Just a Country Boy from Kansas: My Life Story

By Harold Riechers

The book describes the recollections of the author, Harold Riechers, starting in the mid 1930s and extending through the end of the year 2002. The authors early years were spent on a family farm in north-central Kansas. He describes family life on the farm during those difficult depression years, including both fun times and sad times.

The author recalls interesting and unusual incidents that happened during his grade school and high school years in a rural Kansas community. After high school he attended college on a football scholarship. He recalls a number of amusing incidents that happened while he lived in a football dormitory. Later, he married his high school sweetheart and they began a promising future together. The author describes his devastation when his young wife suddenly becomes ill with cancer and dies, leaving him to raise three young children by himself.

After raising his children to adulthood, he married again and began a new phase of his life. The book will be interesting to both youth and adults. Youth will be intrigued by the authors childhood activities on a family farm and adults will enjoy reminiscing about the "good old days" of their own youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 29, 2003
• ISBN: 9781410721341

Harold Riechers

Harold Riechers is a retired chemical engineer. During his engineering career, he worked for several chemical and energy companies in Kansas and Oklahoma. He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and is a certified Professional Engineer in Oklahoma. Mr. Riechers received a BS degree in Chemical Engineering at Kansas State University in 1959 and an MS degree at the University of Kansas in 1966. Born in north central Kansas during the Great Depression, he spent his early years on the family farm. After receiving a good education in the public schools, he attended Kansas State University on a football scholarship. Following graduation from Kansas State, he worked thirty-four years in the chemical processing industries as an engineer.

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©2003 by Harold D. Riechers. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Rev. by AuthorHouse 12/13/12

ISBN: 978-1-4107-2135-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4107-2134-1 (e)

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter One The 1930S-My First Four Years

Chapter Two The 1940S-A New Home And Grade School

Chapter Three The 1950S-High School, College, Marriage, And Parenthood

Chapter Four The 1960S-Graduate School, More Children, And Moving To Oklahoma

Chapter Five The 1970S-Dark Days, A Devastating Loss, And Picking Up The Pieces

Chapter Six The 1980S-Foreign Travel, Remarriage, And Losing My Dad

Chapter Seven The 1990S-Losing My Mom, Retirement, And Grandparenthood

Chapter Eight The 2000S-A New Century And New Adventures

My Life Summary

Newspaper Articles

DEDICATED TO:

My Dad and Mom, Charles and Ruth Riechers, My wife, Donna, And my children, Patti, Paul, Jenifer, and Amanda

INTRODUCTION

About twenty-five years ago I became interested in learning more about my family history. As one grows older, I think it is normal to start thinking more about where we came from and how we got where we are. Also, I think we begin to realize that the persons who know the most about our family history will not always be around. So, I started gathering family information by first talking to my Dad and Mom. Over the course of my life they had mentioned various bits and pieces of information about my grandparents and great-grandparents, but it was sort of scrambled in my mind. Talking to my parents helped somewhat to unscramble the information, but I still lacked a clear understanding of what my grandparent’s lives were really like. I knew their lives were much different than mine and that they had to endure many hardships in their lives. I thought how interesting it would have been if my grandparents had written about some of the events in their lives and passed that information on to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. That started me thinking about my own life and how some of the seemingly insignificant events in my life might be interesting to my grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, perhaps fifty to a hundred years from now.

So, over the past twenty years or so, the idea of writing a book about my life has slowly developed. Finally, about two years ago I actually began writing the manuscript for the book. I have written the book mostly in chronological order, starting when I was born in 1936 and ending at the close of the year 2002. As I write this, I am 66 years old. If the Good Lord should bless me with additional years in my life, I will try to periodically update the book with new editions.

I am writing this book primarily for the benefit of my children, grandchildren, and any future descendants that I may have. I hope this book will help them to better understand what my life was really like. My wife, Donna, and my children, Patti, Paul, Jenifer, and Amanda, may remember some of the family events described in this book. Although there were some sad times, I hope most of the descriptions will bring back happy memories.

CHAPTER ONE

The 1930s-My First Four Years

My story begins in the 1930s in Clay County, Kansas. The 1930s were the Great Depression years and times were tough in Kansas and elsewhere. My father’s name was Charles Harold Riechers and my mother’s maiden name was Naomi Ruth Henry. Dad was called either Charles or Charlie and Mom was called Ruth. Dad and Mom both grew up on farms in Clay County. Dad’s parents were of German descent, his four grandparents having emigrated from Germany. Dad’s mother emigrated from Germany when she was about nine years old. There were three boys and two girls in his family and Dad was next to the youngest. They lived on a farm in Goshen Township about two and a half miles south of the little town of Fact. Mom’s parents were of Irish descent, her ancestors having emigrated from Northern Ireland. There were three boys and one girl in her family and Mom was the oldest child. They lived on a farm in Blaine Township about five and a half miles southwest of Clay Center.

My parents met on a blind date sometime in 1926, when Dad was about 23 years old and Mom was about 17 years old. At that time Mom was a junior at the Clay County Community High School and Dad was farming with his brother, Albert. Later, Dad also operated a trucking service with Albert. It was called Riechers Brothers Trucking. They owned a 1929 GMC truck. After Mom graduatedfrom high school in 1927, she taught in several rural schools in Clay County. Dad and Mom dated for almost eight years and then married on August 21, 1934. They set up housekeeping on the old Jacob Bauer farm, which was about a mile (as the crow flies), from Dad’s family home. My great uncle, Fred Bauer, had previously lived in the house and owned the eighty acres where the house stood. Fred was in his mid-fifties, when my parents were married. He had moved from the farm to Clay Center and lived there with Grandpa and Grandma Riechers on Seventh Street.

I was born on February 15, 1936 in the old hospital in Clay Center, Kansas. The hospital building is still standing and now houses the Clay County Museum. The delivery room was located on the northeast corner of the second floor of the hospital. (About 22 years later, my daughter, Patti, was born in that same delivery room.) I was born twenty minutes after midnight, so I just missed being born on Valentines Day. According to Dad, it was a very cold winter night. The temperature outside the hospital was 20 degrees below zero that morning. He told me that the water tower was being built across the street from the hospital and a few hardy men were working on the tower that cold morning. Of course, I don’t remember any of that. Dad told me about it, when I was older.

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Old Clay Center Hospital, the author’s birthplace.

Dad’s middle name was Harold, so I was named after my Dad. My middle name is Duane. I don’t have any ancestors named Duane, that I know about, so I guess Dad and Mom just liked that name. Dad always liked the name Paul, but when Mom was a girl, a mentally challenged man, named Paul, lived in her neighborhood. So Mom didn’t want to name me Paul.

I can remember incidents in my life, starting when I was around three years old. Some of them are pretty hazy in my memory. I vaguely remember being potty trained. I had a little potty chair setting on the back porch. I remember having a few accidents and Mom becoming frustrated with me. Somehow, I eventually got trained. Later, I used our out-house in the backyard and sometimes I would just go behind a convenient tree or bush. In the wintertime we kept a commode (pot) in the house, so we didn’t have to go out in the cold.

The first Christmas that I remember is also kind of hazy, but I think it was when I was almost three years old. We didn’t have much money, so I was lucky to get one present. I wanted a toy truck and I remember getting it on Christmas morning. That was the best truck I ever received. I think it was the next Christmas that I got a train set. It was a wind-up train complete with a circular track. It would shoot sparks out of the engine stack. I also remember attending a Christmas program at the Twin Mound School. That was the school that Mom attended, when she was in grade school. We went to the program with Grandpa and Grandma Henry. I remember there was a Christmas tree and the children sang, but I don’t remember much else.

When I was very young, Grandpa Henry would give me haircuts at his house. He would sit me on a highchair and wrap a towel around me. He used scissors and hand-held clippers to do the job. The clippers would sometimes pull my hair, so I would do a lot of squirming. I think I started having my hair cut in a barber shop in Clay Center, when I was four or five years old.

My first home was in Goshen Township on the farm where my great-grandparents (Bauer) had settled, when they came to America from Germany in 1883. Great Uncle Fred Bauer lived in the house until he retired from farming and moved to Clay Center. I can remember a few things about the house. The house was still standing in 2002, but it was in pretty bad shape. When I last saw it, the interior had been gutted and it was used for storing hay. As I recall, there was a kitchen, a dining/living room, and a guest bedroom downstairs. A stairway led from the dining/living room to two bedrooms upstairs. My upstairs bedroom was quite small and was also used as a hallway and a storage room. My parent’s upstairs bedroom faced the south and was of reasonable size. There was a back porch on the north side of the house with a cellar under it. The cellar was used as a storm shelter and for storing canned foods.

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Uncle Fred Bauer and his dog in the front yard of the author’s first home.

I can’t remember very much about the furnishings in our house. However, I do remember that we had a wood cook stove in the kitchen. Mom would cook all our meals on that stove and would bake the very best homemade bread. (I liked it hot out of the oven with homemade butter on it.) We had some cupboards for storing dishes and eating utensils. We had a large kitchen table and four kitchen chairs. We ate all our meals in the kitchen, except when we had company. There was also a storage cabinet where Mom kept spices, towels, and other items for the kitchen. In the dining/living room we had a large table and matching chairs that Mom and Dad had purchased when they got married. There was also a matching buffet, where Mom kept our good silverware and dishes. I think there were also a couple of rocking chairs. There was a small wooden rocking chair that was a gift to Mom from her grandmother, when Mom was a small girl. In the fall Dad would set up a wood stove in the dining/living room for heating the house. We burned wood logs in that stove. He would take the stove down in the spring and store it in an outside building to allow more space in the house. The stove would keep the downstairs fairly comfortable in the winter, but the upstairs bedrooms got pretty cold. The heat from the chimney going through the upstairs provided some heat. The guest bedroom contained Dad and Mom’s good bedroom furniture that they purchased when they got married. There was a chest-of-drawers, a dresser with a bench, and a full size bed. I don’t remember anything about the furniture in the upstairs rooms.

We had a Maytag washing machine on our back porch that Mom used to do our laundry. Before we had electricity in our house, a Briggs and Stratton gasoline engine powered the washer. When we got electricity, we replaced the gasoline engine with an electric motor. Mom would heat water in a copper boiler on our kitchen stove for the laundry. She would shave pieces of lye soap from bars and add them to the water. Mom would then fill the washer with the hot soapy water. The lye soap was made by melting tallow (beef fat) and mixing it with lye (sodium hydroxide). We had a clothesline in the back yard that she used to dry the washing. In the wintertime the clothes were sometimes freeze-dried on the clothesline.

The outside buildings consisted of a corncrib, a barn, a chicken house, and an out-house. I think there was also a small storage shed in our back yard. There was a well located about fifty feet straight north of the house. The well had been dug by hand and was about four feet in diameter. The water was not good to drink, but we used the well for keeping food items cool in the summertime. Mom would attach a rope to a bucket and lower it into the well. She would keep milk, cream, and butter in the well. We had an icebox in the house, but we had to haul blocks of ice from Clay Center to use it. We used rainwater for washing clothes and drinking. Dad would haul rainwater from Uncle Albert’s place, which was also called the Old Home Place. They had a rainwater collection system on their house. The water was stored in a cistern.

The house and buildings were surrounded by a number of trees. There was a row of five or six tall cottonwood trees directly to the south of our house and some other native trees around the buildings. I particularly remember a box-elder tree in our backyard. I liked to play in its branches. I also liked to play in the barn and around the chicken house. I remember one time we had some really mean roosters. I guess they thought they were protecting the hens, because they would attack me, whenever I got near the chicken house. They would chase me, flapping their wings and pecking at me with their beaks. I would run back to the house, crying for Mom.

Our house was located about 200 yards east of a township road. Our farm lane ran by a steam-driven sawmill that was owned and operated by Francis Bauer. From time to time, Francis would fire up the steam engine and saw logs into lumber for people in the neighborhood. He burned pieces of scrap wood to generate steam. I would sometimes venture down our lane and watch the operation. I always kept a safe distance, because Mom and Dad had warned me not to get too close to the equipment. I remember that Francis would let off steam from the boiler about once a day and blow it out the stack. The steam would pick up wood chips and hurl them high into the air. That was always spectacular to watch. Mom and Dad were always worried that I would get too close and get hit by the flying wood chips. Francis also liked to blow the whistle on the engine and try to scare me.

Francis and Ann Bauer were double cousins of my Dad and were our neighbors across the road to the west. Francis’ father was Will Bauer, brother of Grandma Riechers. Ann’s mother was Mary Alexander, sister of Grandpa Riechers. They had three children, Lucille, Irene, and Arnold. Arnold, or Arnie, as we called him, was the youngest and was about five years older than me. Since the girls were older, I didn’t get to know them very well. Arnie was kind of like a big brother to me and I liked to play with him. He called me Little Harold. I remember tagging along with him, when he did big boy things. Jerry and Gene Bauer would come over to play with Arnie once in a while. They lived on a farm a few miles away. Sometimes we would all go out in the pasture west of Arnie’s house and play baseball. I think I mostly just watched the older guys play.

When I was about four years old, Arnie invited me to visit school with him at the Fact School. I think Arnie was in the third or fourth grade at the time. That was really exciting for me, because I got to go to school with the big kids. Mom fixed a lunch for me and I walked to school with Arnie. It was about a mile to the school from our house. On the way to school, we went by the Riek’s farm, and Don Bolen joined us. I think that Don was about three years older than I was. He lived at the top of the hill north of us with his mother, grandparents and his aunt. Don’s father had left his mother before he was born. I had a great day visiting school. The teacher was Wandalea Kimbrough and she was very nice to me. I spent the day mostly coloring pictures, as I recall. The only other person that I remember at the school was Donnie Huffman. His father ran a blacksmith shop in the little town of Fact. I think Donnie may have been a year older than Arnie. I remember that the older boys liked to tease Don Bolen and he would get angry. They called him Ding Don, which he didn’t like. I felt sorry for him.

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The author, Harold, at four years of age.

We did most of our grocery shopping at Cass Kimbrough’s store in Fact. His store was sort of like the Quik Trip stores of today. He sold various kinds of groceries and even sold gasoline from a single pump in front of his store. If you wanted some gasoline for your car or truck, you would pump the gasoline by hand from an underground tank to a large graduated glass container above the ground. The gallons were marked on the side of the container. When you had the amount that you wanted, you would then drain the gasoline by gravity from the container into your car or truck. Mom would sometimes treat me to an all day sucker or a Tootsie Roll, when we went to the store. I remember buying dry cereal or breakfast food, as we called it. There weren’t many brands to pick from in those days. I do remember Kellogg’s Pep, Nabisco Shredded Wheat, and Post Toasties. A box of Pep usually came with a balsa-wood airplane that could be cut out and assembled. I liked to collect the airplanes, so I ate a lot of Kellogg’s Pep. Sometimes we would drive the six miles to the little town of Green or the fifteen miles to the big town of Clay Center to shop. Because of the distance, we would make those trips no more than once a week.

Whenever we did make the long trip to Clay Center, it was always exciting, because there were lots of interesting things to see and do. There were also good things to eat. I developed a taste for hamburgers at a very early age. I called them hambugers. We would go to Masterson’s Hamburger Place, which was on the corner of Fourth and Court Streets. They had the best hamburgers and they sold for a nickel a piece. I also liked to go to Carlie’s Ice-cream Parlor. It was located on Court Street across from the Garfield Grade School. Mom would bring a dish from home for the ice cream. I had trouble eating a cone without making a mess, so Mom would put the cone in the dish for me to eat.

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The author’s Dad in his 1930 Marquette Coupe.

Our first family car was a Marquette Coupe. It was a pretty sporty car in those days and was manufactured by the Buick Company. It was sort of beige in color. I think Dad bought it new in