Visiting Grandparents

by Gary White

When I was growing up in Cedar Vale, Kansas my parents and I visited with my grandparents nearly every weekend. Both sets of grandparents were living on farms outside of the neighboring county seat town, Sedan. My father’s parents lived on what was known as Moore Prairie, a flat limestone prairie that is somewhat bleak in appearance. My great grandparents had homesteaded the farm in the late 19th century and my grandfather had built the house and outbuildings over the years. My mother’s parents, the Call family, lived a few miles north and east of the White family, but their area was heavily wooded and had several small creeks that emptied into the Caney River. The neighborhood was called the Rogers neighborhood and had had a one-room schoolhouse of that name in the time before the county schools were consolidated. Both of my parents had received their entire education in those one-room rural schoolhouses.

Our usual pattern was to visit the two sets of grandparents on alternating Sundays. There would always be a big Sunday dinner cooked on the wood stove in my grandmother White’s kitchen or on the gas stove in my grandmother Call’s kitchen. My uncles had drilled for oil on the Call place and struck mostly gas, which they piped into the house. The Calls heated the house, cooked their food, and lighted the place all with natural gas from their own wells. My uncles also siphoned off what they called “casinghead gas,” a liquid that they burned in their pickups. It was the first unleaded fuel, many years before it had been mandated by law.

The alternating Sundays couldn’t be more different for me. When we visited with the Whites I would be the only child, since none of my father’s siblings had children and I was an only child. I was quite the apple of my grandparent’s eyes and always treated with something special. When we arrived, my grandmother would have hot rolls just out of the oven, which I soaked in her fresh-churned butter. I can still remember the taste of those butter ladened rolls and have never been able to duplicate the flavor. On the alternating Sunday, when we visited the Calls, I was one of a half dozen or more cousins, since all of my mother’s siblings had children. While I was not given the royal treatment there, I had the advantage of having several children my own age to play with. We roamed the woods and creeks around the farm, picked wild strawberries in season, and often got into poison ivy. I can’t count the number of times I endured the terrible itching of poison ivy as I was growing up, and I was quite surprised to find that as an adult I seem to be immune to it. I’ve walked through poison ivy repeatedly and never have been infected with the itching rash.

On Sunday afternoons at the Whites we would play games like Pitch or Dominos. When I was old enough I joined in the games and enjoyed the banter of my grandfather, father, and my uncle Vernon as they teased each other as men are prone to do when playing games. I could also go to the parlor where my grandmother had an old reed organ. When I had begun piano lessons I could play hymns and familiar songs on that wheezy old instrument that was in doubtful tune. Sometimes I would go upstairs into the upper bedrooms, which were papered with old newspapers. I enjoyed reading the comics on the walls and developed a taste for the newspaper columns of Will Rogers, a humorist and sometimes movie actor of earlier times. He had come from Oklahoma and often appeared with a lariat rope that he did tricks with while delivering a running satire on the events of the day. The newspaper columns were pretty much like the live performances but, of course, referred to events that took place long before I was born. I remember several of Will Rogers’ sayings. A typical example would be, “I belong to no organized political party--I’m a Democrat.”

When we visited with the Calls, I would play with my cousins for most of the afternoon, but always tried to spend some time sitting at my grandfather Call’s feet. Mark Call was a deep thinker, an agnostic, and a socialist. He was also a pacifist, being totally against the war that was raging in Europe and Asia at the time. I can remember him saying that if Roosevelt had had to build all that war material to get us out of the depression, well, he should have just taken it out to sea and sunk it there. Grandfather Call was a life-long Republican, but not cut from the same cloth as the current crop of that political party. He was adamantly opposed to organized religion and detested capitalism in any form.

All in all, I received a balanced view of the two political parties--Democrat on the Sundays at the Whites and Republican on the alternating Sundays at the Calls. Most of all, I took in my grandfather Call’s socialist, agnostic, pacifist views and have made them my own. I thought that grandfather Call was the smartest person alive and absorbed everything that he said. While I have considerably broadened my view of the world with the passing of time, I remember so clearly those Sunday afternoons sitting at grandfather Call’s feet and listening to everything he said. I still think he was a pretty wise old man and I would love to hear one of his monologues again, delivered by the light of a gas lamp next to the old gas stove in their ramshackle farm house in rural Chautauqua County, Kansas.

PS: I hope I'm not violating my own rules about political commentary with this piece, but I couldn't relate that part of my history without politics entering in.