14: Interview with Connie Parr Graham – Liberal Memorial Library

Date: April 2008

Place: Home of Karen Graham in Liberal, Kansas

Interviewer: Donita Priefert Payne

CG: I am Connie Parr Graham. Leon Graham and I were married on December 23, 1951. He will be gone two years this year in June. I really miss him yet. He was a lovely man, very godly man. I hadn’t really grown up in that kind of an atmosphere because my dad wasn’t saved until after I left home. But I did know a lot about discipline and working. My mother never failed to let us know when Sunday came
around if she didn’t have the energy to take us to Sunday School and church, that this was the Lord’s day. She’d be going to church. I never dreamed that I would marry somebody like Leon, but it was always a blessing and he was a lot of fun. Of course there were some hard times. When we were married, he was in the service for a couple of years and then when he got home I was teaching school
over at Cimarron, Kansas.

He was working for his aunt, Ethel Renick, that is how I met him. He and his uncle Ervin Koppisch ran around together, and Ervin was going with a girl who lived at the same house I did. That is how we met. I did know of him because of the church at Pierceville which was a new establishment after the war. They bought that church house off the base and moved it there at Pierceville. It was where my folks went,
several other people we knew. He was there several times and played the piano, ‘course thrilled all the girls. [Laughing] So I knew of him because my sister was a part of that group of girls. I never dreamed that I would meet him because I was going with other fellows. There were three of us single gals who lived at that particular house and there were a couple of other gals that started teaching that same year,
so we were all just kind of buddy-buddy. We all kind of found a fellow to go with. Some of them switched around with a different one later on. I’ll tell you we had some gay old times. [Laughing] I guess Leon and I just fell for each other. He left for the service and he wanted to know if I’d write to him and I said, “Sure, I could do that.” Then when he came home in June on a furlough, that is when he asked me to marry him, brought me a ring. I thought, my I don’t know about this. I said “Yes” but you know how it is, you don’t know if you are doing the right thing. We were married in December. He went oversees in May before I could get through with my contract. I had to finish the teaching contract before I could go with him. I taught fifth grade. When he got back from the service, we were there in Cimarron, I was finishing up another year of teaching and he did some construction work with a man named Phil [Bill]. I wish he had stayed in that, we would have been better off I think.

We came to Liberal and he started working for Beach. I was pregnant with our first daughter, Reva. Then he got layed off from that job a couple weeks before she was born. He didn’t have another job until a couple of weeks afterward. We wondered if we were going to be able to survive. That is when he started working for the police department. He got on there because he had been in the military police
overseas.

He was in Korea on the island of Kojedo, just off the coast of southern Korea, where they kept millions of prisoners, the prisoners that they took. That is a world of information in itself. It would take another whole day just to tell about that. He wondered every day if he would live through it and I did too because of the things he wrote. When he came home, we lived in Cimarron for a few months and he did construction work. We laughed about his return trip. Being in the military makes such a different person out of a man or a woman. I didn’t know who I was married to because of his different personality and different thoughts on things. That was hard for a long time. I am sure that probably I was different too because of my reaction to him. One morning we were eating grapefruit, I always cut the grapefruit into sections, and he spit the seeds toward the refrigerator. [Laughing] They would ping and go all over the room. That was just one of the lighter things. So, I had a lot of adjustments to make and he did too. We moved down here in the early fall. He started working for Beach Aircraft. After Beach our daughter was born, and after he worked for the police department a couple of years, we had another daughter.

DP: Did he like being a policeman?

CG: I think he did, but it is a hard life. Your family is not respected because your husband is a “cop”. Even some of the relatives would ask favors of him that -you know, you should be allowed to do your job. That is when a lot of the oil companies were still here, and a lot of those big-wig oil people wanted to pay you cash to buy you off and let their kids roam the streets all night while they partied. It is a hard life. I do not like for people to disrespect policemen even if they are not the best kind because it is a hard job and a hard life. Then he had the opportunity and he borrowed money from my dad to run the Standard Station for, I think, three years. That station was across from where Long John Silvers is now. I drove a paper route, drove about 145 miles every day, took my kids with me because they wouldn’t stay
with a babysitter, they bawled all the time. I said I didn’t realize that you could have children that just depend on you. They had never stayed with anybody much, so they were kind of afraid too, I guess. The lady I asked had a couple of boys that were just pretty rowdy, and I think my kids were just not used to that.

He had the opportunity to go north and work for Dr. Good and rent an irrigated farm north of town about 20 miles. It was the first irrigated farm in Seward County. He was excited and I was dejected. I knew what that was like. We lived there for 34 or 35 years. It either hailed out or hailed on for 17 of those years. We never did just have a good crop. That was hard on Leon and hard on the family. I did several things to try to work and help out. Unless you have a field that you are in like teaching, or lawyer or doctor or something it is hard to make enough money to be much help on a farm. But we had four lovely daughters. Leon enjoyed that immensely. He said, “I am the only man in the world that can live with five women, be legal and get by with it.” They were all beautiful girls. The oldest one was Reva, she had black hair and dark eyes like her dad, and she was the one that looked more like her dad and had a personality and temperament more like him than any of the others. Cynthia was our tall slim one. She had real rich brown hair and brown eyes. She got that from my side of the family. She is registrar of deeds now and has two sons of her own who are married and away from home. Reva never had any family, she did get married, she is now deceased. She died of melanoma cancer in 2000. Our third child was a red-head with brown eyes. Her name is Ronda. She had two sons. They are both married and live elsewhere, well one lives here in town and is a registered nurse and works at the hospital. Our fourth daughter is Julie and she lives in Memphis, Tennessee and works for Fed-Ex. I forget just what her job title is, but she keeps all the pilots on track and teaches them all the new things they need to know about rules and regulations. It is a big responsibility. She works hard at her job.

DP: Talk about your relationship with Lydia and Clifford.

CG: Well, my relationship with Lydia and Clifford was kind of distant in the beginning because my mother didn’t have in-laws and my dad didn’t have close family. They were all rather distant. I knew he had some, but we didn’t socialize or get together and so this element of being so close like Lydia and Cliff wanted us to be was new to me, like every Sunday visits and sometimes in the middle of the week. This kind of thing was a new to me. My siblings were not allowed to-we did not spar with one another or tell each other what we thought, and this was a new element to get used to as far as my new in-laws were concerned. It was hard for me, hard on them too, I don’t know. And this thing of so many people being around and spending the whole weekend, I didn’t know what that was like. There were five of us children and my parents and that was our family. I had grandparents who lived near, but my grandmother just didn’t know anything about having the responsibility of grandkids. When we went to her house we sat on the divan and if she offered us a cookie, we could have one, but we didn’t dare ask
for one. She was a lovely woman, very intelligent and accomplished. She and my mother played and sang for funerals, at church and different things, so you know she just was different about family life. So that was hard to get used to because Lydia’s family gathered a lot on weekends -the grandmother, and they had an Aunt Myrtle that wasn’t married, and then Ervin. He didn’t get married till real late in life.
They were just always there. Gaylene and her man lived in a trailer behind the house. She had two kids. So, the house was just always full of people, different temperaments, different things going on. But I learned to love them all. I learned a lot. I hope that I was able to encourage at least the kids to go to school and that type of thing. Lydia did encourage some along that way, but I felt like they needed a lot more encouragement along that line.

DP: Where did you go to school?

CG: In grade school I went to a little country school, but it was the largest one in Finney County. We had 40 students and one teacher, all eight grades so it was very exciting all the time. I don’t know that I learned much of anything except how to read. [Laughing] It was just very interesting as I look back on that experience. Then my dad, since the war was on, wouldn’t let me go to school in Garden [City]
where a lot of the kid’s parents wanted them to go so I drove myself and a couple of neighbor kids ten miles to school and ten miles home every day in the family car, .this was Pierceville -to high school. That building is no longer there, and they don’t have grade school or high school there anymore because there are not enough people that live there. The school buildings are not there anymore and the house
where I first grew up is not there anymore and the house where I lived for 34 years with my husband is not there anymore. They bulldozed it down. So, I really did learn as life went on that you don’t get attached to things here on this earth and have a lot of baggage in that way.

After high school I went to college at Hays, Kansas. At that time, you could go to school two years and take all the right classes and get a teaching certificate. I was the last one of the line that got those. The next year you had to go four years. That is how I got started teaching and I should have pursued that and kept it up. But down here you had to drive so far to go to school and I had the babies and it was just not
a very accepted thing then – back 50 years ago.

Leon never had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do or anything because we were always involved in church work and other things. I never felt very spoiled by him like some women are by their men, until I moved to town. I was still working. I worked until I was 75. I worked the last ten years at the library here at the South Middle School. I loved that. The last two or three years Leon got up every
morning and fixed breakfast for me while I got dressed. We always had family devotions when the kids were home and Leon and I did too. One of those Monday mornings, he said, ”.You know the Lord finally told me that I haven’t prayed for you enough all these years.” He’d take hold of my hands and pray just for me. When he died, I have had a terrible time getting over it. I think because he wasn’t there to pray
for me, I didn’t know how to pray for myself. I have had knee surgery and all these x-rays to decide what to do about my back. I have had cataracts. It just seems like it just all came at once after this.

DP: I remember seeing Leon once when I was in Liberal for a brief time. I don’t remember whether his mother was still alive or whether she had died, but he said with tears in his eyes, “The thing I miss most is having my mother pray for me because I know she did every day.”

DP: Would you like to talk about his war experience? This was the Korean war.

CG: Well, Leon and I met in the fall of, I believe, ’50 and then in February his number was called up to go to the service. He went to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas for his basic training. Leon was very athletic and very able to do strong things because he had big strong arms and hands. He got through that really wonderfully and had several awards and he also was awarded a sharpshooter medal for his ability to
shoot a rifle. When he came home on leave, he didn’t know for sure whether he was going oversees or what was going to happen. You know how they keep them in the dark about everything. Then when he did go back, they called out everybody’s number who was going to go overseas. They had another list of people that were going to stay over. Well, for some reason I have forgotten why, his number wasn’t
called the first time and they held him over, so he didn’t get to go over with the bunch that he trained with. He went a couple of weeks later with another batch. So, he was kind of out of it which was kind of bad. But when he got over there, he got in on when they broke down those compounds. If you could get a hold of an old Life magazine for that period of time, they had a big section with pictures of Colonal
Bowl Boatner, they called him, and how he moved in there with this big tank and they began tearing down these compounds and moving these g4ys to different quarters and breaking them into smaller groups so there wasn’t so many in each one because they would demonstrate. When they broke that down, they found people they had killed in their own compound with lime on them and different
terrible awful things. Of course, they had to use a flame thrower and Leon told what a terrible experience that was to see those men on fire and of course they aren’t killed immediately, but they not only died but they just shrink up. They just had to throw them on a truck and haul them out. They were prisoners but they got fed well, they had steak or something really good every day with vegetables and fruit. A lot of times our guys hardly had a meal. At Christmas time, I don’t know why or why it is allowed, the liquor would flow for free. Leon spent a lot of his time helping his buddies to bed, helping them to clean up. I don’t quite know how he endured it. A couple of times when he had to go in these compounds to look after prisoners they found notes and different things that these guys had on them that told right where his [Leon’s] bunk was, who laid next to him and all this kind of information and that they would kill them. They never did experience anything like that, but he knew that there was somebody who could figure out where each person was all the time. ‘Course there were a lot of things
that you have to do in a place like that because it was just a small island that they set up for this. They had what they called honey bucket brigades every morning out to the ocean. That was no fun. And then he got to be an interrogator. He had to interrogate a lot of these North Korean officers. He drove a truck at one time. Hauled rocks down the mountain. There were some hair-raising experiences. Just lots of
experiences. Going back to Christmas time, the guys were so drunk, the Americans, they would put their hands on hot things and get burned and hurt themselves and then they would fight. The prisoners had a great big turkey dinner and the American soldiers had a cup of this diced mixed fruit for dinner. It was a challenge to keep your temper and be content. You could understand how some of the guys got
impatient with the way things would go. No excuse, I think, for some of them to turn to drink but that is all some of them knew.

DP: Did Leon have any what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to.these war experiences?

CG: Yes, he did. He dreamed a lot. He never wanted to talk about it much. Several people asked him to come and share the war experiences and he said I don’t want to do that. They don’t need to know what went on. I just learned a lot of this as the years went by when he wanted to share something with me. But he did have bad dreams. One night he sat up in bed and he was yelling and waving his arms in
Korean. For years I could repeat that, but I have lost that Korean accent since I had that stroke. I reached over and put my hand on his chest and said, “Honey it is all right, just lay down and go back to sleep.” He brought his arm and his hand back, just before he hit me, he stopped. I guess the Lord woke him up and he said, “Don’t ever do that again, I could harm you.” I knew he didn’t have that in his heart. Yet it
was just so real to him. I am not sure that a man who has been in the service and experienced that ever really gets over it. It comes and goes.

The interview was interrupted by a phone call and the coming of other persons, so ends abruptly. It was coming to a natural end.

Update as of September 2019:

Connie lives in an apartment in a senior housing facility in Liberal. She has some health issues but is active and very alert. As of early in 2020 Connie hod moved to a care facility.

Daughters Reva and Cynthia hove died. Daughter Ronda lives in Liberal area. The other daughter is still in Tennessee.

Connie feels that some of the chemicals used in farming may have played a role in the cancer deaths of Leon and Reba and Cynthia.

Karen Graham now has dementia and is in a nursing home facility in Liberal.

Gayleen Graham is in very poor health and is also in a care facility in Texas.