By Jeff Guy
My dad drives a Nissan Murano SUV around his small town. For a while, he would join the kaffeeklatsch of old guys having breakfast at Braum’s Ice Cream, but he stopped that for some reason. Since I was a kid, I can remember him loving the comics section of the newspaper. Now he complains that the town paper is too thin and has no local news anymore.
He and his wife attended Harveyhill Christian Church for years, but started attending the First Baptist Church shortly after they moved to town. Dad was unhappy with the Harveyhill preacher anyway, saying he didn’t make altar calls at the end of Sunday service and didn’t stand at the door, shaking hands when church let out.
Dad only drives during daylight hours and only in town. As a young man of around 20 years of age, he and a friend would visit a little pizza place off East Kellogg in Wichita, just past the grassy Kansas fields. Run by the Carney Brothers, the little joint had two wooden tables and an open stove.
Nowadays, the original Pizza Hut building is at Wichita State University, which has grown too damn much. The golf course is gone. A Starbucks, for crying out loud. I just hope my favorite dive bar across the street can get named to the state or national Register of Historic Places and get rolled into the safety zone.
Just two years ago, Dad and my step-mom were picking me up in east Wichita after I had a colonoscopy, and from the Walnut Valley “bluegrass” Festival in Winfield after I injured my eye and had to be hauled by ambulance to the hospital. There’s been a lot of driving in the old man’s life. A farm kid, I think he learned to drive a truck when he was 12-years-old. But at 84, he’s cognizant that his reflexes aren’t what they once were.
He lives in a lavender house at the northeast outskirts of town on Country Club Road in Beulah, Kan. (pop. 13,000) in Grossmont County, Kansas, USA. His wife died last February, on Valentine’s Day, of COVID. He survived, but lost 30 pounds and had to have physical and occupational therapy when he returned home to a house that’s too big for one person. A cleaning lady comes in once a week and has for years.
His kids take turns mowing his lawn every week. He has a nice Craftsman riding mower, a birdhouse hanging from a tree in the backyard and he likes his lawn to look neat and clean. You clear the fall leaves off the back patio with a leaf blower and get the mowed grass off his sidewalk and driveway.
What are your roots?
The whole thing started on a rainy night in a farmhouse outside Lathrop, Kan., (pop. 300) June 8, 1937. I think there was some discount special in which my grandpa paid a country doctor $25 and a pig to deliver his second child.
If the baby was a girl, they were going to name her Geraldine, which is kind of a sucky name if you ask me. If they had a boy, his name would be Gerald. The sex of the baby? Hell, they didn’t know beforehand. Any thought of a sonogram was as futurama as a space shuttle. No hospital. No nurses performing an APGAR test. No circumcision.
Richard and Fern Guy had married at the First Christian Church in Marshallville, Kan. (pop. 700) in 1934. The wax bride and groom figures from the top of their wedding cake would sit on the shelf of a glass chest for the ages. Their first son, Donald, was born in September of 1934.
“They were as different as daylight and dark,” my grandpa would say. “Don liked to stay inside and cook in the kitchen. Gerald liked to work outside on tractors.”
Recreation for the family would be a movie show or a picnic with (yuk) bologna sandwiches at the park. Once a year, Grandpa and some other fellas did something involving cattle and would make an annual trip to Wichita.
“That was good ‘cuz we got to eat in a restaurant,” Dad said.
In high school, Dad took the bus from Lathrop to Marshallville. “I wanted to go to a bigger school,” he said. There were around 27 students in his 1955 graduating class in Marshallville, compared to only four graduating seniors in Lathrop, which would close its schools a few years later.
Earlier, that fall, Dad’s high school football team, The Lions, went undefeated. Fifty years later, surviving players of the team were recognized on the field during a half-time dedication at the Lions’ homecoming game.
While on the football team, Dad played guard and tackle, positions we now associate with big guys of brute strength. Dad was tall and skinny, but people were thinner and not as big back then.
His natural shyness and quiet demeanor were well known character traits to people who knew him. There was even some corny rhyme in his senior yearbook about how he was “bashful, afraid of all those scheming girls.” I don’t think he ever had a date in high school.
He became a much more seasoned communicator, while checking oil, fluids, tire pressure and pumping gas at a full service filling station in the big town of Beulah. Dad attended Beulah City College (now Grossmont Community College), majoring, first in engineering, then changing it to chemistry.
His real interest, though, was cars.
Marcia, my step-mom whom Dad would marry many years later, said, “I knew of him ‘cuz he beat all my boyfriends in drag racing. I used to see him from a distance at the race track and wave, but I didn’t really know him.”
He would place a 10 dollar bill on his dashboard of his 1958 Pontiac Chieftain and if a person could grab the sawbuck before he stepped on the gas and sped away, that person could keep it. But no one ever made it.
In 1960, he entered the U.S. Army. It was the Post War, Cold War era when virtually all young men were conscripted into the service. “I didn’t go willingly,” he said. “They came for me.”
After basic training in Texas or Arkansas or some hot place like that, Dad was stationed on a base in Karlsruhe in the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg east of the Rhine River near the German/French border.
Although I’ve heard my ancestors came from Ireland, Guy is a French name so who knows how we ended up where we did? Anyhow, somewhere there’s a picture of Dad standing next to a French soldier and they both had “Guy” on their name tags.
While in the military, Dad had an opportunity to take a new job with a pay raise as an “advisor” in a Southeast Asian country called Vietnam. Fortunately, he didn’t take the bait.
Somewhere in those two years, he took a few trips back home where he was best man at a friend’s wedding and went to a Ricky Nelson concert in Wichita.
He returned home from active duty in 1962 and remained in the Army Reserve for three more years.
I once asked Dad, “I’ve seen you drink Coors. How could you stand that pisswater after imbibing that superior German beer.”
“It took two years to get my old taste back,” he said.
By this time, he was a man of the world, having served in the Armed Service and making a name for himself in local car racing circles. He was no longer that bashful kid. He married my mother, Vickie. He had a job as a chemist at the refinery, Skelly. He and Mom were both active in their local Jaycee’s chapter.
But everything wasn’t all right.
I remember being 3-years-old and feeling tension in the house. I don’t understand what all happened and likely never will. That’s all right. (I used to retreat into my own make believe world where I could create characters and situations.) It got so bad that my mom left my dad.
This brings me to the point where I most identify with Dad. I’ve always taken more after Mom, (who has since passed away) having inherited, both, her good and bad traits. Like she was, I tend to be more the emotive, expressive type when I wish I had Dad’s stoic reserve.
But six years ago, my wife left me, taking the kids with her. I was devastated. I felt destroyed. I felt guilty for what I believed was all my fault, my utter failure as a husband. I wonder if Dad had felt any of that. I never asked and probably never will, but I know he had to feel distraught. How could he not?
I think about it sometimes. At least when my wife divorced me, my kids were 14 and 11 so for several years they’d had some semblance of a stable home. When Mom left Dad, her kids were pre-school and toddler-aged. Dad had it worse.
To my relief, my ex-wife and I had an amicable divorce and we remain cordial to each other today. She never tried to gouge me on child support. Things could get nasty between Mom and Dad. Mom screwed Dad in court, and she later screwed my step-dad. God bless her, I loved my mother dearly, but the truth is the truth.
Love of a lifetime
My dad was a handsome guy, self-confident and a good talker so he didn’t have any problems finding dates or getting girlfriends. But there was one who stood out from anyone else he’d ever met. Marcia, an RN at the local hospital, was newly divorced when she became reacquainted with my dad, whom she’d only known vaguely all those years ago.
“He had a good sense of humor,” she said.
Dad and Marcia (their names just went together) married in 1982 when I was in seventh grade. It wasn’t easy for them, blending two families. They faced a lot of challenges and hardships over the years, but I guess they were determined to make it work. They were a team.
Dad’s advice for getting married: “Wait till you’re 50.”
He was around 60 when he returned to school to finish his bachelor’s degree in the ‘90s. I’d already received mine. He obtained a degree from Newman University in business or something like that. I figured he went back because he could make more money on his job or retirement with a four-year degree. I know how his mind works.
In 1999, he took an early retirement from the refinery at age 62. I think he made the right decision. He worked there for over 40 years, but in the last 10, he didn’t like it anymore. Like everyplace else, the company culture had become more corporate, rigid and cut-throat. They didn’t appreciate the four decades of work he’d put in. I’m glad he never had a stroke or heart attack.
While worrying about things like a mortgage, car payments and grown kids who weren’t always making good decisions, there was the anxiety of the refinery possibly terminating him. Sue them for age discrimination? Yeah, try it. Fortunately, Dad escaped with his dignity intact.
He then took a job, doing maintenance at the hospital where Marcia worked, and stayed there until she retired.
Retirement suited them. Dad and Marcia were a lot more mellowed out with job stress no longer hanging over their heads. They were always on the go. For years, they’d gone to sporting events of kids, then grandkids and ultimately great-grandkids. They traveled to all the surrounding towns and places like Topeka and Kansas City to watch kids compete.
But Marcia’s health wasn’t the greatest. Over the years, she’d fought hard and survived cancer, a heart attack and various illnesses. A cigarette smoker for many years, she had CHF (Congestive Heart Failure) and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) in her final years. She had to use an oxygen tank. I always worried that she would go first. And then what would Dad do?
That day arrived when Marcia passed away last February, the result of COVID. Dad had it too and for a while, I feared they both were goners.
But Dad’s a widower now, he doesn’t have the strength he used to and I’ve been taking a more active role in his life. I help with grocery shopping and mowing his lawn is divided up on weekends between his kids. I get the feeling he thinks he’s a burden, but I don’t mind helping one bit. The man has done a million things for me. If I can return a fraction of that, it’s pretty rewarding.
Valleys, old and new
My uncle Don and his son, my cousin, Danny, came in from Georgia to attend Marcia’s funeral. I followed them to Fulton Valley Farms where the service would be held.
“Have you noticed Dad drives slower than he used to?” I asked Uncle Don when we arrived at the site.
“I’m not saying a word,” he said.
Marcia had a great send-off. It was a fitting tribute to her life. Dad has been making the most of being a widower. I imagine he gets pretty damn lonely sometimes. Fortunately, his brother calls from Georgia every day at around 5 p.m. Uncle Don is a widower too.
When Dad waffles on whether to accept a family member’s invitation to dinner, I say, “Go, Get a good meal. Get out of the house.”
He spends a lot of time in his recliner, watching John Wayne movies and reruns of classic TV westerns like Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and The Big Valley just like his dad did in his final years. Except Dad gets them from the INSP network.
Every time I leave his house he asks me if I have enough gas in my car and if I need any money to get something to eat. “I’m fine, Dad,” I tell him. Reminds me of how Grandpa Guy always gave me Milky Way candy bars when I left his house. Actually, I do let Dad buy me a candy bar when we go shopping.
Last Saturday, I took Dad to a Father’s Day lunch at the Prairie House restaurant in Marshallville. The place has been run by numerous owners over the years. Opened, closed and opened again.
“I haven’t eaten here in about 30 years,” I told the waitress, who looked to be a high school girl.
“I haven’t been here that long,” she said.
Back in the early ‘90s, I wrote about Marshallville for my semester project in Les Anderson’s Advanced Reporting class at WSU. Each student had to pick a small town to cover. In profiling Marshallville, I interviewed people like my grandparents, Grace Jones, who ran Grace’s Diner, and Barbara Sears. (She and her husband, D.B. Sears, ran the town newspaper, The Marshallville Mirror until the paper closed its doors in 1978.) Pillars of the community, long since departed.
We ran into my friend, Connie, at the Prairie House. Last time I ran into her was two years ago at the McDonald’s in my hometown of Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000 in the ‘70s). She was with her granddaughter, Kirby.
“I’ve been volunteering at the senior center,” she said. “Rogene Butts is still going strong -- 102-years-old.”
Ah! One old-timer I interviewed, still around. A retired nurse, Ms. Butts helped the local physician, Dr. Last, make home birth deliveries in the ‘30s and ‘40s. In the ‘50s, she started working at the Beulah hospital. She served on local election boards, helped with blood drives and taught Sunday school at the Christian Church. She still belongs to two Bridge Clubs at the Marshallville Senior Center. A woman who can give first-hand accounts of the Dust Bowl Days, she is the last surviving member of the Marshallville High School class of 1937 -- the year Dad was born.
A life-size figure of John Wayne stood next to the flat screen TV against the south wall, playing a John Wayne movie.
“Ricky Nelson is in it,” I said, looking at the pompadoured kid on the screen.
A few minutes later.
“Hey, there’s Dean Martin,” I said, gesturing to the comical guy with the badge on his chest.
“He played the drunken sheriff,” Dad said.
“Oh, this is Rio Bravo,” I said. “I haven’t seen that movie in about 30 years.”
“I saw it two weeks ago.”
“You ever seen The Sons of Katie Elder?” I said. “John Wayne and Dean Martin played brothers in that movie.”
“Yep.”
For the first time in my life, I paid for the old man’s lunch. It was more expensive than it would’ve been because Dad wanted blueberry pie. He hasn’t reached the elderly stage where people shut down on eating. That’s good. There’s still time. I usually don’t order dessert after eating a chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes (the half-order alone will kick your ass) but I figured -- what the hell? And I gave that girl a tip exceeding 20 percent.
I wonder what that young woman will be doing in 30 years. If I’m still around then, I’ll be an old man. Telling stories about my dad. And so much that came before.
Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress -- The Hollies
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