Two Long Lives Shared

By Xlibris US

A World War Love Story


Two small people who grew up in modest
circumstances, in different states, met on a blind-date that neither wanted to accept. Yet, it led to a marriage that lasted 70 happy years and included a surprising array of activities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499010572

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Dr. Dean McCandless.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014908143

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4990-1058-9

Softcover   978-1-4990-1059-6

eBook   978-1-4990-1057-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/20/2014

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CONTENTS

Sept. 7, 1919

Remembering The Army

Duke Magazine

Dean Mccandless

Biography

I dedicate this book to my children, grandchildren

and great grandchildren.

SEPT. 7, 1919

Dean.jpg

Dr. Athol Cochran made his way to a farmhouse just south of the Pratt Kansas county line. There he delivered a baby boy to be named Andrew Griffith (no relation to the actor). A few miles north and west of the county line, into Stafford County, another young woman was in labor. Dr. Cochran arrived shortly after she delivered a baby boy. Despite his late arrival, the parents named the baby after the doctor. And that, they tell me, is how I came into this world, in the tenant house on the farm of my mother’s father, William L. Garner, better known as Buck. This home was located obliquely southeast of the crossroad from the Antrim Methodist Church, which remains active to this day. The home is gone as are my parents. On my birth certificate, Dr. Cochran wrote Beulah for my mother’s name though it was really Eula, daughter of Buck Garner. My father’s name was Arthur Leo McCandless. They named me Athol Dean McCandless.

Shortly after my birth, my parents moved to a farm owned by my paternal grandfather, George Elmer McCandless, known simply as GE. That farm was in eastern Colorado, near the tiny town of Joes; Avis Marie, my sister, was born there. Another child, Donald, died shortly after birth. Rural farm life in the early twenties was still rugged, and they experienced several crop failures. Several of my recollections relate to punishment for mischief, such as eating the center out of a loaf of freshly baked bread while my mother visited with a neighbor, or getting my sister to play in the coal bin until we were both covered with coal dust! The first grade of school in Joes left few good memories for me. Once, I ran behind the batter as high school girls played softball. A foul ball hit me on the head. When I woke up, I was lying on a bench with my head in my teacher’s lap. I recall her gently stroking my head and that she had a lovely smell of perfume or powder. Another memory is of having to go to the boys’ outhouse often because of diarrhea. To this day, the smell of wet pinewood makes me think of a privy.

In 1926, my parents gave up on the farm that summer. Not knowing where they might settle, they left me with my father’s parents, whose farm was just one mile east of where I was born. Antrim grade school was one mile south and a half mile west. They enrolled me in the second grade there. That made four McCandless kids in that same class—Joan, Cecilia, Hugh, and I. All in all, it was a happy time for me. The home of my grandparents had indoor plumbing and carbide lights. They also had a large orchard with all sorts of trees—apple, pear, peach, cherry, and plum. At Antrim, they enrolled me simply as Dean McCandless, and to this day, few people know that I had another name. It was years before I understood why they omitted it. I did know that a young man in our community had that name and was the object of jokes about it. A long time later, while taking practice teaching at Kansas State College, I was seated beside a fellow student during a conference. She confided that she had a name that she disliked and never used. I then told her that I too had an unused name, and that it was Athol. A moment later she asked me if it was a long a or a short a and if it was one syllable or two, laughing all the while. All of a sudden I was repeating it to myself that way and understood for the first time the reference to the distal end of one’s anatomy and was astonished that such a beautiful young woman could think such thoughts! (My, how times and the use of language have changed!) Also I was and still am grateful that my grandparents omitted the name for me. To this day, on all my diplomas, degrees, licenses, commissions, and government documents, I am simply Dean McCandless. Last year, 1996, Aunt Naomi Garner passed away, and in her will, she remembered me, Athol Dean McCandless! So much for a bum name.

While I lived on the Kansas farm, which I still consider my real home, my parents wandered first to Denver, Colorado, then to Los Angeles where they finally divorced. The court did a Solomon kind of decision, giving Avis to our mother and me to our father. He left me with my grandparents. There were brief episodes when I spent summers with my father, but come fall and schooltime, it was back to Antrim and the grandparents’ farm home. I am forever grateful to them. They were good to me and good for me. I recall having some medical problems that they took care of such as a tonsillectomy even though they were not legal guardians.

Another rather embarrassing episode shortly after they took me in—I had a problem with urination. This turned out to be a phimosis (a foreskin too tight for the glans to be retracted). They took me to more than one doctor, each saying a circumcision was required, costing seventy dollars as I recall, a lot of money in those days. Someone suggested a doctor in a neighboring town. There he looked carefully and said that he could solve the problem right there, and they agreed. He found a tiny space between the skin and the glans, inserted a probe, then whipped it around the glans, freeing things up nicely, though with pain and bleeding! A Vaseline dressing and home we went. Years later as a physician myself, I always made sure that squeamish mothers retracted that bit of skin when they bathed their baby boys!

They really were great to me in so many ways. There were chores to do, and I had to do mine faithfully to get my allowance—twenty-five cents a week. Boy oh boy, I hated gathering eggs from beneath setting hens—they pecked. I didn’t mind gathering kindling for the kitchen stove and bringing in the cows to be milked; it was often fun. The pasture was west across the road from the home, and the cows always seemed to be all the way to the back of the pasture at milking time. I had to watch out for snakes and other creatures, but it was the sudden harsh screech made by some sort of locust that frightened me most often. I was always amazed that such a small insect could make such a loud noise. The lane from the road ran past the south side of the house, which was about one hundred yards from the road. There was a row of lovely, fragrant lilac bushes on the north side of the lane and past the house. The orchard was on the south side of the lane. Among the cows there was one who was most gentle, a Guernsey, who would often allow me to ride her in from the pasture. They all loved to rub against the lilac bushes on the way to the barn, and there old Guernsey would brush me off! The barn was about one hundred yards beyond the house. The home was a large two-story white wood-frame house with a full bath, four bedrooms, and a nursery on the upper floor between the bathroom and the master bedroom. In later years, the nursery became a storeroom or, as grandma sometimes called it, a junk room.

As years passed, my jobs advanced as I grew, and the discipline remained constant. I even drove a tractor pulling a plow, breaking virgin sod on the Western Kansas land whose ownership we now share. By the time I finished high school, I was a pretty good tractor man, pulling the combine at wheat harvesttime. I was proud of that. As a matter of fact, one summer, Mr. Bradley, the high school manual training teacher was our combine man while I was the tractor man. In those days, harvest workers often chewed tobacco to keep your mouth wet. One day Mr. Bradley gave me a chew of his tobacco. As I was huffing and puffing while I spun the steering wheel of the tractor in order to make a good sharp turn with the combine, I swallowed that chew. Talk about instant illness! I was also the laughingstock of the crew that day.

Earlier, when I was age twelve or thirteen, much of the farming was still done with horses and mules. Grandpa and Uncle Fred trusted me with a team of mules to pull a cultivator. They were Jack and Molly. Jack was lazy, and Molly was flighty. Jack would lag back, and Molly would surge forward, struggling to pull the cultivator alone. So I spent much of my day throwing clods of dirt at Jack’s rear end to make him surge ahead and do his share. Often just the sound of the clod of dirt hitting Jack would cause Molly to surge more than Jack. Years later, in dealing with people, it always seemed to me that they mirrored Jack and Molly. If one urges a group or a team to try harder, the doers will respond and overextend themselves and the lazy will gladly watch.

Thinking of horses and mules, I recall another experience. I was always eager to drive a team, and once, at the end of the day, one of the hired men allowed me to drive a team of four back home from the field. Such a team was always eager to get back to the barn for rest, food, and water. As we turned up the lane toward the barn, they began to trot faster than I could run and my slight weight hanging on to the reins didn’t slow them at all, so they were soon dragging me through the sand. Grandpa saw this and laughed and shouted, Hang on, son, hang on, and I did. Grandma saw this and was appalled! She was concerned both for my skin and for the ruin of my overalls!

Grandma was really good to me and rarely scolded me. However, when Uncle Fred bought a big white bulldog as protection for Aunt Margaret, Bosco became a pal of mine. I loved to wrestle with him and, of course, wound up grimy and smelling like a dog. I didn’t mind, but Grandma had to deal with me and my smelly clothes and let me know that she disapproved! In the end, Grandpa simply hauled Bosco to a faraway farm without telling anyone. It was years later that we found out what happened to Bosco, and it was then one of the few times that Aunt Margaret was really mad at Grandpa.

In 1934, my father, Arthur, had a café in Liberal, Kansas. So I spent my sophomore school year (1934-35) with him. I learned to wait tables and deal a bit with customers. That summer (1935), he decided to sell the café and farm some of Grandpa’s Western Kansas land. He had severe asthma, so I drove the tractor in the field while he kept house and serviced the machinery each day. It was agreed to be a fifty-fifty proposition, and once the wheat was planted, he departed, and I went back to the grandparents’ to finish high school there. The summer of 1936 was bleak—the harvest poor and grain prices low. Nonetheless, my share would have been near one thousand dollars. After harvest, I went back to the grandparents’, leaving my father to sell the wheat when he thought the market was best. He did that and departed for California but never sent me my share. Grandpa had suspected that result, I think, because he had earlier suggested that I sell my half right after harvest. So when I started college in the fall of 1937, I had only about one hundred dollars that I had earned in the harvest fields that summer. It was enough to get me started. I worked at the college hospital for twenty-five cents an hour paid by the NYA (FDR’s national youth administration) and waited tables at Jesse Griggs’s Gridiron café three hours a day for three meals a day. Aunt Ethel sent me ten dollars a month, which paid for my room, which I shared first with Pat Harness and later with Bill Deam. Four years and a summer school later, I graduated from Kansas State with a BS degree, a premed major, and an education minor, as well as a second lieutenant’s commission in the US Army. I also had orders to report to the Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment of the Second Infantry Division in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. When I got to Fort Sam Houston, the entire division was in Louisiana. (See next disc, Remembering the Army.)

REMEMBERING THE ARMY

In the fall of 1937, I enrolled at Kansas State College. Since Kansas state was a land-grant college, ROTC was required. All male students had to take the first two years of ROTC, and many hated it. However, I rather enjoyed it and was very pleased when I was accepted for advanced ROTC. The gray-mustached colonel who taught us was a cigar smoker on a campus that allowed no one to smoke on campus. So we