On the Other Hand: An Autobiography

By James W. Marlin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 21, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462834495

James W. Marlin

James W. Marlin, Jr. has had three separate careers. His first career was with the United States Air Force. He was an instructor pilot for students in both German and American Air Forces, a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and a staff officer at the Pentagon. His second career was as an economics professor. He was an associate and full professor of economics in Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina. He was chairman of the Department of Economics at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. His third career was as President of a non-profit corporation in Nebraska, where he headed the Nebraska Council on Economic Education. NCEE provides graduate education to teachers throughout Nebraska on how to teach economics to students from kindergarten through high school. During his academic careers, he was engaged in devising alternative methods of teaching, mostly involving computer applications. He retired in 1995 and moved to his mountain home in Colorado.

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Copyright © 2000 by James W. Marlin, Jr.

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Contents

PROLOGUE

FORBEARS

THE EARLY YEARS

SECONDARY SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY

PILOT TRAINING

FURSTY

TEXAS

FIGHTER PILOT

BACK TO SCHOOL

THE PENTAGON

PROFESSOR

DEPARTMENT CHAIRMAN

ECONOMIC EDUCATION

EPILOGUE—RETIREMENT

To my grandchildren

Melissa, Stephanie, Michael, Susan

Wilson, Jane, John

And all their children and grandchildren

The reason I wrote this book is for you and your offspring

so that you can perhaps know your grandfather a little better.

Your parents can tell you about him,

but they have their own slant on what happened.

Our immortality is in our progeny and to you are my eternity.

I’m always looking for a one-armed economist [one who can’t say on the other hand].

President Harry Truman

Attributed by Howell Raines, Editor

The New York Times

PROLOGUE

Over the last several years, it had become our habit to take advantage of holidays and see some of the surrounding countryside, and so this Memorial Day, we saw no reason to do differently. About thirty-five miles southeast of Lincoln, nestled in the Missouri River bluffs was the small town of Brownville, an early Nebraska commerce center on the river. The town has not changed much since the eighteen sixties. Many of the old houses have been maintained as museums of what life was a century ago. An old riverboat, long since inoperative, was now tied up to a dock and used in the summer for a regional community college’s summer theater.

Our reason for going to Brownville that day was not to see what would probably have been a rather amateur production of the summer meller-drammer, nor was it to view the historic buildings. The real reason for our visit that day was a bit more prosaic. There was a street fair and associated with it a flea market. I’ll tell you up front that Jean is a sucker for any flea market, thrift shop, or yard sale. As long as the good stuff is really cheap, we probably could find something that we could bring home and try to find a place to store. (This is why in every move we have ever made, and there have been a bunch of them, we have shipped at least ten thousand pounds more than the movers have estimated—we seen to get more and more as time goes by.)

After a pleasant hour’s drive through the rolling green hills of far eastern Nebraska, we arrived at Brownville, and the town was in all its glory. Main Street (all four blocks of it) was crowded with all sorts of tables piled with various diverse treasures—antiques (both real and fake), old rusty hand tools, fruit jars, coins, Indian jewelry, wheezing engines, home baked bread—good stuff.

We had arrived about noon, so we decided to have lunch at the only restaurant in town—us and about a hundred other hungry shoppers. The food was pure mid-west farm fare—meat, potatoes, corn-on-the-cob—long on the gravy. With the wait for a table, and the rushing of the high school kids who were not very efficiently waiting on tables, lunch became a leisurely time for people watching. The people were also pure mid-west farm fare. But what the heck, so were we. Sure I had a fancy Ph. D. and was a president of a non-profit corporation and Jean had a master’s degree in computer science. We were mid-western farm stock, nonetheless.

Following lunch, and after about an hour of looking at the diverse goodies, I had about had it. Jean can look for hours, buy $4.38 worth of stuff, and be happy as a clam. However, she was aware that if she wanted to induce me to go to another such event, it would be unwise to press me into flea overload—I can only take so many mason jars. Sensing my growing apathy, she suggested that there was something in one of the documents that my mother, the family custodian of things genealogical, had collected that indicated there was family in the Brownville area. Maybe, she suggested, we could find a headstone in the local cemetery to indicate some traces of my ancestry.

Normally, I would approach cemetery searches with the same enthusiasm as I would a flea market. But this day, given the alternative (more of the four block flea market), cemeteries had a certain appeal. So off we went to the Brownville cemetery, located on a beautiful rolling hilltop above the town. The first thing that I noticed was that there were more dead people in Brownville than live ones—by far. Row after row of tombstones wandered across the hilltops. The narrow dirt road wandered through field after field of dead Nebraskans. It soon became obvious that finding old relatives could become a summer’s occupation—no Skeens were going to be found here today.

Jean had another idea. She seemed to remember that one of the earliest ancestor to make it to the mid-west from Kentucky or Tennessee (I can never remember which—they are sort of the same state aren’t they) was a certain Gilbert Skeen. And he had lived on a farm in Nemaha County. Well, we were in Nemaha County and I had given up on the Brownville cemetery, but there was a town named Nemaha to the south. Well, it was still early in the afternoon, and it was a great day for a ride through the rolling farmlands. The map said that Nemaha was eight miles to the south so what did we have to lose.

About four miles to the south, I spied a faded, peeled paint sign nailed to a telephone post indicating that the Nemaha Cemetery was two miles to the east. Since I usually drive the speed limit, even if we are on a leisurely tour on a Sunday afternoon (if the car can go that fast, it should), I slowed, stopped, turned around, and went back to the narrow gravel road that went straight as a string to the east. At the prescribed two miles, we found a very small plot of land on the top of a hill with a manicured lawn and, with the exception of one very old and large oak tree, was bereft of cultivation, shrubs or other trees. A dirt lane with grass between the tire tracks made a large U through the cemetery.

As we drove into the cemetery, we noticed that there were small American flags stuck in the ground in front of about half of the tombstones. A group of four men was methodically going from gravestone to gravestone placing the flags. The far end of the cemetery had not yet been flagged. With little hope of finding anything indicating ancestors, we started around the loop. At the far end, we had just turned the corner on our way out when Jean said, Stop! Right there in front of us was a rather impressive stone with "SKEEN’ in letters six inches high.

We jumped from the car and found the stone indicating the remains of John Gilbert Skeen, the patriarch of the Skeen clan in the mid-west. This really didn’t tell us much about him, though—just that he and his wife Malinda died and were buried here. As we went out of the cemetery, we stopped where the men were working to see if we could find out any more. The members of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars, as they told us they were, came every year to decorate the graves on Memorial Day. This year they had been a little late in getting started, and they hoped to be through before Memorial Day was over.

When I asked if they knew anything about Gilbert Skeen or any of his offspring, they all said they knew the family. The old Skeen homestead had been two miles north of the cemetery and had been farmed by Skeens since the middle of the nineteenth century. Several years ago, the last of the Skeens, a grandson of Gilbert, had moved to the larger town of Auburn, fifteen miles to the west, and as a matter of fact was still there, although he was quite poorly now. If we wanted to meet him, he would probably be glad to see us. So off we went to Auburn.

When we got to Auburn, Dale was indeed poorly. He had recently had cancer surgery and was in no shape to meet long lost cousins. However, his wife did direct us to his sister-in-law, Ruth who was living a few blocks away. She remembered Gilbert and filled us in on the rest of the family and from her we first heard of Jack Skeen. I had never heard of any Jack’s in the family and I was intrigued. Gilbert’s oldest son, Andrew Jackson Skeen had left Nebraska for Kansas in 1884, taking his wife Patsy and his eight sons and one daughter with him and leaving his nickname in Nebraska. His oldest son, John Anthony was my maternal grandfather.

It’s a good thing that Jack Skeen had married Patsy Watts. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been Daniel Boone’s great-great-great-great-great grandson! (More of this later.)

The last time I had been looking in a cemetery was the previous summer when my Uncle Elvon and Aunt Lydia Skeen had taken us on a foray. Every other year, the Skeen family reunion is held in Topeka, Kansas. Uncle Elvon and Aunt Lydia had flown from their home in Oregon to Lincoln and had gone on down to Topeka ahead of us. My Uncle Al Marlin had recently died, and I was afraid that I would never be able to find my grandfather Marlin’s grave—the people who knew where it was were all dead. I didn’t even know what cemetery he was buried in. I asked Uncle Elvon if he could possibly locate Grandpa’s grave. When Jean and I got to Topeka, Uncle Elvon told us that he had found that Grandpa was buried in the Topeka Municipal Cemetery. After some random wandering around the cemetary, we finally found an office and the people there were able to help us locate his grave. Sure enough, there he was. Chester Wirt Marlin, First Sergeant, Company B, 1st Nebraska Infantry, Mar. 20 1873—Oct. 5 1955. Nebraska???

Here I was at the age of almost sixty and living in Nebraska, and I didn’t know that anybody in my family had anything to do with the state. Yet, a little ancestor searching in graveyards yielded the fact that on both sides of my family there was a direct connection. The Skeen ancestors had homesteaded and farmed in Nebraska. Grandpa Marlin got his first job as a schoolteacher in Fullerton, and was a member of the Nebraska National Guard when the Spanish American War broke out.

Most of my life I was less than enthralled with relatives. When I was growing up in Iowa and Kansas, they were as ubiquitous as cornfields. They were there—that was all. I wasn’t really interested in anyone but those in my generation and assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins who drifted into and out of my life. My mother, was a genealogy nut, but I was not inspired—I couldn’t care less. It was kind of neat that I was related to Daniel Boone, and I am sure that my playmates were not as impressed as I was that he was my ancestor. (I still have difficulty trying to recite the lineage—my relationship is entirely through the distaff side and it is hard to remember who married whom.)

I would guess that I am not the first person who made it into his sixties with little interest in ancestors. Yet something seems to have happened. All of a sudden, as the rest of my life has grown to be shorter than the preceding portion thereof, I have found myself trying to fit me into the overall scheme of the world. Perhaps one is not very philosophical when he is twenty and will live forever. In any event, several months ago I decided that maybe, some day, my offspring, and theirs, might be mildly interested in one of their ancestors—in what he did, how he thought, what his accomplishments and failures were. It is for this reason that I am writing this book.

FORBEARS

In the late nineteen century, when my grandparents were born, the United States was an agrarian society. Over ninety percent of Americans lived and worked on a farm. My family was no exception. My roots are in the farm soil of Iowa and Kansas.

Marlin Grandparents

My grandfather, Chester Wirt Marlin, was born in the tiny town of Eagleville, Missouri on March 20, 1873. Actually, if you believe my Aunt Alice, he was born in a covered wagon that just happened to be stopped in Eagleville. His parents were moving from Illinois to farm in Iowa and stopped in Eagleville long enough to give birth. If you were to ask me to explain where the Wirt came from, I’m fairly sure it was his mother’s maiden name. When I was little, I always thought it was Chester Wart.

My grandmother, Myrtle Louise Wilson Marlin, was born in another small town, West Liberty, Iowa on June 17, 1874, the same year that Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, only ten miles away. They might have known each other, but then ten miles was a lot farther then than it is today. (Isn’t that a wonderful bit of trivia!)

Chester and Myrtle were married late for those times—he was 29, she was 27—on May 23, 1901. They didn’t wait long to have my father, their first child, born November 7, 1902. (It was long enough.) Since my great grandfather was James Walter Marlin, my dad was named for him and his middle name was his mother’s maiden name, hence James Wilson Marlin.

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My grandmother, Myrtle Wilson Marlin.

I never knew my Grandmother Marlin (obviously). She died when she was 52. Her parents were from farm country in Ohio and her paternal grandparents had emigrated from England—I don’t know where the maternal grandparents came from except that their ancestors had been in the United States for some time. I don’t remember my dad talking much about his mother, except I had the impression she walked on water. I have always wished I could have known more about her. We have one picture of her taken about the time she was married. Dad looked a lot like his mother. It really is terrible that I can’t find much more to say about my grandmother, but there it is. I really don’t know her, even second handed.

My grandfather’s ancestry is a little fuzzy for me, too. He always claimed that the Marlin family name was changed when they came from Ireland where it had been O’Marlin. I always felt that this was an apocryphal story, and he always told it with a twinkle in his eye, but who am I to doubt a devout Methodist minister? I’m not even sure he was Irish—Mom claimed he was. The family had been in the United States for several generations, and I think they came from the British Isles, but I’m not even sure about that.

Chester grew up on the farm/ranch in Iowa. After the Missouri birth stopover, his parents James and Melissa, settled in Shelby County. To give you an idea of the state of development in Iowa at that time, the cattle that they raised were unimpeded by barbed wire. It was still open grazing land in Iowa in 1873. We can presume that he led a normal childhood and was educated in country schools. I do know that he was quite an athlete. At one time, he was tied for the world’s record in the fifty yard dash. Unfortunately, his grandson (me) was about as fleet of foot as an old plow horse.

Chester’s older brother, Cal, was the first of the family to leave home. Chester followed him to Kansas City to seek his fortune in the world. It is obvious that he was not interested in farming. He left home before finishing high school and apparently had a number of jobs before he wandered northwest to Nebraska. Grandpa was always bright, and he realized that he needed education. He enrolled in the Nebraska Normal School, which has since either been swallowed up by one of the state colleges, or went defunct. While he was there, he was able to both finish high school and prepare himself for teaching. I would point out that one could get a teaching license at that time by passing a teaching test—Aunt Lydia Skeen got her teaching certificate when she was fifteen years old. Part of the curriculum was the study of Greek and Latin, which he was able to read years later. This would lead me to believe that it was some form of higher education, although I don’t know that he ever got a bachelor’s degree.

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My grandfather, Chester W. Marlin, in his Spanish American War uniform.

His first job out of school was teaching in Fullerton, Nebraska. This would probably have been in the late 1890’s. Chester was always a very patriotic man so he felt it was his duty to join the Nebraska National Guard. When the Spanish America War came along, since there also was not much of a standing army, many National Guard units were federalized and put on active duty; the Nebraska Guard was one of those units. In the army at that time, there were three enlisted ranks: private, corporal, and sergeant. Perhaps because of his education, which was considerably more than most of the farm boys that belonged to the Guard, Chester was enlisted as a corporal. Shortly after the Nebraska Guard was federalized into the First Nebraska Infantry Regiment, he was promoted to sergeant. On arrival overseas, Chester was appointed first sergeant of Company B, the highest rank attainable by an enlisted man. I never got promoted that fast!

There were three Nebraska regiments. The 3rd was not called to duty, the 2nd did a lot of training to go to Cuba, but never made it into combat, and the 1st was ordered to the Philippine Islands. In 1898, the regiment landed in Luzon under the overall command of General Arthur MacArthur. (I mention that, because my dad went in to Luzon 46 years later during World War II, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. I ended up in Luzon in 1968 on my way to Vietnam, unimpeded by a general named MacArthur.)

Chester was too late to see much action against the Spaniards—they had already given up shortly before the Nebraskans got there. However, the Moros, a native Philippine irregular army dedicated to controlling their own destiny had banded together to gain control of the Philippines. They did not want Spanish rule, nor did they favor rule by the United States. This was not what McKinley or the other American leaders had in mind when they went into the Spanish American War. The U.S. wanted both Cuba and the Philippines and they got them. Not much is taught in our schools about the Spanish American War, except Remember the Maine and Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill. I am convinced it was our only overtly imperialist war. Both Cuba and Philippines became American protectorates (read colonies). In any event the Moros had to be dealt with and it was here that Grandpa saw action. According to his discharge papers, during February and March 1899, his unit was engaged in ten separate battles. The Moros were motivated, but poorly armed and the American forces rolled over them, though not without casualties.

Later that year, after the war was over, Company B joined the other companies in the regiment on the boat headed for home. When they got to San Francisco, they were mustered out of the federal forces and left to find their own way home. Fortunately, the Omaha World Herald initiated a fund drive to provide train transportation for the returning heroes to at least get to Omaha. It was up to him to get back to Fullerton. So much for the debt of gratitude to the conquering heroes.

The first indication of the direction his later life was to take was revealed in a letter he wrote to the Fullerton Post while he was still in the Philippines. The letter was reprinted in the much larger Lincoln, Nebraska Independent. Under the headline of A Soldier’s Protest, 1st Sergeant C. W. Marlin wrote:

The boys do not grumble as much at being kept upon the firing line, as the cause for which they are kept there. To be compelled to fight a people defending a cause so sacred and dear to every American citizen, to plant the old stars and stripes over the territory saturated in the blood of its rightful sovereigns; this is what makes them long to be relieved. When a year ago they marched forth so proudly to vindicate their country’s honor, to avenge the insults to their flag, they little thought they would ever be compelled to fight against people loving and desiring liberty.

He then goes on to lambaste the whole idea of manifest destiny in the Philippines and closes his letter with

Have I expressed myself too strongly? I simply echo what I hear the most of Misrepresentation in reports, official and otherwise seems so widespread that it is time the enlisted men were heard. Silence is golden it is said, but sometimes silence is a crime.

Several years ago, Jean and I were visiting in a friend’s house when he showed me the reference to Chester’s letter in the journal, Nebraska History. This started my hunt through the Nebraska archives to find the actual letter. Prior to this time, I did not know anything about his Nebraska history.

The future preacher is obvious. Not only was he courageous in battle, he was also brave enough to take on the politicians for what he considered right.

Am I proud of my grandfather? You better believe it.

After the war, Chester moved to Exira, Iowa where he published the weekly newspaper. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Audubon where his brother Cal published The Audubon County Journal. Chester took over the paper, then later worked in the Post Office, where his father-in-law was the Postmaster. There he met and married my grandmother in 1901 and they started their family almost immediately. My dad was born in Audubon in 1902; his brother Albert was born in 1905.

In the early part of the twentieth century, ministerial schooling was rather casual. Today, Methodist ministers are required to attend three years of theological seminary after college before they can be ordained. These requirements were not in evidence when Chester decided to become a preacher. I doubt that he took any formal theological education. From what I can tell, it was really on-the-job-training. If you felt the call, you could answer pretty easily. Ordination required having a church willing to have you, and he obviously did.

Chester’s first church was in Wakarusa, Kansas, a small town some 24 miles south of Topeka. I haven’t the slightest idea how he got there. I do know that my dad and my Uncle Al both attended elementary school there. Next he went to the church in the Highland Park suburb of Topeka, and from there he went to Eskridge, Kansas. Methodist ministers managed to move around a lot. I am very glad that he did go to Eskridge because that is where my dad and mother met and I might not be writing this if he didn’t get transferred.

Chester was both the minister of the Methodist Church in Eskridge and a schoolteacher—anything to make ends meet. They lived in a large parsonage next door to the house I lived in some forty years later. This assignment was carried out during World War I. Chester was not subject to call up, and my dad was still in high school when the war was over. My mother told stories of the celebration of Armistice Day in Eskridge. You can imagine the roaring bonfires and the milling masses of 300 people.

The family next moved to Oakland, a suburb of Topeka. During his stay there, Myrtle suffered and died from peritonitis at the age of 52. No sulfa or penicillin then.

His next church was in Girard, Kansas where he met and married his second wife, a widow named Helen Louise Ashby Von Kaler, whom all of us grandchildren called Granny Helen, much to her chagrin. She tried heroically to get us to call her Auntie Helen, but finally gave up in disgust and consented to be a granny. The next move to Humbolt saw the beginning of Grandpa’s second family with the arrival of Cal Ashby Marlin on New Year’s Day, 1930.

Meanwhile, my dad had moved to Florida in 1930. Chester came for a visit and decided that there was no sense in staying in a cold climate when he could be warm year round. Methodist ministers were always at a premium and it was not difficult to get assigned to a church in the wilderness of Florida. Chester’s first church in Florida was in St. Petersburg. Alice Jane Marlin (now Stokes), my aunt, was born there on July 24, 1934.

Cal and Alice were more like a brother and sister to me than an aunt and uncle. Cal was four years older than I was, and I was six months older than Alice was (a fact that I have regularly reminded her of all her life, except after we passed fifty). They were really of my generation, rather than my dad’s and we have maintained a close relationship over the years.

The first time I can remember going to Grandpa’s house was when they moved to St. Augustine. The parsonage seemed huge to me. It was made of old, gray stone—looked kind of like a castle to me. There were two things about that parsonage that were made for children. First of all, it had a huge Gone-With-the-Wind staircase that had the most wonderful banister that was just made for sliding. The second remarkable feature was the kitchen. It was huge, and Granny Helen let us roller skate in it. I can still see her cooking and shooing us out of the way. Going to Grandpa’s house was like going to an amusement park.

Over the later years, Chester additionally served in churches in Stewart, St. Cloud, and Miami, where he retired. Since we lived in Kansas and Iowa during this time, we saw very little of Grandpa or his family during that time period. The only time we saw them was during vacations in North Carolina.

After Chester retired, he felt the urge to return to his midwestern roots and he agreed to serve in a small church in Wilsey, Kansas. Cal, Alice, Janet and I were close enough to visit more frequently and we had several wonderful times with them during the time they remained there.

The last time I remember seeing my grandfather was the Thanksgiving at Wilsey when I was a junior in high school. I particularly remember the singing. The Marlin’s were a musical family. Grandpa was the only Marlin man that was a tenor. The rest of us were downhill from there with the bottom being held up by Uncle Al, the lowest bass I have ever known. The men (and at fifteen I felt like a man) were singing old gospel songs in four part harmony. It was a real kick for me and made me feel very grown up to sing with my grandfather, father, and two uncles. That Thanksgiving was also the last time that all of us kids got together as kids. After that, when we saw each other, it was as adults, with adult problems and adult faces.

After three years, Chester went back to Miami and eventually died there at the age of 82. He was a good man. All his children almost worshipped him—to them he was a saint. I can still see the sparkle in his eye as he told us stories. The picture of him I have in my mind is of a kind man with a beaming smile. He was never rich or famous; he always served in tiny churches. But he touched lives he never even knew about. We all loved him.

Skeen Grandparents

When Andrew Jackson Skeen left Nebraska, he already had a family of eight children. His friends always said he had his own baseball team. (Obviously, they were not counting Aunt Sally—it would not be proper to be on a baseball team with eight brothers.) The area near Brownville was long since all homesteaded and it was obvious that he did not have the money to buy himself a farm there. He had heard about an opportunity to manage a ranch of several thousand acres in the Flint Hills of Kansas. The Flint Hills, in the spring, are beautiful—rolling hills unimpeded by trees for the most part. The area was primarily used for ranching; it was not all that hot for farming. The Flint Hills are indeed flint hills—the ground is mostly covered by rocks. Early plains Indians regularly came by to find flint for arrowheads. Even today, as you drive through the area, you can see fences and houses made of stones that were removed so that the ground could be cultivated.

The oldest son, John (my grandfather) was 18 years old when the move to Kansas took place. While he was happy to help on the ranch, he did not remain there long—as soon as he was twenty-one, it was time to go out on his own. John found a quarter section farm (160 acres) near Chalk (another town that no longer exists) on the edge of the Flint Hills. It was close enough to have lots of rocks. The Barnhardts had homesteaded the farm a few years before, but Mr. Barnhardt was anxious to sell, and the price was right for John to buy it. As I remember it, there were only eighty acres that were cultivatable, the rest was maintained in pasture. It was not a very prosperous farm. It was also way out in the country. It was a day’s trip in a wagon to the nearest town, Eskridge.

It is through Grandpa Skeen that I am related to Daniel Boone. (The relationship must be authentic because it was the basis for my mother’s acceptance into the Daughters of the American Revolution.) Daniel Boone’s daughter Susannah married William Hayes, who incidentally was killed in a duel with one of his sons-in-law.

(By the way, I am not 100% sure about Susannah’s parentage—Daniel was gone a lot finding wilderness trails and such, and, if you read between the lines, it appears that his brother Squire Boone filled in for him at home on several occasions. Some of his children were born while Ol’ Dan’l had been gone for a couple of years. Either that or historians got the dates wrong.) Before the unfortunate occurrence with the dueling pistols, William managed to father nine children, one of whom was named after her mother, Susannah.

Susannah Hayes married Joshua Dodson in 1801 in the Louisiana Territory (in what is now Missouri.) At that time, Louisiana law required that a Roman Catholic priest perform all marriages in the Territory. They were, even though they were both Protestants. What we do for love! Surprisingly, for those days, they only had four children, one of whom was Sarah.

Sarah married Anthony Watts from South Carolina. I can remember Mom telling stories about how he ran away from home in 1803 and stowed away on the Louis and Clark Expedition. She used to embellish the story with tales of romance with Sacajawea, the expedition Indian guide. Mother’s tales were sometimes good stories, but of a rather elastic nature—they stretched a bit. Whether any of these stories is true, it is true that Anthony was a friend of Jim Bridger and that Bridger retired on a farm next to Anthony and Sarah. Their marriage produced eight children; the youngest daughter was Patsy who married Andrew Jackson Skeen. (That is probably way more than you wanted to know about my lineage!)

Now back to my Grandfather, John Skeen. I can imagine the life on the farm at that time. Up at dawn to a hard day’s hand labor. Horses were used for everything—tractors had not yet been invented. Plowing the fields, walking behind the plow pulled by the horses. Planting seeds by hand. Milking by hand. Cultivating by hand. Picking and shucking corn by hand and chucking it in a wagon pulled by the horse that knew when to move forward to keep pace with the shucker. It was a lonely life, and it was no wonder that John was keeping his eye peeled for a potential wife.

The problem was that the area was scarcely populated and girls were not plentiful.

It is no surprise, then, that the teacher at the nearest school might fall under his gaze. John’s younger brothers were students in the school, so he had an in. Again, it was fortunate for me that he was looking at the schoolhouse because my grandmother, Ida Anderson, was that schoolteacher.

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My grandfather, John A. Skeen.

My only recollection of Grandpa Skeen, and it is very faint, was the result of a trip that I went on with my family in 1937 to visit Grandpa and Grandma Skeen. This trip was a major undertaking—from South Florida to Kansas. There were paved roads, but no turnpikes and I am sure that the trip must have been a bundle of fun with me at three and Janet, my sister, still a baby. I do remember things about the farm and Grandpa bringing in the milk to be separated on the back porch so that the cream could be sold. I remember going to the field to catch Billy, the very old riding horse who was by then long into his retirement. I also remember the ram. This was a pump that brought water to the house. My Uncle Elvon, Mom’s brother, has told me several times how it worked but I still don’t understand it. All I know for sure is that it made a wonderful ca-chunk when it operated. Anyway, it pumped water to a tank in the house without any pump as we know it today, so they had running water; no one else in the neighborhood did! John died the next year, and my main recollection is through family movies.

Ida’s parents, Gilbert Anderson and Sena Johnson, both emigrated from Norway on a sailing vessel to the New World. They met and married in Kansas shortly after the Civil War and settled on farmlands near Alta Vista, Kansas. Their first child, Ida, was the oldest of their eight children. Apparently, Gilbert and Sena had some sort of genetic problem, which affected their ability to name children. Their children were Ida, William, Herbert, Gertrude, Minnie, Olive, Charles and Walter. I say it was genetic because Ida named her two children Stella Leona and Elvon Gilbert. Thank goodness the genes were not passed on to Stella or I might have been named Orville Wilbur!

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My grandmother, Ida Anderson Skeen.

The grandparent that made the most impact on my life was my grandmother, Ida Anderson Skeen. For much of my childhood, Grandma lived in our house, or we in hers. Girls in the 19th century received little formal schooling, but obviously Ida received enough so that she could teach school. From all reports, she was rather good at it. My real acquaintance with my grandmother began after John’s death.

In 1943, my dad had resigned from his church to go into the service, so we had to get out of the parsonage we lived in. Grandma came to help Mom pack and get ready to move to her house in Eskridge, Kansas that she had moved into two years before after John’s death. (All of this will be explained more in detail later.) In any event, Grandma liked to sleep with the window open and woke up one morning cold, so she got up to close it. It stuck. Then all of a sudden it came loose and Grandma fell to the floor, breaking her hip. We rushed her to the hospital where they put her in the most godawful cast you have ever seen. It went from her chest to her ankle on one side and the knee on the other side. A board, about a foot long, was implanted in the cast between her legs making her look like a big A. She had to live in that thing for a number of months, totally immobilized, till it healed. The result is that her right knee never bent again. Nowadays, she would have had a pin implanted and been out of bed and walking within ten hours.

Two weeks and a five hundred-mile ambulance ride later, Mom, Janet, and I moved in with Grandma. (Actually the trip was made in a hearse—there were no ambulances in Eskridge.) Grandma was enthroned in a hospital bed in the front room that had been turned into a recovery room. Her bed had the most wonderful trapeze on it. Grandma was a big woman (about 5’ 8"). So that she could help in moving to avoid bedsores, a metal frame about four feet above the top of the bedstead, had been installed. A suspended rope with a cross bar hung from the frame, which allowed her to lift herself. More than once I climbed on that frame. Grandma seemed to enjoy my acrobatics, but Mom put a quietus on the process. Spoil sport!

Her stiff leg didn’t deter her very much that I could notice. I can remember her having a garden of about a quarter of an acre, which she tended, leaning on her cane and chopping weeds with a hoe in the other hand. After the war, when Dad had come home and we had again set up housekeeping as a family, Grandma lived in her own house alone for the six months from spring to early fall. Each fall we would trek to Kansas, pick up Grandma and bring her home for the winter months. She always had a ground floor room with a half bath as her territory. Sometimes, she had to share the rooms with a home freezer and a mangle. But she never complained (that I heard). From the time I was nine, till I went away from college, I had the opportunity to live with my grandmother.

I am sure that Grandma tried to keep a low profile. Obviously, she was an extra in our family. I am also sure that both Dad and Mom tried very hard to include her in all family activities. I would think it was nice for the folks to have a built in baby sitter, not that one was needed for long—after the war, I was thirteen and Janet was ten.

Every Christmas, Grandma seemed to get a new hat. (Lest you forget, a woman then would rather die than be seen in church bare headed.) Somehow, in all of the hullabaloo of Christmas excitement, Grandma would get her hat, and put it on her head, usually somewhat askew. She would then proceed to sit in her chair and snake all of the gift-wrap over to her with her cane, where she would smooth and fold it for next year. (I can’t remember that we ever used any of the saved paper.) This image has been, over the years, probably the strongest that I have had of Grandma. When I was a teenager, it was just funny. Grandma, with the hat, folding gift-wrap. But that image also said a lot about her generation. She had grown up on a near subsistence farm, married late, and had few luxuries. A new hat was a luxury, and if you wanted to have nice gift-wrap, about the only way to have it available was if you saved it from year to year. Somehow, it was an unconscious way of teaching me about frugality that I never forgot.

Another incident that occurred when I was about sixteen showed me another side of Grandma. Farm families grew most of their own food. They certainly did not go to the supermarket to buy meat, eggs, dairy products, or vegetables. They raised them. When I was young, we bought live chickens, killed, dressed, and froze them for storage in either a commercial cold storage locker or later, in a home freezer. (On the farm, you ran down dinner in the yard—no luxury of a freezer then.)

Anyhow, by the time I was sixteen I had graduated to the position of executioner in the chicken production line. We had a large stump with two nails pounded in the end with about two inches sticking up that were spread about and inch and a half apart. I would get a chicken from the crate, grab it by the legs and lug it to the stump. The chicken, through some sort of ESP, sensed that all was not well and would squawk loudly and flap his wings. (Somehow we usually bought fryers which were roosters.) I would stick the chicken’s head between the two nails and stretch his neck taut by pulling his legs. The poor foul was dispatched with a blow from Dad’s double headed axe. The chicken, bereft of his head, would then flop all over the back yard, spraying blood over everything and sometimes managing to fly/run thirty yards after he was already as dead as a doornail. I had seen this before, but had never understood what was going on.

My grandmother’s job was to scald the chickens by dipping them whole in a bucket of boiling water, and then plucking them clean of feathers. Mother’s job was to gut them and then cut them up and wrap them prior to freezing them. On this particular day, Grandma and I were doing chickens alone. So, after my time of mayhem in the back yard, I proceeded to the kitchen to help Grandma finish the process. While she was plucking the chickens I casually asked her about why chickens were able to run clear across the back yard after they were obviously dead. It was then that I learned that my grandmother, the old lady with the funny hat and the stack of wrinkled, folded gift-wrap, was really a pretty smart lady. She proceeded to enlighten me about autonomous nerves and their affect on muscles. Seeing that I was interested in the body and how it functions, we had a detailed, demonstrated lecture on the physiology of a chicken body and the similarities to the human body. I learned more comparative anatomy in that one afternoon than I ever did in my zoology classes in college. She was a great teacher. On a chicken carcass, we traced the alimentary canal, the internal organs, the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, and she showed me on my body, where each of these parts were located, and how they worked. It was one of my most fondly remembered learning experiences. On later reflection, I found out that she was a real leader in her farm community—she was the teacher and as such was given deference and position. It is too bad that today’s teachers no longer hold, or probably earn, such prestige.

I was privileged to have lived with, and learned from my grandmother. Today, I seldom see my grandchildren, and very rarely on a one-to-one basis. I had such a relationship with my grandmother and cherish the memory. I am sure there were problems of privacy that I knew nothing about. I sensed that my dad was walking on eggs from time to time, but from my perspective, Grandma was a plus. I never thought a thing about her being an intruder in our family. It was just the way it was and it was fine by me. She never bossed me or tried to discipline me—she was just this neat old lady that lived with us.

Ida lived to the ripe old age of 92. In the last years of her life, her health deteriorated to the point that she could not live alone in Kansas in the summers. My dad had had several heart attacks and Mother was not up to having two semi-invalids in the house at the same time. Grandma therefore went to live at the Methodist Old Peoples Home in Topeka, Kansas. My parents visited as often as they could, and I remember visiting her there once. (I was already out of college and in the Air Force.) During her final years, she went back to what she loved to do—teach. She conducted study classes for the other residents even into her nineties.

I remember her as a kind, intelligent, caring woman, who, when faced with adversity, limped ahead on her one stiff leg and never complained. I can still see her sitting on her bed after washing her hair (which fell almost to her knees) brushing her hair and then braiding it. Normally, I was not aware of the length of her hair because she always wore it braided and in a bun at the back of her head. She was a big woman of pioneer stock, strong in body and mind. And I loved her.

Parents

My father was a gentleman and a gentle man. He was one of the kindest people I have ever known and he had a love of people that made him a success at his chosen profession of the ministry. That does not mean that he was not ambitious. I know that he always had wanted to serve a church with a large congregation or be a bishop, neither of which he attained—his sense of duty saw to that. He was not enough of a politician to be a bishop, but he always felt he should have been one anyway. He did achieve greater success than most of his peers. His greatest success, however, was the thousands of people he served in his lifetime.

I doubt that my dad ever had any idea of being anything but a minister. I know that he looked up to his father and apparently wanted to be like him. Kids growing up in the parsonage either want to emulate their fathers, or get as far away as possible from being a minister. My father fell into the first category, I the latter. Being a Preacher’s Kid (PK) is a cross that many successful people have had to bear. You live in a fishbowl and are expected to be either a goody-two-shoes or a hell raiser. You can’t just be a kid. Dad never told me much about his childhood, but since we were both PK’s I can understand much about his childhood.

Methodist ministers, particularly those in small churches tend to move often. I don’t know whether John Wesley had anything to do with the policy or not, but I do know that bishops then tended to move ministers every two or three years. Therefore, PK’s were always the new kids in school. There were plusses and minuses to living such a nomadic existence. While PK’s were seldom part of the in crowd who had grown up together, they did learn to be more flexible. They tended to have an understanding that the big fish in the little puddle tend to stay big fish in the little puddle. How they managed to cope with being a fish in different fishbowls depended on the individual. My dad seemed to have survived this ordeal quite well.

During my dad’s teenage years, the United States was engaged in World War I. He was just sixteen when the armistice was signed, so he never

Reviews for On the Other Hand

[Ole Gade · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Should you have an interest in a truly detailed, humorous, and so well written account of the life of a person who exemplified Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation personas, this is the book I would recommend. Tim's life documents in a readable and entertaining way growing up during Depression and WWII years, college in the 1950's, Vietnam in the 1960s and university life until retirement with an incredible array of extraordinary activities involving many emerging national and international personalities of the time.