Heading West

Chapter 13

The Way West

Even though I was fresh out of the backwoods hill country, I set off on my great adventure with complete self-confidence as becoming any fifteen-year-old.  After all, I had been to Vancouver, Washington before (ignoring the fact that I was less than five years old at the time), and we had lived for a year in Kansas City.  I did not consider myself a “hick from the sticks” but I combed my hair carefully to make sure there was no hayseed there.

There was no hitch in my travel plans at Kansas City.  One of my older cousins, Denton Hayward, met me at the bus depot and took me and my luggage to Aunt Ora Hayward’s house on 35^th a couple of blocks off the Paseo.  That was familiar territory since in 1930 or thereabouts, we had lived on 37^th just about three blocks away.  Faxon School where I had gone for the third grade was just two blocks down the Paseo beyond the big Katz Drugstore on the corner of 35^th and Paseo.

My cousins Ennis and Buddy Fulkerson, who were near my age, came to stay at Aunt Ora’s while I was there.  I forget who was getting married, but I believe it was Raymond Hayward, Aunt Ora’s youngest son.  Uncle Hubert and Aunt “Ory”, with their bevy of three sons and four daughters, had created a Kansas City branch of the family of which I could never keep track.  I mostly remember the boys (all grown then) Wilbur, Denton, and Raymond, the youngest daughter Maude who was still living at home at the time.  There was also a very pretty little second cousin, Jackie Lou who was near my age. [Not, sure but Jackie Lou may have actually been a first cousin once removed.  This sort of thing is confusing.]

Aunt Ory was the undisputed matriarch of the Kansas City branch of the family.  (Uncle Hubert had died back around 1934.)  She had a huge house that was sort of a catch-as-catch-can boarding house with all sorts of people, mostly relatives, coming and going.  It would be unthinkable to go to Kansas City and not stop in on Aunt Ory.

Needless to say, with a wedding going on the day after I got to Kansas City, Aunt Ory’s house was even more of a “madhouse” than usual.  We boys—Ennis, Buddy, and me—mostly just tried to stay out of the way.  We ate whenever and whatever we could get our hands on—which was no problem as there was food all over the place.  I believe we spent my Grandpa’s two dollars by sneaking off in the evening after the wedding ceremony and taking Jackie Lou to a movie.

A day or two after the wedding, my Uncle Elbert Fulkerson drove me to the Union Station to catch my train to the Pacific Northwest.  I recall being worried that we might be late and the train would leave without me, but Uncle Elbert would just smile and say, “Stop fretting, boy, we got lots of time.”  Not owning a watch, I had no way to dispute him.

At the Union Station and for the first time the old country boy from the Ozark hills was out of his element and bewildered.  The only other time I had ridden a train was when I was five years old when Mother brought us kids back from the Pacific Northwest.  To me, the Kansas City Union Station was a scurrying mass of people and a bewildering number of ticket windows and gates to trains that were chuffing in and out of the station.

We already had my ticket so Uncle Elbert herded me through the bustle, checked my guitar box and suitcase and led me to the right track when they called my train.  He found me a red plush seat in a coach up ahead of the dining car, patted me on the shoulder, and with a last “goodbye boy” was gone.

The train lurched, jerked, then chuffed out of the station onto a westbound track past the Kansas City stockyards.  As it picked up speed through the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansad, and out onto the plains, I had a very strange feeling.  I was completely on my own for the first time.  It was as if a door had closed behind me and another was swinging open ahead.  I liked the feeling.  Even through the long first night I had no qualms and felt no homesickness for the Ozark hills—I was on my way home and was eager to get on with it.

Heading West

Chapter 13

The Way West

Even though I was fresh out of the backwoods hill country, I set off on my great adventure with complete self-confidence as becoming any fifteen-year-old.  After all, I had been to Vancouver, Washington before (ignoring the fact that I was less than five years old at the time), and we had lived for a year in Kansas City.  I did not consider myself a “hick from the sticks” but I combed my hair carefully to make sure there was no hayseed there.

There was no hitch in my travel plans at Kansas City.  One of my older cousins, Denton Hayward, met me at the bus depot and took me and my luggage to Aunt Ora Hayward’s house on 35^th a couple of blocks off the Paseo.  That was familiar territory since in 1930 or thereabouts, we had lived on 37^th just about three blocks away.  Faxon School where I had gone for the third grade was just two blocks down the Paseo beyond the big Katz Drugstore on the corner of 35^th and Paseo.

My cousins Ennis and Buddy Fulkerson, who were near my age, came to stay at Aunt Ora’s while I was there.  I forget who was getting married, but I believe it was Raymond Hayward, Aunt Ora’s youngest son.  Uncle Hubert and Aunt “Ory”, with their bevy of three sons and four daughters, had created a Kansas City branch of the family of which I could never keep track.  I mostly remember the boys (all grown then) Wilbur, Denton, and Raymond, the youngest daughter Maude who was still living at home at the time.  There was also a very pretty little second cousin, Jackie Lou who was near my age. [Not, sure but Jackie Lou may have actually been a first cousin once removed.  This sort of thing is confusing.]

Aunt Ory was the undisputed matriarch of the Kansas City branch of the family.  (Uncle Hubert had died back around 1934.)  She had a huge house that was sort of a catch-as-catch-can boarding house with all sorts of people, mostly relatives, coming and going.  It would be unthinkable to go to Kansas City and not stop in on Aunt Ory.

Needless to say, with a wedding going on the day after I got to Kansas City, Aunt Ory’s house was even more of a “madhouse” than usual.  We boys—Ennis, Buddy, and me—mostly just tried to stay out of the way.  We ate whenever and whatever we could get our hands on—which was no problem as there was food all over the place.  I believe we spent my Grandpa’s two dollars by sneaking off in the evening after the wedding ceremony and taking Jackie Lou to a movie.

A day or two after the wedding, my Uncle Elbert Fulkerson drove me to the Union Station to catch my train to the Pacific Northwest.  I recall being worried that we might be late and the train would leave without me, but Uncle Elbert would just smile and say, “Stop fretting, boy, we got lots of time.”  Not owning a watch, I had no way to dispute him.

At the Union Station and for the first time the old country boy from the Ozark hills was out of his element and bewildered.  The only other time I had ridden a train was when I was five years old when Mother brought us kids back from the Pacific Northwest.  To me, the Kansas City Union Station was a scurrying mass of people and a bewildering number of ticket windows and gates to trains that were chuffing in and out of the station.

We already had my ticket so Uncle Elbert herded me through the bustle, checked my guitar box and suitcase and led me to the right track when they called my train.  He found me a red plush seat in a coach up ahead of the dining car, patted me on the shoulder, and with a last “goodbye boy” was gone.

The train lurched, jerked, then chuffed out of the station onto a westbound track past the Kansas City stockyards.  As it picked up speed through the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansad, and out onto the plains, I had a very strange feeling.  I was completely on my own for the first time.  It was as if a door had closed behind me and another was swinging open ahead.  I liked the feeling.  Even through the long first night I had no qualms and felt no homesickness for the Ozark hills—I was on my way home and was eager to get on with it.

A Country Boy in the Big City

In Kansas City, my father took us to the first talking movie I had ever seen.  I do not recall the name of the movie, but it was at the Woodland Theater just beyond the fire station from our house.  I was fascinated when, at the beginning of the newsreel, a moving picture of a rooster crowed right out loud as if you were standing right near him in the barnlot!  Then, at the beginning of the main feature, the MGM lion roared.  I had to look in a lot of books to find out how they did that.

One important thing to Kansas City kids was the Saturday serial at the matinees.  You were not really “with it” at school unless you had seen the latest episode.  The whole time we were in Kansas City we went to see the serial “The Jade Box” on Saturday afternoons.  It was shown at a theater a few blocks beyond Faxon school.  We found out that on Saturday afternoons kids could get in for a can of food for the needy.  Sometimes we got in for just an egg and eggs were less than 25 cents a dozen even before the Great Depression set in the next year.

A scene from the Jade Box

We got quite fond of movies in Kansas City but, before long we were to move back to the country around Greenfield and Bona and we did not get to see many for several years—not until we moved back to Vancouver, Washington in the late thirties.

I never got to go to the plant where Dad worked but he told us that one of his jobs on the assembly line was to climb into each car body that came by and seal up under the dashboard with putty so rain would not leak in the seam.  It did not sound like much of a job to me and I decided that I certainly did not want to be an assembly line worker when I grew up.  I did not know yet what I wanted to be.  One time about then my father asked me about that and, according to him in later years, I solemnly said, “Well, I haven’t decided yet whether to be an outlaw or a preacher!”  I must have been pulling his leg as I do not recall ever wanting to be either of those.

One thing us kids liked about living in Kansas City was that we had an inside bathroom with white porcelain bathtub and toilet.  We did not have to take baths in a washtub by the kitchen stove and at night we did not have to go outside to a smelly old outhouse to go to the toilet.  We also had electric lights and my mother had a sink in the kitchen with hot and cold running water.  She had a gas cookstove so we did not have to split and carry wood.  There was an icebox on the back porch where an iceman put a block of ice whenever Mother put a card in the window saying how much she needed.

The icebox had no freezer to keep ice cream but we did not lack for it.  Each evening on weekends there were ice cream wagons that came slowly along the street.  They had bells on the wheels so you could hear them coming.  If you had a nickel or could talk your mother or father out of one, you ran out to the corner and the ice cream wagon would stop.

Goin' to Kansas City

Faxon School in Kansas City, MO where Conrad and Richard attended school during their time there. Fall of 2015 the building, which had sat empty for a decade, was turned into affordable housing for seniors.  Quite possibly its former pupils are now tenants.

In 1929 when I was seven, Dad got restless again.  He was not making it at the station and one of our many relatives in Kansas City, Missouri, told him he could get a job at the Fisher Body automobile plant there.  Dad did get a job on the assembly line for Chevrolet bodies and moved us to a two-story white house on the corner of 37^th and Highland not far from where our Uncle Hubert and Aunt Ora Hayward lived.  

Aunt Ora was Dad’s eldest sisters.  Uncle Hubert, an inventor (the Hayward wrench was his design) and entrepreneur, was to die at a relatively early age in the mid-thirties and Aunt Ora reigned for years as the matriarch of the Kansas City bunch—which numbered at one time around seventy-five relatives of various degrees.  We never went to Kansas City in later years without without paying or respects to “Mama Ory.” [My only memory of Aunt Ory was at her funeral in the Bona Church.  Although Friezes left Bona and Dade County, most, including my dad, considered it home—forever.] Hubert and Ora had several children, some of whom I don’t remember much about, but I became close with Maude, one of the younger daughters.  Maude was a happy-go-lucky teenager when we lived there and I liked her very much.  [Although I probably met Maude when I was little and my parents took me to Missouri, I remember her from my visit to Greenfield in 1970.  She was still happy-go-lucky and excited about going to see Elvis.  Of the cousins of my dad that I met over the years, Maude is the one I remember best, heard him speak of the most often, and liked best.]

                The big city was quite a change for a couple of young country boys.  We went to Faxon School on The Paseo about four blocks from where we lived.  Faxon was big and bewildering after having gone to little one-room country schools with maybe a total of thirty pupils in all eight grades.  In those, each class took turns going to the front of the room to recite.  At Faxon, however, each class had a separate room, generally with as many children in it as we were accustomed to in a whole school!  I felt like a fish out of water for a while, but it did not take long to adapt.

When we started at Faxon, I was put in class 3B because of my age, but before long the teacher realized that they teach pretty well in those little country schools because I was ahead of everyone else in the class.  They jumped me one grade 3A and I felt good that once again I was just one grade behind Richard who was in 4A.  I was quite proud when I showed my new teacher that I could already do long division.  She embarrassed me because she was so delighted that she hugged me right there in front of the whole class.

One time at Faxon I was in an operetta as a wooden soldier.  A bunch of us little boys had to march to the music of “The Parade of the Toy Soldiers.”  We had to wear white pants, blue coats with white bands crossed over our chests, and tall black shako hats that our mother made out of stiff buckram.

I was confused and scared while we were lined up waiting to go on the stage.  I was afraid that all those people would just laugh at us and I wished that I could go away and hide.  When the music started and we marched on, I just tried to remember what the teacher told us about marching with stiff arms and legs.  The audience—mostly parents, I suppose—did not laugh.  They clapped for us and we marched off harder.  I suspect that we did not stay in step too well, but as we left the stage they clapped again and that made us feel good.  It left me with the beginnings of a feeling of confidence about getting up in front of people that was to stand me in good stead all of my life.