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For the info of those outside the US, today is our Memorial Day. It was originally set aside as a day to remember the dead from the American Civil war of 1861 to 1865. Just as memories were fading from that war, the losses of World War I made the observance permanent. Along with Independence Day in July and Labor Day in September it is one of the few nonreligious holidays sponsored by the government which is actually observed with a day off from work for most of us not just the government itself and banks. Different families observe the day in different ways. Those with loved ones killed in war may visit cemeteries. Those that don't might go to the beach, go boating, have a picnic, watch car racing or listen to it on the radio, generally enjoying what amounts to the first days of the summer season here.
I thought I share today what Memorial Day long ago was like. Not so different from today perhaps...
My extended family fortunately had no war dead. A several men in the family were wounded in Word War II , but all made it home in one piece. It was my mother's father who decided that Memorial Day would be the perfect day for family reunions. In those days Memorial Day was always observed on the 31st of May,. although if that day fell during the weekend there was a day off the next Monday. It was in fact Memorial Day that led the push for all one-day holidays in this country to be observed on a Mondays so that there would be a long weekend. Fifty years ago, that wasn't the case, but about 4 years out of 7 there was a long weekend anyway. Any time there was a three-day Memorial weekend in those days Grandpa wanted a reunion.
For some kids, Memorial Day was the start of summer. But because our school year extended into June, it was just a taste of summer for us. 1954 was the last summer before I started to school., but my older siblings would have to be in school the day after. I don't know if there was a three-day weekend that year but what follows is pretty much what my family did when there was one in the 1950s.
Friday evening my mother would pack for us, and Saturday morning as soon as my father could get my mother going we started west. 1954 was before the beginning of the interstate highway system. Crossing hilly Missouri on the two lane highways of the day was so notoriously unpleasant that even Mad Magazine made jokes about it. It was difficult to pass and the underpowered trucks of the day had trouble keeping up speed going up hills. These days you rarely see runaway ramps even in the Rocky Mountains. In those days of bad truck brakes there were runaway ramps all over the hilly part of Missouri, and rarely did you make a trip across the state without seeing a truck with serious damage at the end of one of those runaway ramps. Like secondary roads today, the main highways went straight through every town large and small, slowed to whatever speed limit, and stopped at every cross street the locals chose. But, with the exception of a flat tire on practically every long trip, we always made the journey without incident.
The hilliest part of the trip was near home, where travel was a constant line of cars behind each truck, each car waiting its turn to roar around the truck on the next down slope which allowed a brief period of fast travel till the next line was reached. The biggest hill was the climb out of the Loutre River valley. It is in fact a huge canyon with a small stream at the bottom disguised by a forest into looking like just a large pair of hills facing each other.
We crossed the Missouri River in those days at Booneville and that meant if the time of day was right we'd stop at Pete's Cafe for lunch. Pete's Cafe like Wall Drugs in South Dakota and Rock City in Tennessee was known far and wide for advertising everywhere imaginable along the road side. Before the interstate highway system and highway beautification laws, there were few stretches of the main highway across the state that were as long as a mile that didn't have a series of small red, diamond-shaped signs spaced no more than twenty feet apart. Countless children must have driven countless parents insane with the incessant chant of reading each sign as it went by. "Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe!... There were so many signs we kids grew hoarse, and looked forward to the more interesting Burma Shave signs. But the advertising worked. We stopped there, and surprise of surprises Pete's Cafe was probably the nicest restaurant for a hundred miles in all directions; perfectly dignified and with fine food and good coffee for the parents.
We kept going back to Pete's not because of the signs, but because of an incident that happened with me a few years earlier. We'd stopped and had a fine lunch. Near the end of the meal I'd gotten clumsy and knocked over my milk, as three or four year olds will. Everyone in the restaurant looked at me. I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I started crying and was still crying as we went to pay at the front door. Suddenly a kindly looking gentleman with a mustache (Pete himself, I learned later) came up to me and insisted on shaking my hand. As we shook hands he slipped something into my hand. I opened my hand and found a piece of bubble gum. It was amazing how much better it made me feel, and no doubt that made life much easier in the car for my parents. A penny's worth of bubble gum was worth more than what must have been thousands of dollars (in those days a fortune) worth of road signs. We kept going back and back.
Beyond the Missouri River the hills got smaller. Before the days of the interstate we left Highway 40 and got on Highway 50 to go around, rather than through, Kansas City. We crossed into Kansas just north of where my father was from. One of the chief diversions was listening to the funny sounding town names along the way and nearby on other roads; Olathe Paola, Osawatomie (which often led to giggling kids trying to swat each other). The last big town was Emporia where we always saw the big red diesel locomotives racing by with Santa Fe trains. Beyond that was another of those unpleasant portions of the trip. In the days before auto air-conditioning a drive past a feed lot was no fun. One of the biggest and smelliest was at Strong City. It was one of the last big hills before the great plains. The whole steep slope facing the highway was a giant holding area for cattle waiting to be shipped to slaughter houses in KC, St. Louis. and points north and east. On that hillside, the lot must have been a minor ecological calamity every time it rained. Indeed as pollution laws grew stronger in the 1970s the feed lot was forced to move to flat land. The stench behind us, we passed the last of the eastern Kansas mixed farms and crossed the barren land known as the Flint Hills. There were so few houses that even in the 1950s there were no power or telephone lines along the highway, just miles of open country with no soil to support anything but cattle grazing. Beyond that the land changed completely; land so flat that you could see the grain elevators of the second town in front of you down the road. Otherwise it was a land of endless wheat fields. At Memorial Day weekend it would be dark by the time we got this far, but we already knew there was little to see except the next elevator appearing on the horizon.
We were exhausted by the time we got to Grandpa's house. He still lived on the farm then with an outhouse instead of a bathroom. But still it was a fun place in the daytime. He had wheat planted like everyone else that side of the Flint Hills. He had a few head of cattle, black angus, which he insisted made the best beef. At night it was not particularly fun. It was tough to sleep there for visitors, even for a little kid. My Grandpa had an oil well within a short distance of his house. My mother's family was far from rich, but money from oil meant that they left real poverty behind for good, long before the start of the Great Depression. The steam-powered pump on that well ran 24 hours a day. In the daytime it seemed to fade into the background. But at night, its constant out-of-sync loud thumps and bangs made it very tough to sleep except from sheer exhaustion.
Sunday Morning we got up and went to the park in the nearby little town for the reunion. My mother's relatives from all over Kansas, and Oklahoma showed up, but we probably had driven farther than any of them. The kids always had a softball game. In 1954 I was too young to play so we younger cousins amused ourselves with tag and other energetic games. When I was later old enough to play in the softball games I became aware of a strange tradition. With a huge mass of willing new players available the kids from the town all joined in whether they were related or not. We'd have younger kids who were distantly related to us timidly asking to join in, while the locals were shouting, 'I'll play left' or some other position, coming in the game without any formality. Sometimes during a pause in the game one of us grandkids of my grandfather would ask another, if so-and-so over there was related to us or not. Most of the time we'd just shrug. My mother knew all of the adults at the reunion, but even she couldn't really explain how they all were related to us. We'd ask "Who was that?" She answered, "Well, that's so-and-so's daughter." "Who is so-and-so?" "Well, he's so-and-so's, brother." "Then who is he?" "Well, he married blah-blah-blah." And so it would go on never reaching a point where we had any idea who any of the people she mentioned was. It was made all the worse by the fact that my grandpa not only invited his all own kin, but those of his long deceased wife.
Of course, there was a magnificent feast of a picnic. We first cousins tried to sit close to each other, but someone always ended up sitting next to someone on my mother's list of indecipherable relatives, the cousin thus having to explain he/she was so-and-so's child which always enlightened the adults, but left us no wiser. After the meal there were a few more less-organized games, then the party broke up. The aunts and uncles I knew, all gathered at Grandpa's small house and there was a free-for-all of cousins running every which way. After the adults got tired of talking, the aunts and uncles and cousins all split up and went to spend the night at nearby relatives houses. My family always stayed at Grandpa's because we got to go there the least often.
The next morning after breakfast my grandpa rushed around to find his camera. My father would always grin knowingly at me at this point, because as soon as he was outside with the camera, invariably Grandpa would discover he'd used up all his film the day before at the reunion. Every time he'd rush back in the house to search for that roll of film he always had stashed away for emergencies. Grandpa would take his pictures. Then my father would causally get out his camera, which always still had film, and snapped a few shots just before we left.
The road back was tiresome. It was the time of "When are we gonna get there" ringing in my parents ears. The trip was long and unremarkable, except that we usually stopped for dinner at Wright City not all that far from home. The restaurant was called Big Boys and it may still be there. It was the only restaurant I knew of that served meals family-style, with big bowls of food put on the table instead of individually arranged meals. Their fried chicken was great. Kentucky Fried Chicken was far in the future and not nearly as classy or as good. Once when we stopped there, our waitress was floating on air because she'd just finished waiting on Rex Allen, a now-forgotten singing-cowboy movie star. But we knew who he was back then. We hadn't actually seen him, but our waitress's joy was so infectious it really added to enjoyment of the meal.
I was probably asleep by the time we arrived at home. My father would carry me in, and I'd act like I hadn't woken up. Believe me I didn't want to wake up. The next morning it was back to school and work. The whole weekend seemed like a dream.
I thought I share today what Memorial Day long ago was like. Not so different from today perhaps...
My extended family fortunately had no war dead. A several men in the family were wounded in Word War II , but all made it home in one piece. It was my mother's father who decided that Memorial Day would be the perfect day for family reunions. In those days Memorial Day was always observed on the 31st of May,. although if that day fell during the weekend there was a day off the next Monday. It was in fact Memorial Day that led the push for all one-day holidays in this country to be observed on a Mondays so that there would be a long weekend. Fifty years ago, that wasn't the case, but about 4 years out of 7 there was a long weekend anyway. Any time there was a three-day Memorial weekend in those days Grandpa wanted a reunion.
For some kids, Memorial Day was the start of summer. But because our school year extended into June, it was just a taste of summer for us. 1954 was the last summer before I started to school., but my older siblings would have to be in school the day after. I don't know if there was a three-day weekend that year but what follows is pretty much what my family did when there was one in the 1950s.
Friday evening my mother would pack for us, and Saturday morning as soon as my father could get my mother going we started west. 1954 was before the beginning of the interstate highway system. Crossing hilly Missouri on the two lane highways of the day was so notoriously unpleasant that even Mad Magazine made jokes about it. It was difficult to pass and the underpowered trucks of the day had trouble keeping up speed going up hills. These days you rarely see runaway ramps even in the Rocky Mountains. In those days of bad truck brakes there were runaway ramps all over the hilly part of Missouri, and rarely did you make a trip across the state without seeing a truck with serious damage at the end of one of those runaway ramps. Like secondary roads today, the main highways went straight through every town large and small, slowed to whatever speed limit, and stopped at every cross street the locals chose. But, with the exception of a flat tire on practically every long trip, we always made the journey without incident.
The hilliest part of the trip was near home, where travel was a constant line of cars behind each truck, each car waiting its turn to roar around the truck on the next down slope which allowed a brief period of fast travel till the next line was reached. The biggest hill was the climb out of the Loutre River valley. It is in fact a huge canyon with a small stream at the bottom disguised by a forest into looking like just a large pair of hills facing each other.
We crossed the Missouri River in those days at Booneville and that meant if the time of day was right we'd stop at Pete's Cafe for lunch. Pete's Cafe like Wall Drugs in South Dakota and Rock City in Tennessee was known far and wide for advertising everywhere imaginable along the road side. Before the interstate highway system and highway beautification laws, there were few stretches of the main highway across the state that were as long as a mile that didn't have a series of small red, diamond-shaped signs spaced no more than twenty feet apart. Countless children must have driven countless parents insane with the incessant chant of reading each sign as it went by. "Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe! Pete's Cafe!... There were so many signs we kids grew hoarse, and looked forward to the more interesting Burma Shave signs. But the advertising worked. We stopped there, and surprise of surprises Pete's Cafe was probably the nicest restaurant for a hundred miles in all directions; perfectly dignified and with fine food and good coffee for the parents.
We kept going back to Pete's not because of the signs, but because of an incident that happened with me a few years earlier. We'd stopped and had a fine lunch. Near the end of the meal I'd gotten clumsy and knocked over my milk, as three or four year olds will. Everyone in the restaurant looked at me. I was so embarrassed and ashamed that I started crying and was still crying as we went to pay at the front door. Suddenly a kindly looking gentleman with a mustache (Pete himself, I learned later) came up to me and insisted on shaking my hand. As we shook hands he slipped something into my hand. I opened my hand and found a piece of bubble gum. It was amazing how much better it made me feel, and no doubt that made life much easier in the car for my parents. A penny's worth of bubble gum was worth more than what must have been thousands of dollars (in those days a fortune) worth of road signs. We kept going back and back.
Beyond the Missouri River the hills got smaller. Before the days of the interstate we left Highway 40 and got on Highway 50 to go around, rather than through, Kansas City. We crossed into Kansas just north of where my father was from. One of the chief diversions was listening to the funny sounding town names along the way and nearby on other roads; Olathe Paola, Osawatomie (which often led to giggling kids trying to swat each other). The last big town was Emporia where we always saw the big red diesel locomotives racing by with Santa Fe trains. Beyond that was another of those unpleasant portions of the trip. In the days before auto air-conditioning a drive past a feed lot was no fun. One of the biggest and smelliest was at Strong City. It was one of the last big hills before the great plains. The whole steep slope facing the highway was a giant holding area for cattle waiting to be shipped to slaughter houses in KC, St. Louis. and points north and east. On that hillside, the lot must have been a minor ecological calamity every time it rained. Indeed as pollution laws grew stronger in the 1970s the feed lot was forced to move to flat land. The stench behind us, we passed the last of the eastern Kansas mixed farms and crossed the barren land known as the Flint Hills. There were so few houses that even in the 1950s there were no power or telephone lines along the highway, just miles of open country with no soil to support anything but cattle grazing. Beyond that the land changed completely; land so flat that you could see the grain elevators of the second town in front of you down the road. Otherwise it was a land of endless wheat fields. At Memorial Day weekend it would be dark by the time we got this far, but we already knew there was little to see except the next elevator appearing on the horizon.
We were exhausted by the time we got to Grandpa's house. He still lived on the farm then with an outhouse instead of a bathroom. But still it was a fun place in the daytime. He had wheat planted like everyone else that side of the Flint Hills. He had a few head of cattle, black angus, which he insisted made the best beef. At night it was not particularly fun. It was tough to sleep there for visitors, even for a little kid. My Grandpa had an oil well within a short distance of his house. My mother's family was far from rich, but money from oil meant that they left real poverty behind for good, long before the start of the Great Depression. The steam-powered pump on that well ran 24 hours a day. In the daytime it seemed to fade into the background. But at night, its constant out-of-sync loud thumps and bangs made it very tough to sleep except from sheer exhaustion.
Sunday Morning we got up and went to the park in the nearby little town for the reunion. My mother's relatives from all over Kansas, and Oklahoma showed up, but we probably had driven farther than any of them. The kids always had a softball game. In 1954 I was too young to play so we younger cousins amused ourselves with tag and other energetic games. When I was later old enough to play in the softball games I became aware of a strange tradition. With a huge mass of willing new players available the kids from the town all joined in whether they were related or not. We'd have younger kids who were distantly related to us timidly asking to join in, while the locals were shouting, 'I'll play left' or some other position, coming in the game without any formality. Sometimes during a pause in the game one of us grandkids of my grandfather would ask another, if so-and-so over there was related to us or not. Most of the time we'd just shrug. My mother knew all of the adults at the reunion, but even she couldn't really explain how they all were related to us. We'd ask "Who was that?" She answered, "Well, that's so-and-so's daughter." "Who is so-and-so?" "Well, he's so-and-so's, brother." "Then who is he?" "Well, he married blah-blah-blah." And so it would go on never reaching a point where we had any idea who any of the people she mentioned was. It was made all the worse by the fact that my grandpa not only invited his all own kin, but those of his long deceased wife.
Of course, there was a magnificent feast of a picnic. We first cousins tried to sit close to each other, but someone always ended up sitting next to someone on my mother's list of indecipherable relatives, the cousin thus having to explain he/she was so-and-so's child which always enlightened the adults, but left us no wiser. After the meal there were a few more less-organized games, then the party broke up. The aunts and uncles I knew, all gathered at Grandpa's small house and there was a free-for-all of cousins running every which way. After the adults got tired of talking, the aunts and uncles and cousins all split up and went to spend the night at nearby relatives houses. My family always stayed at Grandpa's because we got to go there the least often.
The next morning after breakfast my grandpa rushed around to find his camera. My father would always grin knowingly at me at this point, because as soon as he was outside with the camera, invariably Grandpa would discover he'd used up all his film the day before at the reunion. Every time he'd rush back in the house to search for that roll of film he always had stashed away for emergencies. Grandpa would take his pictures. Then my father would causally get out his camera, which always still had film, and snapped a few shots just before we left.
The road back was tiresome. It was the time of "When are we gonna get there" ringing in my parents ears. The trip was long and unremarkable, except that we usually stopped for dinner at Wright City not all that far from home. The restaurant was called Big Boys and it may still be there. It was the only restaurant I knew of that served meals family-style, with big bowls of food put on the table instead of individually arranged meals. Their fried chicken was great. Kentucky Fried Chicken was far in the future and not nearly as classy or as good. Once when we stopped there, our waitress was floating on air because she'd just finished waiting on Rex Allen, a now-forgotten singing-cowboy movie star. But we knew who he was back then. We hadn't actually seen him, but our waitress's joy was so infectious it really added to enjoyment of the meal.
I was probably asleep by the time we arrived at home. My father would carry me in, and I'd act like I hadn't woken up. Believe me I didn't want to wake up. The next morning it was back to school and work. The whole weekend seemed like a dream.
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