Army Green

By Walter D. Rodgers

Army Green is a fictional study encompassing the lives of two friends from Kansas City, as they encounter the events and situations of the last half of the 20th Century. Their backgrounds are similar, yet differ enough to provide an intriguing level of contrast.

It is the sequel to Century's Child.

The two men meet as teenagers in the Kansas National Guard of 1954. Their lives develop over the next 50 years, separately for the most part, but along parallel career and family lines.

The protagonist, Bill Anderson, begins his post-high school life intending (and wanting) nothing more than to have a "steady lifetime job" at Sears, Roebuck's gigantic mail order plant in Kansas City, Missouri. Thirty-five years later he has developed a completely-unexpectedly steady lifetime job as one of the Army's seniormost enlisted logisticians. He describes his life as a series of accidents which turned out well. The reader can't avoid the conclusion that the narrator made those incidents bear fruit, and his protestations to the contrary, chance had only a small part in their outcome.

The turning point of his story is the crucial accident of his activation and posting to Vietnam in the wake of 1968's Tet Offensive. After that, even with twelve years' seniority, Sears doesn't have a chance.

During his career, he continues to encounter his friend, now-Doctor Coe Richards, the protagonist of Century's Child. Richards' more-conventional civilan-and-reservist's life provides an engaging ongoing counterplot from the first to the last stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Nov 13, 2002
• ISBN: 9781412250368

Walter D. Rodgers

Walter D. Rodgers is the pseudonym of a retired family physician who lives across the Narrows from Tacoma, Washington. Dr. Rodgers is a life member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, who practiced in the American Southwest for 33 years. He has been board-certified in family practice since 1975. He has served as a hospital chief of staff, vice-chief of staff, and as chairman of numerous hospital staff committees and departments. He was elected president of his home district's division of the American Medical Association in 1987 for a two-year term. He was an adjunct professor of family medicine from 1980 to 1994, and an assistant professor in the same department from 1995 till his retirement in 1998. Dr. Rodgers represents the generation born in to the Great Depression, which grew up during World War II, and who were the active members of the force-in-being that, over forty-five years, won the Cold War. Dr. Rodgers served as an enlisted man in the peacetime Army of the 1950s, and was commissioned after completion of Field Artillery Officer Candidate School in 1961. He changed his branch assignment to Medical Corps upon graduation from the Kansas City College of Osteopathy and Surgery in 1966. The author has also been awarded the Combat Medical Badge, the Bronze Star Medal, the Army Meritorious Service Medal, five Army Commendation Medals, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with bronze star device, plus seven other lesser decorations and is entitled to wear the ribbons of three unit citations. He is a qualified military parachutist. In 1985 he was named a Distinguished member of the 502d Infantry Regiment (Airborne) based on his combat service in Vietnam. Dr. Rodgers is a life member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Association Military Surgeons on the United States, of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and of the Disabled American Veterans. The author is also a graduate of the National Defense University, Class of 1990. His thesis was a comparative study of ethical behavior in the military and in civilian society. Dr. Rodgers served for one year in Vietnam and for six months during Operation Desert Shield. Additionally, he served 42 years in the Army Reserve's Active Troop Unit Program, retiring as a full colonel in 1996. Also by Walter D. Rodgers: Army Green Western Sunrise

Book preview

ARMY GREEN

The Cold War Testament of Sergeant-Major William Anderson

The sequel to Century’s Child

A Novel

by

Walter D. Rodgers

© Copyright 2002 Walter D. Rodgers. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Rodgers, Walter D., 1936-Army green : the cold war testament of Sergeant-Major William Anderson / Walter D. Rodgers. ISBN 1-55395-045-3 I. Title.

PS3618.O34A78 2002    813’.6   C2002-905000-6

This book was published on-demand in cooperation with Trafford Publishing.

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JOE TENTPEG

MY BEST CUSTOMER

The following is a work of fiction.

References to actual historical persons have used the actual names and ranks in effect at the time.

References to everyone else in this novel are totally based on the author’s imagination. They are not intended to portray any actual human being, living or dead. Many of the incidents described are based on combinations of the experiences of several men, with no intent to portray any one of the sources.

Place names, with the exception of a few military bases’ and camps, have not been changed or disguised in any way.

And there really is a Sears, Roebuck and Company where the author once worked.

All other references to persons and events in this novel are absolutely fictitious, as are the names, dates, and times of some of the military operations described.

Short portions of this novel were previously published in Century’s Child, copyright 13 November 2000.

WDR

To Mickey, who put up with me while I wrote a first novel, and then stayed for Act Two.

And to Dr. Oscar Hawksley: Operation Market Garden didn’t go well for you, but based on your results and experience, we got it right in February 1991. Airborne, Sir!

WDR, 26 June 2002

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mister Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth…with some stretchers…"

Mark Twain (Pseud.),

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

*

The difference between a soldier and a warrior is only this: The soldier has a logistical support system backing him up that allows him to sustain his fighting. Without logistics, in a few days a soldier becomes first a forager afoot, subsequently a guerrilla, and finally a common bandit trying to survive.

COL John Coe Richards

National Defense University Essay

June 1990

*

(1)

10 September 2001

My name is Bill Anderson.

I’m an Army command sergeant major, pay grade E-9, the top enlisted rank.

I am not a Regular; by choice, I’ve stayed a Reservist On Active Duty (RAD) since 1968. I keep trying to retire, and the Army always agrees, but then asks me to extend for one more year, and in one instance, for 18 months.

This is the ninth time that they’ve done it.

They seem to like my work.

Sometimes I think (as my lifelong friend, Coe Richards, first pointed out) that at the old-for-a-soldier age of 65, unable to take or pass an unmodified physical training test (APRT), what I can do is to provide an institutional memory to an organization (the Army) that is notorious for short-time personnel tours, and of either having a very short memory or none at all.

And it was all an accident, every step of the way, from my being a seventeen-year-old junior college kid, till now.

I started out with the intention of making my career as an employee of Sears, Roebuck and Company.

However, things change. Boy, do they change.

Along the way, I met John Coe Richards, Junior, in 1954.

We were the newest enlistees in Company F, Second Battalion, 137th Infantry Regiment, a unit of the 18,000-man 35th Infantry Division, in the Kansas National Guard.

I had just turned eighteen. Coe wouldn’t be eighteen for five months.

The Division, then and now, was located as a sort of territorial army combat command, drawing on the male populations of Kansas and Missouri. It had been formed along with the rest of the National Guard of the United States in 1916. The Division had also been activated for Federal service several times since, and had campaigned on the Mexican border later in 1916, in France (Meuse-Argonne) in 1918, and again in France and Germany in 1944-45.

The two cities of Kansas City, Missouri and its smaller brother, Kansas City, Kansas, lie astride the state line. Company F was located on the Kansas side. It was not unusual for young men to cross, as Richards did, to serve in the type of unit that they preferred.

For example, my cousin, Harold Wallace, wanted to serve as a medic. He crossed from Kansas City, Kansas to the Missouri side to serve in the 35th Division’s 205th Medical Battalion, simply because that was where its armory was located.

I had just graduated from Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas. Richards had graduated at the same time from Raytown High School on the Missouri side.

The Korean War (or at least the fighting) had ended eleven months before. As of 2001, the state of war is still in effect; it’s just been in a prolonged condition of cease-fire.

Image368.JPG

Neither of us was employed at what anyone could consider a permanent job. At that time there was usually no employer who would hire a young man for a long-term job, unless he had served out or was serving out his military obligation, which at that time was for eight years’ service. A young man could satisfy this imposed duty in any of several ways: he could serve on active duty for two years, usually as a draftee, two more in the Active Reserve, and four more in the Inactive Reserve. Or, as one of several other combinations of alternatives, he could sign up for eight consecutive years in an Active Reserve component. Women had no military obligation.

I chose Company F because it was conveniently located four blocks south of my parents’ home, where I lived until 1968. Months later, Richards told me that he had chosen a rifle company because he thought that he would receive more training in battlefield behavior and therefore in survival skills there than in any other nearby Reserve Component unit. There were no infantry units in the Kansas City, Missouri, area. Special Forces didn’t exist yet, officially, and the few Rangers around were all in the Active Army.

Richards was a quiet guy.

You couldn’t tell much about him; he didn’t say much. When he was given an order, he never answered, beyond a prompt Yessir. He just carried out his instructions immediately, and in silence

He wore clear-plastic-rimmed glasses (some of the guys called him Mister Peepers, because he resembled the late actor, Wally Cox, who made that role famous in the early days of television). He didn’t smoke, drank only an occasional beer or two, and tended to read books in his off-duty time. He seemed smarter than the average infantry recruit. He also tended to learn things faster than the rest of us. There was an air or an appearance about him of someone who was absorbing and filing away everything around him for later use. Smoker or not, he looked sort of professorial, like someone who should be smoking a pipe off-duty. And wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.

His clothes were visibly cheap, but were always clean, mended and worn neatly. Needless to say, this was before the Sixties, when grunge became the sartorial motif of choice.

In the Company mess, he always ate every scrap of food that he took; his stainless steel partitioned messhall tray looked clean when he had finished eating. In contrast, I, and most of the others ate most of our rations (childhood training: clean up your plate.), but might leave part of some serving of something behind for the garbage detail. Not Richards. He usually went back for seconds if they were offered. I remember that he hated liver, and when it was served, he just gave it a pass rather than taking a serving and then throwing it away, as many men did.

He was slow to take offense, and never intentionally gave it, but if it came down to Fist City (and twice, it did, not counting the very brief incident in ‘55 involving a short pick-handle), he was very fast, once he started swinging. It was two years before he told me, and I suspect no one else, that he’d fought as a lightweight for four years, in his earlier teen-age years.

He wanted to be an officer, but never mentioned it to any of his fellow-soldiers until he had been in the company for over a year, and even then he only told me. That’s not to say that he was secretive. He just tended to play it close to the vest, always, as if what was going on in his head was his alone, and unless there was a pressing need for him to speak out, he wouldn’t.

At that time, I wanted to be a supply clerk, and nothing more. My father, a veteran of World War II, had advised me that a good supply clerk is valuable to his unit, and so is kept safely to the rear, rarely risking wounding or death, though he would probably see some action.

Richards (his preferred given name was Coe, his middle name) and I were sort of drawn to each other, and we became buddies, starting in Basic Training. We had a lot in common. We were about the same size. We both planned to start (and could only afford) Junior College in our respective hometowns in the fall of 1954. We were both non-athletic; we could perform the infantry training, just, but not much more, and we both hated it. Our taste in movies was similar. Our family backgrounds were similarly lower-middle-class, manual-working people and urban (I introduced him to my family, and he took me across to the Missouri side to meet his folks).

Both before and since the war, my father, Davis William Anderson, had worked in heavy industry in the West Bottoms (the Missouri River flood plain), manufacturing Fiberglas insulation.

My mother, Eve Wallace Anderson, was what we’d now call a stay-at-home mom.

Both my parents had graduated from Wyandotte High in the mid-1930s. Neither of them had any higher education.

I was their only child.

Coe’s parents were divorced; he was an only child, too.

At the time we met, Richards’s mother and stepfather had separated, and, leaving the stepfather, Roy, alone in the Raytown house, Coe and his mother were living in a small apartment in midtown Kansas City, Missouri, about an hour’s bus ride from the Armory.

Coincidentally, neither Richards nor I had access to television in our homes.

My home life was stable.

Coe’s was not, and never had been.

I’d say in retrospect that his Grandmother Richards and her middle son of three, Alfred, were the relatives who’d had the most influence on Coe’s personality development, and not his parents. His mother and father came close, but didn’t quite exert equal degrees of influence on what became the finished product.

The Richards clan was Coe’s anchor in very turbulent waters.

I went to junior college full-time, still living at home, got an Associate’s Diploma in Business in 21 months, and went to work at Sears (it seemed to promise steady lifetime work, and steady work was considered a plus) in inventory control.

Coe worked nights, three-to-midnight at a White Castle (I wonder how manyburgers he was tempted to divert, and couldn’t, because as a pre-manufactured item, they could easily be inventoried against the cash-register tape). He went to Kansas City Junior College on the Missouri side during the day.

Meanwhile, in the National Guard, I would go to Kansas City Kansas Junior College, and would stay in Company F for five years. Then, I’d transfer to Company H as a supply sergeant, first as a buck sergeant, then as a staff sergeant, the authorized rating for the job.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself, and I don’t want to do that. I want to tell the story the way that it happened, as what my English 1-A professor would have called a linear narrative.

Since he decided in early 1955 to take the plunge and go to medical school, Coe would transfer out to another unit (an artillery firing battery was all that was available nearby) in Sedalia, Missouri. He’d gone as far as he could at his junior college, and had to move to finish pre-medical studies at Central Missouri State College.

However, we were both still in subordinate units of the aforementioned territorial 35th Infantry Division. That meant that, whatever happened in our civilian lives, for many years we were able to get together several times during the division’s 17-day Annual Training sessions, usually either at Camp Ripley, Minnesota, or Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. That way, we were able, over a few beers, to catch up with the changes that had happened in our lives over the intervening 12 months.

This story is at least partly Coe’s, because I’ve never seen a more colorful yet completely honest guy, whose military, marital, and civilian careers dead-ended, spun, crashed and burned, and should all have died three times over, or one whowas able to come back again and again, and finally well, let me tell you how itwent, start to finish.

You may not agree about the colorful part.

You may call him just flat-assed stubborn, as opposed to his being determined.

Personally, I’ve never seen much difference.

Instead of stubbornness, my life’s…course, I guess, was determined by a series of unplanned, unexpected events, and it still turned out well.

Over the years, finally becoming four decades-plus, Coe and I kept running into each other in-and outside the Thirty-Fifth Division. As we became older and more prosperous, the more spontaneous phone calls replaced more formal letters. After cellular phones were invented the calls also increased in frequency, and our relationship grew closer.

And our final encounter, longest of all, was accidental, too.

(2)

August, 2001

Men are attracted to war, Coe Richards told me a few months ago, on a scenic trip to Rialto Beach, on the North Pacific coast, a few miles north of Pacific Beach, Washington.

They always have been, and probably always will be. And, later, they usually regret it, once they’ve been sufficiently terrified, or are wounded, or develop their first case of malaria, dengue, or dysentery. Somehow, war loses its adventure and/or nobility somewhere along that continuum.

I agree, I said. We’ve both seen that initial enthusiasm wilt under the press of danger, discomfort or pain.

I contend, too, he told me on that same later sightseeing trail-walk, that any story can begin at the beginning, the middle, or the end.

You’ve met most of the Richards Family, Bill. I started going by my middle name, Coe, because I’ve never liked John or Jack. I did once go by J.R, to avoid confusion on a job here I worked with another Richards (no relation).

And my story, The Family’s story, begins toward its middle, when I signed on the dotted line at age seventeen, met you, and became what the British army calls a boy soldier.

Neither of us has much time left, to the extent that the end of our lives is much closer than the beginning, but the end isn’t here quite yet.

As this Twenty-first century begins, we’re in our mid-sixties.

We experienced nearly two-thirds of the Twentieth Century. There was never a dull moment, Coe said.

Not unless you count the Eisenhower years (1952-1960), I responded.

Since we are getting old, Richards said, I think our story needs–deserves–to be told. Our aging is a chronic problem. If we’re lucky, we may live twenty more years, or if not, less than one. I do not mention this as a cheap attempt to garner sympathy. It applies to us both equally; everyone dies, in my experience.

However, before we ‘re gone, we need to, and should, leave an account of ourselves as an example to future citizens. They will be the children of later decades, perhaps even of later centuries.

And let me say now, at the outset, Coe said, that the story will be as real as I can make it, as real as it was.

We’ve known each other too long to worry about tact.

Romance, Coe often said, has seized me by the scruff of the neck three times, and has temporarily shaken me loose from whatever common sense I had. By the time that any degree of rational thought and behavior had returned, the first two relationships had gone stale, and I devoutly wished that my third episode could have been the first.

I envy you, Bill, he’d said before; your first has been your last.

I have two grown children, he went on. You know all about them. They aren’t major players in our history, though. Your two kids, on the other hand, are.

That may be the only time in our long association that I felt sorry for Coe, but I never, never told him so. He didn’t want my pity, no, anyone’s pity, and I wouldn’t risk even a temporary interruption of our friendship by expressing it.

Many men, Coe once told me, as they sense their mortal years as being finite, (and I do mean men; I’ve never seen a woman do it) write some sort of testament or life history. In my line of work, I’ve seen them written in ballpoint and in pencil, even in crayon once, on all kinds of paper, even carefully unfolded pressed-flat brown grocery bags. Sometimes they’d sit down to record it before they’d even been diagnosed as being ill. My suspicion is that, consciously or not, it’s an effort made to ensure that they won’t be forgotten.

I’ve heard it said that whenever an old person dies, it’s as if a library has burned to the ground.

So, that may explain why I want to tell the story of our generation, from what I think is a majority point of view.

That’s what our story is about.

That, and the phenomenon of individual change. Especially in the sense that a bad start, even a really bad start, which we both had, need not equate to failure. Look how you and I started out, and how our lives have changed.

Above all, look how we turned out.

It may be charged that war makes up an inordinate amount of the subject matter of my narrative.

Bill, you, of all people, know what I know: war figured prominently in the 20th Century, and it involved both of us, at first-and second-hand. I can only try to further justify my opinion by stating three personal opinions about war:

One: It appears to be a recurring, vicious human behavior. Net result: negative.

Two: In spite of the tremendous waste and even misuse of human and material resources, it accelerates progress in every field of science known to man. Net result: positive.

Three: It brings out the best and worst in human beings, rapidly. After first-hand exposure to it, there can be no question in your mind about who you are. And you will judge people around you, especially those in authority, by whether they are real, or simply trying to convince you that they’re something that they’re not. That’s a contribution to both personal insight and to understanding our fellow-man. Net result: positive.

The positives outnumber the negative by two to one.

Wednesday Night Training Assembly (aka Drill) Company F, 137th Infantry,

November, 1954

The company commander was CPT Paul Fall. He was a postal worker in real life.

The executive officer was 1LT John M. Russell, a realtor.

Our platoon leader was 2LT Oliver A. Williams; the platoon sergeant was MSG Bjortvedt, who worked at Sheffield Steel.

At 1855 (6:55PM), the first sergeant would blow his brass military police whistle, and then let it drop to the end of its chain. He would call the company, with no officers present, to attention, and call the roll.

CPT Fall would then come forward, and face the first sergeant. The latter would then salute and report: Sir the company is formed.

The captain would return the salute, and then give the one-word order: Post. At that command, the first sergeant and the platoon sergeants would march to the rear of their platoons. The platoon leaders, all second lieutenants, would then move forward and fall in to the front of their platoons.

The captain would usually order Prepare for inspection. The men would open ranks so that the officers could walk between them and look at their uniforms and weapons for any status short of spotlessness. The inspection in ranks could take thirty minutes.

At 1930, we were sent to class. We carried our rifles there (and everywhere, for four hours) so that we’d get accustomed to their heft and touch.

We got a break at 2100, and then had another class or maintained our equipment till 2230. A typical second period class might be one hour of the required eight hours preliminary rifle instruction (PRI). We had to pass it before we even thought about firing our first live cartridge through our M-1s. It seemed like much more than eight hours, peering through our sights and calling Mark! to the fellow-recruit manning the target twenty-five feet away. Every three shots an instructor would connect the last three pencil-point dots to make a shot group. A vertically-elongated oval meant you weren’t controlling your breathing as you simulated firing. A tight circular group to the right or left required a compensatory rear-sight adjustment. A tight circle high or low meant another rear sight change down or up, respectively.

Lectures might cover almost any military subject you can imagine. The Army had a rich supply of 16mm instructional films left over from World War II and the Korean War. Our training officers drew on them freely.

Four Wednesdays a month, and two weeks every summer.

However, by 1965, the routine had changed so much that it was unrecognizable.

August 2001

We were eating lunch at the new Amerisuites Casino’s buffet in North Kansas City.

Both of us were back in town to visit relatives.

Coe Richards was more of a habitué of Las Vegas than I was, having been there nineteen times since 1970. He maintained that this casino compared favorably with Vegas’s. Certainly, the buffet was every bit as good. Bryant’s World-Famous Barbecue even had a branch restaurant there, joining the gamut of Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Mexican eating places positioned strategically around the periphery of the gaming floor.

There’s less gambling noise, but more background music, though, he noted aloud. Personally, I think I prefer music.

It was a Tuesday. The place was crowded with night workers, the unemployed and retirees.

Quite a change from when we were growing up and gambling of all types was illegal, he said.

My cousin, Jim, he continued, says he has figures from across the country that prove the introduction of casinos to any area has a deleterious effect on the local social structure, from spousal abuse to bankruptcies showing a sharp rise dating from their opening. He’s in high finance, and should know, at least about the bankruptcies.

Our talk turned to the Great War of 1914 through 1918.

I visited Verdun and The Somme last October, Coe said.

I missed the 1914 battlefields, except Mons/Ypres, but even that single example was enough to compare it, fought 85 years ago in 1914, where the soldiers were pretty much all volunteers, with the other two, fought two years later, where they were mostly conscripts.

The Frontier Battles of 1914 were costlier than either of the other two was, though the casual listener to accounts of all three would likely conclude exactly the opposite.

In August 1914, when Great Britain went to war in Belgium against the invading Germans, thousands of men, including several dozen members of Parliament, volunteered immediately and were killed within the first 90 days of fighting. That was partly explainable, I think by the ninety-nine years of European peace that preceded 1914. Young men went off to war as if on a summer’s lark.

Now, we know better.

Even though the combat veterans of the 20th Century are thinning out, enough survive to remind us of war’s unspeakable, horrible face.

If another world war were to involve the United States, ask yourself how many of today’s Congressmen would do the same thing 1914’s Parliamentarians did?

I get zero for an answer; what’s yours?

It’s the difference between doing what you want to do, and may even think youlove, in a way, and doing what you are forced to do.

*

(3)

September 1954

Grandmother Elfrieda Richards

Her sons called her Freddie, and she hated it.

Coe called her Grandma Richards. He’d never have dared call her anything else.

He took me to meet her one Sunday in the autumn of 1954. She insisted on making lunch for the three of us that day. For twelve years after that, I must have made transparent excuses to be there for a meal on at least two dozen different occasions.

She had a formal demeanor, much more so than my own grandparents did, though they were contemporaries in age.

She had been born Elfrieda Vogelsong in 1881, in Paola, Kansas. Her father was a prominent man in that community, being part-owner of a grain mill. He had fought in the Civil War as a seventeen-year-old boy, and had been on Sherman’s March to the Sea, from the ashes of Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, in late 1864.

Freddie was never pretty as a young woman, Coe had said, as her sisters were, but was quite plain. When I met her, I couldn’t help noticing that she resembled the late Queen Mary, wife of King George V of Great Britain, and I think she knew it. Her spine, too, was straight as a ramrod, as Queen Mary’s is shown in every picture of her that I’ve seen.

Ordinary or not, her family felt (and said) that by settling for a match with a common carpenter, she had married beneath herself.

She and Clair C. Richards, Coe’s grandfather, had met in 1900, and were married in 1901. His family, and shortly thereafter the newly-married couple, moved to Kansas City, Missouri. He and his father built two houses on Lawndale Avenue, on spec, and sold them. He’d bought the third lot, beside the first two and, between 1902 and 1903 built the house, first the central four rooms, then adding-on room by room. That was where Freddie would live until her death in the spring of 1964, where I’d met her and where I cadged a meal whenever I could.

Since Freddie stood only four-feet-eleven, her kitchen had been custom-built by her husband for a very short person. The Richards cousins, Coe said, delighted in childhood visits to it, because they could reach everything; it was just right for them, too.

Coe’s Grandpa Clair, as he called him, had then built a large carpenter’s shop from property line to property line (he’d never get away with that with today’s zoning laws), across the back yard, opening onto the alley in back. It had fifteen-foot-wide freight doors which opened and closed from side to side, riding on overhead rollers. For years afterward, for his entire life, he had some small (as compared to a residential or commercial building) job going out there.

His work was his life, with as much time out for hunting and fishing as he could manage. He kept a couple of bird dogs and loved the outdoors. Coe’s father was the only boy of the three who shared that affection for outdoor sports. He developed into a good wing shot, an avid fisherman.

Mrs. Richards’s sons were born in 1907, 1909, and 1914, all of them at home, as was customary at the time for all except society’s homeless and most destitute women. Only in the late Twenties did hospitals become acceptable places for labor and delivery of respectable women.

Even Coe’s cousin Amy, whom he worshipped, was born at home in 1932.

Coe’s Uncle Alfred, Amy’s father, told me once about he and both his brothers taking childhood trips back to Paola to visit their grandparents several times a year. When the boys arrived, they’d run straight to their grandfather’s mill and throw themselves onto–into–piles of milled wheat, rolling in and on it, burrowing into it, and sifting it through their fingers.

It was some time in the late 1920s (but before The Crash of 1929) that the house next door, at 348 South Lawndale, the middle one of the three that Clair Richards and his father had built, came onto the market. Freddie insisted that they buy it, split it into two share-the-bath apartments, and rent them out. Clair had preferred not to have the responsibility for the property, because he’d rather have used his spare time for hunting, fishing, or working at his own pace in The Shop.

As was (and would continue to be in Coe’s family) the usual circumstance, Freddie prevailed, and the house came into their family (they weren’t what Coe thought of as The Family, not yet). As things turned out, Coe told me, it was a damned good thing that it did.

Her husband died unexpectedly in the winter of 1934, under unclear circumstances. He’d gone to his cabin near Liberty, Missouri, to go fishing. After he left the Lawndale house, Freddie never saw him again. It’s not certain what happened to him. His boat was found adrift in the Missouri River a few days later, but his body never turned up.

Freddie, Coe told me, never moved a tool or board in the Shop after Grandpa Clair died. He showed me the roll-aside freight doors and the half-finished, dust-covered fourteen-foot rowboat that his grandfather had been working on, sitting inverted, up on blocks for the past 20 years, lacking only the transom board, seats, sanding and painting to be completed.

Widowhood in those days of one-wage-earner families was bad enough; for it to have occurred in the middle of a depression compounded it into a real disaster. Mrs. Richards had always been careful with money. Now, of necessity, she became downright closefisted.

Yet, she believed that what does not kill us makes us stronger, and in this case, it did just that.

She split the family house at 346 South Lawndale into two shotgun apartments, and continued to manage the two in 348, giving her the income from three apartments in two adjacent houses, plus a place to for her to live in the fourth and largestapartment.

Coe’s father was the youngest of her three boys. He was the last of her sons to move out of 346. He’d married Coe’s mother in 1934, and Coe was born in 1936. They often left him with Freddie,