Living off Grandma’s Sayings: From Leeds to the Legislature

By Yvonne Starks Wilson

In Living Off Grandma’s Sayings: From Leeds to the Legislature, retired Missouri State Senator Yvonne Wilson recounts her experience growing up in the segregated community of Leeds in Kansas City, Missouri, with her Grandma and describes the impact of this experience on her life as an educator, state legislator, and public servant. Lessons learned from her Grandma formed the bedrock of Senator Wilson’s career in the Kansas City, Missouri, School District during the turbulent years of desegregation, her time in the Missouri House of Representatives and Missouri State Senate, her service in the Kansas City community, and her role as wife, mother, and grandmother. Throughout the book, Senator Wilson reflects on the continued value of her Grandma’s sayings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796053982

Yvonne Starks Wilson

Retired Missouri State Senator Yvonne S. Wilson is a long-time educator and public servant residing in Kansas City, Missouri. Born in the small segregated community of Leeds, Senator Wilson grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. She served as teacher, principal, and Director of Elementary Education in the Kansas City, Missouri, School District for thirty-five years before being elected to the Missouri General Assembly, where she worked for the citizens of Kansas City and the State of Missouri for eleven years as Representative and Senator. She currently serves as president of the Spirit of Freedom Fountain Foundation, Inc. and Swope Community Builders. Shaped by her own grandmother, Senator Wilson is a grandmother of six, one deceased.

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Copyright © 2019 by Yvonne Starks Wilson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019912269

ISBN:              Hardcover                 978-1-7960-5396-8

                        Softcover                  978-1-7960-5397-5

                        eBook                       978-1-7960-5398-2

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Rev. date: 08/28/2019

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M EMOIR WRITING IS an act of gratitude and love. I dedicate this memoir to my elementary and high school teachers, college professors at Lincoln University and the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and all who saw my abilities and advanced them. It is dedicated to my students, who made me a better educator and who, as adults, have become and remained my close friends to this day. It is dedicated to my constituents, who remained loyal and still seek my counsel on political issues.

This memoir is dedicated to Grandma, Papa, and Aunt Alice, who lovingly stepped up to the task of raising me and my three siblings after the death of my mother. It is dedicated to my beloved family: my deceased loyal and supportive husband, Jim; my deceased son, Jay, ever devoted, who encouraged me to run for political office; my oldest daughter, Berishia, who travels miles to spend time with me and Cupcake, the pet companion she gave me; my youngest daughter, Alycia, who looks after me as I once looked after and cared for her; Alycia’s husband, my son-in-law, Dr. Ramon Nichols, who cared for Jim during his difficult last phase of Alzheimer’s; my baby sister, Vivienne, who has the memory of an elephant and reminds me of everything I have forgotten; my niece Dee, Vivienne’s daughter, who managed each political race; and to all those who affected my life along the way to a successful, rewarding career.

Finally, this book is dedicated to those who said kids from Leeds could not succeed, providing proof that indeed they can!

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1   Family History

Chapter 2   Childhood and Schooling

Chapter 3   Career in Education

Chapter 4   Marriage and Family Life

Chapter 5   Public Service

Chapter 6   Politics

Chapter 7   Travel

Epilogue

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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D R. GARY R. Kremer, executive director of the State Historical Society of Missouri, was the driving force behind starting this memoir project. After visiting my in-home office, storage area, and library of keepsakes, he confirmed my belief that I’ve got a book in me. Dr. Kremer connected me with a staff member at the Society, Dr. Michael Sweeney, who agreed to help shepherd the book along. Without Michael, this book would not have come to fruition.

To those family members, coworkers, and acquaintances who have transitioned from this life and made a tremendous impact on my own success, I owe you a heartfelt thank-you. I am grateful to my mentors—including high school teachers and college professors—and my many friends, followers, and supporters in civic, professional, social, and political organizations who supported me over my ninety years.

My living children—Berishia Wilson Chamberlain and Alycia Wilson Nichols—provided constant support and encouragement throughout this process, and they continue to sustain me as I age.

Without my baby sister, Vivienne Starks Smith, with her tremendous memory, there would have been so many gaps and omissions that the book may not have been as accurate or as interesting as I hope it turned out.

Finally, I am grateful for the memory of Grandma—Millie Ann Woodard Gibson—who raised me with her humorous yet remarkable and encouraging sayings. This book is written based on many of those sayings, which I heard while she raised and prepared me for the life you are about to read.

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INTRODUCTION

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M Y LIFE HAS been blessed with so many accomplishments, achievements, innovations, and experiences that I would like to share them in a book of memories based upon expressions heard during my childhood from my loving grandmother. I will share with you my family background, childhood and schooling, career in education and politics, involvement in public service, marriage and family, and extensive travel experiences. It has been a journey with a destiny that was much bigger than I realized—a journey carrying me from teaching neighborhood friends on the front porch of Grandma’s house through grade school in a run-down schoolhouse, a high school several miles from home, a segregated college, three graduate degrees, a successful career in education, an impressive career in local and state politics, and finally, to a well-deserved retirement. It has been a journey of learning, leading, and teaching and a journey of excitement, pain, love, family, travel, and tragic losses. Doors were opened, and opportunities emerged, which affirmed my belief that anything I wanted to do was possible and that I would be successful at it. All along the road I traveled from that front porch, I believed that I could, so I did.

I was born on the cusp of the Great Depression on March 22, 1929, delivered by the family doctor, Dr. L. P. Richardson, at 3619 White Avenue, the home of my mother’s parents—Roy Dale Gibson, whom we called Papa, and Millie Ann Woodard Gibson, whom my siblings and I called Grandma. The two-bedroom house at the time, later to become three, was in a little community called Leeds, located on the far eastern edge of Kansas City, Missouri. I was my mother’s second child, named Yvonne Delores Starks and nicknamed Sissy. My mother, Virginia D. Dolly Ruff Starks, born in 1909, died in 1934, when I was five years old. She left four children for her then forty-six-year-old mother to rear. While it was the desire of my father’s mother, Lula Harvey Starks, to split the children up, taking the two oldest and leaving the two youngest with my mother’s mother, Grandma, who promised her daughter she would raise the four of us together and send each to college, won out. Thank God for she did just that!

This book reflects tough love and lessons learned. I owe much of what is written in this book to Grandma’s rearing and her many sayings, which shaped my incredible life. Grandma had what my siblings and I thought were not only weird and strict but also especially hilarious sayings to keep us on track to becoming successful and respected. We’d dare not question their meaning or laugh in her presence because we’d surely be punished. Often, we could not hold the urge to laugh at what we thought were funny or fogyish ideas, so our usual place to let out a whoop was deeply embedded among the clothes in our bedroom closet, where Grandma could not hear us. Later in life, when we were comfortable about asking and Grandma was comfortable with sharing, we would ask, Grandma! What does that mean? Her response was always sidesplitting, not only for us but for Grandma as well. I’m sure you’ll find some of them familiar and uproarious as I refer to them in this book. Hopefully, the book and my story convey that regardless of the ups and downs in life, one can succeed. I have tried to share all experiences of my life that I can recall without being ashamed or untruthful. As Grandma would say, Tell the truth and stay in church.

My faith tells me that God made me just the way He wanted me to be, skinny legs and all, with specific plans and direction for me to achieve my goals. I sincerely believe, as I reflect on my life’s journey, that God gave me certain gifts and abilities and had a plan for me then luckily placed me with my Grandma, who put me on the right path to discover these gifts and abilities and to use them. My siblings and I were raised in the Baptist church. I was baptized at age thirteen and converted to Catholicism at age twenty-seven. I consider myself a child of God, and I am a Christian. I was created to be an educator and a servant of the people and to ultimately become a citizen of heaven.

Grandma often related how, as a child, prior to going to school, I sat on the front porch teaching the kids in the neighborhood. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher and to go to school. Ultimately, I became that teacher. I am an educator with certification in the State of Missouri to teach pre-K through eighth grade and taught in Kansas City classrooms for seven years and then certification in administration for life. I served as principal in four of the city’s elementary schools and later served for three years as director of elementary instruction for the school district of Kansas City, Missouri, providing supervision and leadership for the district’s many elementary school principals. As an elementary school principal and as director of elementary instruction, the belief that God’s plan for everyone includes special gifts and abilities is one that I passed on to teachers, urging them to encourage each student to find and explore their gifts and use them, regardless of how they scored in math or other core subjects.

While reading this book, you will find that I accomplished my dream of becoming a teacher and infused the skills and characteristics of a good teacher in my daily walk of life. I’ve had the opportunity to utilize those skills with my immediate family while serving in leadership roles in public service, in my political career, and finally, in my continued involvement as a public servant while in retirement. Little did I know that my thirty-five-year career in education was just one phase of a continuing journey from Grandma’s front porch. This book will reflect the journey that took me into leadership roles—which include being the president of the Spirit of Freedom Fountain Foundation, director of the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center, and president of other civic and community groups—as well as a political career capped by eleven years in the Missouri General Assembly as state representative and state senator.

In retirement, I remain actively involved in the community, serving on several boards, commissions, and committees. I have remained an actively involved member of the Spirit of Freedom Fountain Foundation, as a founding member and serving close to forty-years as chair; the Swope Community Builders Board of Directors, serving as chair of the executive and operations committees; the Kansas City Metropolitan Crime Commission, serving as cochair of the State of Missouri and Kansas policy committee; and the ONYX Board of Directors, serving as secretary and treasurer.

I am, at this writing, a widow after sixty-one years of marriage to a wonderful husband and father, Jim Wilson, who supported and encouraged me through my life experiences. I am a devoted mother of our two girls and one son. Our youngest daughter, Alycia Wilson Nichols, lives nearby in Lee’s Summit, Missouri; and Berishia Wilson Chamberlain, our oldest, moved to Minnesota at the age of thirty-four but frequently visits her family in Missouri. Our youngest child and only son, James Edward Wilson, died in a motorcycle accident at the age of thirty-eight. I am an old-fashioned grandmother of six and a great-grandmother of six. In addition, I am also a perpetual learner, a volunteer in the community, and a lifelong friend of over seventy years to Marie McIntosh Grant, whom I met my freshman year at Lincoln University. To my despair, Marie died before I completed this book.

My hobbies include reading, listening to all types of music, seeing stage plays, shopping, cooking, and traveling. I’ve traveled extensively throughout the world and have several destinations on my bucket list." Hopefully, by the time this book is published, I will have been able to cross off those hoped-for trips. With security issues across the nation and in the world, I may have a long wait.

I asked myself, Why try to write a memoir at this age when you can’t remember all the positive and negative experiences in your life? I did not want to relive the painful experiences or wish the hurts or negative experiences on anyone. The writing experience provided another chance to come to the acceptance of challenging experiences and painful losses of family members and grieve the losses of grandparents, aunts, parents, sister, two brothers, granddaughter, son, and husband as necessary. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process of writing this book. There were things I had forgotten and things I learned, and recalling certain incidents and things about my childhood often evoked ambiguous feelings. The tough person I know that I am, I was confident that I could handle any reflections of times I’ve blanked out either deliberately or for whatever reason. Perhaps I should have named the book In Search of Me or Who Am I? In the long run, I would not trade or deny most of my wonderful experiences.

Were it not for being a preserver of papers, notes, pictures, books, files, and records—what one might call being an organized hoarder—I would not have anything to fall back on to reflect on my life and how it changed over time. I knew that I would someday need to look back on some memories, especially the good ones, so when I decided to retire from a steady pace of work and employment at the age of eighty-one, I needed to find a place to organize all these memories and stuff … and I do mean stuff. When I retired from the Kansas City Public Schools in 1985, I used some of my retirement money for a major renovation of our home at 4545 E. Fifty-Third Street, where we’d lived for fifty-three years, and concluded it was the time and place to create an office space from which to work and to house some of my stuff.

While accumulating these materials—about family and community involvement and about work in education and politics—the need for storage became obvious. I’ve never been one to tolerate clutter. Therefore, I added a storage room to the house with shelves and room enough for plaques, photo albums, and artifacts bought during travels and acquired throughout my careers. While everything was in order, there was too much of it—things I felt needed to be held on to for memories that I believed would become useful to someone or for something in the future. Somewhere in my busy schedule of going here and there to meetings and working on projects, I recognized I needed shelves, storage boxes, notebooks, and sheet protectors for the papers and other materials, as well as a protected environment for their safekeeping. I learned the importance of climate control for paintings and documents during my experience as director of the Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center. While in that position, I was trained at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; and I visited the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, with other museum directors in the People-to-People Program and toured the Louvre in Paris while bringing in the new millennium with family and Lincoln University friends. I had accumulated enough artifacts collected on my various trips to Africa to require storage crates, where I could take them out from time to time to display in various places throughout the house or loan to various venues.

Additionally, upon retirement from eleven years in the Missouri General Assembly, where I maintained two staffed office spaces filled with furniture and file cabinets, I left with boxes of files containing House bills, Senate bills, committee proceedings, and letters to and from constituents, government departments, and elected officials, you name it. What did I do with all these materials? I kept some and threw some out of course, but deciding what to keep and how and when to go through all these to make those decisions was a challenge. It has been almost ten years since I retired from the legislature, and I carefully and not so carefully saved materials, some of which I draw upon for information in this book.

For some information and materials, I had to rely on my youngest sister, Vivienne, who also keeps organized documents and files. She knew and remembered some things that I did not know or had known but since forgotten. While helping me in my home office to get organized with filing and to find information more easily for writing the book, I’d often pull out and leave papers, files, folders, and whatnot in disarray. I would get frustrated and call Vivienne. Vivienne, a collector and organizer, told me more than once, I don’t want to come back here and find this place looking like this again. She has notebook after notebook of our family heritage and files on each family member. She should be writing this book since she has all the information.

At the end of this process, I can say, Thank God Grandma raised me. The public schools of Kansas City, Missouri, groomed me for my future. Lincoln University nurtured me by overseeing my development while away from home. The University of Missouri–Kansas City awarded me with two graduate degrees. The Missouri General Assembly humbled me through exposure to the values, differences, interests, and the economic disparities in the State of Missouri. I am in constant contact and company of my sister, daughters, grandkids, nieces and nephews, friends, neighbors, members of various organizations—such as Lincoln High School and Lincoln University alumni and my sorority and social groups—and church family. At ninety years of age, I can honestly say that I am happy with my life. As Grandma would say, As happy as if I had good sense.

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CHAPTER 1

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Family History

G RANDMA INSTILLED IN each of us a sense of family and the need to stick together and support one another. Through the years, when and where there seemed to be the need to engage family for support and discussions or just to mingle, Grandma was the convener. It was usually through family dinners. Every year in February, around the time of my mother’s and father’s birthdays, and then every holiday, we had dinner at Grandma’s house. As we grew older and married, we split locations: Thanksgiving dinners were held at my home, but Christmas remained at Grandma’s house. After she died, Vivienne kept the tradition of family dinners. I miss the Thanksgiving dinners held at my house, where all the family members whose lives Grandma and Papa played a great role in gathered. With a family filled with medical professionals—my sister Virginia was a registered nurse; my niece Johnett is a doctor; her sister, Dee, worked in Johnett’s office; and my daughter Berishia worked in multiple doctors’ offices and later became a paramedic—you can imagine the topics of conversation at the dinner table. It was always about health, life, and death.

I have difficulty remembering much of my early childhood, five years and below. Memory of being with or around my mother and father at an early age escapes me. I only have a vague memory from discussions of Grandma’s disdain for my father’s mother, Grandma’s insistence that he provide financial support for clothing, and the ugly visits to his mother’s house where he was living. My story, therefore, will reflect on my father’s and mother’s genealogy, my siblings, the community, and the house I was raised in. This chapter will reflect on the history and background of my being, based on Grandma’s reminder, Don’t forget from whence you came.

I would suspect that, like me, many people really have no idea of their family background on either their mother’s or father’s side unless genealogy study has been done. I had not considered genealogy until I watched Henry Louis Gates’s show on TV, Finding Your Roots. He had studied the ancestry of prominent personalities such as Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, and others. I know less about my mother’s side, except for hearing a few stories from Aunt Alice, my mother’s baby sister who lived with me the last days of her life, and for recent genealogy work done by Vivienne in her studies of our family background. I have learned more about my father’s background because of my relationship with him and his second wife, Tisha Shirley, whom we called Mother Tisha, and through our travels to his relatives in Lawrence, Kansas, and later trips to recent family reunions on his mother’s side. Yearly, I attended the Carter-Harvey family reunion in Bonner Springs, Kansas, with my father. It was only of late that I learned about the Hilderbrandts, my paternal grandfather’s family.

Lula Harvey and Chester R. Starks

My father, Chester Ricardo Starks, whom we called Daddy, was born on February 14, 1910, in Tonganoxie, Kansas, to Lula Harvey and Douglas Hilderbrandt. I don’t think Daddy was told who his biological father was, nor did he hear the rumors that circulated among his maternal cousins, the Harveys, the Shephards, and the Hilderbrandts. In 2014, my nephew Anthony Ricardo Starks—son of my oldest brother, Chester, and a direct descendant of Daddy—had a DNA analysis to help us learn more about Daddy’s paternal ancestry. While the findings did not pinpoint an exact location, it traced the lineage to Northern Europe and Asia.

My father’s mother, Lula M. Harvey Starks, was one of eight children born to Green Harvey and Mary Carter Harvey. There is an interesting story about Lula’s father, Daddy’s grandfather, Green Harvey. The story—as told by Daddy in an interview with Horace Peterson, founder and director of the Black Archives of Mid-America—was that Green Harvey and his siblings were children of slaveholders in Missouri. In 1863, the slaveholder brought all his slaves, with the exception of Green Harvey, across the Missouri River to the free state of Kansas. The slaves were split among plantation owners to help them homestead. In search of his siblings and freedom, Green Harvey became a runaway slave and swam across the Missouri River to Kansas. It is believed he survived by getting down behind a log as he swam, evading the gunshots from the water patrol during his escape. They were called the paddy rollers.

Daddy moved from Leavenworth County, Kansas, with his mother to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1912. Lula Harvey married Charlie Starks of Kansas City, Missouri, that year. They lived at 1910 E. Nineteenth Street and later moved and raised Daddy at 1812 E. Twenty-Fourth Street. Daddy had two half sisters by Charlie Starks named Argina Starks and Dorothy Starks. The half sisters lived with their mother, Esther Starks. Argina and my mother, Virginia, were great friends throughout and after their years at Lincoln High School. Argina graduated high school in 1925; and my mother, Virginia, graduated in 1926. Aunt Genevieve, my mother’s oldest sister, also