The Road Taken: By a Child of the Great Depression, 1933-1955

By Roger L. Youmans

Roger L. Youmans, MD grew up in Kansas City, Kansas and attended the University of Kansas with a Summerfield and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity for excellence in scholarship. He married Mary Winkie Stewart after his first year in the University of Kansas School of Medicine. Following his graduation and internship he became a resident in General Surgery, but after one year he took his family with him to Congo where he staffed a rural hospital for six months during the riots that followed Congos Independence from Belgium. He completed his surgical residence at the University of Kansas Medical Center, passed his Surgical Boards, Missionary Orientation Course, and studied French and completed the course in Tropical Medicine in the Princess Astrid School of Tropical Medicine in Belgium, with distinction, before returning to Congo with his family under the Board of Missions of the United Methodist Church.

He spent his adult life practicing and teaching surgery and tropical medicine in various medical schools in America and Africa. He was named the outstanding teacher at the Oral Roberts University School of Medicine in 1972 and again in 1974, and received the Distinguished Service Citation from the University of Kansas in 2008.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 24, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467067027

Roger L. Youmans

Two dramatic years, 1953 and1954, changed the course of Dr. Youmans’ life and the lives of all Americans. In 1953 Youmans was a twenty year old pre-medical student at the University of Kansas and was the first Caucasian to pledge the Upsilon Chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. He moved into the fraternity house of the oldest and largest Black fraternity in America, and he lived and learned with his African-American brothers. That same year newspapers across America took notice when a cross was burned on the lawn of the fraternity house. Later that year Youmans was the first Caucasian to address the National Convention of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial discrimination in public schools violated the United States Constitution, and fifteen years later the U. S. Congress finally passed the laws that implemented that decision. Dr. Youmans later became a medical missionary in Congo, and one of his fraternity brothers took his own wife and child to Congo to help him. More than fifty years later the University of Kansas honored Dr. Youmans with a Distinguished Service Citation conferred by the Chancellor of the University, and the following year he received the Alpha Award of Merit from the National President of Alpha Phi Alpha, and a ten minute standing ovation. What happened in the Youmans’ family and neighborhood in the thirties and forties that shaped this author’s character and life? The Road Taken by this child of the Great Depression offers poignant and exciting stories of Youmans’ first nineteen years and his insights into questions that face all young people. The author candidly records his childish and youthful aspirations, failures, and encouragements, and the reader of these often humorous episodes will laugh as he recognizes variations of his own experiences. Young people, and people who are still young in heart, will love this small book of true and unforgettable stories.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

This book grew out of the stories I told my children about my childhood and youth during the lonely evenings in Congo. So I want to dedicate this book to them and their children, Grace, Joy, John, Roger, Joshua, Jonathan, Niccolo, Zachary, Zane, Katie, Sammy, and Nate.

Preface

This story is written for my grandchildren, and all others who can see reality from a young person’s perspective. It is the story of a family with six children who lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the reconstruction of the world, and the onset of the Korean War.

Each day we live our lives without being able to see what lies ahead, and we don’t know where the road we are on will lead us. We will have opportunities to turn off the road we are on, and take a different one, which may be better or worse than the road we’ve been traveling. Side roads may look easier, or more interesting, but we can’t be certain where these will lead, either. So our tomorrows are really a mystery that we solve only by having faith that the road we follow will take us where we want to go, or perhaps by believing that changing to a different road is what will lead us to the fulfillment of our dreams.

Robert Frost said it well in The Road Not Taken.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

This little book, The Road Taken, should be regarded as a kind of record of the roads I followed and some of the roads I chose not to follow. My choices weren’t much different from anybody else’s most of the time, because I couldn’t foresee the future any better than they could. Only occasionally did I do something unusual. You are traveling through life in a similar way, but hopefully, you will follow a road that leads to what you want and where you want to be. You may not recognize every diverging road along the way, even as I didn’t, and you may not have even recognized which road would have led to your dreams. That is truly sad. These roads, the ones we think are ideal and the ones we think are perilous, often look very much alike when we make our choice

This book is like a map I might make of where I went, and what I saw and did along the way. There were many diverting forks in the road I followed; and each was potentially helpful or distracting, and some were even dangerous. For example, when confronted with the possibility of failing in spelling, I chose a road more dangerous than I could have imagined. Sometimes the choices may look alike but result in very different outcomes. A diverging road may appear more inviting and offer easier travel, but it may expose us to greater dangers. Trying to change roads too often may confuse our sense of direction, and too many alternatives that seem so nearly equal, may cause us to neglect even making a choice.

The compass we trust to provide directions in life, our conscience, is set early in our childhood, but will need adjustments based on later experience. When I told a two year old neighbor to eat a cockroach, she did. She continued to trust me, but I adjusted my conscience to more carefully consider the influence of idle talk. My first romance required an adjustment that was a lesson in trusting parents and friends, but I was still making my own decisions and accepting responsibility for my choices. It’s okay to be naïve, but don’t confuse it with being stupid. In The Road Taken I want to open my life as a child, as an adolescent, and as a teenager, for you to laugh with me about my foibles and to adjust your compasses on the basis of the experiences we share through my writing and through your reading.

I’ll tell you about growing up in the Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties, my first infatuation, my frustration with school, and my experience of being smacked in the mouth with a baseball bat. I’ll tell the family stories that most affected me, and of attractive girls with whom I did not fall in love. I’ll tell you about my struggle to be an athlete, and my failures. I will try to express what I was thinking, feeling, doing, and choosing as I actually remembered them when reading my old diaries and yearbooks. I’ll confess how I got my brother into trouble even though I loved him, and how and why I lied to my father and cheated on a test. But I’ll also tell you about my remorse and sense of guilt, and how I resolved these feelings. I’ll tell you about the good things that happened at church camp, in the high school orchestra, the tennis team, the Hi-Y club, and about my friends that have remained friends for a lifetime.

The Road Taken is a funny story, a happy story, but even more important, it’s a true story.

Obviously parents and siblings are major factors in setting the compass of our consciences, so I will bring them into the story. Other children become important in school; some are attractive and others are not. Kids in secondary school take a more conscious role in their choices about which of the roads they will follow, whether for better or for worse. I’ll tell you my choices about integrity, popularity, life goals, the opposite sex, religion, and academics, and I’ll tell you how my choices affected my life.

It’s all here in the road I took five and six decades ago, and where it led; it gave ample time for me to look at the results of those experiences with a clear-eyed perspective. I’m not advising you to follow the same road I did. That’s not possible. Besides, you will find that I made many mistakes, and I hope you can learn from my mistakes, avoid them, and know why and how I made them, so you can avoid those mistakes. Be assured that I have tried to be transparent and honest, but I confess that there was not always clear evidence of some details that I include to make the story flow smoothly. There were undoubtedly factors that influenced my choices and results that I didn’t recognize at the time, and some that I still do not recall or record. But, here is my life, The Road Taken, by a child of the Great Depression in the mid-twentieth century. Enjoy!

CHAPTER 1

The Mad Dog

"The best thing about the future is

that it only comes one day at a time."

Abraham Lincoln

I entered into a family that began years before I was born, so I inherited, for better or worse, the stories my parents had remembered and repeated to me. But I’ll tell you what I heard. I do have my own memories of later adventures, especially of the ones I recorded in my diaries. Most of the details were easily recalled because they had happened before my brain was cluttered up with so much trivia. Much of my adult life has been repetitious of earlier experiences and easily forgotten. I’ll be honest and tell you the bad choices I made as well as the good, because they’re both necessary if we are going to learn anything important.

After Mom brought me home from the hospital, she was so tired from the ordeal of her delivery of me, the trip home, and feeding me, that she put me in my makeshift crib and fell asleep. My nine-year-old brother, Ray, took me out of the crib while my mother was asleep and put me in the basket of his bicycle, and then took me up the alley to show his friends the newest addition to our family’s future baseball team. He went first to Wilber Mays, who lived next door to the Nickerson family, but not finding Wilber at home, he rode down the alley to show me to Jewel Fugate and Clyde. Mrs. Nickerson had noticed Ray while he was next door at Mrs. May’s house and was surprised to see what she thought was a large doll in his bicycle basket, but a second look revealed that it was a baby.

Mrs. Nickerson remembered that Mrs. Youmans had gone to Bethany Hospital several days earlier to deliver her sixth baby, and she concluded that Ray was riding around the neighborhood with the newborn baby in his bicycle basket. She called Mom on the phone and told her what she had seen. By this time, Ray, riding his bicycle with me in the basket, was headed down the alley toward Fourteenth Street.

Mom intercepted Ray at Jewel Fugate’s house, and took me out of the basket, still safe, and carried me home. Of course, I don’t remember this episode, but I’ve heard it so many times from Mom that it must be true. Even Ray acknowledges the essence of the story is true.

My parents, Raymond Orlando and Gladys Irene Brian Youmans, had been married nearly a dozen years before I was born, and they had earned advanced degrees from Columbia University in New York. Education was important to them. Dad had built a prospering printing and publishing business during the economic boom of the Roaring Twenties. The collapse of the stock market after 1929 and the resulting Great Depression drastically reduced the budgets of the schools upon which Dad’s printing and publishing business depended. When the sales to the schools stopped, Dad and Mom owned a small farm they called the Kaw Cliffs that was intended to be their home when they retired. But with confidence that their printing and publishing business would flourish again, they mortgaged the farm and used the money to print a catalogue promoting the books, plays, and readings they had in stock. They mailed the catalogue to schools and potential customers all over the Midwest. They knew this was a gamble, but they didn’t know how deep the economic depression would be, nor how long it would last. The company never made a single sale as a result of those catalogues. Mom and Dad lost that gamble, and they lost their farm.

The economic depression continued through the thirties and the beginning of the Second World War, and our family slid slowly to the edge of poverty. My birth at such a time was not a happy occasion for our family. Even my grandfather suggested that Dad get something done to avoid more children. He said six was enough. So I was destined to forever be the baby of our family.

As if these problems were not enough, the early thirties were also the years when Kansas and Oklahoma were called the dust bowl, and the strong winds blowing out of the Southwest United States carried the dry, powdery top soil of Oklahoma and Kansas farms to Kansas City and even on to Missouri and Illinois. These dust storms sometimes blotted out the sun in the middle of the day, and they left gritty dirt and sand on streets and in the homes. The dirt blew through cracks around the windows and doors even when they were closed.

My father was a religious man and had been ordained an elder in the Methodist Protestant Church, and on weekends he was a supply pastor for various small congregations in the Kansas City area. My mother was an artist and a teacher at the Kansas City Art Institute and was active in the American Association of University Women. She was also active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Knowing these things will help you appreciate why I did some of the things I did as I was growing up.

In those early years I wasn’t even aware of how poor our family was. I do have dim memories of Dad as the pastor of the Queens Garden Methodist Church just outside of Kansas City. It was a basement with a temporary roof at the time, and Mom used to sit between her six kids while Dad preached. One Sunday, my two oldest brothers, who were sitting on opposite sides of Mom, both got up and went outside at the same times. Mom could only go after one of them while the other escaped, temporarily. Thereafter, Mom sat at one end of the pew and had another adult member of the church sit at the other end. At least that’s the story I heard from Mom.

I have a clearer memory of an event that happened at about the same time at that same basement church. It was a Sunday in June, and I told Mom that I needed to go to the bathroom during Dad’s sermon. She told me to wait. After five minutes, I told her I couldn’t wait any longer, so she let me go outside to the outhouse alone. Queen’s Garden was a rural church. A dog, that seemed to be in the church every Sunday, Queenie, had been sleeping on the cool cement floor, but as I left, she got up and followed me