Category Archives: Meade

family, Meade, miscellaneous, Mom

Mourning—It Never Gets Easier

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Snow is always beautiful, but not always enjoyable. It can be deadly with the right combination of circumstances.
Snow is always beautiful, but not always enjoyable. It can be deadly with the right combination of circumstances.

Feb 10, 1948.  A beautiful, Spring-like day in southwestern Kansas. That evening, three young people headed from Meade to Fowler, adjacent towns between Dodge City and Fowler in Meade County, to attend a dinner among friends. Alas, weather predictions being what they were in 1948, they didn’t know a massive blizzard was just over the horizon. It started snowing while they were eating dinner. Later, around 10 p,m., the three decided to drive the 10 miles back to Meade. They didn’t make it; all three perished in the blizzard.

Saturday just passed was the 69th anniversary of when the first of the bodies was found. I think. Records aren’t clear, memories of things that old are few and fading. Most likely the three died on the 11th, though their bodies might not have been found until the 12th or 13th.

Esther, almost 69 years later.
Esther, almost 69 years later.

Two of those who died are the younger sisters of my mother-in-law, Esther Barnes. I had heard bits and pieces of the story over the years. About 18 months ago I asked Esther if she would talk with me about it, and let me write the story for the Meade Historical Society website. She said yes, and I interviewed her in our house over a couple of days.  It took me a few months to complete and sent to the Historical Society for them to upload. You can read it here. If for some reason that link doesn’t work for you (looks funny to me), try this for the index and click through to the story.

When I interviewed Esther it was 67 years after the event. I knew it would be painful for her, and it was. But she gave me the details she knew about, most of which she heard from someone. She lived in Fowler at the time, newly married and with a 9 month old son. They had no phone, so she only heard about it days later as the news got around.

Two of her three sisters are gone, but she has her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Two of her three sisters are gone, but she has her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Saturday was the 69th anniversary of that event. At the supper table, Esther said, “I still think about the girls,” by which she meant the sisters. Several times during our meal she teared up. 69 years, and still the mourning goes on.

I understand this. It’s been 51 years since my mother’s death, and I still think of her most days, and wonder what life would have been like if she hadn’t had the terrible illnesses and died from them at age 46. It certainly would have been different. Yes, the years have deadened the mourning some, but it’s still there.

I’m not sure there’s really a point to this post. It’s just something that I want to share.

Oh, if you get to the Meade Historical Society site, you’ll notice the article is listed at the “Buzzard of 1948”. I just notice that, and will ask them to fix it. If you read the article there, you’ll find a number of typos and an some awkward formatting. I remember fixing those, so I must have sent them the wrong file, because I remember fixing those items. Just suffer through them. I’ll find the right file and send it for re-uploading.

Meade

Meade Kansas Demonstrates Changing Economy

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I hope regular readers of this blog will indulge me one more post about Meade before I get back to regular topics. This will sort of tie together the trip for me. One more subject from the trip awaits–our tour of the old Thompson homestead, but that will come later.

Meade Kansas, both the city and the county, has become a home away from home of sorts for me. I began making trips there in 1975, the year after leaving Rhode Island. Several times a year while we lived in Kansas City, less frequently during the nine years overseas and in North Carolina. Now, during our nineteen years in Arkansas we’ve made perhaps twenty-five trips to Lynda’s home town: mainly for holidays, funerals, and reunions. We haven’t done the tourist thing to Meade, maybe not ever.

I’ve come to know Meade fairly well. I can’t remember all the names of all the streets, but I can find my way to any place in town with no problem. I’ve spent time in the library and the courthouse, at the truck stop or the city park, and of course much time at Lynda’s home church, the Meade Church of the Nazarene. I’ve watched changes come to the city as an outsider and wannabe insider.

In 1975 Meade was 90 years old. It had a quaint downtown district that stretched along US Highway 54 and Kansas Highway 23, the crossroads that came to the town after it was built. A mix of brick and wooden buildings gave the town some character. A few were vacant, and some had changed tenants each time we went back. The economy was based on agriculture, and Meade’s 1800 people seemed reasonably prosperous.

At some point there was an oil boom. Farmers leased drilling rights to various companies, who brought in workers and drilling commenced. Several productive wells were brought in. About the same time the confined hog raising operations began in the county (none real close to Meade or the other communities). The population rose, they say, to around 2,200, though this may never have been at a census time.

Now, Meade’s population is around 1,600, based on a two-year old estimate. The recently concluded census may prove it to be somewhat less than that. It seems most of the buildings in the downtown area are now vacant or, if fitted for multiple tenants, and less than half the building occupied. So much population has moved away. One man told us that 90 percent of the high school grads leave the town. Ten years later some return to raise families in what they know to be a good, wholesome place. But there’s not much around to attract new families to the area.

Another part of the economic problem for Meade is the reasonable closeness of alternative markets. Dodge City and Liberal, cities of perhaps 30,000 each, are around 40 to 45 miles away. That’s close enough with today’s good automobiles and pick-up trucks, even with the cost of gas fairly high, that no one thinks twice about making a four or five hour shopping excursion to the place of greater choice and better prices. The technology of transportation has hurt Meade’s economy, to the benefit of Dodge and Liberal.

In the countryside, outside of the towns, I noticed one big change from prior years: much more corn is being grown. Meade County has always had a variety of crops. Winter wheat always seemed to dominate, but farmers also planted corn, milo, soy beans, sorghum, and probably others. The dryland farming of the past seemed to favor winter wheat, however. Now, everyone seems to be growing corn as the main crop, mostly irrigated corn. I’m sure the reason is to feed the expanding ethanol market.

You can’t blame farmers for growing what’s being purchased, or what appears to have a brighter future. We should worry though about all that groundwater being extracted, probably from the Ogalalla Aquifer. Again, technology is the driving force of the change, in this case coupled with public policy. The technology to make ethanol is now developed enough that it sort of makes sense with the government subsidies applied, and so the farmers are adapting.

Ethanol might be a temporary phenomenon, fueled by technological advances and public policy. But what about the changing demographics? It seems to me that is, to some extent, also a function of technology. The technology of good transportation to go back home fairly frequently. The technology of good and cheap communication to stay in touch frequently. The technology that allows the bigger cities to provide the greater mix of entertainment and jobs that lure people there.

I don’t know what the future holds for Meade. There should always be a town there, maybe about the size it is now. I hope so, and hope it thrives for many more years.

Meade, memories, miscellaneous

Something Special: Meade High School, Class of ’67

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This was the fourth reunion I attended of Meade (Kansas) High School class of 1967, my wife’s graduating class. We also attended in 1995, 2000, and 2005. Now some of you may ask how a class with year ending in 7 has reunions in years ending in 0 and 5 instead of 2 and 7. To explain I need to tell you a bit about Meade.
First you need to find it on a map. Look for southwestern Kansas. Find Dodge City, Liberal, and Garden City. Mead in on US Highway 54, about 40 miles southwest of Dodge, 39 miles northeast of Liberal, and about 60 miles southeast of Garden City, about 100 miles east of the Colorado border and 20 miles north of the Oklahoma panhandle. Notice on the map how the towns in this area are ten to fifteen miles apart. The dryland/irrigated agriculture of the regions does not need population centers with services closer than that.

Meade, the city, has somewhere around 1,700 people. It peaked at 2,200 people in past censuses, when agriculture boomed and oil drilling was in full swing. But 90 percent of their high school graduates move away. A few move back ten or twenty hears later to raise their families, and a few people move in in search of jobs, but not enough to replace those who die off.

With the small population, and with the largest graduating class ever being about 64 people, and with a total of 3,400 graduates in the school’s 98 year history, the Meade High Alumni Association decided to have all school reunions on the 5 and 10 years. They hold this on the closing weekend of the county fair. So all interested alumns came to Meade last weekend.

Lynda’s class had 61 graduates, and three “friends of the class” who for whatever reason left the cohort, making for 64 people associated with the class. Near as anyone can figure thirty-two of those attended some or all of the events. We drove in late Thursday afternoon, not knowing her class was holding a party of the early arrivers, so we didn’t attend that. We did attend the Friday evening party. It was supposed to be for the class of ’67, but there were people there from ’57 (kind of old and out of place), ’61, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’68, and probably ’69. All over town there were similar gatherings that evening.

Saturday was a reunion at Lynda’s home church of returning attendees, then tours of the old school, then a picnic at the park of the classes of ’65, ’66, ’67, ’68, and ’69 (while other groups met elsewhere in town). Then a banquet and program that evening of all the classes, then an after-banquet party for ’67 that sort of fizzled (or started very late), then an ecumenical church service on Sunday morning. At each of the official or semi-official gatherings, the conversations lingered long. Heck, even the check-in on Saturday morning was a reunion, with small grouped engaged in animated conversations.

I enjoy going to these reunions, even though I didn’t attend that school and had met only one of her classmates before 1995. I sit back with the other spouses or significant others, and watch the interactions of the returning classmates. For a long time only two or three lived in Meade. That number is not up to six, so almost all of them are coming in from afar. The interaction is great. Every reunion someone returns who has never been to one before, and that person becomes a star of sorts as everyone tries to catch up. the men keep looking older in five-year chunks, and the women seems to change less, no doubt the chunks mitigated by applied colors and perhaps surgeries. The women all insist the guys take their caps off to see what they are hiding. The guys…make no similar request of the women.

This class of sixty-four has something my class of 725 doesn’t have: a shared school experience, and a shared community experience. They all went to the same grade school and junior high school, actually in the same building as the old high school. When someone tells a story about Mrs. Griffiths, one of the two 6th grade teachers, everyone knows her (even those who had the other one), and can appreciate the story. Everyone in the class knew each other well, and hung out with a large proportion of the class after hours. They shopped at the same grocery store, tormented the same elderly people, vandalized the same vacant houses, and played in the same woods.

In contrast, I doubt if I even knew a hundred people in my graduating class. I think not more than five others from my elementary school spent all twelve grades in the same schools I did, though many others spent more years together. Those shared experiences and relationships with the entire class is what I don’t have with my class. Maybe part of it is because it took me forty years to ever get to one of my reunions. Bit I knew very few of those at my reunion. Of the 79 who attended, I probably knew fifteen. I met about five or ten of my classmates for the first time, even though forty years ago we walked the same halls and hated the same assistant principal.

My class will never have that special bond that Lynda’s class has. It can’t have it. For all the benefits of growing up in a good sized city with a large school, the lack of shared experience is one of the unfortunate drawbacks.

Kudos to Meade High class of ’67. I hope you know what you have.
family, Fowler, Meade

Road Trip No. 2 is Over

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We returned last night from southwest Kansas, 1067 miles after starting. The main purpose for the trip was my wife’s high school reunion, but I scheduled much more around that. We had time with aunts and cousins. We visited two family cemeteries. We attended the old home church. We went to the county fair. We took late evening walks of more than a mile, after the temperature dropped below 90, and marveled at the clarity of the Milky way. We visited the hometown museum, which is much changed since I last went in it thirty years ago.

And we visited the old homestead where Charles and Zippy Thompson lived for thirty years. No, Zippy is not a nickname. I’ve often wondered why Isaac and Sarah Chappell named their second daughter Zippy Ellen Chappell, but they died about a hundred years before I knew her name was Zippy, who herself died in 1962, fourteen years before I married in. Lynda’s mom was with us for the homestead tour. In fact, she’s the main reason I wanted to make the trip. Well, I wanted to see it too. Thirty-four years of trips to Meade and no one ever suggested we try to find the place where the sod house was built into a hillside, and the spring house kept the meat and produce cool. No, the fixation was always on the Cheney family and the last stop of the wandering 49er.

But Esther had spent much time at her grandparent’s farm/ranch on the Finney/Haskell county line. She helped tend the vegetable garden, pick flowers, slept on a mat on the earthen floor, used the outhouse, and spent a rustic week of enjoyment with grandma and grandpa. Esther enjoyed the visit most of all, carefully stepping over a variety of critter holes, abandoned farm equipment, and building debris with her 85 year-old legs, and getting Texas tacks on her slacks, recalling what she experienced seven or eight decades previously. Lynda enjoyed it too. Her cousin Trish carried off a souvenier, an old over cover.

We also visited a scene of less happy memories, where my wife’s two aunts perished in the blizzard of 1948, the year before my wife was born. Esther and Faye, the two remaining sisters who were not with the others for that fateful car ride, showed where the car got stuck, where Louise’s body was found three days later at the bottom of a ravine, where Phyllis died, and where their friend Marvin apparently tried to make it back to the car but failed in hie attempt. That visit was harder than the other, which is likely the reason we never did that tour before. We drove that road maybe thirty years ago, but no one asked, “Where exactly did the girls die?”

One other unhappy but necessary visit was with Lynda’s cousin Bobby, from Cimarron. His 33 year-old daughter committed suicide a year ago. We talked with him a couple of months after it happened, but this was the first time to see him. He explained how nothing helped with the healing. I hope something we said did, though. Bobby keeps up the Cheney plot in Fowler Cemetery, and was driving down on Sunday to do so when we suggested we drive up to see him. So we met at Aunt Rosa’s house in Fowler and again at the cemetery. One lighter moment came when he pointed out that a man buried right next to the Cheneys was named Jerry Garcia. Bobby says he has a lot of fun telling people he mows Jerry Garcia’s grave, and they think him a celebrity of sorts. Not being a Grateful Dead fan that went over my head until Bobby explained it.

Many memories made, and recalled, on a good six-day trip, concluded by meeting up with other cousins at Baxter Springs, Kansas, as we returned home yesterday, and dining on old Route 66. May there be many more such times and trips.