Heritage—Stafford

When you're a little kid, you just kinda go along with whatever your parents tell you to do -- including traveling over the river and through the woods to visit relatives. When you're in your twenties, you have a lot of other things on your mind (girls, jobs, motorcycles, girls, etc.), so you don't spend much time thinking about activities with extended family. In your thirties, you find a therapist to help you deal with the traumas you suffered from doing all the stuff your parents forced you to do when you were a kid...and you begin to understand the myriad ways your family has scarred you and kept you from achieving your full potential. And, finally, somewhere down the road after that, you begin to wonder why you didn't pay better attention to, and more greatly appreciate, the rich heritage spanning the generations leading up to your arrival on this planet.

My late-blooming interest in my heritage has spawned an interest in genealogy, and an accompanying desire to help my father write his autobiography. As part of that project, my brother, my son, and I drove my dad back to his boyhood home town, and spent a day trying to collect as much information as we could about where and how he grew up. (Tanner is still in the "Why are you making me do this boring stuff?" phase, but being the good kid that he is, came along on the trip with minimal protest. The one concession he asked for was the we stop in Hay, KS and eat at Al's Chickenette...which he had heard was the greatest fried chicken restaurant in the world. Not sure if it lived up to that lofty claim, but it was pretty good.)

I doubt that too many songs have been written about the glories and wonders of Stafford, Kansas, nor too many books written about its appeal as a tourist destination. It's a farm town, with very little going on other than providing the basic needs of the folks who work the surrounding land. My dad says it probably had twice its current population when he lived there in the 1920s and 30s, but other than the fact that his paternal grandfather's house was torn down and replaced by a more modern home sometime in the 60s, not a lot has changed. The streets are still made of brick, there's angled parking on main street, and the buildings of my father's youth are still standing.



Some of the buildings are empty and neglected. There certainly wasn't much activity; you could safely cross the street without looking both ways. And the few people we saw were...well, let's just say that the population was NOT dominated by skateboarders and frisbee tossers. There was definitely a bit of a geezer vibe going on.

Here's the building my dad worked in as a teenager. It was a hardware store then:



Tanner pointed out that there wasn't a single foreign car anywhere in the town. All Fords and Chevies. That may be due to the fact that there just aren't many auto dealerships anywhere nearby, but it could also indicate something about the local attitudes and viewpoints. This is America's Heartland, the kind of place that feeds the rest of the country. Most of the residents might be older and resistant to modern trends (like beatniks and hippies and such), but I suspect they remain fiercely proud of their country, and of their contributions to it.

I think my dad enjoyed himself as he ambled through the memories. And though I had been to this town many times as a kid, this was the first time I really tried to pay attention. It was fun to imagine my dad as a gangly teenager, walking to work and then selling hammers and new-fangled radios to the townsfolk. His days in high school were probably filled with the same test-taking and "I wonder if she likes me" anxieties that we all faced; but with no TV cartoons to watch when he got home. No diversity in the classroom, either. But I'm sure they talked about musicians and movie stars with their friends. They played football and baseball just like today's kids; it's just that their caps were worn with the bill to the front. Though the streets were empty now, I could imagine seeing them filled with happy kids running home from school and getting ready to do their evening chores.

The biggest culture shock for me was when we walked into the town's one-and-only diner...and saw people smoking at their table. It's only been a few years since such activities were outlawed where I live, but it's amazing how shocking it is now to be jolted back to the times when puffing cancer sticks with your meal was an accepted and expected way of life. But once that jolt passed by, we had a relaxing and belly-filling interlude. The walls of the diner were covered with interesting jigsaw puzzles to study, and the burgers were quite tasty.

Our other activities in town included driving by my grandmother's childhood home -- it still stands, but is succumbing to entropy. We also asked the local insurance agents if they knew where to find my dad's cousin (they did), and we spent some time at the library doing research. I'll talk about that, and our visit to the ol' homestead in a future post. Until then, thanks for dropping by, have a great day!