Sunflowers and Peanuts

Well, the move to Hutchinson, Kansas was a great success!  The Burney family crossed over the 5 ton bridge into Kansas in a Tom's Toasted Peanut Truck.  Well, we actually bounced over the bridge...here we come in a Peanut Truck and Sunflowers are everywhere!  Roy hated that bridge from the first time we crossed it until the last time he crossed it....that was a long hate affair and it was crossed many many times in the 10 plus years we lived there.  We always had to stop at the Port of Entry for daddy to do his mileage report on the truck.  It was just on the Kansas side of the bridge.  The bridge was an old wooden slat bridge with low rails at the sides.  It was, indeed a rickety old thing.  There will be more on the bridge later.

The rest of the road into Hutch was basically straight and flat with the beautiful Sunflowers shining and blowing in the ever blowing Kansas wind, and as we looked out the windows of the truck it looked like a huge golden quilt that was being held at one end by a giant, snapping it the way Mother snapped the sheets after they had dried on the clothesline to get the wrinkles out.  It was beautiful and it was a sight that gave me a good feeling about Kansas.  Roy liked the flowers, but he was still crying about the bridge.  It REALLY scared him.  And, being my little brother, I was trying to console him and trying to get him to look at the flowers.  He was beginning to settle a bit when all of a sudden the flowers stopped and on both sides of the road was this really weird looking low lying kind of board fence.  You got it, Roy thought we were going back over the bridge.  But, nope, this stupid looking thing on both sides of the highway (most highways in Kansas at that time it seemed) was a SNOW FENCE!  I had never heard of a snow fence, and have, to my knowledge never seen a snow fence since I left Kansas.  Kansas winters are bitter, I think it is even flatter than Oklahoma.  So, they built these snow fences to keep the blowing, and I do mean blowing snow off of the highways.  Makes sense right?  The snow is so thick you can't see your hand in front of your face and it is blowing across the prairie and comes to one of the fences and becomes huge drifts, leaving the highway clean and then on the other side of the road it would start again piling up to the other fence.  Okay, they don't really work that way, but to be perfectly honest, they never made much sense to Roy or to me as we grew up and made many many trips on that highway going to Oklahome for the weekend.....and somehow, those roads did stay clearer...and there were often times drifts four and five feet deep against the fences.  Wonder if that still happens today.

Okay, we are a bit older here, but still in grade school, I know this because this picture is taken in front of our first house and we moved from there when I was in the seventh grade.  The peanut truck is the same....it was our "family car" until I was in High School.  I hope you can tell in this picture that Roy's arm is linked in mine.  I tried to blow up this picture, but almost almost lost the entire photo.  As said, before, I am a blogger novice so in the event as time goes on, I learn to work better with it, I will make it bigger. 

I write this and sometimes I simply have to stop awhile.  As I go through the photos and remember the stories, I cry.  I cry because of the joy of remembering and I cry from the sadness of still missing him.  I cry remembering how much I loved him and protected him when we were little.  I cry remembering how he used to "drive me crazy" following me everywhere I went.  I cry like I did when I read the book "Notebook."  By the way, Roy gave me that book for Christmas when I was in Chickasha taking care of Mother.  He came and spent Christmas with us.  What a joy that was!  It was wonderful!  When he left to head back to Kerrville, it was snowing really bad....hope there were snow fences along the way.

Okay....had my cry so back at it again.  Where was I....oh yeah, we were standing by the peanut truck in the snow.....

Our house was really neat as I remember.  Rooms were huge!  Rooms look bigger with no furniture, or very little, but these rooms were big.  You can tell in the photo (if you can get it large enough) that the homes were all large, mostly two story.  Ours also was a two story, but we only occupied the bottom floor.  I seem to be having a senior moment and I can't remember if I told you that there was an apartment above us and two lesbians lived in it.  Of course, Roy and I had no idea they were lesbians....in fact we had no idea what lesbians were....we only knew they lived there, they were two girls sharing the apartment, one a school teacher and one an R.N. and we liked them.  They were fun to be around and they ate dinner with us a lot.  Donna, the school teacher was my gym teacher in Junior High.....nope, still had no idea she was a lesbian or what a lesbian was.  It was a totally different era...children were still innocent...life was "kept" from us....we were just like "Leave it to Beaver," except Mother did NOT clean house and cook dinner in high heel shoes.  

Temporary detour there, now back to our life.  Our house was huge.  Or the rooms were.  There was a front porch with brick columns that went all the way across the front and the front door was glass.  You can tell a bit about it in the following photo.  It may be WAY too big....I think I may have enlarged it.... we'll see.

As all can see, it is no larger....hhmmmm, must work on that on my own time....Okay, you can see the door, the window, the foot stool.....and Roy and his friend Toby Brown.  This was just after Christmas and I know that because Roy has on his Davy Crockett suit.  (Minus the coonskin cap)...I blew up this picture so, I will now tell you what all the items are.  Roy has the coonskin cap in his left hand and his "gun" in his right hand.  He and Toby are sitting on a "Tom's Peanut Truck."  (Wish I had that today, wonder what happened to it?)  Moving on, in the bottom right hand corner on the floor (real hardwood) there is the "Davy Crockett Fort" that goes in the large box on the left side under the window.  Under the box, sticking out you can see a "sock monkey."  But, what you cannot see, nor could I see even when I blew it up, on Roy's left wrist is an "Original - Authentic - always on time Davy Crockett watch.  That story of this particular Christmas and the "trip" we took will be in the next post.  I am already laughing hysterically remembering!!!!  Hope it is as funny for you....but I will promise you we laughed about it and talked about it for the rest of our lives.  But, now on with the house arrangements....

The house faced south and at the other end of the living room was the television, two spinning chairs that you can still find at Lynn's house to this day in her living room.  I haven't been there in over six years, but they were there the last time I was in the house.  And kids still love to spin in them.  Roy and I spun; Kurt and Scott spun; Cathy and Erin spun; Leah, Jay and Amy spun; Matthew and Ashleigh and Jessie spun; Zack and Kristi spun; Shannon, Sonya and Melanie spun and many many more have spun!  If you have been a spinner in one of these chairs let me know! 

There was also a fireplace (non-working) or we just never lit it, I don't know.  Then finally a green couch was added.  The television had one channel and it came on at 6:00 in the evening and ran until after the news at 10:00.  We were GLUED to it.  It started off with the Star Spangled Banner and ended with jet airplanes zooming through the clouds and someone reciting:

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

— John Gillespie Magee, Jr

During the rest of the 4 1/2 hours or so between these wonderful things we watched, Ike Eisehower running in the Presedential election, Libarace and I don't remember what else.  All of course in black and white....and grainy, even with our "rabbit ears".  Then we got color tv.  It was great!  It was a piece of some kind material, about the same size as the screen and you kind of just put it over the screen.  The energy from the tv would help it to cling close to the screen.  It was colored from light at the top to like red at the bottom and as long as people were standing just right they had almost a flesh colored skin; if they bent down, their face of course was very red.....and NO we did not have remote control.  But, then I guess there was no reason for it when all you had to do was turn it off and on and move the rabbit ears around depending on the weather.

Okay, now moving north from the middle of the living room was a huge archway, also serving as the entrance into our bedroom.  Actually it was a dining room, but this was now a one bedroom apartment, but we never realized that.  We just thought we lived in a big house.  There was a double bed and a very small closet and a wardrobe cabinet with four drawers and a door on it.  This was Roy and my bedroom.   Going on north was mother and daddy's room and it was much smaller, but it had a door on it.  The closet was also larger and the bath was in their room.

Moving from "our" room you went into the big eat in kitchen and out the back door to the utility room and out the door to the huge back yard.  There was a window over the kitchen sink and I remember mother liking that as she did dishes.  She didn't like doing the dishes, but she did like a window over the sink.  She always had a kitchen window over her sink, as I recall.  

So that about does it for today and the tour of the house.  There still stories to tell about while we lived in the house and that will be coming soon.  From about 1952 - 1956.....funny stories.  See ya next blog!