|
|
|
Verne Laing RANDOM
THOUGHTS ABOUT GROWING UP There
was something nice, even pleasant, about being born and raised in a small town
in northwestern Nebraska early in the 20th Century.
Alliance, Box Butte County, Nebraska, probably had a population of 2,500,
had two grade schools and a high school, and was a railroad division point on
the Burlington Railroad halfway between Lincoln, Nebraska, and Billings,
Montana. The
town was on a prairie a few miles west of the Nebraska sand hills and probably
there was not a tree of any nature or kind for forty miles in any direction,
except right in town or in a farm yard that used water from the windmill to
develop a yard with a few trees. Everybody
knew everybody else, or at least knew who they were.
People expected you to be a good boy if you came from a respectable
family, so naturally you tried to keep yourself in line.
The town was maintained primarily by the paychecks of the railroad
employees, but there was also some income from dairy farming, a few wheat fields
and potato farms that grew excellent potatoes.
A little farther from town there were also ranches raising cattle and
horses. Many people in town kept a
team of horses and lots of houses had a barn in back on the alley. When
I was quite young we moved from the small cottage in which I was born to a house
closer to the business district. There
was one telephone in our block of houses, and it was a crank phone.
You rotated the crank until you caught the operator's attention, and then
you could talk to her and place a call. It
was a big event when we first acquired our crank telephone.
By that time my father had ceased working in a barbershop and had
acquired a small clothing store for men only.
The telephone number at the store was No. 4, and at our house the
telephone number was 444. Those
numbers remained our telephone numbers until after I had gone away to college.
There were so few phones that everybody knew everyone else's' telephone
number. However, you did not need
to worry about a directory as small as it was, because the telephone operator
knew everybody and knew all of their numbers and even knew where to reach them
usually if they didn't answer their telephone.
At the tender age of 5 I started to Kindergarten and sometime during
either that first year or perhaps the second year our grade school burned to the
ground. It was a spectacular night
fire and everybody was out to watch it. Among my very closest friends were the Robbins boys. Their father was an engineer on the Burlington and they lived a block or two away from our house. During the summer they were "proving up" a Homestead about 25 miles out in the sand hills. This meant that they had to live on this 160 acre tract of land for three months out of the year and do some improving of the property. What they did was to dig a well and put in a windmill and build a one room sod house. It was great to spend summers there. They had a horse and buggy which we were free to use and probably the four of us boys were a lot more bother than we ever realized, but it was fun, and we actually lived in that Soddy. Occasionally, though we slept in the hay in an improvised sod barn that had been built to shelter the horse and to serve as a small shop. On
my ninth birthday we moved to a house that had been built right on the edge of
town which permitted us to have a burro. His
name was Bromo Quinine and he loved my sister, Jean, while barely putting up
with me. I had to look after him
which meant that I would stake him out at night, and he learned to pull the
stake out of the ground with his teeth and run away.
I have chased that burro a great many miles.
He treated it as a game, but it was somewhat of a chore to me.
He had uncanny eyesight and was able to see me and start running farther
away before I could locate him. But
he was so playful about it that I could never really get very upset about it.
However, my sister could walk right up to him anytime.
When he saw her coming he would just wait in a docile fashion for her to
arrive and ride him back home. Since
he was my animal he was my responsibility.
Many times I would have been glad for her to have been his owner. When
we first moved, on my ninth birthday, to the home on Platte Avenue which was one
block west of the official city limits, it was not too far away to lose touch
with my friends. However, I made
new friends who also lived close to Emerson School and on the far west or
northwest part of Alliance. We were
only a block and a half from the school, and my new group of friends were people
who were interested in Bromo Quinine, the burro, and in games which we played on
the school grounds or on the prairies. It
was a half mile straight west from our back fence to a railroad track and all of
that flat prairie land which ran a mile north and south was our domain. One of my chores was to go to the Davidson's every evening about three blocks away across prairie land to get our milk. The Davidson's had two or three cows and we got a gallon can of milk every day on which the cream rose overnight, so that we had not only milk but also cream if we wanted it. Speaking
of Emerson School it was in the second grade, or perhaps the third grade, where
we were taught some preliminary geography and shown how to read maps.
My desk faced north and, of course, the top of the maps always faced
north. From that date to this the
only way I have ever been able to read a map was to place the map so that north
was north on the map and north on the ground; otherwise, the map never has made
any sense to me. Either I was taught to read the map too well, or not well
enough. Back
to my boyhood friends. My family
had acquired a vacant lot immediately north of our home.
This lot became part of our play area.
We built club houses out of wooden crates in which pianos or other large
items had been shipped into Alliance. We
were able to obtain these large boxes for hauling them away from the retail
store, to our north lot. Under
these club houses we dug caves of several rooms and had our meetings and also
our secret societies or clubs. One
Saturday afternoon the local movie as a part of the promotion of its matinees
gave away a Shetland pony. I had
stayed the night before at a friend's home a mile or two outside of the city. So I took the two of us to the matinee and gave him his
choice of tickets. What do you
know, the ticket that I kept was the one that was drawn, and so all at once I
had a Shetland pony. Her name was
Peanuts but we changed it to Judy, for some reason that I now do not recall. Whenever
there were rodeos or carnivals, horses and riders were very prominent. There were parades and floats.
I can remember that in one I had Bromo Quinine attached to a small
decorated cart or coaster wagon. He
had one penchant and that was that if any other animal tried to pass him he
always tried to race. This happened
right in the middle of a parade when one of the parade officials rode by on his
horse. This gave quite a fillip to
that parade, and it still amazes me that no one was hurt with all the people out
watching that parade and Bromo trying so hard to catch that official on his
horse. One
of the reasons that my sister Jean could not spend more time hunting for and
returning our errant Bromo Quinine was because she was studying piano. Our mother played the piano in the Baptist Church for
services and for choir practice so, of course, she felt that Jean and I should
be able to play the piano too. Neither
of us progressed very far. Later I
wound up playing the cornet and was somewhat of a prodigy on it by the age of 8.
Unfortunately, however, I never got any better. Anyway, by the time I was in high school I was able to teach
some of the other boys how to play the trumpet which had replaced the cornet,
and also I had my own little orchestra that played in church and also played for
dances occasionally. Sometimes I
wonder how our parents were able to put up with the decibels involved, and the
interminable practice. I
had other chores: In addition to Bromo Quinine, and later in addition to Bill
and Judy, , I was raising chickens. This
was supposed to be a family venture, but guess who had to feed the chickens,
clean the chicken yard, and clean and occasionally white wash the chicken house,
and shovel and re-shovel paths in the snow in wintertime.
One of the main foods for our chickens and our various dogs and cats were
table scraps. (Whatever became of table scraps?) Also,
my Dadd (he always spelled it Dadd) was an excellent gardener which I was not.
To my chagrin he insisted that I be a gardener, too.
To me this was an unending and un-enjoyable task, except for two annual
occasions: When the strawberries ripened and we could pick fresh strawberries to
put on our breakfast cereal, and when the asparagus ripened, and, we could cut
off fresh spears of asparagus to put on toast for breakfast or for lunch.
To this day, although I eat them I do not care for most of the vegetables
which I grew, and I have a positive dislike for radishes. One
of the unfortunate features about our move to the edge of Alliance was that we
were just outside of the city limits and had no connection to the city sewer
lines and had to use a septic tank. You
may not believe this, but the garden grew best close to our septic tank.
Also since we were one block outside of the city our water was piped that
one block. So I guess that we were
early suburbanites. When we were talking about the chicken house and tool shed I
neglected to mention that the man who had built this house, a man named Vance,
was unaccustomed to and skeptical of inside plumbing, so he had built both an
inside bathroom and an outdoor outhouse into that shed which later became my
workshop. A few of our friends had
no bathroom. We
had a board fence around our back yard that was six feet high.
Many are the times that I have walked right across the top of this fence
on my homemade skis, which were made from barrel staves.
The snow would either be that high on the level or it would drift over
and across the fence. Speaking
of snow and cold, one time when I was home for 18 days at Christmastime from
college the warmest that it got in that entire period was 101 below zero, and it
went down to 351 below zero. The
snow was deep and there was almost no traffic of any kind, except that the train
had a great big snow shovel arrangement and blower that made it possible for
trains to get through on the track. One
winter started with a heavy snow storm early in October, and until the following
May we were never without deep snow requiring paths to get around in town, and
cars could not travel-except in town where the streets had been more or less
shoveled for one or two lanes of traffic (such as it was).
There were practically no open roads to the country or to the farms.
Farmers had sleighs however so that things did not come to an absolute
standstill, but to say the very least traffic was limited.
Maybe you think I didn't have to shovel a lot of snow.
Boy. I even earned some
money shoveling paths for other folks. Another
of my chores was to keep the kitchen stove constantly equipped with kindling and
coal from the basement. And I
looked after the furnace, too. ours was a two-story house, and the furnace was
unequal to the talk of warming more than one or two rooms on the first floor.
Anytime you wish to know about the difficulties of starting fires in the
early cold mornings, when in the living room the goldfish were frozen in their
bowls in solid ice, and about how to bank a fire so as to try to keep it from
going out during the night, and about clinkers that will not burn but will foul
up the burner chamber in a furnace so that nothing else can burn in there
either, I will be glad to go into detail. Clinkers
are the part of the coal that will not burn but become hard as nails and will
sort of weld into a mass that is very difficult to remove from the furnace.
Keeping even the part of the house warm that we did required lots of
effort on my part. And I must say
that our family lived primarily in the kitchen where we had the cook stove going
constantly. We even dressed and
undressed there in cold weather. There was a reservoir of water as a part of the stove so that
we could always dip out some hot water when we needed it.
And we needed it frequently, because during those cold winters lots of
times our water pipes would freeze. My
father got pretty good at thawing out the pipes with a blow torch that we had.
He never allowed me to use the blow torch because it was likely to cause
the house to get on fire. Many
houses in Alliance did suffer from blow torch fires. Our
kitchen had six doors. It was
probably 14 or 15 feet square. It
had a door on the east going into the living room.
There were three doors on the south, one went into a screened-in hallway
that lead to the back porch which was a cement porch about five steps up from
the sidewalk. The next door on the
south side of the kitchen opened to a broom closet, and the other door opened to
the basement stairway which went down a few steps to a grade or ground level
door that permitted entrance to the house at ground level. Practically the entire west wall was double windows.
Then on the north of the kitchen the west door led into a fairly sizeable
pantry and the other door, which was between the sink and the kitchen stove lead
into the bathroom. Six doors in
that small kitchen in which we practically lived during the c6ldest parts of the
year. I don't know how my mother
stood it. Because
of the inadequacy of the heat emanating from our too-small furnace, we also had
for many years a base burner in the dining room.
It was a large heating stove on legs with isinglass windows, and it was
also my province. That is, I had to
keep it stocked with kindling and with coal and dump its ashes.
One thing about the coal which I forgot to mention, and that is that
frequently coal came in large lumps and part of my job was to break those lumps
down to stove size by hitting the coal with the back of an ax.
Sometimes that was not too easy. Also,
I had to fight clinkers in that base burner stove.
Sometimes my grandmother would come visit us from Missouri, and when she
did I still can visualize her backing up to that base burner stove and lifting
her skirt and petticoats to let in the warmth. In
the ceiling of the dining room was a grate that could be opened from upstairs in
Jean's bedroom. At bedtime she
would run upstairs in the cold, open the grate and run back down until the chill
was off in her room. The heat did
not penetrate into my bedroom, so I would undress downstairs and run up to my
room and jump into my bed with its goose-down feather bed.
The down came from wild geese that my father had shot on hunting trips. As
to hunting, my father was considered one of the very best of duck hunters, and
did his best to teach me how. He
took me along whenever he could. The
second way in which I was different was that I never entered a barber ship until
I had gone away to college. My dadd
had been a barber in the army during the Spanish-American War and had worked as
a barber in Alliance before starting his own clothing store.
He always insisted upon doing my haircuts. He had his old barber tools and would sit me up on the piano
stool, unscrewing the seat to its highest level and putting his old barber apron
over me. He did a good job, too,
and also bobbed my sister Jean's hair when bobbed hair became the fashion.
But that was an era when everyone went to the barbershop.
Lots of men went daily for their shave and as I recall shaves were 25
cents and haircuts were 50 cents, but we lacked that kind of money to throw
around. Also, my father had a whole
set of straightedge razors, and he taught me how to use and how to hone a
straight-edge razor, which I did for several years. One
of the happiest memories that I have of childhood is going to the Black Hills in
the summers. It was just over a
hundred miles from Alliance, and there were some fine trout streams there.
My Dadd was an excellent fly fisherman and did his best to teach me how
to become one. I still recall the
first rainbow trout that I ever caught on a fly.
I had been trying for three years to fly fish and this first small
rainbow that I caught just as my Dadd In
the Black Hills we camped out in a tent usually on the Slate River which was a
small creek near Mystic which is near or close to Rapid City, South Dakota that
flowed into the Big Rapid River. We
had no car and the only way we could get there was on what was known as the
"Windy and Dusty" railroad which ran between Rapid City and the
eastern part of South Dakota. To
get there we had to take the Burlington from Alliance to Edgemont or Hot Springs
and transfer to that "Windy and Dusty" railroad with all of our
camping paraphernalia. Each day as
the train went by we could deliver messages or accept deliveries because the
train would slow down a little bit as it went by the Slate Creek Bridge.
In order to mail anything we had to attach it to a long stick with a loop
on the end of it and the trainman could catch it by putting his arm through the
loop as the train went by. At
our camping place on Slate Creek in the Black Hills we were able to gather wild
strawberries. They are little bitty
strawberries but very flavorful. It
was unbelievable what my mother could do on a campfire.
We had a grill that went over it. Also
we had a sort of oven that we could place over the grill. By keeping wood on the fire As
an aside, my dadd was considered such an excellent fly fisherman that when
President Calvin Coolidge wished to come to the Black Hills to fish for trout my
father was asked if he would not be the one who would show the president how to
handle a fly rod and cast with artificial flies for trout.
Although my dadd refused to do this, nevertheless, I thought that this
was a rather high tribute to his ability as a dry-fly trout fisherman.
No wonder though, I have seem him stand behind his clothing store on an
afternoon when the store was not busy and cast with a dry-fly by the hour at a
fifty-cent piece or a silver dollar which would be perhaps 75 feet from where he
was standing. It was uncanny the
way he could make the fly land where it was supposed to. Not only was my Dadd a
preeminent fly fisherman, he was also an outstanding duck hunter.
We did not own a car until I was 12 or 13.
Nevertheless, my father managed to take me along on several hunting trips
for wild ducks and geese. The sand
hill area east of Alliance had a lake in nearly every sizeable valley.
In the spring and fall these were splendid duck lakes.
I have seen the sky black with rising flights.
When I was very small the hunting season was both spring and fall. Most
of our hunting was done by wading out in the bulrushes.
Many times, though, we would get on a hill area between two lakes and
shoot a rifle or a "hell-er-di-scoot" ball from our shot guns toward
swimming ducks to cause them to fly. They
usually flew against the wind to the lake in the next valley which would be
right over us. We would try to
camouflage ourselves and frequently we had good shooting. Of course, hazing
ducks and spring hunting seasons were banned while I was still a boy. When
we finally bought a car - a 1920 Buick touring car - then we could and did go
hunting more often. That car was
the only thing that my dad ever bought on time payments, I believe.
Installment purchasing was new then.
He paid $650 down and $500 per month for two more months.
That was installment buying in those days for a fine automobile costing
$1,,650.00. Grouse
and prairie chicken hunting was never too good.
Pheasants were planted in Nebraska while I was away in college and they
really flourished. So after I
settled in Wichita Don Davis and I went to the Alliance area and later to the
Broken Bow area every fall for seventeen years to hunt pheasants with Pop. (My
sister Jean always called our father "Pop").
In 1949 there was a tremendous snow in western Nebraska that practically
wiped out the pheasant population for years. Because
of that trout fishing and hunting as a lad I have always liked the outdoors to
fish and to hunt. I have never been
able to match my father's skills. However,
that has not deterred me from annual trout fishing vacations with Bob Gwinn and
frequent quail and pheasant hunts each fall.
I dearly love the beauty of those mountain streams.
Being out hunting or fishing seems to "recharge my batteries"
whether we do or do not bring home the bacon.
Another
of my happy boyhood remembrances, and there are a lot of them, was driving
through the countryside with a veterinarian friend.
He had a roadster car and carried his veterinary medicines and
instruments in the turtle back. We
went all through the countryside to farms and ranches.
He always managed to arrive at about meal time.
Unceremoniously he and I always went in to eat with the family.
I never did get over the fact that they seemed to expect such actions on
our part. And we ate well with the
farmers and ranchers, too. It
would be remiss of me not to mention that I tried two different times to work on
farms. Even though I had been
around burros, ponies, and horses all my life, I still was not capable of
harnessing and handling a fractious farm team when I was about 12 and was fired
from my farm job. This could have
been the only time that I was ever summarily discharged, except that I believe I
also was fired from the second farm job where I worked several weeks for a
farmer who raised mostly vegetables, potatoes and wheat.
All that I remember about this job was that it was dawn to dusk, hard,
sweaty work, and that the farmer himself did not believe When
I was about eight years old I had been out at a farm for a few days and the
farmer and his wife brought some butter and eggs in by buggy to the Alliance
Creamery. I walked into the
darkened creamery from a very bright sunshiny day and saw what I thought was a
stairway. I started to walk down
the stairway, and it turned out to be an open elevator shaft.
Naturally I fell and in falling I grabbed for something and caught hold
of the cable or rope that started the elevator. I was about to be caught between the elevator and the floor
when a tall young man who was working at the creamery that summer jumped up and
grabbed me by the feet and pulled me clear just as the elevator went past.
All that I had was a scalp wound that required eight or so stitches, but
I could have been caught right squarely between the elevator and the floor in
something like a guillotine or a stamping machine.
My family was so relieved that I was not seriously injured that after I
came out of the emergency part of the hospital with my stitches my father took
me down and outfitted me with a new blue serge suit.
Of course, in those days boys' suits had knee length knickers, and we
wore long black stockings and button shoes.
My father only handled men's clothing so this boys' suit had to be
purchased at another store. I still
have an advertising souvenir from my dadd's store, sort of like a pocket knife,
except that what folded into the handle was not a blade, it was a button hook
for the shoes. The
next narrow escape I can remember was when I was about 10 or so I went to a
homestead in Wyoming which was being proved up by a family whose daughter lived
with us while she was attending high school.
They had a little Maxwell touring car and I was teaching her how to drive
it. She was doing very nicely until
we drove back into the garage and she forgot how to stop the car.
The back of the garage was right on the bank of an irrigation ditch that
was about 6 feet wide. Of course the car did not slow down at all and it knocked the
whole backend out of the garage which made a bridge and we went safely across
the irrigation ditch. Fortunately,
they made Maxwell cars small in those days. The
next incident I believe was when I was about 12 or so.
I was at the stockyards and somehow fell off the top of a shed and landed
on my back across a cattle feeding trough.
The pain was intense and when I tried to walk I found that one leg was an
inch and a half longer than the other one.
At the doctor's office he had me lie across a couple of chairs, turned
off the light and apparently left the room.
Actually he had not left the room. He
waited until I was totally relaxed then sort of jumped on my back.
The former pain had been as nothing compared to this one but the back
apparently had popped back into place (I never did trust that doctor again and
have always felt lucky that he didn't break my back). There
were two incidents involving guns. At
a homestead cabin three of us boys who had been shooting prairie dogs with a 2.2
rifle, or rather shooting at prairie dogs with a 22 rifle, had gone back
in the cabin when we realized that one of the guns still had a shell in it.
In trying to take the shell out, the gun went off right between two of us
sitting at the table and shattered the water pitcher and bowl that was sitting
on the table between us. Luckily it
did not hit either of us. The
other incident was when three of us boys went out to Bronco Lake to do some duck
hunting. One of the boys, Pat
Bignell, had hip waders which were his pride and joy.
Since none of us ever had any money these were sheer luxury.
Somehow he rested his 410 shotgun on the foot of his boot and it went off
and shot right through his toes and these hip waders.
We were worried about his foot and his toes, but he was upset about the
ruined waders. We put him on a
coaster wagon that we had hitched up to my horse and hauled him back to a road
where we could hail a car to take him in to the hospital and it turned out that
he was not badly injured. The
next accident was when my friend King Robbins was driving his family's new 1924
Buick roadster. He was a senior in
high school and I was a combination junior and senior student since I had
decided to go through high school in three years.
While driving too fast on a gravel road we came to a soft or muddy spot.
He lost control. The car jammed across the ditch into a steep bank.
He was able to brace himself by holding on to the steering wheel, but I
was thrown through the windshield which was a two piece windshield and quite a
bit of the lower pane broke off in my face.
It required a pretty good surgeon to get the pieces of windshield out of
my face and required 33 stitches to close the wound.
We had thought that I had a broken jaw, but it wasn't.
Anyway I had to live on a liquid diet for a couple of months before my
face was usable again. What really
upset me about that accident was that I had been trying for three years to make
the high school football team and it looked as though I would have been able to
play in the line, probably center, in the game that was to be held the Friday
following this accident. One other
effect of this accident was that I was never able to play a cornet or trumpet
again. and I had a dreadfully
difficult time in making those payments. I
did practically every kind of work that was available in that town, I believe,
except soda fountain jerker. I
worked for the city as an apprentice electrician; I dug sewers; I dug graves in
hard, gravely soil; I worked in my dadd’s store.
I worked in the potato fields when schools let out so that we could go
out and help the farmers and the Indians from the Pine Ridge Reservation pick
the potatoes. I sold books and
newspapers. I always took
subscriptions for the Denver Post when the circus was coming to town because
that afforded me free entrance to the Sells-Floto Circus if I could sell enough
subscriptions which I usually did. Since
nobody else had money either we did not know that we were poor, and certainly we
did not feel poor. Even though we
had no means we had practically everything else to respond to life. I guess you would say that we were "comfortably
poor." However, we had financial reverses in 1922.
Selling on credit was new. My
father had tried to extend credit at his men's clothing store and there was a
recession and customer's quit paying their bills. My dadd still had to pay his suppliers so he lost his
clothing store business. In 1923
the store went through voluntary bankruptcy, but there must have not been much
loss to the creditors because My
father wound up going into the insurance business.
First working as a salesman on a commission basis for another agency and
later-on having his own insurance business, selling all kinds of insurance,
including life insurance. By
that time my father and I had become very close.
And I am sure that he was crushed to be unable to assist me financially
to go on with higher education. Both
he and my mother as well as my sister had encouraged me for years in my hope to
go to college and law school. Actually
I had hoped to be a lawyer since in the fifth grade when I was selling magazines
and I saw the County Attorney one Saturday morning sitting at his breakfast
table at about 9:30 in the morning reading the Denver Post And smoking a cigar,
really taking it easy. My dadd
always felt that he had to be at work at 7 a.m. Right then I decided that the
law was for me. I even sold that
County Attorney a subscription to Boys' Life magazine for his son who was
younger than I. In
order to save some money I began playing with a dance band group playing
Saturday night barn dances. It was
a terrible chore and very hard on my lip. But
I was able by the time I finished high school to have saved $252, as I recall.
That was my capital when I started to the University of Nebraska.
It was all that I needed because I was able to find a job waiting tables
in a sorority house and clerking on Saturdays in a store.
Also, I got a job singing with a radio station.
All of these fit well into my schedule of studies.
Actually, studies had never been much of a chore.
My folks had seen to it that I earned to do my homework and I was always
on the honor roll through grade school and high school.
In college I barely missed making Phi Beta Kappa by a fraction of a
point. Somehow
it did not take much money to enjoy life in those days.
I was able to have girlfriends in high school and in college,
occasionally go to shows, plays and to all of the high school and college
sporting events. In those days the
University of Nebraska had a topnotch football team and was the only team in the
country to beat Notre Dame two different seasons.
Our high school had pretty good teams in its league also and we had some
excellent track men that did well not only in Western Nebraska but also in the
State meets at Lincoln. I was not
one of them, but I tried out for everything. It
cost quite a bit for season tickets to the Nebraska football games in the big
stadium. I had friends in the band.
In order to get into the games I would borrow the case for Bob Laing's
trombone and walk in as though I were a member of the band and sit with the band
and watch the games. That was only
possible because the ticket takers were always lenient to someone who was
working his way through college. Anyway,
they were good seats to watch the games and, as I said, Nebraska had a fine
football team in those days. Speaking
of sports, one summer I was working with a gravel crew graveling roads near
Hastings, Nebraska. There was a
small town, Harvard, Nebraska, that needed a player or two on its town baseball
team, so I wound up playing third base with that team.
If anyone ever asked me about my athletic prowess I was able to tell them
that I played baseball for Harvard. That
made a particularly good story later on when I actually went to Harvard Law
School after having graduated from the University of Nebraska and after having
worked one year to raise some money toward tuition and expenses. Because
I was not too athletic I did get a lot of activity in other fields besides the
Glee Club and quartet ting. I was in
oratorical contests and a member of the high school debating team. on our trips
by train to other towns or cities to debate we learned to play chess; not very
well, but at least we played. A
few of my boyhood friendships have lasted all these years.
Most of us graduated from high school in about 1924, so that is quite a
long time. Oftentimes I wonder what
has happened to the other friends, and what life had held for them and for the
nice girls we grew up with. All
through grade school and high school I was so busy playing in bands and
orchestras and in clubs and groups, and later on in going to parties and dances,
that I never did do a great deal of outside reading.
I worked hard on my lessons and assigned reading, but that was about all.
Oh, I did read a few magazines and a few books from time to time but I
did not learn to read fast for pleasure. It
was many years later before I began to appreciate books.
A large part of that I must attribute to my lovely wife Ernestine who
reads books constantly along with all her other activities. Even
though I was working my way through college I believe that with a little more
application on my part, perhaps less party going and dancing, along with my
outside jobs and so forth, could have resulted in a Phi Beta Kappa key.
Actually I missed it by two fifths of a point. In law school I didn't make as high a grade average as I
should have because I went blank, sort of cracked up, in one examination in my
first year of law school. It was in
a course that I was better prepared for than any other course, but something
happened, sort of like a momentary nervous breakdown, perhaps too much pressure
and tension. Anyway, I could not
sleep at all the night before and I did not do well on that one examination.
Oh, I passed it all right but it brought down my scholastic average. One
more thing about schools. Because
we had no means at that time, I tried very hard to get a scholarship for
college. Paul Thompson and I took
examinations to try to get into Swarthmore, a fine college in Pennsylvania, and
we did get into the semi-finals I guess. However,
we did not quite get that scholarship, and that was the reason that I had to
work my way through college. Also,
I tried to get into Annapolis at the same time that Paul was appointed to West
Point. However, I could not get the
appointment until after I had completed two years in college. That was too late for me because in those days after two
years in college you could go right into law school.
I could not see spending four years at Annapolis and four years in the
Navy before going on to law school when I was already at that point.
I had received the first alternate appointment after one year in college,
had taken the Annapolis examinations and had passed them, but the principal
appointee went. Also, after college I tried to get a graduate scholarship to
go to Oxford. I tried out for the
Rhodes Scholarship and one of the examiners, a lawyer in Lincoln, Nebraska, who
had been a Rhodes scholar, told my father that I was the runner up for the
scholarship from Nebraska which in those days was done on a state-by-state
basis. The fellow who actually
received it was well qualified so I did not feel badly about that.
However, I did feel badly about the fellow who accepted the appointment
to Annapolis ahead of me and only stayed for one year. We
went to the Baptist Church in Alliance which was a church with very poor
finances, hardly any finances at all. The
poor preacher had to exist usually on the Sunday collection plate proceeds,
which often were not much. I always
felt very sorry for the preacher and his family, because they were so poor. Fortunately, some of the members gave food to the family,
sometimes chickens, for instance. We
had several different preachers because none could stay very long.
I was jealous of the Episcopalians.
They had a small, pretty stone church (ours was frame), and they seemed
better financed and much looser in scruples.
Our church did not prohibit dancing, but did not encourage it, whereas
the Episcopalians actually danced in their Guild Hall. We
learned to dance because the mothers of our girl friends organized a dancing
class which met in the basement of the library.
It turned out that although I was not the equal of some of my
contemporaries on the athletic field I was at least their equal on the dance
floor, so I did not neglect that particular pursuit.
Actually, if I had kept a diary in those days through the last part of
high school and all of college, I think it would show that I spent a great many
evenings at dances and dancing parties. Some
of my dancing girl friends were the very finest ballroom dancers in either high
school or college. Actually
the only reason that I joined a fraternity at all was because the girls in the
sororities seemed to be embarrassed to have dates with fellows who did not
belong to a fraternity. Probably I
would have been a fraternity member from the start except that my first year I
was not invited to join the fraternity or one of the fraternities that I might
have been willing to join, if invited. Later
on I was told that I was not invited to the fraternity of my choice because it
was not believed that I would be able to pay the sums necessary to belong to
this fraternity because I was working my way through. This is probably true, although I might have been able to
make it somehow. The fact is that I
was not invited. When I did join a
fraternity it was not one of the top-ranked fraternities on the campus.
The thing that distinguished it from the others was that one of the
fellows in that fraternity invited me to become a member. By
the way, the dating that I did was usually in some other sorority than the one
in which I waited tables. That was
not always the case. Usually I
tried to get dates with the best dancers. Probably
the smartest thing I ever did in my life was to find the job waiting tables in
sororities because I was too poor to pay for my food.
Besides I had been so short of funds that I might have been reluctant to
pay for my food, even if I could have afforded to do so.
At the first sorority house where I waited tables I also had to look
after the furnace. My boyhood
training in learning how to keep a furnace going to bank it at night and so forth
was put to good use. Many a night I
banked that sorority house furnace when I was dressed in my tuxedo on the way
home from a party. While
in college I worked at many things which took a lot of time and I went to lots
of parties which also took a lot of time. Most
of my courses involved a lot of reading. I
taught myself how to scan a reading assignment then go back and read it a second
time for content. Many years later
Evelyn Wood made a fortune using this same system to train people how to do
speed reading. Ha. After
law school I looked and looked for a job in a law office, in Washington, D.C.,
in Cleveland, in Kansas City, in Omaha, in Lincoln.
It was the bottom of the depression.
No jobs. From Kansas City I
drove to Wichita with a distant cousin. We
landed in Wichita at about noon on a Saturday and the offices where I hoped to
seek employment were closed, except two: One was having a loud drinking party --
it was the bone-dry era and they had some booze; nothing doing there. The
other office had two lawyers working on a brief.
They reluctantly permitted me an interview.
Fortunately for me they were involved in a public utility controversy.
I had quite recently passed a law school exam on the very question they
were briefing. So I gave them some
ideas and they had the mistaken idea that I was gifted; but it was coincidence.
They just happened to be working on a point that Felix Frankfurter (later
Mr. Justice Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court) had taught me well.
However, they did not have an opening in their office. So
I went home to Alliance. It had
been my idea that if I failed to find a position in the middle west that would
go to the Seattle area to live and hopefully find This
still was not enough money to solve my problems.
So I went to a filling station on the highway and waited for a
south-bound car to come along. Finally
a fellow drove up in a coupe, barely making it because of being out of gasoline.
He walked up to the station carrying a .22 caliber rifle.
He asked if someone would give him something for it so that he could buy
some gasoline to get him to Oklahoma City.
I volunteered to buy the gasoline if he would take me as far as Wichita. He did. We
arrived about nine in the morning. I
located a cleaning and pressing shop, had my suit pressed and went up to Yankee,
Osborne and Sears to apply for a job. After
the interviews on August 9, 1932, they said I could go to work; to come back to
start work on September 15. I said
I doubted if I could get back again, as I had exhausted my funds and credit to
get here for the interview. So they
said okay, take off your coat and start to work.
I did, and forty-five years later I am still practicing law in Wichita,
having in 1945 - with Lester Morris, started our own firm which is now Morris,
Laing, Evans, Brock & Kennedy, Chartered. After
I finished college I had intended to go back for a graduate year to take some
graduate courses and to do some teaching on a graduate teaching fellowship.
However, the University of Nebraska changed the graduate courses so that
there was nothing I wanted to take. Consequently,
I went to work on the road as a traveling salesman selling high school class
rings, pins, and other jewelry, and also caps and gowns and diplomas.
This was quite a job and taught me a lot about sales work.
There was a rather short season to sell such items.
So between Thanksgiving and Christmas I quit and went back to Alliance to
work with my dadd selling insurance and real estate. This
was a wonderful year for me as I got to work closely with my father. The only real money that I made was by buying and
reselling a 1700 acre ranch about 20 miles northeast of Alliance.
As I recall, I agreed to buy this property from a man back in Boston for
less than I believed that I had a ready sale for this same property, and I
netted about $1700. This was the
bulk of my capital as I got ready to go away to law school.
In those days tuition was $400 per year, so I was off to a good start.
You paid your fees one semester at a time, so I paid $200 towards my
tuition, found a job waiting tables, got a job singing as paid tenor soloist in
the Old Cambridge Baptist Church. Then
at Christmastime I learned that the bank in Alliance in which I had my funds
deposited had failed. So once again
I was scraping bottom financially. However,
I took a volunteer examination and made a good enough grade to receive tuition
loans from Harvard Law School, even though my grade point was not quite high
enough to get a scholarship. These
were finally paid off after my second son, Dave, was born. In
a small town there are some good influences, The school rooms are quite small
and the pupils or students have the opportunity to become well-acquainted with
their teachers. I had several
outstanding teachers, particularly our second grade teacher, Miss Soper, Bernice
Miller who taught us history in high school and rather casually shaped
my philosophy of life. (I have often wondered if she ever realized the
tremendous influence she had on my way of thinking).
Among other things, at a time when I was in a period of grave doubt, she
convinced me that there had to be a Higher Being behind this wonderful world of
ours, and I have always held that as a tenet of my faith and hope. Frank
Prince who was our high school football coach and algebra teacher also taught us
a great deal about manliness and maturity. one example: Paul Thompson and I had
received identical scores on an algebra exam when we were sitting not too far
apart. Apparently this looked
suspicious and word got around that we were to be accused of having cheated.
Immediately I went to Mr. Prince and demanded that another examination be
given to Paul Thompson and to me in separate rooms in the high school building,
which was done. Again we got
identical grades. So we heard no
more about it. Also,
I got quite a lot out of being a boy scout.
I became a first class scout and had several merit badges, but never was
able to become an Eagle scout because we had no facilities-in Alliance for the
completion of some of the necessary merit badges, and besides I'm not sure now
that I was able to run fast enough to qualify for some of the athletic merit
badge requirements. Also, the Court
of Honor which passes on merit badges had sort of gone out of existence when our
Scoutmaster, Kenneth Hamilton, moved away.
He was also a very good influence on our lives because he was an
excellent Scoutmaster, taught us a lot of the principles of scouting and took us
on many fine scout camping trips. It
pains me to remember that I did not get nearly as much out of Sunday School as I
should have. Our boys' class was, I
am afraid, a bunch of unruly hellions. We
were never able to retain a teacher; each would quit after a very few Sundays.
In spite of our bad deportment we did learn a little and overall Sunday
School was a good influence. By the
way, the lowest grades on my school report cards were always in the space marked
"Deportment." It
may not be clear to others in reading these memoirs, but in spite of a few fist
fights that I was unable to talk my way out of, and some well-deserved
thrashings that I received at the hand of my mother or father, I must say that
mine was a happy and carefree childhood with many fond recollections. In lawyer fashion, Respectfully submitted,
Copyright
© 1999, 2000 Verne Laing. "I,
Witness to History" and logo are trademarks of Wesley Retirement
Communities, Inc., d/b/a Larksfield Place. All rights reserved.
|
