Time for Some More

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

A)  What is one of your most vivid childhood memories? Was it family, friends, places, events, or just plain fun?  Your first memory?  Your most fun memory?

Memories – are they memories of the event or memories of the family films and photographs? That’s a hard question for me to answer since we watched those family movies over and over.

My earliest memory that is not from one of those movies is of our home in Kansas City when I was 3-4 years old. These memories are just flashes and not backed up by any family photos. My father was a teacher at Washington High School in Wyandotte County, Kansas. My memory is of a small house on a property that had a corral where they broke horses. Other memories of this time period involve my brother (18 months younger) and I sharing a room and the walls being stucco or cement.

Another memory from a couple of years later is of my brother and I playing out in the snow with our neighbor in Dodge City. While playing, we watched a helicopter fly over with what was likely hay bales hanging from the copter. I also remember talking about the helicopter over the evening meal when my dad explained they were taking food to the cattle because their normal food was covered in snow.

Another memory from the same time period is of getting my tonsils out. I remember the ether mask coming down over my face and scaring me. The next day, mom served bierocks for supper. Since my throat was still sore, I couldn’t eat them. When I asked my mom about this, she said that she thought we could eat whatever since we had been jumping on the bed all day long. Unfortunately, my only memories of this time are of the mask and of not being able to eat. To this day, I don’t like bierocks.

When it comes to fun memories, I have a lot from my Dodge City days. There were five families with children about the age of me and my brothers in the neighborhood: Lee, Keeley, Edminston, Sayre and us. Summer time found us outside playing all over the neighborhood. Other fun memories involve going to the pool almost every day at 5 pm to swim.

And then there were the vacations. Living in Dodge City, we often went to the mountains for our vacation. One of those vacations was to the mountains around Taos, New Mexico. During that trip we went to a ‘fish farm’ where my brothers and I were allowed to ‘go fishing’ The trout were biting our lines so fast, that I had caught two fish in the time it took to get my brother’s poles in the water. Thus, my parents had 4 fish to pay for instead of 3.