From Rat-Tail Ridge to Capital Hill and Back: The Life Journey of Robert Edward Fulton and His Partner, Norma Maxine Heitman Fulton

By Robert Edward Fulton

“From Rat-Tail Ridge To Capitol Hill And Back” is an autobiography written by Robert Edward (Bob) Fulton before his passing in 2018. It’s the story of a man born during the Great Depression into a poor and hard-working family of Middle American farmers, who became a public school teacher at the age of 16, served in the Army, and was the first in his family to graduate from college. He went on to obtain advanced degrees in law and public administration, to serve in the highest levels of government, and to become one of the country’s leading experts on government programs for alleviating poverty. Bob’s
own journey was a reflection of the hope that he tried to bring to others — that when opportunity is made available to people of personal integrity and industry, good things can grow, just as life can spring up from the unforgiving soil of a farm on Rat-Tail Ridge.

Bob’s own journey was deeply shaped by the experiences of those who went before him; “From Rat-Tail Ridge To Capitol Hill And Back” thus also tells the story of his ancestry. As with many Americans, the family story began with migration from another continent in search of a better life — in his family’s case, from Europe in the 1700s. It’s the classic pioneers’ tale, moving from parts east to the land west of the Mississippi in a persevering struggle to cobble together a workable life in a new land.

“From Rat-Tail Ridge To Capitol Hill And Back” at once rings both familiar and remarkable, providing common refrains of the American experience while also reminding that principle, basic decency, and commitment to community are the magic stuff of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781665501477

Robert Edward Fulton

Robert Edward (“Bob”) Fulton was an unusally gifted government and community leader who was broadly revered for his skills, optimism, good humor, and integrity. A special human being and a great American, “From Rat-Tail Ridge To Capitol Hill And Back” is his story.

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Copyright © 2020 C. Scott Fulton. All rights reserved.

Art contributions by Sasha (Koo-Oshima) Fulton (front cover) and Karen Fulton (rear cover).

Editorial team: Scott Fulton (editor-in-chief), Robin Fulton, Kenton Fulton, Karen Fulton, Krista Fulton, and William Straub.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/02/2020

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0148-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0146-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-0147-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020918553

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Prologue

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1   How It All Began

Chapter 2   Life on the Farm and at Heitman School

Chapter 3   My Four Years at Patton High School

Chapter 4   College and My Career as a Teacher

Chapter 5   How Maxine Became My Life’s Partner

Chapter 6   You’re In The Army Now!

Chapter 7   Robin Enters The Picture

Chapter 8   Return To Civilian Life

Chapter 9   Scott Inserts Himself Into The Story

Chapter 10   Off To Washington

Chapter 11   The Bureau of Aeronautics

Chapter 12   Kenton Makes It A Threesome

Chapter 13   The Road To Damascus

Chapter 14   Enlisting In The War On Poverty

Chapter 15   Some Photo Memories

Chapter 16   The Boston Years

Chapter 17   My Years With The Department of Health, Education and Welfare

Chapter 18   The Road Back To Damascus

Chapter 19   Climbing Capitol Hill

Chapter 20   Oklahoma, Here We Come!

Chapter 21   Back To Rat-Tail Ridge

Chapter 22   One Last Lap of Work and Service

Chapter 23   The Years of Retirement and Reflection

Chapter 24   The Last Word

Annex 1

Annex 2

Annex 3

Epilogue

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife Maxine; my Father and Mother, Hadley and Gleta; our three sons, Robin, Scott, and Kenton and their wives, Karen, Sasha, and Jenny; and our seven wonderful grandchildren: Jennifer, Jacob, Keri, Krista, Adrienne, Stephanie, and Nicholas. Because Maxine’s and my children are all boys, each of our grandchildren began life with the surname Fulton. What I have learned about the journeys of prior generations of Fultons is summarized in this compilation. As both Maxine and I descended from the same pioneer Fulton family, it makes us proud to have passed that name on to future generations.

Foreword

Our father was something of a force of nature. If you get the sense in reading this book that he was constantly in motion, then you are finding the man that we knew and loved. We think Dad intended this book primarily for his heirs, but others may find it of interest as well, as his story is fairly remarkable. From a very modest beginning—a remote and humble farm in America’s heartland—he rose to highest levels of government, rubbing elbows with our country’s political elite and powerful and influencing the shape of public policy, especially in relation to the war on poverty.

When we were young, he seemed at times distant from us, as he hustled from one thing to the next, whether career-oriented or volunteer service. In the book, he refers to Robin and his son Jacob as possibly hyperactive, but we surely know where that gene came from. Dad’s sprint left a lot of the parenting to Mom, and she was more than up to the task. But in even the midst of all the busy-ness, he found time to make many fond memories for us, from playing ping-pong and baseball (and chasing the dog to get the ball back), to flying kites, to sledding, to fishing (including unconventional forms, like hogging fish in the creek), to his efforts to disguise work as play, marching us out as make-believe little soldiers to cut the underbrush around the house in order to flush out the enemy.

After we grew up, we found him a wonderful friend, as interested and engaged in the lives around him (especially his family) and as fundamentally positive about life, as anyone you will ever meet. We feel very blessed to have grown up with and lived in the shade of this very special man.

Dad was always of a mind to write a book. For years, he seemed to be preparing to write the definitive work on welfare programs. He had retained and preserved an absurd amount of files, articles, and other documents as fodder for such a master work. That book never materialized, but we got something much better instead, as his thirst to write at some point veered in the direction of an autobiography.

Although he had written most of what he wanted to share, he wasn’t able to stitch it all together before his third and final bout with cancer, which took him from us in the summer of 2018 at almost 87 years of age. He left the book project for us to finish, and, when our sense of loss began to loosen its grip, we found our way to it and have welcomed the echoes of his life and his voice in these pages.

As can be seen from various passages in the book, as well as from the annexes at the end, Dad and Mom had a long-time interest in family genealogy. One of their ambitions was to trace the heritage to the American Revolutionary War, with the hopes of establishing that one of our ancestors had fought on the American side, thereby establishing grounds for admission into the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) for Mom as well as any of her descendants. While Dad could trace the Fulton lineage through Elijah Fulton to before the Revolutionary War, he was unable to establish that any of our relatives fought in the war.

After his death, Mom was contacted by Teri Moss from Fredericktown, Missouri, registrar of the local chapter of the DAR, as well as a relative, who told Mom she believed she could make the connection. In fact, she was successful in doing so, but not through the Fulton side of the family, but rather through the Mungle and Yount families (Mom’s mother’s side of the family). Our ancestor, Jacob Yount from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, served under General Nathaniel Green during the Revolutionary War for the American side. Mom has now qualified for the DAR. Dad would have been pleased.

Dad’s life was a relentless race from which we of course learned much about living, but he also modeled considerable grace in dealing with the travails of life, especially in his senior years. An avid reader all his days, we were worried for him when macular degeneration started destroying his vision. Toward the end of his life, reading was quite effortful, and he often asked Mom to do the reading for him. This no doubt also slowed down his work on this book. But not one ounce of bitterness did he show in dealing with the loss of his vision, or his other ailments. He proved resilient, finding ways to be happy. He just applied himself differently.

And in his final days, he showed us a tour de force on how to leave this earth. There were less than four weeks between his diagnosis of stomach cancer and his death, and he made the most of them. He called everyone he knew, first to tell them what about his diagnosis, and then a short time later, to tell them goodbye. He designed, in its entirety, his funeral service. He called everyone with a role in the service to make sure they were willing to serve and to thank them for their service. He left us with instructions on various things that would need to be tended to when he was gone. He even wrote most of his own obituary, which we have added to the book as a fitting Epilogue.

And he did not let pride stand in the way of letting us help him, tend to him, as his body was failing. Again, no frustration, or even sadness, but rather remarkably good humor—right up to the end. We spent his last night in a hospital room with one of his guitars, singing him some of his favorite songs. For our Dad, this was a perfect concluding note.

The Sons of Bob Fulton,

Robin

Scott

Kenton

THE SYCAMORE TREE

There stands tall and strong at the old family farm

A magnificent sycamore tree

With limbs reaching outward like welcoming arms

Inviting a climb, and offering a seat

Shaped through the years by the sun and the snow

A gentle giant if there ever was one

Offering shade in the soft grass below

A refreshing escape from the midsummer sun

Now just like that sycamore, there was a man

Who always stood tall through the years

Who cast a long shadow across the land

Touching so many both far and near

Rooted in faith and grounded in virtue

Strengthened through testing and forged by the wind

Rising up over the bramble and refuse

A towering presence for family and friends

Providing shelter and blocking the wind

A steady companion through thick and thin

Maybe not perfect, but pretty darn close

A finer man you never will know

Now some folks are born to a spoon made of silver

Some born to live in complete luxury

But I’d take my fortune above any other

For I was raised in the shade of a sycamore tree

A song written in 2011 by son Scott for Bob on

occasion of his 80th birthday

Prologue

Word from my doctors in August 2000 that I had prostate cancer put a temporary end to my procrastination about writing down the highlights of the rather full life I have had. The realization that this should be a priority had hit me some time earlier when I tried to sort through the numerous things I’d like to accomplish during the remainder of the earthly phase of my life and to identify those that others could still do after I left the scene. It struck me then that anyone else trying to write about my life experiences would not be able to uncover the whole story. The conviction that it was time to get on with this project was reinforced that August day when Dr. Andriole, a leading urologist at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, called to tell me the biopsy had revealed cancer cells in my prostate gland.

Despite that motivation, I managed to stretch work on this book out over a period of several decades. Fortunately, the Lord, with the help of the doctors, enabled me to stay around long enough to get it close enough to finished to leave in the hands of my sons.

The title I have chosen is intended to provide the beginning—and perhaps the end—of my journey through life in the hilly terrain near the village of Patton, Missouri. The high ground on which my parents’ farm was located was called Rat-tail Ridge by my Dad and some of the neighbors. The journey took me through Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Illinois; Boston, Massachusetts; back to Washington again; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and then back to Rat-Tail Ridge. The second stay in Washington, D.C., included six years on the staff of the United States Senate Budget Committee; hence the reference to Capitol Hill in the title. There were also lots of short side trips.

One of my life-long side trips was researching the deeper story of my family’s roots. As my wife Maxine (or Mac as many called her) and I share some common heritage through the Fulton line, exploration of family genealogy ended up being one of our great passions and adventures together. The product of our research is touched on in the body of this book but is set out in greater detail in the attached Annexes. From ancestor Alexander Fulton to Maxine and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, some ten generations of our Fultons have been part of the American scene, spanning over 250 years. Despite the passage of years, to Maxine and me, the history of our family in this country seems quite short. Yet, we need look back only a few generations to see that some of our ancestors were living at the time the United States of America was beginning to take shape. Our shared great-great-grandfather Elisha Fulton (1) was born in 1795, only six years after George Washington was sworn in as our first president. Like Daniel Boone, he was a pioneer who was part of the great western movement in the 1800s. He was the bridge who connected our family in Missouri to its roots in North Carolina, Tennessee, and even Ireland and Scotland.

The full story of our line of Fultons will, of course, likely never be written, for much of it has been lost as the different generations have passed on. It is, I think, a proud history and one to which I trust later generations will provide additional interesting chapters.

My own chapter of that history has been interesting and stimulating throughout. My hope is that my descriptions of the journey will help my grandchildren and future descendants know more about the life my beloved Maxine and I have led than they would otherwise have known. If others outside my family find the account of this journey interesting, that will be icing on the cake.

My writing convention in this book is to use I rather than we, and the experiences are of course told from my vantage point, but this is definitely the story of Maxine and my journey together.

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the encouragement and help of Maxine. As will be explained in due course, she shared fully in my adventures, including numerous family moves brought on by my restless spirit and eagerness to explore new career opportunities. Our sons, Robin, Scott, and Kenton and our daughters-in-law Karen, Sasha, and Jenny have also contributed enormously to my life along the way, including helping wrap up this book. The boys undoubtedly are reminded by what I have written about the times when I wasn’t there for their events or was unavailable to help them deal with challenges. Sorry for that, Boys.

Numerous other people have reviewed all or parts of my drafts and offered helpful suggestions. Particularly vital in this regard has been the help of my friend Bob Newlin, a professional journalist, Pat Stark, who was for years the nation’s number one expert on the Fulton heritage, and Sue Stanfill, a cousin with whom I have collaborated now on two books she has completed and who has provided valuable information on three of my family lines. I apologize for not mentioning the names of others whose contributions have helped guide me toward a full and accurate accounting of my stewardship of the life God has given me.

I must also acknowledge the enrichment of my life that has been produced by having known the many fine people whose paths have crossed mine. I feel very fortunate to have led an interesting life; to have never had a boring job; and to have been stimulated, challenged, and blessed by wonderful people from all walks of life. The people I have met have made my life’s journey fulfilling—and often exciting.

Most importantly of all, I thank God our Creator for having put me in the world at the time He did and for opening to me splendid opportunities to have a rich life and to be of service to some of the people about whom Jesus taught us to be especially concerned.

1

How It All Began

My Parents

My father, Hadley James Fulton, and his future wife and my mother, Gleta Miinch, grew up on farms near Patton, Missouri. By road, their homes were three-and-a-half miles apart, but the walk through the fields of neighbors was much shorter. Dad’s family included nine children. They were sustained by a very small farming and orchard operation. Mom’s family had a better farm and only four children to support. Neither family ever had any money to spare.

My Dad’s Side of the Family

Dad’s parents were James (Jim) Redman Fulton and Rosetta (Rose) Fadler Fulton. My dad, Hadley, was their fifth child and first son, born in 1909. He was named for Herbert Hadley, governor of Missouri. This reflected the strongly-held Republican political views of his father. Dad’s middle name was the same as his father’s first name. In the Scotch-Irish tradition, sons very often were given the same names as their fathers, grandfathers, and earlier ancestors. Apparently, in Dad’s case, the desire to show the Republican flag was strong enough to partly overcome the tradition.

My Grandpa Jim was the first Fulton ancestor with whom either my dad or I had personal contact. He died in 1944 when I was 12 years old. I don’t recall ever talking with him about his parents or grandparents, but my dad and some of his sisters told me a few things they had heard from Grandpa Jim about his family.

One fact was well established: Grandpa Jim’s parents had died when he was six or seven years old, and he had gone to live with his older sister Mary and her husband James Wesley Nations. His childhood hadn’t been a very happy one, as he apparently clashed often with Mary’s husband.

Also, Grandpa Jim told his children that his parents had moved to Missouri from elsewhere, but there was not agreement among the children as to whether he had said they were from Tennessee or from North Carolina. As is discussed in Annex 1, it is likely that they were from both places; census records confirm that my great-great-grandfather Elisha Fulton (1) and his family, which included my great grandfather and Grandpa Jim’s father Elisha Fulton (2), left North Carolina in the 1830s and moved to Tennessee. About ten years later, they moved to what is now Bollinger County, Missouri.

The deeper story of the Fultons is that in the 1600s, large numbers of Scottish peasants moved to Northern Ireland (often called Ulster) to work on land that had been taken away from Irish landlords as a result of England’s successful war against France and its ally, Ireland. As the Industrial Revolution got underway, these immigrants and other newcomers from Scotland supplied much of the labor for the factories that were built in Northern Ireland.

Some of the immigrants from Scotland bore the surname Fulton. The most persuasive explanation I have seen of the origins of the Fulton name is that it started with residents of a place known as Fowle Towne in Scotland, so-called either because the land was plentiful in fowl needed for the English King’s table, or because the soil was foul or poor. In tracing the move of our ancestors across the eastern half of the United States, Maxine and I have joked that the Fultons seemed to have a tendency to go to places where the terrain was rough and the land wasn’t the most fertile. Certainly, this was true of Rat-tail Ridge where my parents’ farm was to be. I believe it was also true of Fowl Towne.

One of the most fascinating things Maxine and I learned as we explored the histories of our families was that Elisha Fulton (1) was the great-great-grandfather of us both! We had both been told when quite young that our families were kin to each other. Both of us understood that we were a little kin, but that it wasn’t close enough to keep us from dating and marrying. It was fun for us to discover the nature of that kinship and that Maxine was a Fulton long before taking my name.

This is all discussed more thoroughly in Annex 1, but the short story of our being a little kin goes like this. Elisha Fulton (1) was married, widowed, and then married again. My line descended from the first marriage; Maxine’s from the second.

Maxine and I call ourselves half-third cousins. We reach this conclusion through the following steps: Elisha Fulton (2) and Melinda Fulton Mayfield, children Elisha (1) through his first and second marriages, respectively, were half-brother and sister. James R. Fulton (Grandpa Jim) and Etta Mayfield Heitman (daughter of Melina and Maxine’s paternal grandmother) were half-first-cousins. Hadley J. Fulton (my father) and Truman Heitman (Maxine’s father) were half-second-cousins. This makes Maxine and me half-third cousins. Got it?

Once we figured it out, Maxine and I have both gotten a big charge out of explaining our relationships to various people, including our grandchildren and Fulton genealogists with whom we have worked through the years. It also made pursuit of Fulton family history something of shared interest for us both. The Annexes to this book, which share our findings regarding our deeper family roots, are the product of that labor of love.

My dad’s mother Rose Fadler Fulton was the daughter of Henry August Fadler and Mary Louisa Yamnitz Fadler, both of whom were children of immigrants from Germany. Both Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma Fadler lived to quite old ages. Great-Grandpa died at 99, following by only a few years the death of Great-Grandma at the age of 93.

My personal memories of my Fadler great-grandparents are limited to recollections of family dinners being held at their home, and seeing Great-Grandpa a few times at other family gatherings. I regret not having spent more time with them. Great-Grandpa was born in the 1850s and had memories of the Civil War. Indeed, his grandfather, Joseph Grounds, was killed by bushwhackers during the War. Bushwhackers were Missouri Confederates who hid in the backcountry and carried out small-scale attacks, usually by ambush, on Union patrols through hit-and-run campaigns. As a boy of about twelve, Great-Grandpa accompanied his grandmother several miles to help bury her husband in a small cemetery near the spot where he was killed along Castor River in Madison County, Missouri.

Grandma Rose was the oldest child in a family of seven children. One story Grandma Rose told about her hopes and dreams as a young person was that when she married Grandpa Jim she thought she wouldn’t need to work as hard as she had as a child on the farm because Jim was better educated than most of the other young men in the area and had taught school prior to their marriage. Grandma Rose would laugh as she recounted this, saying that it wasn’t long before she discovered that the work in her life after marriage was even harder than it had been in her earlier life.

Her life as the wife of Grandpa Jim was indeed filled with hard work. They had nine children and operated two small farms, located a half-mile apart. They raised most of their own food on the farms and in their large garden. For many years, they had a small orchard which, along with sales of chickens, turkeys, eggs, hogs, and an occasional cow or calf, provided very modest amounts of cash to pay for the necessities that they could not produce themselves.

Somewhere along the way, Grandpa Jim began to suffer from diabetes. This limited his ability to do farm work and also made him sometimes moody and short-tempered. His daily insulin shots were administered by Grandma Rose. In the 1930s, when he was about 62, Grandpa Jim’s toe became infected, gangrene set in, and his leg had to be amputated. He obtained an artificial leg but couldn’t tolerate it and thereafter walked on crutches most of the time without having his artificial leg attached.

I spent part of one summer when I was about eleven or twelve years old staying with Grandpa Jim and Grandma Rose. I liked to go there, partly because some of my uncles and aunts and their children were often there. Also, my aunts had left there a wind-up Victrola record player and a player piano, both of which I loved to operate. That was the first time I took a real interest in music, although by that time we had a radio at home and I, with the rest of the family, enjoyed listening to the Grand Ole Opry on WSM in Nashville, as well as other music from nearby radio stations.

I cover Grandma Rose’s and Grandpa Jim’s entire family in the Annexes, but I will mention a few of the characters here because of their place in my childhood memories. Their second daughter was Lacy. She married a man named Harvey Hahn, and, while I was growing up, our family visited fairly often with the Hahn Family. Although it was less than three miles from our house to theirs, going to their home was something of an adventure. It required crossing a creek and going through gates and over land belonging to the Beck family, who were close neighbors of the Hahns. A memory I have of the Hahn’s home was that they got their water from a nearby spring, and there was a footbridge over the spring branch to their garden. I thought that quite special. They also had a toy wagon that was built like a big farm wagon. I thought it much more fun than the little red wagon we had at home.

Another child, Lona, was the fourth daughter born to Grandma Rose and Grandpa Jim. She married Noah (Noke) Sharrock at a young age. They lived on the Myers’ place, which was one of the farms Grandpa and Grandma had owned. The Sharrock family and my family had more frequent contacts when I was growing up than we had with any of our other Fulton cousins. I think this happened both because they lived within three miles or so of our home and also because Dad had been a friend of Noke while they were growing up. The adults in the two families simply enjoyed each other’s company. It worked very well for the children since the ages of my brothers and me matched up very closely with those of the Sharrock boys.

I recall picking berries with the Sharrocks, including one episode when Bud Sharrock and I put sheep manure on the top of a bucket of berries picked and left temporarily beside the berry patch by Denzel and Don Fadler, distant cousins and neighbors of the Sharrocks. It wasn’t long after we left the immediate area that we heard an explosion of angry words and profanity when Don found his compromised berries. Most of our time with the Sharrock boys, though, was spent doing constructive things like climbing trees or playing ball.

My Mom’s Side of the Family

My mom, Gleta Miinch, the oldest daughter of John Franklin Miinch and Carrie Stanfill Miinch, was born on July 9, 1909, at the farm where her grandparents originally settled. My mother’s family name apparently is a modification of the Münch name the family had in Germany where her grandfather was born. The guess is that the u umlaut, as they call it, was converted during immigration into a double i, making for a most unusual surname. I suppose it could have also derived from the German name Muench. In Perry County, Missouri, and other nearby areas today, there are numerous families with that surname. Interestingly, the pronunciation of Muench and Miinch sounds nearly identical. In any case, as far as we can tell, only the direct descendants of the first John Miinch (1) have ever used the ii spelling of the last name.

John Miinch (1) left Germany as a relatively young man and settled originally near Chester, Illinois, in 1857. There, he met his bride, Henrietta Sophie Frederica Zimmerman, also a recent immigrant from Germany. My grandfather, the second John Miinch (or John (2)), told a story that he said his father had told him about his decision to leave Germany. According to this account, John (1) had been accused of stealing cream or butter from a spring house. His innocence was later established, but not until after he had been in jail for quite some time. As Grandpa told the story, John (1) was angered by his experience, may have resented his own father’s failure to get him out of jail more quickly, and thought the Bavarian government had been unfair to him. Grandpa said the unusual spelling of the last name may have also resulted from his father’s desire to break away from anything that connected him to his past or identified him as a German.

Regardless of the circumstances of their immigration to the United States, it seems quite clear that John (1) and his wife Fredericka wanted their children to be fully American as quickly as possible. One bit of evidence for this is the fact that John (2) learned to speak almost no German. Even though he was the youngest child and presumably heard primarily English being spoken by his parents and older siblings, it seems obvious that his parents were deliberately trying to shed German language and culture.

My grandmother Carrie Stanfill Miinch was the daughter of William Green Stanfill and his wife Nancy Farmer Stanfill. My grandmother’s paternal grandfather was Thomas Monroe Stanfill or Stanfield, a Civil War veteran. It appears that Thomas used the name Stanfill before he entered the Union Army. Children born before his Army service used that version of the name. Those born afterwards used the name Stanfield. Military records show that his name was actually spelled three different ways while he was in service—Stanfill, Stansfield, and Stanfield.

Nancy Farmer Stanfill was also the child of a Civil War veteran. Her father, Adam Farmer, was in the Third Tennessee Cavalry for about three years. His unit engaged in extensive action before surrendering in northern Alabama in early 1865. He was then a prisoner in a Confederate prison for several weeks before being released as the first step in a prisoner exchange. His story is more fully told in Annex 3 to this book.

By the early 1860s, John (1) and Fredericka Miinch had migrated from Illinois to northern Bollinger County, Missouri. Both John (2) and his three oldest children, including Gleta (my mother), were born on the farm located between Patton and Marquand that John (1) and his wife had acquired when they moved from Illinois. When Mom was nine years old, her family moved to another farm about ten miles farther north in Bollinger County. Her memory is that her father decided to move because he wanted more and better land. They did indeed move to one of the better farms in northern Bollinger County. The farm consisted of 222 acres, most of which were tillable, and it had a good house and a modern barn.

By the time of that move in 1919, the John Miinch (2) family included three little girls. My mother, Gleta; and then Clela, who was born in 1914; and then Freda, who was born in 1918. Two years after the move, the youngest child and only boy, Lowell Cleophus, was born.

There has always been considerable speculation and some chuckling among family members about the choices of names for the Miinch children. I have never encountered another person named Gleta. My mother says Grandma told her she saw that name in a magazine, had never heard it before, and liked it. Similarly, Aunt Clela says Grandma Carrie told her she saw the name Clela in a book. Aunt Freda, with the only conventional name of the three, was apparently named for her Grandma Miinch (Fredericka). None of the girls were given middle names. When Lowell was born, John and Carrie apparently decided he needed a middle name and they picked a beaut—Cleophus! Lowell said he didn’t know where that name came from, but my Cousin, Annabelle White Brown, says Grandma told her she saw that name in the Bible and liked it. In some translations of the Bible the name is spelled Cleophas and Cleopas (See Luke 24:18).

The way the Miinch children were reared appears to have been in sharp contrast with the approach used by other German immigrants who settled in nearby Perry County, Missouri. There, the German language survived for more than a hundred years, preserved in part by a number of German language schools.

Partly because Hadley’s and Gleta’s farm was located so near to John’s and Carrie’s, the Fulton boys (my brothers and I) had almost daily contact with Grandpa John and Grandma Carrie as we grew up. However, much more than physical proximity was involved in our relationship with Grandpa and Grandma Miinch. They took a real interest in all their grandchildren, and their home was a wonderful place to visit. Their farm was quite interesting to us, especially the system installed in the barn for unloading hay from wagons. It was a rope and pulley mechanism, in which a half-wagon-load of hay could be pulled into the barn at one time. The most exciting part for us was when Grandpa would jump out of the hay hole of the barn and hold onto the slings as he parachuted down to the wagon bed about twenty feet below.

Grandma and Grandpa had a real concern for the well-being of their neighbors and their extended family. They provided a home for Grandma’s nephew Milford Pulliam for many years after Grandma’s sister Mae was killed when she fell from a wagon after the team of horses pulling it ran away. Likewise, when Laura Mungle, Maxine’s maternal grandmother, died with a house full of young children, Grandpa and Grandma Miinch provided a home for the youngest child, Glen Mungle, for several months.

Aunt Clela tells about accompanying Grandma when she took food to the Jim Duncan family while nearly all members of that family were sick. This was a round trip of about five miles, and Grandma walked the entire distance carrying the food she had prepared.

I never heard either of my grandparents cast a racial slur. When a group of Black gospel singers visited Pine Hill Church, they all stayed at Grandpa and Grandma’s home. All the threshing crews loved to have dinner at Grandma’s, because the food was always so outstanding.

If any of you readers infer that I think my Miinch grandparents were outstanding people, you are right!

One of the interesting aspects of the later lives of the four children of John and Carrie Miinch is that they all attended the Pine Hill United Methodist Church for a period of at least ten years after Clela and her husband moved to the country following the deaths of my grandparents about a year apart in December 1969 and January 1971. For much of that time, they and their spouses made up a majority of the active members of that