Barbara and their first son Timmy. Timmy was only a baby. I had called the police and they came out with the coroner who pronounced him. Later the death certificate said the cause was arteriosclerosis, hardening of the arteries. Daddy didn't smoke cigarettes but he chewed tobacco and always had to have a coffee can to spit in at all times. He carried this can around with him. He always had brown spittle around his mouth and down his chin. I can still smell that can whenever I think about it. They carried him away after awhile. It seemed like forever. I had made all the calls and family started showing up. Barbara and I went to tell Floy Mae because she didn't have a telephone. Floy Mae and Ronnie had just had their first baby, Wayne. As soon as she saw our faces she knew what had happened. She started to cry. We went back to the house and they hadn't taken him yet. They were "making him ready" in the bedroom. I remember leaning against the wall in the dining room when it suddenly hit me that he was gone. I slid down the wall and started sobbing uncontrollably. The funeral was horrible. Picking out the casket was disappointing to say the least. When I was in school about two weeks before his death, a local funeral director came to visit Mama and Daddy and talked them into buying a funeral package for Daddy. It was the understanding if they Paid 90.00 now it doesn't matter if he died tomorrow he would get the big bronze casket in the brochure. When I got home Mama had told me what they had said. I thought it too good to be true but she assured me she asked all the questions and they said yes he would get the nice casket they had picked out. But when he died they said they had to pay at least three months on the package. That meant everyone in the family had to make monthly payments on the funeral. Donald took charge of course, he was the oldest son, it didn't matter what Mama wanted. So Daddy was buried in blue suede cardboard- like casket. We bought a suit from the funeral home; Daddy had never worn a suit before in his life. He would have hated that. He never wore anything but bib overalls. He also wore an engineer’s cap to cover his bald head. He used to say he worked on a train back in the early teens shoveling coal into the engine. In 1918 he had joined the army during WWI. They lived in tents and took care of the big white horses. He never cared for horses after that much. He had to shoe them and keep them brushed every day. It sounded like Heaven to me. I had always wanted a horse but Daddy had said " if you had to take care of them the way we did you wouldn't want one" He had a huge picture he kept rolled up in his steel trunk. Everything he had from those early years was in that trunk. French and German coins etc. It was the only thing they saved from a grease fire that burned down a house they rented when Mama was pregnant with me. She said she had been cooking in the kitchen and had put grease on to heat. With all the kids she had to keep track of at that time she forgot about it. It traveled up the back of the stove and the next thing she knew it was out of control. They had to live in the barn. The neighbors came and brought them food and clothes. She said she had a nice picture of Daddy in his uniform, and other precious pictures. They lost everything except that trunk. Bobby ended up with that picture but I don't know if he still has it. It had rips and tears in it the last time I saw it which was long before we'd moved from rte 116.
That early morning of June twelfth 1970, when everyone had gone home to rest for the visitation the next day, Mama still slept in that bed. I was terrified after everything had happened and the storm still raged on but the puppy had ceased his yowling. We never saw that puppy again. I tried to get Mama to come and sleep in my bed with me but she wouldn't hear of it. I had to sleep with her and of course I had to sleep in the very spot where Daddy had died. I couldn't sleep and I know I saw a tiny light like a small star hover over the bed above me. It hesitated and then it headed to the open window and went out. Daddy was gone as if he'd never existed. No more hard work in the tobacco fields to keep his large family alive. No more back breaking work cutting down trees and splitting the wood to keep his family warm in the cold Missouri winters. He was dead and buried in that cemetery in Dearborn waiting for Mama to join him eight years later.
In July my brother Bobby and his wife Barbara Ann asked me and Mama if we would like to go to Branson on vacation. We had never gotten to go anywhere when Daddy was alive except to Hannibal Mo when I was just 5 or six years old. We boarded the River Queen, an old steamboat and I got to blow the whistle. I had heard many years later that that boat had sunk and was at the bottom of the Mississippi. Daddy would never let Mama go anywhere without him and he never wanted to go anywhere except fishing.
We told him yes we wanted to go, Mama worried if it would be proper. Bobby thought we should get out of the house and enjoy ourselves for once so we went to Branson. We went to Silver Dollar City, an amusement park, then to Harrison Arkansas which was 40 miles south of there. There was another amusement park there and I rode a new roller coaster called the Mouse. I was terrified and vowed never to ride a roller coaster the rest of my life, being afraid of heights and falling about a 100 ft out of thin air just for the heck of it. We had a very good time all in all and it was good to laugh again. I hadn't seen Mama laugh and smile like that in the 17 years I'd known her.
When we got back home family said we should move from that house so we called Housing and they said they had another house not too far from there on Nebraska Street. We took a walk about 2 blocks south, then over to the west off of Lake Avenue and turned down a dirt street. I said, "Look, Mama! There's a cute yellow house with a fenced in yard and a front porch with a bench swing. Wouldn't that be nice if that was the house? "Mama looked at the paper the lady at the Housing Authority gave her and said,"211 West Nebraska street, this is it! "We did a double take and couldn't believe the cute little yellow house was 211 West Nebraska. We laughed and said "let's go see it".There were people still living there but they let us in. It had a large kitchen and a back porch too. The back yard was a half sized lot with a steel bar and two swings attached. We used the dining area for my bedroom. The wallpaper was black and white with huge flowers on it in the living room, a wild color scheme in all the rooms. I had trouble sleeping for several months after we moved in. I kept thinking Daddy was hiding under my bed and he was going to pop out any minute. It wasn't long before I started sleeping with Mama.
In the fall that year Floy Mae had her second baby, Brian, and had to move in with us. I guess they got kicked out of the apartment on Locust. It was at that time Kathryn called and said she needed a ride; Marvin had said he was going back with his ex wife. She had no kids, no husband, and the man she had been living with and had hoped to marry was out of her life for good. Floy Mae's husband Ronnie White said he and I would go to pick her up since Ronnie and Floy Mae had spent enough time in KC (he had worked for Deffenbaugh's trash company) and knew how to get there. So there was me, Mama, Floy Mae, Wayne and baby Brian, and Ronnie and Kathryn living there.
I was in my senior year of high school at Benton. I enjoyed school there. It was a lot of fun and I regretted having only this last year after having so many bad years at Faucett and Agency. Students go to Faucett from first grade to sixth and then junior high at Agency for two years and then the last four years of high school back at Faucett on the high school side. At Benton most people were like me, poor. At Faucett rich farmers kids with their fine clothes and fancy houses and hairdo's made fun of poor people like me. So at Benton I was no longer a wall flower and was able to laugh and open up more. I wanted to go to Prom with my DJ phone boyfriend but he said he had to work. Truth was he had been phone boyfriends with a lot of girls and was afraid he'd see someone he "knew".So I stayed home. I didn't have anything to wear anyway.
My new girlfriend, Kathy Atkins had a car so she and I and Penny and Colleen paled around. Kathy had told me Colleen was going with a guy that she didn't like but he had this mad crush on her. She had tried to let him down easy but he wouldn't listen to her little hints so she decided to give him a big hint and stopped the car and told him to get out. I guess he had to walk back to Elwood, Ks where he lived just over the Missouri River Bridge.
One day Kathy asked me if I wanted to go to Lake Contrary where kids hung out and swam in that disgusting water and I had never been, so I said Sure! She said she would come and get me and wear a suit. I actually had a suit. Don't remember where I got it but I put it on, grabbed a towel and waited. There were hundreds of people there when we got there including Charles and Leslie Huff. She said she wanted me to meet Leslie, Charles' brother. He had thinning blond hair and a pasty complexion. Nice smile. I oddly enough was more attracted to his brother Charlie. Who being the complete opposite had lots of dark brown hair. They were both thin but Charlie had broad shoulders, skinny shoulders but the bone structure was there. He said he had been lifting weights at the Mobile gas station in Elwood where his friends hung out. His little brother Richard was there and I asked Charlie how old was he, six? He laughed and said "No, he's fourteen".
Kathy had asked me if I liked Leslie and I said to tell you the truth I kind of liked Charlie. She said she was so happy because Charlie was the one Colleen had dumped out of her car that night.
Kathy gave him my phone number and he called me continuously until I married him on September 17th 1971.His mother hated me from the moment she heard he had a girlfriend. He lost the access to his car from having too many tickets and his Dad always had a lawn for him to mow or some reason he was grounded. He was always late for our dates and he had to walk across the Missouri River Bridge to meet me halfway. I'd start walking and he'd start walking until we'd see each other and run into each other's arms. The Missouri River Bridge was a narrow expanse and shivered and shook every time a car crossed over it. If you happened to be on it when an eighteen wheeler crossed you just had to hang onto the side and wait for it to pass. Later they blew that bridge up and built a new bridge with walkways on the sides, but that was several years later.
Charles and I walked to Hyde Park which was south of Benton High School. We'd walk and talk and laugh. He was my best friend and I was happier than ever. His mother fought us tooth and nail. She hadn't met me yet and couldn't accept the fact that we were together forever like it or not. Charles was born in Huntsville West Virginia in 1952.Born just nine months after his sister Della on October 22nd.He was premature and so tiny he slept in a dresser drawer. Sometime during his baby years he developed an infection in his right ear and only had 20% hearing in that ear. His nose was too big for his thin face. He had blue eyes that we used to call "bedroom eyes".Charles was kind and funny but he was slow to temper. He hardly showed any emotions. He didn't seem to get mad or care strongly about anything which used to drive me crazy. I would yell and scream and show my Dennis temper often just trying to get him to react.
In September I was eighteen and Charles was eighteen so we didn't need permission from our parents to get married. I wanted the date September seventeenth because that was Mama and Daddy's wedding anniversary. As usual I was in a state. The wedding was scheduled for eleven o'clock and Charles was late again. His parents were still trying to hold on to him. I was mad and unsure if getting married was what I really wanted to do. He took my hand and led me up the sidewalk to Lake Avenue to the car where his brother Leslie and his sister Della were waiting to be our witnesses at the court house. Her Honorable Judge Margaret Young married us and then firmly told us that she didn't think it would last. I laughed and was happy until the day was about over and I told Charlie I was ready to go home now. I was tired of driving around with the car horn honking. I was coming down from the high and excitement of getting married and I just wanted to go home. He said when we go home we're not taking you back to your house we're going to the little apartment we had rented on north 19th St. We had an upstairs apartment in the back. There were many steep steps to go up to get to the door. At the top of the stairs leading to our apartment, the floors were varnished wood and the little kitchen was to the left. To the right was a large living room. It was furnished including utilities for 65.00 a month. Down the short hall there was a moderately sized bedroom to the right and opposite on the left of the bedroom was a large bathroom with an old fashioned claw foot tub. The spicket was tiny and it took forever to fill up. One day when I was getting Charlie's lunch ready for him when he came home from his job at Artesian Ice on his lunch break; I decided to take a bath first. I reached down to turn the water on when a large Wolf spider jumped down into the tub. I had always been afraid of spiders ever since we lived at the farm house on rte 116 when Mama was doing the laundry on the back porch using an old wringer washer. The dining room closet that Skippy had nursed her broken leg was where we kept the dirty clothes. I was helping her sort when I saw a white gathering of soft cloth like material in the corner of a piece of fabric. I picked at it when I saw some grey thing wriggling out of it with fangs bared and standing straight up in a threatening posture. I screamed and ran to Mama to tell her about it. When we lived in that tiny three room house on “A” highway the out house was balanced on the edge of a ravine and it was full of huge Wolf spiders. When you opened the door there was always a huge spider with four legs on the inside of the door and four legs on the hinge. You were afraid to go in because if you moved the door it could jump. I'd go back to the house and holler at Daddy that there was a spider on the door of the outhouse and I couldn't go in. He'd take a fly swatter down there mumbling "if you don't look for them you wouldn't find them".We always told him he needed something bigger than a fly swatter when a fly swatter was meant for flies and not something as big if not bigger than the palm of my hand. I remembered Mama telling me when she was a little girl that her mother had told her to go to the well and pull up the bucket that was on a long rope and pull up a bucket of water, she said when she did there was a spider that covered the whole top of the bucket!
I waited about five or ten minutes and decided I wasn't taking a bath in that tub until Charles came home to kill that spider. Even then I wasn't too keen on turning that spicket on again until I was sure there were no more spiders.
We fought and fussed for about two weeks of marriage, I was through "playing house" and again I told him I wanted to go home. He informed me we were married and there would be no going home again. After two months I decided I wanted to live in a house not an apartment, so we went house hunting. We found a cute little house in Elwood just around the corner from his mom and dad's house. They still hadn't accepted me as their daughter-in-law and never would. His dad seemed to be resigned to the fact another one of sons was lost to them, first Henry to Mary in Lincoln Nebraska. They had two sons, Henry III and Billy the baby. I can't go through all the details of the horrendous slight bestowed upon Mary just for falling in love with their son mostly because I wasn't there but the stories only parallel the Hell his mother spewed on me throughout my married life.
In May of 1972 Charlie informed his mother that I was pregnant with my first child, Jennifer Carol Huff. I named her Jennifer after the main character Jenny on the movie "Love Story".Charlie reluctantly took me to see the "girlie flick" when it came to St Joseph. It was a beautiful and sad movie and I bought an organ from my brother Clyde, the music from the movie, and I learned to play by number.
In the fall of 1973, when Jenny was nine months old we moved from Elwood to a farm house where rte 116 and hwy 371 intersected. It was just a mile east of the house where I grew up. Leslie had urged Charlie to quit his stable job at Artesian Ice making 2.00 an hour to go to work with him at this painting company where income was not guaranteed but when you did get paid it was a lot more than he was making. He quit his job and we took the '69 Camaro and filled it with as much stuff as we could fit in it and making several trips back and forth we finally settled into our new house. We brought a poodle, a kitten, and later we bought a pony to keep in the small area about a hundred feet from the house. There was running water and French doors opening into the huge bedroom. The kitchen was also very large. The living room was adequate, not too small and not too big and the bathroom was very small. We had to call Savannah to have our water turned on in our name.
Charlie had to go in to town every day to see if there was any work available. Every time the answer was “no“. Leslie always seemed to have work but she had her family to help support them. She, meaning his new wife, Linda. She had a daughter that was 3 months old when our daughter was born and she had named her daughter Jenny too. She already had Jenny when she and Leslie got together. He'd (Charlie) come home every day not knowing how he was going to afford the gasoline to go again the next day. The Camaro used oil and we were out of that too. Jenny needed diapers and milk and the dog needed dog food. We had been buying the pony a bale of hay for him to eat all week. We couldn't pay the rent or the lights or the water or propane for the propane tank. It was December. We couldn't pay Norman's tire company for the tires we'd bought on time.
Floy Mae and Ronnie had moved too. They moved into a small old house that had to be heated with wood. They had a cistern for water and they had a truck. Ronnie had lost his job too. He had worked at the stock yards in St Joseph. When he came home from work the smell of the stock yards came with him, even though he showered before leaving work and he showered after getting home from work. The smell was in his car and always stayed with him. When they moved to that old rickety house they came to visit us in our little farm house since they had moved south as well on 371 hwy. They moved about 5 miles north of us. Our two families were in the same boat so to speak so we applied our wits, what was left of them, and asked farmers if we could pick up the corn that the combine had missed in the fields. Usually they would let us otherwise they would have stray corn growing in spots they didn't want .Some farmers turned their cattle out in the field to eat the remaining corn.
I carried Jenny now ten months old through the corn fields. Picking corn and throwing the ears in the back of Ronnie's truck. At the end of the week we would get 15.00 a truck load after we blistered our hands and fingers peeling the kernels off by hand and getting docked for the moisture content since we didn't have any way to dry it in big dryers like the rich farmers .Mama said for us to use another corn cob to help loosen the kernels. This was backbreaking work not to mention the pain. Jenny had lost a shoe in the corn field so I had to hold her little foot in one hand and try to pick corn with the other. At the end of the week we divided the money in half and I took the 7.50 to the store and bought diapers and milk for Jenny. We did all this work on empty stomachs. The dog was starving and the cat was starving since it was too cold even for the mice to come into the house. I couldn't cook. Couldn't have done the dishes if I did and the stool froze up and cracked. Jenny and I used to sit in the living room and watch reruns of Green Acres at five o'clock and Leave it to Beaver until they shut off the electricity and the water. We couldn't buy propane since they wouldn't come for less than 100.00.We didn't have a telephone so we couldn't call anyone for help. The landlady said she didn‘t care about our plight all she knew is that we didn't have the 50.00 for rent and we had to go. The U joints were going out of Ronnie's truck so we couldn't pick corn anymore. No one came to see if we were dead or alive and all Charlie's dad could say was "if you don't put oil in that car the engine is going to blow up and you won't have a car."
The car was making a popping noise in the engine and we knew it wasn't going to last much longer .I even rode the pony with Jenny in front of me to Floy Mae's house. I wasn't a very good rider since the only experience I'd had was wishing for a pony when I was a young girl and the westerns we watched on TV. That's all Daddy would watch or allow us to watch when we finally did get a TV. But Danny was a good pony and we rode a long way, walking and bouncing all the way. When we finally came to the driveway Floy Mae greeted us with disbelief on her face. She had a "down on her luck" story too. I was hoping she had some food or something to help us at least get some word to Mama and Kathryn.
The last time Charlie drove the car toward St Joseph he ran out of gas and had to walk about seven miles the rest of the way. No work that day either. He walked to Mama's house and used the phone to call Kathy who was now married to his best friend from school, Lester Sanderson. We had used the last eighteen cents in his pocket to buy 1/2 gallon of gasoline in Faucett and went to my sister Mary Ann and Bobby's house to see if anyone had called to offer him a job. Once while he had gone to town to see if the paint company had work for him to do and again was turned down, he had put in applications at other businesses and left Mary Ann's phone number. When we finally got there, she informed us that a company called Dale Alley chemical company had called and said he had the job if he could get there for the interview. I had been doing my laundry at Mary Ann's and she informed me that Bobby said it was making their water bill too high so I couldn't do laundry there anymore. I was just so happy about the new job that Charlie would get as soon as he could get there I didn't care about much else.
While we were still in the house freezing, Leslie and Linda and Richard came down out of the blue and stayed all of five minutes. Instead of offering help Linda said "we're going home it's too cold in here.” How did they think we were standing it? They could go home where it was warm and cozy with food in their refrigerator. I just couldn't believe they were going to leave us there with the baby and not come back. They never did.
After Charlie made that phone call to Kathy and Lester they didn't hesitate to come and take us back to their apartment they had gotten on Housing. They were so afraid they were going to be in so much trouble. They wouldn't let me bring my poodle or the kitten because they weren't allowed to have pets. Although other tenants had big German shepherds etc. We brought dog food down to the dog but the cat was dead. Danny looked like a skeleton. We begged Kathy and Lester to let us bring some hay down there now that Charlie had a job we could afford to buy it but they wouldn't let us haul it in their car. The landlady called the police and a man from the dept talked to us. I explained the hardships we had and little if no help. He was very nice and sympathetic. I finally managed without asking Kathy but the pony was picked up by the animal shelter and sold.
We lived with Kathy and Lester for three weeks. They resented us being there and we hated being a burden on them. We wanted a place of our own. After Charlie got a few checks together we started looking for a place to live. We found a duplex on south twenty fourth St. the landlady lived on the other side. She was elderly and told me when she banged on the wall I was to go over there and check on her. She banged on the wall a lot. Mostly she didn't want anything but to talk about her medical conditions and what not. I got awfully tired of hearing that banging and scared that she might actually need help and I wouldn't know what to do. We still didn't have a phone. Charlie got up at five o'clock in the morning to walk twelve blocks to work. We argued over fixing peanut butter sandwiches with equal amounts of jelly. I hated the stuff (peanut butter) ever since Mama and Daddy and I and Floy Mae went to visit Audrey when I was a little girl and Charles (Sugar) and I shared a jar of peanut butter. He loved it but I was getting sick of the same noxious taste. They had a little black dog named Snooker and we laughed when we'd fed some of it to Snooker and she fought with it when it got stuck to the roof of her mouth. Snooker lived to be an old dog living for sixteen years. Charles (Sugar) died at the age of forty two after driving a truck all night and stopping to play pool at the local truck stop .He went to bed and never woke up. He had spent two years or so in Vietnam in the seventies on the front lines. The men that survived were allowed to go anywhere in the world they wanted. He chose to go to Hawaii for R&R before returning home. I had heard about Agent Orange, that chemical they sprayed all over dense forest areas to kill the dense foliage. Others claimed it gave them many cancer and respiratory diseases. Charles had gone to the VA in Leavenworth where they had told him he had cancer and needed chemotherapy treatments. He said he didn't have time for treatments he had to work.
After a few arguments Charlie figured I wasn't getting up at five o'clock in the morning to make sandwiches he said I didn't spread right anyway, so he made his own lunch.
We couldn't take the neighbor's banging so one night we left and moved to a big two story house on north Fifth Street. Jenny was walking then and potty training was eminent. After three weeks she was trained. She shed the bottle at one year .I couldn't stand to hear Charlie's mother hollering about that bottle.
On Sundays Charlie always tried to drag me to Troy where his Mom and Dad lived now. He would stay outside with his brothers and his dad while I was trapped in the house with his sister Joann, Richard and Gina. Gina and Richard were nice but Joann was at that awkward age where she complained about everything and of course I was always the target. I never understood why she was so mean to me but his mom sure got a big kick out of it and joined in with the harassing and torment. I was so miserable I would go outside to try to talk Charlie into coming in n the house or taking me home. We'd get there about ten o'clock in the morning and would not leave until midnight. Every week on the way home he'd get an ear full. I'd swear I’d never go there again but come Sunday there we would go again. She had something to say about the way I raised my daughter, the way I folded socks you name it. She rode me continuously. When we told her I was pregnant with Jenny in May 1972 and she wasn't born until 1973.she kept saying "I told you so! I knew it!"! We had gotten married you'll remember in 1971.She must have thought that was the longest gestation period in history.
I didn't understand why he wouldn't go over to Mama and Kathryn's house on Nebraska St; he said there weren't any men there for him to talk to.
Floy Mae and Ronnie moved again too. They were living on Pryor Avenue in north end. While Charlie worked on the Camaro, (the motor mounts were broken, the motor was raised and a new motor put in. Large chains were used to stabilize the motor in place of new mounts. Charlie was known for piecing his vehicles together with spit and glue and the occasional rubber band) I walked from north fifth to Floy Mae's house on Pryor Avenue. She died my hair the lightest shade of blond. My hair was long, down to the middle of my back. After Jennifer was born and I had breast fed for three months I actually had breasts and I was a skinny 115 lbs. The transformation from mousy brown to almost platinum blond was mind blowing and when I came walking up the St. on north fifth, Charlie couldn't believe it was me. I have to admit I had to do double takes in the mirror to believe it was me too.
During the time we had that Camaro he had painted racing stripes on the hood and trunk. It was a blue Camaro and it looked good but it would not stay running. He had put a six cylinder engine in it but it was an automatic and he said six cylinder automatics were always "doggy".He got so tired working on it all the time. One day coming back from Kansas it stalled and we pulled over to the gas station in Elwood. He looked at me sitting in the passenger seat I had already had another mother-in-law bashing. I must have had a look that he didn't care for on my face because he took a sixteen ounce Pepsi bottle, threw it at the windshield where I was sitting, spidered the windshield. Every time we drove the car onto the street a cop would give us a ticket. We never did get that fixed. We finally sold it or gave it to a junk yard on K-highway north of St Joseph. About broke Charlie's heart.
We moved again to south 14th St. but not so far south this time to a very expensive apartment. It was 100.00 dollars a month which was unheard of at that time. It was so cute and had a fake fireplace and a divider between the kitchenette and the living room. It only had one bedroom so Jenny slept on the couch. It was 1975.She was 2 1/2 then, it was July. Charlie had been working nights then, days on and off every month. He was so tired he couldn't sleep at nights because he was used to staying up at nights and sleeping days then they would change him to days and he had a hard time getting up in time for work. We woke up one morning and it was nine o'clock in the morning, he was supposed to be at work at eight o'clock. He was fired that day. Here we were again with 100.00 rents, our Volkswagen we bought after the Camaro fiasco was in the shop at the "Bug Surgeon" getting a new motor. Charlie had taught me how to drive a stick on that Volkswagen. We walked all over the place because that was the only way we had to get around. We needed groceries of course so we walked to the A&P store on 22nd St. just a few blocks from our first apartment on North 19th St, had a checking account but it was empty. We still had to eat. We wrote checks that we didn't know how we were going to cover but Charlie thought any day he would get a job. He got a job at Norris and Sons trash service but the owner quit coming to get him. He hated that job anyway. He couldn’t stand being so filthy all the time and they gave him the dirtiest jobs. He tried to file for unemployment but Old man Norris blocked it.
One evening when we were at home Charlie Paul the manager of A&P came knocking at our door and wanted to know how we were going to pay for these checks that had bounced. We explained the circumstances, that he was trying to get a job but none had offered him an interview. We didn't have a phone so I don't how anyone was supposed to call even if they had something. Charlie Paul offered Charlie a job at the store cleaning the parking lot and pulling weeds out of the sidewalk. He took the money we owed out of his check every week. Finally he was moved inside the store as a stocker on the night shift.
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
When I was a little girl around the age of 3, I remember we lived in a big 2 story house on country hwy 371.The small town of Faucett was about 5-7 miles to the north and Wallace was a few miles to the south and east with Dearborn about 3 miles south and 5 miles to the west. The house was tall and white with peeling paint and big tall trees all around. My first memories are outside playing with the kittens and trying to potty train them as I probably was being trained at that time as well. The only problem with that was I was holding them over the barrels of pop bottles my brothers and sisters had collected along the highway and other country roads. My brother Clyde who was about 20 yrs older than me caught me and yelled something about not doing that so I ran into the house to my mother's waiting arms screaming and crying because Clyde had yelled at me. To say I was a spoiled brat was putting it mildly and my brothers and sisters didn't hesitate to point that out to me and anyone that would listen, as if my actions didn't give it away anyway. I had heard stories that the old house was haunted and that drunks would wander along the road wanting a hand out or their car had broken down. We didn't have a telephone or a TV then so we couldn't have called anyone to help them even if they weren't "unsavory" as Daddy would have said.
We lived in the old house about a year before moving but I remembered another older brother Orville who was younger than Clyde had asked the landlord's son if he could give us kids a ride on his horse. The horse was big and shiny black and the most beautiful animal I'd ever seen in my short 3 yrs of life. Orville picked me up and sat me on the back of him and told me to hold on tight. I did and closed my eyes the whole time we were flying all around the property. When we got back I was still alive as miracles would have it and I remembered saying to my brothers and sisters still on the ground, “Wow, he went fast!" All my life we memorized the order of when all the kids were born, first there was Audrey, born in 1925 and when she was 17 had run off with a man about 40 yrs older than herself. Mama said she couldn't keep her home when Dud Deets came around. She had 3 children all older than me, Pete the wild unmanageable, then came Charley whom Audrey called Sugar, he was the nice one, sweet and skinny like Pete but not as mean and onerous. Then came Cindy, a daddy’s girl, and spoiled like me. They lived in Kansas City around Riverside. Next there was Donald, he too was gone and married with a daughter named Donna Mae, later he had another daughter named Suzie who was 3 yrs younger than me who said "Uh huh Donna Mae!" all the time. My sister and I used to mock her just to make her mad. Donald was the oldest son and thought he knew it all and was entitled to just for that reason. He was stubborn and hot headed just like Daddy and when those two would get into an argument sparks and a stick of wood would go flying! He came over one day to show Daddy that new chain saw he'd bought at Sears and Roebuck, of course they had to start it up right there in the living room. I was afraid of loud noises and I hated that thing. I screamed and cried to make them stop it but of course they had to take it apart to see how it ran, the awful smell of gas fumes and burning oil filled up the place and I didn't stop screaming until they shut it off. Donald also had two sons that came after Suzie, Donnie Jr. and Stephen, the baby. Thelma was the next in line. She had met a trucker when the family lived in Horton, Ks. She moved to Papillion, Nebraska and bought a new house. We went to visit one time and saw all the modern conveniences, kitchen cabinets, appliances etc. Some things we never had or would have for many years to come. Thelma had 4 children, Larry was the oldest and one year older than me, then came David, Karen and Steve. She was married to Bob Burke and only came to visit a few times a year.
Clyde, I've already spoken about, was born in 1932.He is also hotheaded and stubborn and has a mean streak, thinning black hair that only lasted to the end of his twenties. He stayed single until 1961 when he met and married a girl named Mary, still in high school and pregnant with his first child a girl they named Pamela Ann. Pammy was a cute little girl with long curly dark brown hair and the biggest blue eyes. I played with her and made her laugh. I always got to go with them when they wanted Pam's picture taken because I could get her to laugh by making a face and saying, "Duh"! Mary and Clyde got along like cats and dogs. One day when they were driving to KC in their convertible they were arguing as usual and Pammy was sitting between the bucket seats riding like she was atop a horse. They didn't have seatbelt laws or car seat laws in the early 60's.Clyde slammed on the brakes at a stop sign or light no one ever really knew the whole truth of the story but Pammy fell in the back floor board flat on her back where the transmission hump rose up from the floorboard. She said she couldn't move either arms or legs. She was rushed to the hospital somewhere in KC then sent to Columbia Mo to a treatment center there. She finally regained the use of her legs after many months in that hospital but arms were left limp at her side and her hands and fingers limp and claw-like. Today she works and types! I cannot tell you how she does it because I haven't seen her for at least two decades but we see her mother every once in a while. Clyde and Mary divorced in 1967 when he found her with another man she'd met in a bar. Clyde went on to remarry a girl named Barbara who was our next door neighbor and my best friend. She was only three years older than me. She too was pregnant but had a miscarriage. She went on to have two more children David and Brenda who Clyde rarely saw and I wouldn't know them if I saw them on the street. She couldn't take his temper either and they divorced in 1969 or 1970.
Orville is next in line behind Clyde. He met a girl named Betty Lou when we moved from the big old house on 371 to Wallace. She too was pregnant and named their first born Orville Jr. But Orville just called him "Snake".They had seven or eight children all together and Orville had a nickname for them all. I don’t think I ever knew their real names.
Floyd, I was told was a handful. He kept running away from home and they'd notify the police and they'd bring him back and he'd just run away again. He married a girl from Platte City, a town just a ways north of KC. Her name was Delores, just like my first name, although I always went by the name of Darlene which is my middle name. Floyd worked for the 7-up company driving a truck delivering 7-up to stores etc. He liked to go hunting deer with his buddies from work. He and Delores had three sons, Mike, Bruce and Kenny in that order. When I was fifteen or so I would stay with them over summer vacation and baby sit. Michael being the oldest was a handful like his daddy. He was tall and skinny with blond hair. He was always pulling and grabbing at me until I told his Mom. That took care of that. Bruce seemed ok when he was little. He was quieter than Mike, the middle child. I had heard about twenty or thirty years later alcohol and drugs took his life. To this day I haven't heard what happened to Kenny. Delores died a few years back from heart problems. I remember when I was about two years old she was studying to be a hairdresser and Mom and Daddy took us to their apartment when they were first married so Delores could fix my sister's hair.Delores yelled at me to stay away and as usual I kept going around and around the chair making her a "nervous wreck" as I remember it. The victim in the chair was my sister Floy Mae.
Bobby Loren was my favorite brother because he was the youngest boy and stayed the longest. He always was prone to accidents. One day when the family was cutting wood to heat the house, Bobby was sitting in the back of the wagon holding a big glass water bottle in his lap. He was sitting on the edge of the end of the wagon and daddy hit a bump in the road and out flew Bobby. The glass broke and sliced him in the abdomen. He required quite a few stitches but since this was before I was born the details are a little sketchy. He also has a heart anomaly where his heart is close to the skin. You could just watch his heart beat every time he'd raise his shirt I'd look at it and watch it beat. He was told if he was hit there it could kill him. Although getting hit in the heart area couldn’t be good for anybody. He went to the army, signed up, he and our cousin Alvey. Alvey was one brick short of a load and didn't pass the physical but of course Bobby did. He left in 1963 and wrote letters from Soul Korea. He said he liked Tokyo and said it was just like the states! He married Barbara Ann when he got out. Daddy wasn't too keen on Barbara Ann because her grandfather had come from Mexico and could hardly speak English. Daddy was definitely a bigot but he was born in 1900 and was raised that way with the times. Bobby and Barbara had a boy named Timmy and a girl after Barbara's mother Patricia. They had another son named Russell. A Few years’ back Bobby had had a heart attack and needed angioplasty. He was pretty pale when I went to see him in ICU but Bobby was always a joker and made some remark when I asked him "what are you doing here?" Bobby was kind of quiet and Mama would get so mad when Orville and Clyde would take him to the Sunset Inn. That was a little bar about a mile from our house. I don't think Bobby was much older than eighteen and not allowed to drink by law and by Mama's rules. I remember Bobby telling me a story about coming home late one night and running over something in the road. The next day one of the town's drunks, there were many, had decided to lie down in the road and sleep it off. One car before Bobby had run over him and then Bobby had come along and hit him, not realizing it was a person. He was alright though but his legs were broken and had to be amputated. He lived the rest of his life in a wheel chair. No one ever knew who did it, or why he was in the road in the first place.
After Bobby's angioplasty his wife Barbara found out she needed one too. She thought it would be simple since Bobby came through it ok and she was several years younger than he. Barbara died on the operating table. There was a lawsuit and many things had gone wrong, too gruesome to mention here. Kathryn Lorene was the next child born to Mary and Cecil Dennis. Talk about stubborn and quick to temper! Always dressed like one of the boys. She had long flowing dark hair and blue-green eyes. Built muscular, was feminine when the time called for it. She married Johnny Warren I believe in 1963.I was only ten years old. I liked Johnny he was so nice but he could tick Kathryn off just by looking her way. Of course anyone could. She had two sons little Johnny and James whom she called Jaime. Theresa came along before James a year or so later since Johnny and Theresa were about 9 months apart. Johnny decided the secretary was easier to get along with so he didn't come home for about a week and left Kathryn and the kids to starve in their home in KC. Kathryn was forced to go door to door to ask for food and milk for the kids. The two littlest ones were still in diapers. She couldn't pay the bills. I don't think Johnny ever came home again after that, they were divorced and Johnny married Ann. Kathryn moved in with Audrey in the trailer park in Riverside. There was a small house just barely big enough for two people let alone a mother and three little kids. There were rats and one bit Johnny on the finger. James ended up with a huge ring worm on the top of his head; the doctor had to shave it and gave her some ointment to put on it. She met a man named Marvin and he finally took her in but he had six kids of his own. He had told her if she gave her kids back to Johnny then he would give his kids to his ex-wife and they could live together and he would marry her. Johnny had been calling and trying to coax her to give her kids up but she didn't want to. Marvin finally convinced her it was the only way they could survive because she wasn't working and couldn't, with taking care of her kids and his kids too. His kids were older and could take care of themselves at home and her kids were little and couldn't. She decided that maybe the best thing for her to do would be to give Johnny the kids, he was more able to take care of them than she was, the man she had planned to marry said he would give his kids to his ex-wife didn't he? So the pick up was scheduled and Johnny came and took her kids never to be seen or heard from again after he had promised to bring them back on regular visits and during summer break. Her kids grew to hate their "fictitious mother" as they couldn't remember her and only heard what Johnny and Ann chose to tell them. Marvin had met another and had no intentions of giving up his kids at all. We, Mama and I got the phone call in 1972 that she had to come home. She had no place to live and Marvin was kicking her out. Ronnie and I, Floy Mae's husband, went down to pick her up and she lived with me and Mama on Nebraska St in the city of St Joseph.
Mary Ann is nine years older than me born in 1944.Two years younger than Kathryn, tall and thin with brownish blond hair and a slight buck to her upper teeth. She also has a stubborn streak but not as quickly to anger as Kathryn. She met a stock boy at the grocery store in Dearborn and fell in love in an instant. Kathryn and Floy Mae also had a crush on him, Bobby, who they later found out, his father owned the store. Nickle's Market was a small grocery which they eventually sold and opened an even smaller store in Faucett. He had two sisters, Barbara and Nancy the youngest. Nancy was a year older than me and was a cheerleader at the school at Faucett I attended. She was much more approachable than her older sister Barbara whom Mary Ann said was so stuck up and so much "better" than we were since we were so poor we couldn't pay attention. Mary Ann and Bobby dated off and on about a year when in 1962 they married. A big fancy wedding they paid for and I was not allowed to attend because "I had no manners and was too dirty to live".They tried for the next year to get pregnant and finally on September 24th 1963 little Debbie was born. Little Debbie was a Tom Boy and didn't care to do much else but read books which her mother thought was a waste of time. When little Debbie went to kindergarten I babysat almost every weekend. When Debbie went to bed at night she would sleep walk and scare me to death by sneaking up behind me making no sound and reenacting scenes that had happened during the day at school. I was in the bathroom in their apartment in Faucett fixing my hair or what not, I was a teenager at the time and Debby came in and started to pull down her underwear to pee in the floor. I screamed at her "What are you trying to do!"Mary Ann came in and said "You're not supposed to yell at sleepwalkers, they could die!” Bobby and Mary Ann fought constantly and he started to turn to other family members for his comfort, so to speak but when he started after me I ran and told everyone that would listen. After the first few times no one believed me and because in the 1900's no one talked about such things Daddy called me a liar and Mary Ann wouldn’t hear of it. She finally took me and Mama to Westab where he worked and embarrassed him by confronting him at his work in front of all his peers. He of course emphatically denied everything and she took him back. I got so I was afraid to be alone at the house because he knew when I got out of school and had followed me to the outhouse and tried to raise the hook on the door that I had in place to keep the door locked. I of course being only twelve years old at the time was flattered that he was paying attention to me in such a grown up way. As soon as I got it through my head that he was not really flattering me or giving me a real compliment in any way shape or form that’s when I told him what and where he could go and that I was going to tell! It didn’t seem to slow his tries down however. Lord knows he tried but I was a feisty spoiled little brat you remember and I would have kicked him to Dearborn and back! As it happened I didn't have to do anything. He finally quit coming after me, found someone else and they divorced after 28 years of marriage.
Floy Mae was born in 1947 six years before me. She was the baby until I came along in 1953.We fought and argued but I usually had Mama on my side. Floy Mae was in the sixth grade when I started first grade at Faucett. She had long hair, dish water blond. I was told that before I was born they had chickens and a rooster that always chased her around the yard. He caught her one day and attacked her face with his long spurs. That rooster became dinner that day. Her face was bleeding it left some scars that disappeared over the years. But if you looked real close you could almost see them along with tale tell signs of where the glass cut through her forehead when she was in a car wreck when she was little and went through the windshield. She was mean and hateful and spiteful to me after I was born because now I was the baby and she felt tossed aside like an old shoe. She helped me get on the bus for school and showed me where my classroom was, knowing I was scared to death. There was no kindergarten then or preschool so when you turned six you started first grade. I used to watch her fix her hair and ratting it up high like Jacqueline Kennedy did and she was very good about makeup, putting it on and putting her hair up on rollers. Sometimes Audrey and Dud would come up from K.C. and we would play with Cindy, Pete and Charles. We lived on rte 116 in a ranch style house with a huge fenced in yard with big barns and cattle and sometimes pigs. We always had cats and dogs. Clyde had brought with him a big dog named Copper that would only listen to him and would only let him pet it. Anytime anybody else got near it would growl and threaten to bite. They said it was half coyote. Daddy had put rat poisoning out for the mice and Copper had gotten into it. He was running around like a crazy wild thing until Clyde came home from working at the manufacturing plant that would later be known as Snorkel, got a shotgun and killed it by the road where I29 is now. Floy Mae and I were friends on and off as most sisters are. I remember her tormenting me over something I don't remember what it was now and I threw a lid from a can that had been taken off with an old fashioned can opener and hit her in the face with it. That left a scar too. Kathryn took up for me when she ran to tell Mama and Mama said not to worry about it. Kathryn had saved some money working at the Nickle‘s supermarket in Dearborn where they had met Bobby Nickles and bought a bicycle. She'd had it on layaway and Floy Mae tried to ride it one day and ran into the side of the house with it. Mama was so afraid Kathryn was going to "kill" her when she got home from work but she just yelled and sulked. Kathryn was good at sulking. Floy Mae had more boyfriends than she could count and two weeks before she graduated from high school she found out she was pregnant. She quit school because in those days, late sixties, you couldn’t go to school if you were pregnant or married. On December 26th 1966 Stacey was born, father's identity was questionable but in 1968 she married a boy she met at an apartment house in St Joseph who was three years younger than herself. They are still married to this day with sons, .Ronald Wayne, Brian and Ronald Gene Jr. Her mother-in-law talked her into naming her last child after her son because they called Ronald Wayne, Wayne, Ronald Gene, JR. She wanted her to name one of her sons after Ronnie her son. JR went on to join the army at the start of the Iraq war in 2003.He wants to make a career out of it; we just want him to come home safe.
My name is Delores Darlene the last born of eleven Dennis children. My story starts where it began at that two story house on hwy 371.We moved from there to Wallace where Orville met Betty. It was a two story house but it wasn't as big as the old house on 371.It had a big heart shaped cement swimming pool but it was always kept empty. We were told to stay out of it, but we were kids and we played in it anyway. Charles and Pete played with their cars and trucks in there and we played hide and go seek. We played out there after dark and the landlord was afraid someone was going to get hurt. Betty's friend had a little brother who was two or three years younger than me and he was having a birthday party. Mama had gone to the store at the corner where Clyde always bought his butter brickle ice cream and bought him a toy drum for me to take to the party. I didn't want to go, I of course wanted to keep the drum for myself and I was afraid of other little kids. I didn't like them and they didn't like me. I hadn't associated with anyone else except my family and I didn't trust anyone else. Not even daddy. I slept with Mama and Daddy until I was five years old. Mama would get up at six o'clock am and fix breakfast for Daddy. It would be dark as pitch in that bedroom and frankly Daddy scared me. He was always yelling and grouchy. We all knew to just stay out of his way and not argue with him about anything because no one could argue as good as Daddy. I was afraid of the dark but laying there in the darkness with this evil old man ready to yell at me for no reason except the joy of yelling and controlling everybody to do things his way. DO NOT DISTURB DADDY! That has been the rule for as long as I can remember, the next fourteen years anyway.
Well I didn't go to that party, mostly because I was scared to death of other people and other peoples' children. I just sat there on the steps and pouted and sulked, (I was pretty good at sulking too!)Betty's Mom came over and sat down beside me and said "You don’t have to go if you don’t want to! But I don't understand why you wouldn't want to go; there will be ice cream and cake and party hats. You'll have a good time!" I told her I was afraid and she told me to stay there and she'd take the drum to the little boy. So I gave her the drum and felt like such a bad little girl and so ashamed of my behavior. She actually made me feel guilty and that just made me want to be worse than ever. I knew Floy Mae was afraid of June bugs so I'd scare her with them and she would scare me. It was a long time before I could look a June bug in the eyes again!
When I was five years old in 1958 we got the news that we were going to move again. Mama and Daddy took me with them to Dearborn and showed me the new house with the big yard and the big white tobacco barn and other out buildings. The yard had hog wire fence all around the biggest part of the yard and a well down at the barn where we had to haul water up to the house. It had a pump handle and it was rusty looking. It had to be primed first. You had to have water first to get water. I carried a two and a half gallon bucket in each arm to balance it out yard had small hills, passed the outhouse. The outhouse had to be dug anew when it got full and we always kept an Alden's catalog close by for tissue. We didn't have toilet tissue or any of the amenities we take for granted today such as tooth paste or tooth brushes. You rinsed your mouth out with water and used your fingernail to scrape off what you could. I didn't know what toothpaste was until a social worker came by to check on us and we had to go to Patee Hall, which was a free clinic for poor families that lived in Buchanan County. We'd make an appointment to see a dentist and we'd, (Floy Mae and I) get our teeth cleaned by a mean grumpy old dentist who hated children and his job, obviously. After several people complained about him he went to KC to work and we got a new Dentist who liked little kids and his job. He gave us toothpaste and toothbrushes. I’ve had every tooth in my head filled. Believe me I brushed my teeth every day after that.
I had watched Floy Mae get up every morning in the fall and winter to get ready for something they called school and was informed after my sixth birthday which fell on April twenty fourth in 1959 that in the fall I, too, would be getting up and going to school with her. I would be in the first grade and she would be in the sixth grade. We would ride the big yellow school bus together and she would show me where to go and introduce me to my teacher etc. When the day came at the end of August I really didn't believe I would actually go. I thought I would stay home with Mama as I always had and watch Daddy sleep on the couch or follow him down to the pond where he would spend the day fishing. I had to be quiet and not move or run on the bank because I was always told I would scare the fish. He took me fishing with him one day when I was little I don't know how old I was but it rained and rained and Daddy had a poncho in his tackle box that he put on and I shared it with him. We always went to the Little Ozarks fishing lake north of St Joseph somewhere, I couldn't tell you to this day how to get there but they had a swinging bridge that was fun to walk across. It scared Mama to death to walk over it but sometimes Daddy wanted to fish on the other side and the only way to get there was across that bridge. It would swing and sway with every move you made and Mama was afraid of heights. They fished almost every chance they could and when they would go Floy Mae was supposed to watch me. She would. She would inform me that as soon as Mama and Daddy left we were walking to Dearborn. Dearborn was approximately four miles from where we lived on rte 116.We had to cross over the I29 Bridge that was just put in after we moved there. It stretched from as far north as Council Bluff Iowa or further since I haven't been that far north and passed KC to the South, connecting to 71 hwy south. We walked over railroad tracks and passed Bee Creek. We make it to the Y intersection and turn south toward Dearborn, passed the grave yard where friends had died like Leonard Sickle who was so handsome and young and his family was good to us by giving us old hens to kill so we would have something to eat on Sundays. Unfortunately I made friends with those chickens and treated them like pets. I spent a lot of time in that shed in the middle of the yard where the chickens were kept. Trying to keep the dogs from killing them before Daddy could was a challenge but we didn't have any money to feed ourselves let alone chickens and we had to let them out to feed during the day.
On Sunday morning Mama would have the clothes hanging out on the line which stretched out next to the wood pile where the ax was. I would beg Daddy not to kill my friends since they were the only friends I had at the time. We got to eat so he'd stretch their necks across a stump and wham, headless and flopping all over the ground. Mama would curse him for killing chickens so close to the clothes line.
Leonard Sickle died of cancer in the early sixties and Cindy and Floy Mae were devastated. He had teased them about actually going out with him, as if! We'd make it to Dearborn and I was so tired. That's a long way for a small child to walk. Lee Lunsford worked at the gas station on the south end of town and Floy Mae was crazy about Lee Lunsford. So much so that she told him Stacy was his but when Stacy was born she looked exactly like Jimmy Huntsman another boy that she had gone out with. That was it! She still said it was Lee's but she could see the resemblance herself after a while and stopped saying Lee was the father. She had moved in with Kathryn and Johnny in Kansas City before the big break up there. Then she moved in with Audrey in Riverside.
Sometimes Lee would take us home if he was able to leave the station or we would just walk home and hope someone would give us a ride, most of the time someone would, like Shelby Singleton or Darryl Nye. We usually always made it home before Mama and Daddy came home from fishing and we always had to clean the fish. I hated that part because the smell was terrible and the mess was even worse than the smell. The dogs loved it though. Daddy would cut out the bubble and give it to me to burst on the cement. Fun times!
Daddy used to go hunting with the boys but he started having strokes even though he was only in his sixties. That was really old back then. He had a stroke at the Little Lake of the Ozarks and started vomiting up blood. He had what was called bleeding ulcers and the only way they had to get home was if Daddy drove them in the old 1953 Plymouth. Mama had never learned to drive and there were no cell phones back then and we didn't have a regular phone at home. The only convenience we had was electricity and propane gas to run the kitchen stove. Before that Mama cooked on an old wood stove that was considered a kitchen stove back in its day. Daddy almost drove off into the lake that day. Mama had run to the concession stand to tell the owner and I think he called someone. I really don't remember because Floy Mae and I were in school that day and we didn't have any money for doctors and ambulances. Daddy wouldn't have gone to a doctor anyway. They made it home anyway somehow and told the tale to us when we got home from school.
Daddy had a little rat terrier that Donald had given him in 1952.The only person she would let hold her was Daddy and he bought her store bought dog food while we wondered where our next meal was coming. Mama was jealous of Skippy and said he thought more of that dog than he did her. She stayed in the house with us. That was more than he ever let any other dog.
One day Clyde and Bobby were out in the driveway working on cars and Clyde moved the car for some reason or another and everyone heard a yelp! When they checked to see which animal had been hit everyone turned a pale green sick color when they saw that it was Skippy. Her left leg had been broken and Daddy wasn't home at the time. No one had enough money to take her to the vet and St Joseph was about twenty miles away. Skippy suffered and bit her leg and it finally turned green and she was able to chew it off. She lay in the closet in the dining room and whined and cried and suffered for two weeks at least. Daddy laid on the couch his usual spot and cried with every whine and scream. Clyde didn't come around much around that time. I think Daddy knew deep down that he didn't mean to do it but she always laid under the cars to be in the shade. He thought he should have looked for that before moving the car. She wouldn't have let anyone touch her but Daddy anyway so I don't know how he would have gotten her out from under there. She would bite anyone just like Copper. She recovered and every time there were family pictures Daddy would keep his hand over her left front leg so no one could see she had no leg there just a stump. I remember how sad I felt for her and for Daddy. I remember when she would play with a rag and play tug of war, before she got too old to play. When we moved from rte 116 it wasn't long before she couldn't control her bowels anymore and Daddy had to take her to the pound to be put to sleep. He shed a few tears that day too. That was the only time I remember Daddy crying except the time when he had another stroke right after we moved to “A” hwy and had insisted on helping with moving the refrigerator. We had lived on rte 116 for nine years when the landlord kept the light on in the stripping room of the big tobacco barn and the bill went on our house line so we had to pay it. We were all heartbroken that day. We loved that house even if we had to haul water in buckets in the dead of winter and get up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom in three feet of snow. We didn't think Daddy would leave that pond and all the fish he had stocked it with. The trees I had climbed before I became afraid of heights just like Mama. The barns and the woods I played in and gathered greens with Mama in the morning so we would have something to eat that day. The rabbit and the duck we had kept in the hog house next to the big tobacco barn that Clyde painted for Bill Foster for 100.00.He was painting that barn the day that Mama got sick in 1961 and I had to go down and tell him that Mama wanted to go to the hospital in St Joseph. She was afraid she was having a heart attack. It turned out she was. She got better though and we moved out of that house. We had wallpapered the front room, played ball down by that big old barn. I learned to mow the grass with the new lawn mower Daddy had gotten at Sears and Roebuck. I was five years old when we moved there in 1958 and I was fourteen years old when we moved to “A” highway. The landlord wasn't as forgiving when I ran through the woods and explored the property. He owned dairy cattle and also had Herefords pasturing there. Daddy said he told him to tell me not to be climbing over his fences! At the other house we had a big oak tree in the front yard and a big swing on one side for me and Floy Mae and a small one for him to sit in on the other side. On A hwy we had a small tree with a small swing. The house was a three room shot gun house. One bedroom, so I slept on the couch. The kitchen was only big enough for one or two people at a time. It did have a sink and when Kathryn was living with Marvin he was a plumber and he brought us a water pump that fit in the cistern. As long as we had water in it we had running water. We even got a phone courtesy of Donald. We were so excited! Daddy didn't know how to use the phone and held it upside down sometimes or he held it so far from his ear he couldn't hear anything. It was mostly because of the strokes he'd had. I remember when he had a stroke one time while he was lying on the couch and he had a green film come over his eyes. I asked him if he could feel it come over him and he could barely speak but he said "yes" he could. Audrey came and insisted on taking him to the hospital he actually went because he was afraid of dying. He stayed in the hospital a day or two when Dr Dumont said he was dying and there was no more they could do for him. We took him home and then the landlord said his oldest son Steve was getting married and he wanted to build a house on the property and we had to move again. We contacted housing authority in St Joseph. They found us a house on Clayton Street. I would have to go to a city school. They said I could go to any one of the schools in the district so I chose Benton because my best friend Carolyn Shimer from Faucett was going to Benton. The school district annexed their area so she had to quit going to Faucett high school and start going to Benton high school. I had to walk to the next street over and catch a ride with some friends of hers who were Jehovah’s witnesses as she was and their dad took me to school for awhile. Then some reason they weren't able to take me anymore, probably because of their religious beliefs. I probably said something I shouldn't have I don't know, I don't remember now.
School was about over for my junior year. It was spring of 1970. In June I had my senior pictures taken and Mary Ann and Bobby, her husband Bobby, took me and paid for them. I started working at Henry's Drive in on Cherokee St a few blocks from where we lived. I got paid every two weeks getting less than a dollar an hour. I worked there a month was fired for too many over rings. I didn't really know what I was doing anyway. Drunks came in on Friday and Saturday nights. Mothers would send their children in to place orders and the kids wouldn't get it right and the mothers would come in and throw food in your face. If you had to do an order over because a customer would change their mind about an order it would cause an over ring. I had eleven over rings in one night. I tried to explain if they had ordered it and got what they ordered the first time the amount of money would have been the same. That didn't help so I lost my first job.
The first part of June was stormy. There was a puppy hanging around the house and I wanted to keep it but we lived in town and Daddy said he would take it to the pound tomorrow if he could get someone to take him there. The rain got worse and the thunder roared like a beast from beyond. The puppy whined and howled most of the night. The lightning lit up my room like broad daylight. About three o'clock in the morning Mama came into my room in a panic and shouted "its Daddy I think he's dying.” You have to come in and look at him and tell me what you think!" I argued back at first because after all I was still half asleep and it was three o'clock in the morning. She was so insistent that I crawled out of my nice warm bed and told her he was just trying to get attention. He'd been saying he was going to die for years. When I went through the dining room and into the kitchen, the door was open to their bedroom and I could see him rising up and falling back down then up and back down. He was making this horrible breathing sound. When we tried to talk to him he acted as if he couldn't hear us. He just kept rising and falling back onto the pillow. Finally he stopped making that deep guttural breathing noise and he stayed down on the pillow. His eyes were wide open and it seemed like he was staring at me. I, of course was on the phone as usual. Daddy and I had many arguments about the phone. I had a "boyfriend" who worked at the local radio station. I'd call in and he'd talk to me for hours on end. We actually went out on a date once. He took me to the Pizza Hut. I'd never had Pizza before. I was in love! But this time I was calling Brother Bobby who lived in the south end with his wife Barbara and their first son Timmy. Timmy was only a baby. I had called the police and they came out with the coroner who pronounced him. Later the death certificate said the cause was arteriosclerosis, hardening of the arteries. Daddy didn't smoke cigarettes but he chewed tobacco and always had to have a coffee can to spit in at all times. He carried this can around with him. He always had brown spittle around his mouth and down his chin. I can still smell that can whenever I think about it. They carried him away after awhile. It seemed like forever. I had made all the calls and family started showing up. Barbara and I went to tell Floy Mae because she didn't have a telephone. Floy Mae and Ronnie had just had their first baby, Wayne. As soon as she saw our faces she knew what had happened. She started to cry. We went back to the house and they hadn't taken him yet. They were "making him ready" in the bedroom. I remember leaning against the wall in the dining room when it suddenly hit me that he was gone. I slid down the wall and started sobbing uncontrollably. The funeral was horrible. Picking out the casket was disappointing to say the least. When I was in school about two weeks before his death, a local funeral director came to visit Mama and Daddy and talked them into buying a funeral package for Daddy. It was the understanding if they Paid 90.00 now it doesn't matter if he died tomorrow he would get the big bronze casket in the brochure. When I got home Mama had told me what they had said. I thought it too good to be true but she assured me she asked all the questions and they said yes he would get the nice casket they had picked out. But when he died they said they had to pay at least three months on the package. That meant everyone in the family had to make monthly payments on the funeral. Donald took charge of course, he was the oldest son, it didn't matter what Mama wanted. So Daddy was buried in blue suede cardboard- like casket. We bought a suit from the funeral home; Daddy had never worn a suit before in his life. He would have hated that. He never wore anything but bib overalls. He also wore an engineer’s cap to cover his bald head. He used to say he worked on a train back in the early teens shoveling coal into the engine. In 1918 he had joined the army during WWI. They lived in tents and took care of the big white horses. He never cared for horses after that much. He had to shoe them and keep them brushed every day. It sounded like Heaven to me. I had always wanted a horse but Daddy had said " if you had to take care of them the way we did you wouldn't want one" He had a huge picture he kept rolled up in his steel trunk. Everything he had from those early years was in that trunk. French and German coins etc. It was the only thing they saved from a grease fire that burned down a house they rented when Mama was pregnant with me. She said she had been cooking in the kitchen and had put grease on to heat. With all the kids she had to keep track of at that time she forgot about it. It traveled up the back of the stove and the next thing she knew it was out of control. They had to live in the barn. The neighbors came and brought them food and clothes. She said she had a nice picture of Daddy in his uniform, and other precious pictures. They lost everything except that trunk. Bobby ended up with that picture but I don't know if he still has it. It had rips and tears in it the last time I saw it which was long before we'd moved from rte 116.
That early morning of June twelfth 1970, when everyone had gone home to rest for the visitation the next day, Mama still slept in that bed. I was terrified after everything had happened and the storm still raged on but the puppy had ceased his yowling. We never saw that puppy again. I tried to get Mama to come and sleep in my bed with me but she wouldn't hear of it. I had to sleep with her and of course I had to sleep in the very spot where Daddy had died. I couldn't sleep and I know I saw a tiny light like a small star hover over the bed above me. It hesitated and then it headed to the open window and went out. Daddy was gone as if he'd never existed. No more hard work in the tobacco fields to keep his large family alive. No more back breaking work cutting down trees and splitting the wood to keep his family warm in the cold Missouri winters. He was dead and buried in that cemetery in Dearborn waiting for Mama to join him eight years later.
In July my brother Bobby and his wife Barbara Ann asked me and Mama if we would like to go to Branson on vacation. We had never gotten to go anywhere when Daddy was alive except to Hannibal Mo when I was just 5 or six years old. We boarded the River Queen, an old steamboat and I got to blow the whistle. I had heard many years later that that boat had sunk and was at the bottom of the Mississippi. Daddy would never let Mama go anywhere without him and he never wanted to go anywhere except fishing.
We told him yes we wanted to go, Mama worried if it would be proper. Bobby thought we should get out of the house and enjoy ourselves for once so we went to Branson. We went to Silver Dollar City, an amusement park, then to Harrison Arkansas which was 40 miles south of there. There was another amusement park there and I rode a new roller coaster called the Mouse. I was terrified and vowed never to ride a roller coaster the rest of my life, being afraid of heights and falling about a 100 ft out of thin air just for the heck of it. We had a very good time all in all and it was good to laugh again. I hadn't seen Mama laugh and smile like that in the 17 years I'd known her.
When we got back home family said we should move from that house so we called Housing and they said they had another house not too far from there on Nebraska Street. We took a walk about 2 blocks south, then over to the west off of Lake Avenue and turned down a dirt street. I said, "Look, Mama! There's a cute yellow house with a fenced in yard and a front porch with a bench swing. Wouldn't that be nice if that was the house? "Mama looked at the paper the lady at the Housing Authority gave her and said,"211 West Nebraska street, this is it! "We did a double take and couldn't believe the cute little yellow house was 211 West Nebraska. We laughed and said "let's go see it".There were people still living there but they let us in. It had a large kitchen and a back porch too. The back yard was a half sized lot with a steel bar and two swings attached. We used the dining area for my bedroom. The wallpaper was black and white with huge flowers on it in the living room, a wild color scheme in all the rooms. I had trouble sleeping for several months after we moved in. I kept thinking Daddy was hiding under my bed and he was going to pop out any minute. It wasn't long before I started sleeping with Mama.
In the fall that year Floy Mae had her second baby, Brian, and had to move in with us. I guess they got kicked out of the apartment on Locust. It was at that time Kathryn called and said she needed a ride; Marvin had said he was going back with his ex wife. She had no kids, no husband, and the man she had been living with and had hoped to marry was out of her life for good. Floy Mae's husband Ronnie White said he and I would go to pick her up since Ronnie and Floy Mae had spent enough time in KC (he had worked for Deffenbaugh's trash company) and knew how to get there. So there was me, Mama, Floy Mae, Wayne and baby Brian, and Ronnie and Kathryn living there.
I was in my senior year of high school at Benton. I enjoyed school there. It was a lot of fun and I regretted having only this last year after having so many bad years at Faucett and Agency. Students go to Faucett from first grade to sixth and then junior high at Agency for two years and then the last four years of high school back at Faucett on the high school side. At Benton most people were like me, poor. At Faucett rich farmers kids with their fine clothes and fancy houses and hairdo's made fun of poor people like me. So at Benton I was no longer a wall flower and was able to laugh and open up more. I wanted to go to Prom with my DJ phone boyfriend but he said he had to work. Truth was he had been phone boyfriends with a lot of girls and was afraid he'd see someone he "knew".So I stayed home. I didn't have anything to wear anyway.
My new girlfriend, Kathy Atkins had a car so she and I and Penny and Colleen paled around. Kathy had told me Colleen was going with a guy that she didn't like but he had this mad crush on her. She had tried to let him down easy but he wouldn't listen to her little hints so she decided to give him a big hint and stopped the car and told him to get out. I guess he had to walk back to Elwood, Ks where he lived just over the Missouri River Bridge.
One day Kathy asked me if I wanted to go to Lake Contrary where kids hung out and swam in that disgusting water and I had never been, so I said Sure! She said she would come and get me and wear a suit. I actually had a suit. Don't remember where I got it but I put it on, grabbed a towel and waited. There were hundreds of people there when we got there including Charles and Leslie Huff. She said she wanted me to meet Leslie, Charles' brother. He had thinning blond hair and a pasty complexion. Nice smile. I oddly enough was more attracted to his brother Charlie. Who being the complete opposite had lots of dark brown hair. They were both thin but Charlie had broad shoulders, skinny shoulders but the bone structure was there. He said he had been lifting weights at the Mobile gas station in Elwood where his friends hung out. His little brother Richard was there and I asked Charlie how old was he, six? He laughed and said "No, he's fourteen".
Kathy had asked me if I liked Leslie and I said to tell you the truth I kind of liked Charlie. She said she was so happy because Charlie was the one Colleen had dumped out of her car that night.
Kathy gave him my phone number and he called me continuously until I married him on September 17th 1971.His mother hated me from the moment she heard he had a girlfriend. He lost the access to his car from having too many tickets and his Dad always had a lawn for him to mow or some reason he was grounded. He was always late for our dates and he had to walk across the Missouri River Bridge to meet me halfway. I'd start walking and he'd start walking until we'd see each other and run into each other's arms. The Missouri River Bridge was a narrow expanse and shivered and shook every time a car crossed over it. If you happened to be on it when an eighteen wheeler crossed you just had to hang onto the side and wait for it to pass. Later they blew that bridge up and built a new bridge with walkways on the sides, but that was several years later.
Charles and I walked to Hyde Park which was south of Benton High School. We'd walk and talk and laugh. He was my best friend and I was happier than ever. His mother fought us tooth and nail. She hadn't met me yet and couldn't accept the fact that we were together forever like it or not. Charles was born in Huntsville West Virginia in 1952.Born just nine months after his sister Della on October 22nd.He was premature and so tiny he slept in a dresser drawer. Sometime during his baby years he developed an infection in his right ear and only had 20% hearing in that ear. His nose was too big for his thin face. He had blue eyes that we used to call "bedroom eyes".Charles was kind and funny but he was slow to temper. He hardly showed any emotions. He didn't seem to get mad or care strongly about anything which used to drive me crazy. I would yell and scream and show my Dennis temper often just trying to get him to react.
In September I was eighteen and Charles was eighteen so we didn't need permission from our parents to get married. I wanted the date September seventeenth because that was Mama and Daddy's wedding anniversary. As usual I was in a state. The wedding was scheduled for eleven o'clock and Charles was late again. His parents were still trying to hold on to him. I was mad and unsure if getting married was what I really wanted to do. He took my hand and led me up the sidewalk to Lake Avenue to the car where his brother Leslie and his sister Della were waiting to be our witnesses at the court house. Her Honorable Judge Margaret Young married us and then firmly told us that she didn't think it would last. I laughed and was happy until the day was about over and I told Charlie I was ready to go home now. I was tired of driving around with the car horn honking. I was coming down from the high and excitement of getting married and I just wanted to go home. He said when we go home we're not taking you back to your house we're going to the little apartment we had rented on north 19th St. We had an upstairs apartment in the back. There were many steep steps to go up to get to the door. At the top of the stairs leading to our apartment, the floors were varnished wood and the little kitchen was to the left. To the right was a large living room. It was furnished including utilities for 65.00 a month. Down the short hall there was a moderately sized bedroom to the right and opposite on the left of the bedroom was a large bathroom with an old fashioned claw foot tub. The spicket was tiny and it took forever to fill up. One day when I was getting Charlie's lunch ready for him when he came home from his job at Artesian Ice on his lunch break; I decided to take a bath first. I reached down to turn the water on when a large Wolf spider jumped down into the tub. I had always been afraid of spiders ever since we lived at the farm house on rte 116 when Mama was doing the laundry on the back porch using an old wringer washer. The dining room closet that Skippy had nursed her broken leg was where we kept the dirty clothes. I was helping her sort when I saw a white gathering of soft cloth like material in the corner of a piece of fabric. I picked at it when I saw some grey thing wriggling out of it with fangs bared and standing straight up in a threatening posture. I screamed and ran to Mama to tell her about it. When we lived in that tiny three room house on “A” highway the out house was balanced on the edge of a ravine and it was full of huge Wolf spiders. When you opened the door there was always a huge spider with four legs on the inside of the door and four legs on the hinge. You were afraid to go in because if you moved the door it could jump. I'd go back to the house and holler at Daddy that there was a spider on the door of the outhouse and I couldn't go in. He'd take a fly swatter down there mumbling "if you don't look for them you wouldn't find them".We always told him he needed something bigger than a fly swatter when a fly swatter was meant for flies and not something as big if not bigger than the palm of my hand. I remembered Mama telling me when she was a little girl that her mother had told her to go to the well and pull up the bucket that was on a long rope and pull up a bucket of water, she said when she did there was a spider that covered the whole top of the bucket!
I waited about five or ten minutes and decided I wasn't taking a bath in that tub until Charles came home to kill that spider. Even then I wasn't too keen on turning that spicket on again until I was sure there were no more spiders.
We fought and fussed for about two weeks of marriage, I was through "playing house" and again I told him I wanted to go home. He informed me we were married and there would be no going home again. After two months I decided I wanted to live in a house not an apartment, so we went house hunting. We found a cute little house in Elwood just around the corner from his mom and dad's house. They still hadn't accepted me as their daughter-in-law and never would. His dad seemed to be resigned to the fact another one of sons was lost to them, first Henry to Mary in Lincoln Nebraska. They had two sons, Henry III and Billy the baby. I can't go through all the details of the horrendous slight bestowed upon Mary just for falling in love with their son mostly because I wasn't there but the stories only parallel the Hell his mother spewed on me throughout my married life.
In May of 1972 Charlie informed his mother that I was pregnant with my first child, Jennifer Carol Huff. I named her Jennifer after the main character Jenny on the movie "Love Story".Charlie reluctantly took me to see the "girlie flick" when it came to St Joseph. It was a beautiful and sad movie and I bought an organ from my brother Clyde, the music from the movie, and I learned to play by number.
In the fall of 1973, when Jenny was nine months old we moved from Elwood to a farm house where rte 116 and hwy 371 intersected. It was just a mile east of the house where I grew up. Leslie had urged Charlie to quit his stable job at Artesian Ice making 2.00 an hour to go to work with him at this painting company where income was not guaranteed but when you did get paid it was a lot more than he was making. He quit his job and we took the '69 Camaro and filled it with as much stuff as we could fit in it and making several trips back and forth we finally settled into our new house. We brought a poodle, a kitten, and later we bought a pony to keep in the small area about a hundred feet from the house. There was running water and French doors opening into the huge bedroom. The kitchen was also very large. The living room was adequate, not too small and not too big and the bathroom was very small. We had to call Savannah to have our water turned on in our name.
Charlie had to go in to town every day to see if there was any work available. Every time the answer was “no“. Leslie always seemed to have work but she had her family to help support them. She, meaning his new wife, Linda. She had a daughter that was 3 months old when our daughter was born and she had named her daughter Jenny too. She already had Jenny when she and Leslie got together. He'd (Charlie) come home every day not knowing how he was going to afford the gasoline to go again the next day. The Camaro used oil and we were out of that too. Jenny needed diapers and milk and the dog needed dog food. We had been buying the pony a bale of hay for him to eat all week. We couldn't pay the rent or the lights or the water or propane for the propane tank. It was December. We couldn't pay Norman's tire company for the tires we'd bought on time.
Floy Mae and Ronnie had moved too. They moved into a small old house that had to be heated with wood. They had a cistern for water and they had a truck. Ronnie had lost his job too. He had worked at the stock yards in St Joseph. When he came home from work the smell of the stock yards came with him, even though he showered before leaving work and he showered after getting home from work. The smell was in his car and always stayed with him. When they moved to that old rickety house they came to visit us in our little farm house since they had moved south as well on 371 hwy. They moved about 5 miles north of us. Our two families were in the same boat so to speak so we applied our wits, what was left of them, and asked farmers if we could pick up the corn that the combine had missed in the fields. Usually they would let us otherwise they would have stray corn growing in spots they didn't want .Some farmers turned their cattle out in the field to eat the remaining corn.
I carried Jenny now ten months old through the corn fields. Picking corn and throwing the ears in the back of Ronnie's truck. At the end of the week we would get 15.00 a truck load after we blistered our hands and fingers peeling the kernels off by hand and getting docked for the moisture content since we didn't have any way to dry it in big dryers like the rich farmers .Mama said for us to use another corn cob to help loosen the kernels. This was backbreaking work not to mention the pain. Jenny had lost a shoe in the corn field so I had to hold her little foot in one hand and try to pick corn with the other. At the end of the week we divided the money in half and I took the 7.50 to the store and bought diapers and milk for Jenny. We did all this work on empty stomachs. The dog was starving and the cat was starving since it was too cold even for the mice to come into the house. I couldn't cook. Couldn't have done the dishes if I did and the stool froze up and cracked. Jenny and I used to sit in the living room and watch reruns of Green Acres at five o'clock and Leave it to Beaver until they shut off the electricity and the water. We couldn't buy propane since they wouldn't come for less than 100.00.We didn't have a telephone so we couldn't call anyone for help. The landlady said she didn‘t care about our plight all she knew is that we didn't have the 50.00 for rent and we had to go. The U joints were going out of Ronnie's truck so we couldn't pick corn anymore. No one came to see if we were dead or alive and all Charlie's dad could say was "if you don't put oil in that car the engine is going to blow up and you won't have a car."
The car was making a popping noise in the engine and we knew it wasn't going to last much longer .I even rode the pony with Jenny in front of me to Floy Mae's house. I wasn't a very good rider since the only experience I'd had was wishing for a pony when I was a young girl and the westerns we watched on TV. That's all Daddy would watch or allow us to watch when we finally did get a TV. But Danny was a good pony and we rode a long way, walking and bouncing all the way. When we finally came to the driveway Floy Mae greeted us with disbelief on her face. She had a "down on her luck" story too. I was hoping she had some food or something to help us at least get some word to Mama and Kathryn.
The last time Charlie drove the car toward St Joseph he ran out of gas and had to walk about seven miles the rest of the way. No work that day either. He walked to Mama's house and used the phone to call Kathy who was now married to his best friend from school, Lester Sanderson. We had used the last eighteen cents in his pocket to buy 1/2 gallon of gasoline in Faucett and went to my sister Mary Ann and Bobby's house to see if anyone had called to offer him a job. Once while he had gone to town to see if the paint company had work for him to do and again was turned down, he had put in applications at other businesses and left Mary Ann's phone number. When we finally got there, she informed us that a company called Dale Alley chemical company had called and said he had the job if he could get there for the interview. I had been doing my laundry at Mary Ann's and she informed me that Bobby said it was making their water bill too high so I couldn't do laundry there anymore. I was just so happy about the new job that Charlie would get as soon as he could get there I didn't care about much else.
While we were still in the house freezing, Leslie and Linda and Richard came down out of the blue and stayed all of five minutes. Instead of offering help Linda said "we're going home it's too cold in here.” How did they think we were standing it? They could go home where it was warm and cozy with food in their refrigerator. I just couldn't believe they were going to leave us there with the baby and not come back. They never did.
After Charlie made that phone call to Kathy and Lester they didn't hesitate to come and take us back to their apartment they had gotten on Housing. They were so afraid they were going to be in so much trouble. They wouldn't let me bring my poodle or the kitten because they weren't allowed to have pets. Although other tenants had big German shepherds etc. We brought dog food down to the dog but the cat was dead. Danny looked like a skeleton. We begged Kathy and Lester to let us bring some hay down there now that Charlie had a job we could afford to buy it but they wouldn't let us haul it in their car. The landlady called the police and a man from the dept talked to us. I explained the hardships we had and little if no help. He was very nice and sympathetic. I finally managed without asking Kathy but the pony was picked up by the animal shelter and sold.
We lived with Kathy and Lester for three weeks. They resented us being there and we hated being a burden on them. We wanted a place of our own. After Charlie got a few checks together we started looking for a place to live. We found a duplex on south twenty fourth St. the landlady lived on the other side. She was elderly and told me when she banged on the wall I was to go over there and check on her. She banged on the wall a lot. Mostly she didn't want anything but to talk about her medical conditions and what not. I got awfully tired of hearing that banging and scared that she might actually need help and I wouldn't know what to do. We still didn't have a phone. Charlie got up at five o'clock in the morning to walk twelve blocks to work. We argued over fixing peanut butter sandwiches with equal amounts of jelly. I hated the stuff (peanut butter) ever since Mama and Daddy and I and Floy Mae went to visit Audrey when I was a little girl and Charles (Sugar) and I shared a jar of peanut butter. He loved it but I was getting sick of the same noxious taste. They had a little black dog named Snooker and we laughed when we'd fed some of it to Snooker and she fought with it when it got stuck to the roof of her mouth. Snooker lived to be an old dog living for sixteen years. Charles (Sugar) died at the age of forty two after driving a truck all night and stopping to play pool at the local truck stop .He went to bed and never woke up. He had spent two years or so in Vietnam in the seventies on the front lines. The men that survived were allowed to go anywhere in the world they wanted. He chose to go to Hawaii for R&R before returning home. I had heard about Agent Orange, that chemical they sprayed all over dense forest areas to kill the dense foliage. Others claimed it gave them many cancer and respiratory diseases. Charles had gone to the VA in Leavenworth where they had told him he had cancer and needed chemotherapy treatments. He said he didn't have time for treatments he had to work.
After a few arguments Charlie figured I wasn't getting up at five o'clock in the morning to make sandwiches he said I didn't spread right anyway, so he made his own lunch.
We couldn't take the neighbor's banging so one night we left and moved to a big two story house on north Fifth Street. Jenny was walking then and potty training was eminent. After three weeks she was trained. She shed the bottle at one year .I couldn't stand to hear Charlie's mother hollering about that bottle.
On Sundays Charlie always tried to drag me to Troy where his Mom and Dad lived now. He would stay outside with his brothers and his dad while I was trapped in the house with his sister Joann, Richard and Gina. Gina and Richard were nice but Joann was at that awkward age where she complained about everything and of course I was always the target. I never understood why she was so mean to me but his mom sure got a big kick out of it and joined in with the harassing and torment. I was so miserable I would go outside to try to talk Charlie into coming in n the house or taking me home. We'd get there about ten o'clock in the morning and would not leave until midnight. Every week on the way home he'd get an ear full. I'd swear I’d never go there again but come Sunday there we would go again. She had something to say about the way I raised my daughter, the way I folded socks you name it. She rode me continuously. When we told her I was pregnant with Jenny in May 1972 and she wasn't born until 1973.she kept saying "I told you so! I knew it!"! We had gotten married you'll remember in 1971.She must have thought that was the longest gestation period in history.
I didn't understand why he wouldn't go over to Mama and Kathryn's house on Nebraska St; he said there weren't any men there for him to talk to.
Floy Mae and Ronnie moved again too. They were living on Pryor Avenue in north end. While Charlie worked on the Camaro, (the motor mounts were broken, the motor was raised and a new motor put in. Large chains were used to stabilize the motor in place of new mounts. Charlie was known for piecing his vehicles together with spit and glue and the occasional rubber band) I walked from north fifth to Floy Mae's house on Pryor Avenue. She died my hair the lightest shade of blond. My hair was long, down to the middle of my back. After Jennifer was born and I had breast fed for three months I actually had breasts and I was a skinny 115 lbs. The transformation from mousy brown to almost platinum blond was mind blowing and when I came walking up the St. on north fifth, Charlie couldn't believe it was me. I have to admit I had to do double takes in the mirror to believe it was me too.
During the time we had that Camaro he had painted racing stripes on the hood and trunk. It was a blue Camaro and it looked good but it would not stay running. He had put a six cylinder engine in it but it was an automatic and he said six cylinder automatics were always "doggy".He got so tired working on it all the time. One day coming back from Kansas it stalled and we pulled over to the gas station in Elwood. He looked at me sitting in the passenger seat I had already had another mother-in-law bashing. I must have had a look that he didn't care for on my face because he took a sixteen ounce Pepsi bottle, threw it at the windshield where I was sitting, spidered the windshield. Every time we drove the car onto the street a cop would give us a ticket. We never did get that fixed. We finally sold it or gave it to a junk yard on K-highway north of St Joseph. About broke Charlie's heart.
We moved again to south 14th St. but not so far south this time to a very expensive apartment. It was 100.00 dollars a month which was unheard of at that time. It was so cute and had a fake fireplace and a divider between the kitchenette and the living room. It only had one bedroom so Jenny slept on the couch. It was 1975.She was 2 1/2 then, it was July. Charlie had been working nights then, days on and off every month. He was so tired he couldn't sleep at nights because he was used to staying up at nights and sleeping days then they would change him to days and he had a hard time getting up in time for work. We woke up one morning and it was nine o'clock in the morning, he was supposed to be at work at eight o'clock. He was fired that day. Here we were again with 100.00 rents, our Volkswagen we bought after the Camaro fiasco was in the shop at the "Bug Surgeon" getting a new motor. Charlie had taught me how to drive a stick on that Volkswagen. We walked all over the place because that was the only way we had to get around. We needed groceries of course so we walked to the A&P store on 22nd St. just a few blocks from our first apartment on North 19th St, had a checking account but it was empty. We still had to eat. We wrote checks that we didn't know how we were going to cover but Charlie thought any day he would get a job. He got a job at Norris and Sons trash service but the owner quit coming to get him. He hated that job anyway. He couldn’t stand being so filthy all the time and they gave him the dirtiest jobs. He tried to file for unemployment but Old man Norris blocked it.
One evening when we were at home Charlie Paul the manager of A&P came knocking at our door and wanted to know how we were going to pay for these checks that had bounced. We explained the circumstances, that he was trying to get a job but none had offered him an interview. We didn't have a phone so I don't how anyone was supposed to call even if they had something. Charlie Paul offered Charlie a job at the store cleaning the parking lot and pulling weeds out of the sidewalk. He took the money we owed out of his check every week. Finally he was moved inside the store as a stocker on the night shift.