The Fall of the White Knight

By Virginia Loffelmacher

1929 was the onset of the great depression. Taxes kept rising. People worried about the cost of the Old Age Pension Plan. People were losing their jobs. The only thing growing in North Dakota was sage brush and tumble weeds.

My mother was a well educated person, but stayed home, because that is what wives were expected to do. She recited poetry, made paper flowers, and read me stories about King Arthur and his Knights of the round table.

Parents need to be heroes for their children. Those children who learn to trust their parents are confident and self reliant, they are ready to give back to a needy world. They also learn that sometimes heroes fall. It takes a lot of courage and strength to get up after a fall. My white knight fell hard. But he got up and persevered. He was still my white knight. He's been gone 42 years. But will never be forgotten.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466957664

Virginia Loffelmacher

My dream was to be a writer but other projects kept interfering. I filled notebooks with notes and squirreled chapters away for later, I thought I had time. In 1993, I retired after teaching for 36 years. Then I had to deal with arthritis, diabetes, and breast cancer. I am a 16 year cancer survivor. I looked around on my 80th birthday and discovered I did not have a new project, and thought maybe it is about time to become a published author. My husband Don and I have been married for 56 years, raised five children, ten dogs, and several cats lived and died, throughout those years. We currently live in an apartment, with only one cat.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Badlands Child

It was July 10th, 1936. I was going on five. I lived with my mother and father in the midst of North Dakota’s beautiful Badlands. We lived in a one room log cabin. It was built by my father in 1929 after he had married my mother. He had cut large cedar trees from the hills behind the cabin, cleaned the branches away and used the ten and twelve foot logs to build the sturdy little cabin.

I sat on the large flat rock in front of the log cabin door. It served very nicely as a step. The rock was about seven inches thick and at least four feet across. I sat with my knees tucked under my chin and my dress pulled down over my legs in a vain attempt to keep the mosquitos from biting. It was already dusk. Momma was calling me to come inside the house. I pretended not to hear. My father would come home from town very soon. He would never forget to bring me candy. I was determined to not let my mother put me to bed before he came.

Our nearest neighbor lived about seven miles away. I spent most summer days outside watching for my father to come home or playing with animals. We lived on a ranch. There were some cattle and horses but many many sheep. I remember there were cats and dogs as well, and lots of wild animals that came up into the yard. Often I would follow my father around as he did chores. When he went to town I felt anxious and lonely for him. He was the axis on which my life revolved.

Now in the distance, even in the dusk, I saw a cloud of dust rise skyward. It was the dirty thirties and so dry that a car could churn up an enormous cloud on the unpaved Badland roads. My eyes followed the dust cloud along the skyline until I saw two distinct beams of light. Now the headlights were turning off onto the road leading to our cabin. I ran as fast as I could up the dirt road toward the barbed wire fence that kept the cattle and horses out of our yard. I didn’t even feel the rocks under my bare feet as I ran. The gate was not open. My father had stopped to open it. I ducked under the barbed wire to get to the car before he had the gate opened. My dress caught and ripped and I left most of it on the barbed wire of the fence, with never a backward glance. No worry to me that I was wearing only sleeves and panties. My father had left his car door open and I jumped into the car ahead of him.

Now, he stopped the green, 1933 Chevy coupe in front of the rock step. I jumped on his back holding on to his neck. His hair was black, thick and curly and a little long between haircuts. I could feel it’s softness against my chin. He had a small sack of peppermint candy in his shirt pocket and I reached around for it and almost forgot to duck my head when he walked through the door. The taste of the peppermint, the feel of my father’s muscles as he lifted me to the floor, the soft timbre of his voice as he said, You better get to bed, kid. My world was complete. My father was home!

Life in the thirties was hard. We had only the real necessities of life, food and shelter and enough clothing to get by. There were no luxuries. But for me it never could get any better than that. With my father home, I felt warm and safe. I scuttled off to replace my torn dress with an equally ragged night gown. We were very poor then, as were many people in the thirties, but I remember that time for me as blissfully happy. Nothing bad could happen to us, my father covered every crisis. I felt safe and protected and soon fell into a peaceful trusting sleep.

Our cabin had only one big room. It was not really that large, only about 10 feet by 12 feet. The black Monarch cook stove burned wood or coal and a big black cupboard stood against the same wall at one end of the cabin. A big old iron bed, also black, was against the opposite wall and the round oak table with six chairs was in between. There was also a huge dresser with a large mirror next to the bed and a small high backed rocker in the middle of the floor. there were no clothes closets. Clothes were all stored in the dresser drawers. A cot against the middle wall was where I slept. The door was on the opposite wall. An oak China cupboard with rounded glass doors was next to the door on the same side as the big bed. It was an elegant piece of furniture in that simple house. My mother kept her prettiest china dishes and other treasures