Category Archives: Family

Never Lost on Midwestern Memory Lane

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Topeka Capital-Journal
Nov. 26, 2000

On the weekend before Thanksgiving our son, Steve, who lives in Maryland, with his son, Jake, 11, were here, and Steve insisted we visit the birthplaces of my parents. Being the kind of father I am, I agreed, but the problem was that my dad was born in Miltonvale and my mom and Howe, Neb., and Steve wanted to hit both in one day.

We headed toward Miltonvale and I compounded the problem by stopping in Manhattan to show them the K-State stadium and the new Colbert Hills Golf Course. Then, I figured that since we were so close, we should stop in Wakefield to say hello to former Gov. Bill Avery.

That was fine, except that as we started to turn off US-77 Highway on K-82 we learned it was closed, and we’d have to detour around the bottom end of Milford Lake and approach Wakefield from the south.

Everything seemed to be working, but we ran out of highway signs and were forced to make the reluctant decision that we were lost. Thus began a day of learning anew of the hospitality and innate goodness of rural Kansans. Continue reading →

‘Singing Outlaw’ Evens the Score

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Topeka Capital-Journal
Nov. 10, 1997

The state of Kansas is wondering what to do next year with a cash surplus that….

FLASH – I interrupt this column to announce the birth of our 9th grandchild, a boy, born to Rory and son Kurt in Los Angeles. It was 8:05 a.m. Friday when the phone rang as I was typing the first sentence of this column. It was Kurt, saying the baby arrived two weeks early, and everyone is healthy and happy.

Outstanding reporter that I am, I still forgot to ask how much the baby weighed, or if the name has been chosen. I was in too big a hurry to call the newborn’s Grandma, who is at a family gathering in Holcomb. I’m sure the birth details will be on the national and international Associated Press wire, and on the evening new network news.

Now back to the column. Continue reading →

Soaring Memories of Britton, Okla.

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Topeka Capital-Journal
October 28, 1994

Please bear with me this morning while I shed a tear over the passing of one of the great landmarks of my youth. They’re going to tear down the hangar at the abandoned airport two miles west of my old hometown of Britton, Okla. With it will go a lot of memories.

It was the workplace of many of my early heroes. It was the original headquarters for the airline founded by Paul and Tom Braniff of Oklahoma City, and Braniff pilots who lived in Britain would come into my dad’s drug store. They would be in uniform, and they would speak to me, and I’d be walking on air.

My uncle, Bill Garthoeffner, learned to fly there in 1930. I saw him take his first lesson in a Waco biplane, and after he got his license and bought a tiny Viele Monocoupe, I was one of his first passengers. I held the control stick while he said, “keep the wings level in the nose on the horizon.”

My brother Al work there before he went away to become a Navy pilot. He flew in World War II, flew for United and Pan-American after the war, and then went back to the Navy and made it a career.

Wiley Post used the hanger to prepare his Lockheed Vega, named Winnie Mae, for his historic solo round-the-world flight in 1933. He was visited at the field by Will Rogers, and they would die together in 1935 when the plane Post was piloting crashed on take-off near Point Barrow, Alaska. Continue reading →

Courtney Joins the Tree

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Topeka Capital-Journal
Feb. 10, 1988

A week ago last Monday, our daughter Amy left her home in Arlington, Texas, early. It was her first day off from work on what promise to be a lengthy vacation, if you can call it that, since she was expecting to deliver a baby the following Thursday.

She made her first stop at the mortgage company, where she made a house payment, but then she started feeling some contractions, or whatever it is that expectant mothers feel. So, she drove to her doctor’s office, and was there when he arrived at 9.

He checked her immediately, and told her to get to the hospital. She was there by 9:30, checked in, and called us in Topeka and said things were happening fast. She delivered at 10:40, and her husband, Duff Nelson, got there just in time to welcome a new daughter, their second.

We saw her briefly Tuesday night, and then on Wednesday morning we went to the hospital and picked them up. Barely 48 hours after the big event, she and the baby were home. That’s the way they do these things in this day and age.

This is the modern version of the old tale of Indian women who had to drop off the trail just long enough to have their papoose, then catch up or be left behind. Continue reading →

Buel and Mr. Barnes

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Topeka Capital-Journal
December 24, 1986

When I think of Christmases past, which I am inclined to do when I have to write a column for Christmas Eve, it isn’t long before I get around to thinking about an aunt we called Buel and her longtime employer and friend, Mr. Barnes.

The name “Buel” was a badly mangled version of Elizabeth, uttered by one of my brothers or cousins in an early attempt at speech, and it stuck. For the rest of her life, she wasn’t Aunt Elizabeth or Aunt Buel. She was just Buel.

She was my mother’s sister, one of the three Shively girls whose mother died when they were very young. They’re all gone now, and so is their only brother, who was in his 80s when he drowned in the Platte River in his hometown of Saratoga, Wyo. while fishing.

Buel never married. She worked for Mr. Barnes for maybe 30 years. They had a close relationship, so he became close to our family, too. Buel would bring him to our house often, and at Christmas he would share in the exchange of presents and in the big meal. Continue reading →

Leona Frances Shively Snider

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Topeka Capital-Journal
December 6, 1985

We buried my mother, Leona Frances Shively Snider, last week in Oklahoma City. Her grave is on a wind-swept hill near the chapel in Resurrection Cemetery, beside my dad, her husband of more than 50 years, Daniel William Snider.

He was buried there in 1968. He died at 88, she at 96.

Their children were there, and a lot of their grandchildren, and even a couple of their great-grandchildren. They all came, from coast to coast, to say goodbye.

The priest who said the funeral mass is the chaplain at St. Anne’s, where my mother lived her last 13 years. He said she showed great courage, faith and patience in the last few months of her life.

I disagreed. Courage and faith, yes, patience, no. She was impatient with death. She prayed she could die and join my dad. I have the feeling that at least three times a day she looked God squarely in the proverbial eye and said, “what are you waiting for?” Continue reading →

Family Money: Carving the Oklahoma Pie

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Topeka Capital-Journal
April 28, 1997

You’ve heard this before: put some relatives and family members around a table, and in the center put some money or valuables to be divided among them, and you’ll see some greed, resentment and even some skullduggery. I am speaking as a victim when I say I’ve been there.

I was done in by my own blood brother, who lives in Dallas. Like most highbinders, he says now it was all a mistake, and he even places the blame on an Oklahoma lawyer, one of the worst kind, who is now deceased, making him one of the best kind.

I’d like to believe him, but his mistake – if you want to call it that – was so enormous, and the stakes were so high, that it is difficult for me to do. I’ll tell you the sordid story, and you be the judge.

As you read this, consider the possibility of a conspiracy among all the relatives involved in this, and try to think of a reliable lawyer who might represent me. I realize “reliable lawyer” is oxymoronic, and I may have to settle for considerably less. Continue reading →

Ordinary Genius Vince Cushing

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Topeka Capital Journal
January 1992

When it came time for him to graduate from the University of Notre Dame, John Cushing had a problem. Cushing, who was the father of a friend of ours, didn’t have the money to pay his tuition, and the school had this sticky rule that if your tuition wasn’t paid you didn’t graduate.

He appealed to the priests who ran the place, and they said a rule was a rule. But when he made such a solemn promise he eventually would pay what he owed they relented and sent him out into the world.

Some 30 years later he paid what he figured he owed. He gave Notre Dame a new engineering building that still bears his name. He gave more than that, too. Continue reading →

Shaking Things Up for Grandson Cole

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Topeka Capital-Journal
April 29, 1998

Ten of us were having dinner at a long table in a Mexican restaurant appropriately named “Los Gringos Locos” when I suddenly felt the floor roll to one side and then the other. I looked up and caught the eye of son Kurt, who lives here, and he gave me a funny grin and said, “That was an earthquake.”

No kidding? I figured we might have been hit by a runaway train, or that the place had slid into the ocean and we were rocking and rolling. I looked at diners around us and was relieved to see they didn’t seem to be concerned about anything beyond their rice and refried beans.

I was about to decide it was all a joke when the television set over the bar offered a ‘special report’ saying there has indeed been a quake, registering 3.8 on the Richter scale, with its epicenter at nearby Alhambra. Continue reading →

Amy’s Friends, No Explanation Needed

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Topeka Daily Capital
Oct. 23, 1960

A friend of mine named Amy, who is three years old, has as one of her best friends a man who is an inmate in the state penitentiary in Lansing. It is a friendship built on the simplest sort of foundation. It is a friendship between a man who probably needs friends and a little girl who is overwhelmed by unexpected favors.

It’s a rather long story, and it doesn’t get any shorter the way I tell it. . . . Continue reading →