15: Interview with Dale Kapp – Liberal Memorial Library

Date: October 3, 2013

Place: Liberal High School class reunion (Dale was in the class of 1952), Liberal, Kansas

Interviewer: Donita Priefert Payne

My name is Donita Priefert Payne and I am sitting here with Dale Kapp. We have both come for the high school class reunions for the classes of 1950 – 1954. This is Dale’s time to talk. We have briefly mentioned topics I would like him to talk about.

DK: I am Dale Kapp and presently reside in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. I have lived there since 1965. I was born and raised around Liberal. My grandparents homesteaded some property along the Cimarron River. Grandad came, I think it was in 1908, and homesteaded. His name was Jay Jarret Kapp. Granny was Judy Bell. They came from Winfield, Kansas. Grandad homesteaded and then moved the family out here in 1914.

DP: He came prior to 1914. Wasn’t homesteading pretty much completed before then?

DK: It was but he was able to. He and Granny each acquired a quarter section ground along the river somewhere south of Moscow.

DP: Was it a relinquishment?

DK: I think it was a homestead, I don’t know exactly how that worked but I remember he and Dad talking about it. He moved the family out here. Dad was born in 1908, that would have made him about six years old when they moved out. Grandad built a house and moved the family out from Winfield. They came out on a train, had their livestock and everything on the train, unloaded it at the train station in
Liberal and had a wagon and horses and they loaded the belongings on it and traveled about 12 miles north of town to the place on the river. And so that is my beginning. It was not on the river, but it was maybe a couple or three miles on the farmland west of the river. I don’t know what section it was. I don’t think I could even take you up there today they have changed the roads so much. So that is where they started. My dad, Bernard Lee, went to school at the Golden Plains School established for that particular community. About 1928 or ’29 my mother, Goldie Wright at that time, came from Steelville, [?] Missouri on her way to California. She had two brothers living here in Liberal. I think they were farming somewhere around the area, they were not married, so she came out to cook for them in the summertime. While she was here, they needed a schoolteacher for the Golden Plains School. She had just graduated from Columbia University in Missouri. At that time, it was a two-year class for a teacher’s certificate. She was qualified to teach and apparently the school board discovered that she could do that and convinced her that she should stay instead of going to California. So, she did. She needed a place to stay so she stayed with my grandparents and my dad was still living at home. I guess the rest is history. [Laughing] They got married in 1930, October 30. Dad then worked on the Lanker Ranch which probably doesn’t mean anything to a lot of people, but it was a ranch right on the river. Dad worked there. They lived in kind of a half-dug-out type house that was on the place. As a matter of fact, that is where I was born, in that house. I remember Mom said Dad went to town and got the doctor when it was time for my arrival. He came out and delivered me, so that was my beginning. They lived there for, I think, a couple of years and then Dad started farming on the Hitch ranch which was over west of the Lanker
ranch. We lived there until 1940 when we moved down to the farm about three miles north of Liberal. It was owned by a lady name of Critchfield who lived back in Indiana. I don’t remember too much about living on the Hitch ranch. I was pretty young.

I do remember Dad’s first tractor that had the old lug wheels on it. If you are an old timer you know what that is. I remember that. I remember some of the animals that we had. Dad farmed with horses for a while. I remember that. It was quite an event for us to be able to move down from the ranch and rent some property and move into a nicer house. My mom tells me that the dust storms of the early ’30s roamed across the plains up there on the ranch and she talked about putting wet towels in the windows and doors to keep the dust out and it being so black that she could hardly see to the corral and barn because of the dust and how it just piled up against everything. A lot of the crops that people planted were just destroyed.

When we moved down to Liberal, north of Liberal, Dad rented that half section of ground and the house was much nicer. No electricity. REA had not gotten out. I don’t think anybody had electricity yet. We carried the water in from the well. Had a septic tank the water drained into. We had a Saturday night bath in a #2 wash tub full of hot water. [Laugh] That sort of thing. But you know, I think about those years when we were living out there. We lived just about a half mile down the road from you. All of us kids were about the same age. Went to school at Liberty School. In those years, none of us had a lot of money. We didn’t know that we didn’t have much money. Us kids didn’t. We all grew up together and played together. Had entertainment, things that we did together. We didn’t have TV. Dad did have a radio. We listened to a lot of radio, particularly at night, particularly in the wintertime. We would sit down and listen to the Great Gilder Sleeve, Jet ____, and Henry Aldrich. There was a show that came on fairly early in the evening that I listened to, Gene Autry. Burns and Allen was another one. The Shadow. Dragnet. Fibber McGee and Molly. And we played a lot of games: Monopoly, Pit, Rook and all kinds of stuff entertaining in the evening. We used kerosene lamps. When we first moved down there, we just had a coal burning stove. That was how we kept warm.

I was born October 11, 1934. I will be 79 next week. We moved down there I think 1940. I started school in 1940. Liberty was about one-and-a quarter mile north. Went to school there until I was a seventh grader. I remember the teacher only taught one-half year [Dale’s first year] and then she had to stop and deliver her first child. I don’t remember who came after that. Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Jantzen were
teachers there. Harriet Downing was my teacher.

DP: She [Harriet] was my teacher when I came to Liberty in the second grade. I started school when I was five and started at Sleepy Hollow. Rose Downing [Rose and Harriet were sisters] was the teacher at Sleepy Hollow. Then I moved and started second grade at Liberty.

DK & DP: Harriet was a very good teacher.

DK: I think after her was Mrs. Ligue Wright.

DP: Her family had been here for a long time. Gene was her son.

DP: Harriet’s husband was Pat Holt.

DK: I remember Pat Holt. They farmed when we were living on the ranch up there, right across the road that separated the horse property. When I was a little guy, Pat drove the tractor down and came over to the house and asked Mom if he could take me and let me ride with him. He loved me and took me for rides on the tractor.

DP and DK: They were very wonderful people.

DK: Mrs. Wright and then a Mrs. Jantzen.

DP: She was kind of a disaster, she was quite old. She couldn’t stay awake. [Laughing]

DK: Mom was a schoolteacher and when we got into fractions, I had a big problem with fractions and she [Mrs. Jantzen] would not let you bring your book home. That frustrated me as well as Mom. So Mom went to the bookstore and bought a math book and we worked on fractions. I still remember how to do fractions. I can still do those today. I may be working on my computer, but I can tell you with a pencil
what something is. In seventh grade I came to town to school. And for eighth grade. Freshman was considered Senior High.

DP: Let’s go back and talk about your parents.

DK: Dad was born February 1908. Mom was born September in 1908. Dad was born in Winfield, Kansas. Siblings were Uncle Gene, who by the time I realized who my grandparents were, they had moved to Liberal and Uncle Gene was living on the property up there where they homesteaded. Uncle Everett was in Wichita. I think Aunt Ila was in California, Uncle Bill was in California. Dad had one sister and three brothers. Dad was not the youngest, he was next to the #3. I remember that my grandparents lived in Liberal when we went to see them. [Name of person not clear] ran a grocery store out in what was it, something on Allen – down there on South Kansas Avenue on the west side. They had a feed store across the street from a grocery store. Gran dad ran the feed store for them. Chicken feed, cow feed and whatever they needed. Those are my memories of him. Grandmother died a natural thing. Gran dad was in a retirement village in Hugoton, I think in 1969. I think maybe they both died in 1968 or ’69. Grandad was 92. Granny was seven or eight years younger. She died first.

DP: What were they like? What do you remember?

DK: I don’t remember too much. We would come down and Mom and Dad would drop us off in town and we would spend a day or two with Grandad and Granny. She liked to sing and play the piano that was in the living room. They ran the feed store, but they were also custodians at First Christian Church. Jay and I would be there with him and help. On Sunday mornings, they had the old church bell and Grandad would lift me up and I could pull the rope and ring the bell when it was time for Sunday School and church. So that was our connection to the Christian Church. They were members there. There was a furnace with a boiler in it and Grandad would go down and stoke the fire up. They had an upright piano in the living room and Grandma would sit down after dinner and play and sing.

Grandad was a cigar smoker. [Some laughter] I can just remember sometimes they would come out on Sunday afternoon and want to go for a drive around the country and see what the crops looked like. Grandad would get in the car and light up a cigar and Mom just about croaked you know. [Laughing] I can remember that. He never would talk too much about his past. He was born back in South Carolina, I
think. What brought him to Winfield, I don’t know. He met Granny there. She was born in Illinois and was in Winfield also so how they met, they never talked much about their early life.

I know that he missed WWl. Kind of interesting to me, that all the wars that have been fought, Grandad didn’t go to war, my dad missed it because he was a farmer in WW2, I missed it for the Korean War. My kids missed it for all the rest of the wars. It was not that we did not want to go, we were kind of in between them.

DP: That was the case with my family too. Polly Ann Fraim was my mother’s great grandmother. She came to Liberal and lived with her son, Thomas Fraim who was my grandad’s father, towards the end of her life. She was here several years. She had originally lived in Kentucky and her husband had gone to fight on the side of the Union army during the Civil War. So that is the only military service that my
family has ever been involved in.

DK: I don’t know beyond Grandad. The Wright family did a genealogy on their family history back a hundred years, but Grandad never did. We had a few things that said maybe they originally came from Germany. Maybe the name was shortened. May have settled originally in Ohio. But Grandad wound up in Winfield, kept farming there. Then decided western Kansas looked better.

DP: The Westward Movement-

DK: Yes, go west young man.

DP: Talk about your parent’s personalities – what they were like as people, their interests, how they felt about living in this part of the country, some of the things that were unique to them, what was important about them?

DK: I think it was family. We did a lot of things with family. Mom was very creative and came up with things for us to do and projects to work on. I think she was involved in getting the 4-H club started. I think the County Agent was Fincham. That was a passion for her. I think she was involved even after I was past 4-H. I would go out and judge some of the activity projects. The kids explained why they did what they did.

DP: What was she like as a person? Was she quiet, talkative? Was she reserved?

DK: She was talkative. A lot of people would stop in and talk to her, have coffee and pie. She didn’t drive. She and Dad would go visiting together sometimes Sunday afternoons. Dad was easy-going. Was a good farmer, a perfectionist in that he couldn’t stand to see a weed in any of his property. If there was a weed Bernard was going to get it. I remember when he was teaching me to drive the tractor. At one time when Liberal Army Air Field was here, they had a radio tower just about a mile north and a mile west of us and our property went a mile west so we farmed east and west and so Dad said, “Now that pole over there, drive straight toward it.” He wanted a straight row. I remember if I wasn’t watching the pole, he knew cause there was a cinch in the row. That was him. He loved being a farmer. He really did, that was how he grew up and what he knew and he just thoroughly enjoyed it. He enjoyed, when we boys got old enough to be in 4-H, he was very interested in our projects, the calves, the hogs, and all that sort of thing that we needed. He was on the State Fair Board for a long time, put the fair together, so he was a farmer’s farmer.

He and Mom didn’t have a spat to speak of, maybe a disagreement. When they told you something you paid attention. We did a lot of things together. He read the newspaper. Mom was a reader. We had farm magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, Successful Farming, Household Magazine, some newspaper that came once a week that had some funny things in it. Dad had finished eighth grade. Mom had some college. But they seemed to work it out. It didn’t seem to be a problem.

Mom, she was a little, how do I want to say it, negative sometimes. She worried a lot. I don’t know why but just her nature. I can remember later years when I talked to her, she would say, “I don’t think you can do that, that’s not right, I don’t think that ought to be done.” Yet she was very conservative. I remember one time she told me they went to the bank to borrow money for seeds to plant. I think whoever the banker was, he loaned them $300 and Mom said I didn’t think we would ever pay that back. Back in those days, the wind blew and if you planted a crop up there on the ranch it was real sandy. Plant a crop and the wind blew and covered it up, and you would plant again and hoped you got rain. Those were tough times. At the end of the Dust Bowl times. They got married in 1932. Those were just some tough times.

I remember when we were going to Liberty, you remember that, during the war, about 1942 or ’43, they were doing scrap metal drives. We would take Delbert Bryant’s truck and go to the various farms. I think we would sign up at school, go around to the farms and talk to the dads and ask if they had iron and stuff to get rid of. Delbert would come by the school and pick up some of the older boys and pick up scrap iron and take it down for the war effort.

DP: I don’t remember that. My father would probably have said, “I might need that piece of wire.” [A lot of laughing]

DK: And he might. In those days you needed and used a lot of stuff. I remember Dad being pretty genius sometimes. I think I inherited that from him. My passion is taking something that someone says can’t be fixed and fixing it. My dad was a good mechanic. He could figure out how to do something with a piece of bailing wire and plyers. You could fix a lot of things. He fixed most all of our equipment. Now we have
all the fancy combines, cabs, and everything and we had the old kind of tractor type things. You had to have somebody on the combine and somebody guiding the tractor. Driving the tractor was my job. I remember when I was long gone from the farm and Dad would buy a new tractor. It had a cab on it, airconditioning, stereo, power steering, power brakes. It was like sitting in a car.

Going back and changing the subject- my grandfather was a young man when the Wright brothers did their first airplane flight. He was still alive when they put a man in space. Think of all the things that happened in that span! Grandad never talked about that. Sometime I will ask him “Grandad, what was the matter with you, why didn’t you talk about these things?”.

Mom was a wonderful cook. When we first moved down to Liberal, she had an oil burning stove. But we weren’t there very long until Dad bought a propane tank and set it out beyond the house and she bought a propane cook stove. For a while we had an ice box because we lived close enough to town you could bring out a 25-50 pound block of ice and it would keep things cold. Then Servel made a refrigerator that ran on gas that could be converted to propane. We bought one of those.

DP: Having refrigeration was a revolutionary invention.

DK: It was. We didn’t have electricity so having something that ran on propane was great. That lasted until we got electricity, I guess.

Mom did laundry to start with in two big old tubs. I don’t know how she heated the water, whether Dad rigged up something with propane or how he did it. We had a washhouse. The water was right there. Not too long after that somebody was having a contest. It might have been in the Western Auto store or someplace and you could win a washing machine. Dad entered her. And she won. The problem was it had an electric motor on it. So, Dad says we can get a Briggs and Stratton motor and hook it up to the washing machine. It wasn’t too long after we moved down there that he did that. She had rinse water two or three times and bluing and then you hung out on the line to dry. It simplified her life to be able to put that laundry in that machine.

DP: Do you remember the fragrance of the newly done laundry when you bring it in off that line, after hanging in the sunshine?

DK: I remember that well. I remember how cold the sheets were when they were crimped up in the wintertime before she put flannel sheets on. The flannel sheets and a number of blankets. She was a very precise housekeeper. She did very well with what she had to do with. Everything was clean and painted, she would paint the cabinets, the windows, the walls doing something. When they got to
looking not what she thought they should she would paint them.

DP: You said she was a reader. What did she like to read?

DK: In later years she belonged to Christian Herald Book Club. She looked forward to the magazines. The Sears & Roebuck catalog came two times a year. Montgomery Ward catalog came twice a year. She ordered a lot of things from them.

DP: Overalls for the boys –

DK: Yep. Underwear, plaid shirts and that sort of thing. She’d send a check off in the mail. It took two weeks for it to come. We were all waiting. That brings up another thing. She ordered baby chicks. They would come to the PO. It would take two weeks for them to come. Chicks! The mail man would call her when they came in, he would be bringing out a box of baby chicks. We would have the brooder house all ready, the heat on, ready to go. I remember going into the PO one time it sounded like a chicken farm. Everybody was having chickens. Cheep, cheep. She would order 100 of them. The chicken house- I didn’t have those chores so much. The chickens would get under the brooder. Mom pretty much took care of that. As we were older, we gathered the eggs. Sometimes find a bull snake in the nest. Certainly
got your attention when you reached in and there was a snake. You would take him out and turn him loose. We ate a lot of fried chicken. We had hogs. Not long after we moved down there, Fairmont Creamery had a locker box and we rented a locker because the freezer in the refrigerator wasn’t big enough. We would butcher a beef, had chicken, butcher a hog. I remember Dad cured his own bacon. He’d fix the brine, put the pans down in there and the bacon, cure it, then wrap it up in a sheet and hang it up in the rafter.

DP: I remember that locker too. You would have the meat cut up in certain kinds of cuts and wrapped in meal-size packages.

DK: We would go to town on Saturday and when we were ready to come home go to the locker and then come home. It was great. Trying to think of the man that ran that, can see his face but can’t remember his name.

DP: And maybe you got an ice cream cone at the ice cream part of that Fairmont.

DK: Sometimes. The lady who ran that was Velda Smith. Her daughter would help her sometimes. To piggyback on that, during WW2 when the troop trains came through, we would happen to be in town sometimes and we would just go down and park. Sometimes they would get off the train and dash into the ice cream store. The whole point of that story is that that young gal that was working there became
my wife. That was Gail. Her mother ran that store. In high school we began to date. The mom’s name was Velda Smith.

DP: I bet Gail was a cute little girl. She was a lovely woman.

DK: She was. I think about that – you never know how things are going to work out.

We separated the milk in the washhouse and then the cream we would put in a five gallon can, seal it and take it down to Railway Express and they would haul it to Atchison, Kansas. Every week the can would come back and we would send another one. They would send us a check for that cream.

DP: I recall doing that some, but I think we took it right in to that Fairmont Store.

DK: Maybe that’s where it was. You could be right. It was there. But it went to Hutchinson then.

DP: Fairmont was a big business in this area for a long time.

DK: I am kind of a pack rat and I have some old milk bottles and I have one that says Fairmont.

DP: What did your parents do in Grange? Do you remember anything about that?

DK: Dad was Master for a while. Maxine Browne was the treasurer. Mom was in charge of entertainment. She would get a play together, getting somebody to read something or getting together that sort of thing. The schoolteacher in her was a kind of passion and she seemed to have a lot of stuff to draw from. It always seemed to me that Grange was kind of a social gathering.

DP: They had their ritual. You had to be a member to be present at that so the kids would all run around outside.

DK: I remember that we would go out -then we would go in for the program.

DP: Those were always a lot of fun.

DK: They were a lot of fun. We always had something to eat afterward. There was a cakewalk-that was a fundraiser. Had something to do with pies. Grange had an exhibit at the fair. It was Progressive Grange #21 think. It was a get-together, a community. What they actually did I don’t know. It met once a month.

DP: It had an insurance program for many years. Bill Fitzgerald’s dad was the person in charge of the insurance for that particular Grange. I think they talked about farm issues a lot, concerns of rural communities. Of course, for kids it was play time.

DK: We had a Sunday School that met in the schoolhouse. Once a month a pastor would come out from Liberal and preach and then go back and preach in his own church. We thoroughly enjoyed that. It went on for quite a while. Henry Franz, Pete Gintzler, Lee Swan, your dad Don Priefert sang a quartet. They were pretty good. That was always a treat on Sunday morning. And your mom played the piano. They
sang some of the old Stamps songs. That was kind of a highlight. Even as a kid, you would not think that would be that impressive, but it was. And then I remember your mom doing flannel graph lessons. Virginia Chance did chalk talks. Somebody would read a scripture and sing a song while she drew out the chalk drawing. So those were good times. Community. You all got together. About all beliefs, about all,
some didn’t believe. My mom and dad were not Christians at the time. Pete Gentzler moved to Colorado somewhere.

DP: They were related to the Grahams. Pete was a character.

DK: I remember Mom talking about Pete.

DP: He and my dad did a lot of stunts together for Grange. They rehearsed that a little bit. My grandmother wrote stunts for them to do. I remember those – so silly- kind of like Saturday Night Live only a little cleaner in its humor. [Laughing] People wouldn’t have tolerated that I think.

DK: Henry Franz lived up there where Fitzgeralds live.

DP: There was also a men’s quartet in Grange – a couple of Sniders, Chet Hockingsmith, Willard Downing. Elmer Snider and Chet Snider. They were super good. They sang a lot of barbershop, just wonderful kinds of stuff. It is amazing how talented so many people were in that community. Do people today do those same kinds of things? I don’t know. But as I have talked to people, every home in that day had a piano. Someone knew how to play the piano. Singing, reciting. Maxine Browne could recite poetry- until the day she died she could do that.

DK: Mom did poetry too. Maxine taught at Antelope Valley School.

DP: In one of the interviews [Esther Swan, the wife of Dick Swan] a child had been sick. Dick Swan. Maxine was the teacher and she would set this little child on her lap. He remembered that. She was a unique individual. You could hate her, you could love her. I said this on some of the other interviews, she was domineering, bossy, could drive you up the wall, getting her way with her ideas. She was also, my parents thought, a genius.

DK: My mom thought a lot of her too.

DP: She was a go-getter, a mover-shaker, talented in many ways. There were some very unique people in that community.

DK: I always felt sorry for their only son, Clifton. She kept her thumb over him. You are going to interview him? Good.

DP: I am going to interview Clifton. I think it was a difficult childhood for him. I talked to Wayne Phillips who lives out there. He is related to Maxine. He doesn’t know a lot about their family history. He thinks there may be some tapes of Maxine talking if he can find them. They were related to the Harveys. I remember my parents and grandparents talking about the Harveys. Maxine is related to the Harveys .
They were really early timers.

DK: Remember the Piles? Roy, the two twins, Genevieve and Genavon. There was an older sister.

DP: They were very active in Grange. They lived on the ranch that the Hunt family purchased from the Piles. You were born in what year?

DK: 1934. Jay was born in 1938. He was born at my aunt’s house. My aunt (Mom’s sister) and uncle Martin Janus had a dairy west of town where the air base is. The government bought out the land. Jay was born there.

DP: Talk about Jay.

DK: My brother-we had our disagreements. Mom would straighten us out. We had a great time. He was – I remember more after school. He went to the consolidated school one year and then we drove to town together and he went to Washington. In junior high he was in the band. I started on the clarinet. Jay took lessons from Mccosh. I switched to saxophone. We raised registered Herefords for a while, and we showed those. He was easy going, kind of laid back. He liked to read.He was a good student. He was more studious, and I was interested in having a good time. He could have been an engineer or who knows what. He died. He died December 16, 1952.

DP: In talking about him with Karen Graham, she said he was perfect in every way. He was handsome, he was pleasant, he was very intelligent. He was just the perfect person. Within the family you might not say that, but from friend’s viewpoint he was kind, gentlemanly, not a big cheese. Karen, Jay and Paul were in the same grade. Paul was a year younger and I didn’t realize that until recently. My mother
started him even though he was a year younger because there would not have been any other kids his age a year later. One year I remember we had quite a few kids -12 or 15 in school.

DK: I think Howard Franz was there the year I started. [DP: I don’t think this is accurate.]

DP: One year there were a lot of kids at Liberty. Karen and Gaylene Graham, you and Jay, Paul and I, three kids who lived east on the Clodfelter place. The oldest was not very bright. They were kind of mean. One year there were some cousins of yours, they were your uncle’s stepchildren. Those kids were ornery, not well behaved. Eldon and Jannette Guttridge came to our school one year. Others I don’t
remember. Grahams, Kapps and Prieferts were the core. One year we had five -you and Jay, Paul and I and Karen. Jerry Salley and Richard Salley were both there the year that Mrs. Jantzen was the teacher. That was a disastrous year. Jerry and Richard were so mean. In the interview with Gaylene and Karen Graham we talked about how Jerry and Richard were so mean to you and tormented you. Gaylene got
fed up with it one day and she grabbed a hold of them and swung them around, both of them, and said, “Now, you leave Dale alone.” And they did after that. Do you remember that?

DK: I don’t remember that.

DP: She remembers it! I remember it! And she said, “The rest of you kids just stood up beside the schoolhouse. I called to you to come and help and none of you did -you just stood there.” Jerry and Richard were mean to everybody. We had quite a discussion about them. I said I just could not imagine either one of them growing up to be decent adults. But people said they did. I remember a horrible thing. My desk was behind you. I don’t know whatever possessed me, but I took the compass point and stuck you in the behind. I felt it was such a stupid thing for me to do. That is one of the childhood things that I remember. So sorry that I did something like that. Talk about Jay, what he did in high school. Freshman year.

DK: We had cattle on wheat pasture. Every evening we would bring them in and put them in the corral. We had a couple of horses. They were just loose in the pasture. When we needed one, we would just go throw a bridle on it and jump on bare back and get the cows and bring them in. He had come home from school and had gone down in the pasture to catch a horse to get the cows and just never did get
back. When I got home from work and the cattle weren’t in yet, Dad said Jay went to catch the horse and get them in. We discovered that the horses were still down in the pasture, so we went down there and Jay was just lying on the ground. Dad came in the car and we thought he was dead, but we took him to the hospital, and he was gone. It effected Mom and Dad. Gail and I were going together, and we were
planning to get married in the next year, 1953, and so it didn’t affect me so much because I had other interests. But Mom and Dad really took it hard. Mom, still in her 90s, when May 23rd comes around remembers Jay’s birthday. He would be 75 in May of this year. Did she ever get over it? Probably not, but she accepted it. I just remember when we had the funeral the church was packed. The whole freshman class came.

DP: Jay had been elected President of the freshman class.

DK: That is true.

DP: That speaks to the kind of person he was. Having gone to country school and then to town. There were some very outstanding people in that class. Did they ever figure out what was the cause of death? DK: The autopsy determined tracheal thrompalis. Something clogged it and he couldn’t breathe.

DP: You would never get over that.

DK: No, they never did. One of the things that came out of that, I think, not immediately, but eventually they became Christians. Jay had just made a profession of faith about, maybe a month or less because he was to be baptized on one of the Sunday evenings. [A bit of weeping by both Dale and Donita.]

Dale: Every once in a while, when the family has a reunion, I wish I had a brother that I could go visit. I don’t know what he would be doing but it would be fun to have somebody to go to.

DP: He was just a remarkable person.

DK: Yes, he was. You asked about him. I couldn’t think of something particular. But we were close.

DP: What were some of the things we played together as kids? We lived about a mile apart.

DK: We rode bicycles up to your house or you would come to my house. I remember at school playing Annie Over. Choose up sides, catch the ball then try to get somebody. We played Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers. Try to sneak up to the barn loft silently and scare one another.

DP: I remember we had a chicken house and there were old barrels behind that we would climb up on and climb on the roof of the chicken house and play Cops and Robbers or something·up there. Pretended to shoot the cars as they went by on the highway. Running around the farmstead making shooting sounds. These were boy games, but I had to do it because nobody wanted to play anything that girls did. I remember playing cars in the yard. Of course, boys play with cars, spend hours making roads. Some of the old machinery that was not used, we would climb around on, pretend kind of games. I remember we would argue about our father’s cars and which car was the best. This was probably not too long after the war ended. Cars were kind of scarce to come by and my dad had some kind of something, and your dad had something else. They were not the same brand so there was a lot of discussion about which car was the best. [Dale remembered that my dad had a Buick.]

DK: Hiram Salley had a ______. He was a cattle buyer for one of the meat packing places and he would go all over the country in that car buying cattle and going to farm sales.

DP: I didn’t even know what he did. He had a farm, but he didn’t do the farm work himself.

DK: In later years Dad rented it from him, that half section across the road from us. That is good land. He had it terraced. I worked for him. I had left the power company and Dad and I had some time we weren’t doing anything and he wanted me to come over and I don’t remember what he wanted me to do but he had it terraced and he was showing me how to plow the terrace. He got his tractor turning too sharp or something and ran into the machinery behind him and I remember telling him that I was sure glad he was driving that tractor and not me. He didn’t say anything. I learned by watching him what not to do. He didn’t ever do much of the farming. And I don’t think Jerry did either He hired it done or had a hired man who lived out there when Jerry built that new house.

DK: Kenneth and Leota Brown lived just south of us. Dean and Dan Brown were younger than Jerry Salley. The Bruns lived south of us, had the two girls. I was reading the paper yesterday and saw that Roselle is head of the Chamber of Commerce. She had a flower shop.

DP: The Flower Basket. It is here but somebody else owns it.

DK: Other memories about childhood play. We had hoops on the granary to play basketball. One Christmas Mom got us a farm set and we would play with the animals, make roads in the dirt, make a field, all kinds of things like that. Dad had a wheel of some kind and we would get a stick and try to keep that thing rolling down the driveway and back.

DP: What are some of your memories about 4-H?

DK: I had champion steer a couple of years in a row. Went to Hutchinson a time or two to show. Dad always wanted us to have the best livestock and we did. Gary Warden and I were competitors. He was part of the Eager Beavers. One of the times I got Grand Champion and he got Reserve Champion. We were good friends until it came time to show and tell and then not so good. Just had a lot of great experiences. There were some kids from town and community. Mom was one of the project leaders. There were some people who lived on the Salley place [DP: I think it was the old Anthony place] named Arbuthnot, Robert and Jean. Bob was the club leader, Mom was a leader.

DP: Bob and Jean were Kansas State graduates. They were on the Anthony place for a few years. Something kind of interesting – Bob had a sister. My dad had an aunt who lived in Denver, their name was Carpenter, they had nine or ten girls and the husband was determined to have a son, so they kept having babies until they finally had a son. That son married Bob Arbuthnot’s sister. Strange world isn’t it.
We met them once when they came to Liberal to visit Bob and Jean. Actually, he committed suicide later. Bob and Jean moved back to the Manhattan area.

Dale: Bob had a brother who was a vet, was a partner with someone down in the south part of Liberal.

DP: I thought that brother was a rancher. Bob and Jean lived in that Anthony old house. She was a very domestic person and fixed up that house as much as it could be fixed up. They both did a lot of work with us in 4-H.

Dale: Jean did a lot with cooking, sewing and that sort of thing and Bob did a lot of the club things and livestock. When I went to high school the FFA program was started and that correlated with 4-H.

DP: Remember we did things to prepare for model meetings, business meetings using Roberts Rules of Order, doing demonstrations. There was judging on model meetings.

DK: We did plays. Mom did plays. Did fashion shows, best dressed boy and girl.

DP: Remember that we did a play that we took to the Kansas State Round-Up at Manhattan. You, Jay, Eldon, Jennette, myself, Paul, and I think Mona Sealey. I don’t remember what it was. Some little romantic comedy about kids.

DK: 4-H camp was at Dodge City.

DP: I recall Rock Springs as the 4-H camp, the state 4’H camp.

DK: I still have some of those project books. Instead of carting around and storing, I should throw it away.

DP: I have some things my mother had. I am sorting it and throwing a lot away. Some I will sort and use in a family history project.

DK: I have pictures taken by one of those old brownie box cameras. Some of the Dust Bowl. You see that old cloud rolling in.

DP: Those represent a time and an era. A lot of people probably have those. They could be scanned into the computers.

Some general conversation about old things.

DP: Talk about your life.

DK: I worked for the power company about five years. I was a lineman. Gail and I were married August 1953. Dad and I farmed together for a while. We leased the Anthony property. We also had the Black property north of town. Had about 2,000 acres. Melody was born in ’56 and Greg in ’58. I had asthma as did my kids. We moved into the old Anthony place for a year or so. We all had asthma and hay fever. We
moved back to Liberal and owned a house in Liberal. I farmed with Dad another year or so and then I said I just can’t. There was an ad in the paper for Harps furniture store, wanted a delivery guy so I said I can do that. I worked at that for a little while and then Harp decided he needed a carpet laying crew. So, we had two carpet laying crews. That is how I got into that. Then he built the store called The Furniture
Mart on South Kansas Avenue. I helped build it. The guy he had managing it left to go back to eastern Kansas so then he made me the manager. I managed that for three years and then Homer Hawkins, who had Hawkins Furniture, was wanting somebody to manage his store. I got a better deal and went there. Wound up, Hawkins carpet layer quit so I started laying carpet again. One of my best friends, Carlos Stuck from church, had come to Colorado in 1963 and we’d come out to visit him and he kept telling me, “Dale you need to move to Colorado.” About two years later he convinced me that was right, so I went back and told Homer in three weeks I was moving and came to Colorado. Gail and I both felt like it was the right thing to do. We left Mom and Dad and her folks. Her dad died the year after we moved, 1966. Everybody out there was from somewhere else. Southern Baptist work was pretty new there then. We went to a Southern Baptist church. So that is how that all worked out. The kids graduated from high school in Colorado.

DP: You started your own business there didn’t you?

DK: In 1977. I laid carpet for a long time. I decided I wanted to get back into sales. I worked for Sealy Mattress Company. That was going good until they wanted to transfer me to Salt Lake City. They wanted me to run that operation. I went there for about three months (back and forth). Took the family over and it just wasn’t a fit. I came back and told the guy I appreciate all you have done for me, but it just doesn’t feel right to go to Salt Lake City. Such a weight flew off my shoulders when I walked out of the office that morning. So then went back to laying carpet. I did that until 1977 and Carlos and I laid carpet together. Our friends found out we were in the carpet business and so they would come and say could you give me some carpet. We found a guy that we could buy carpet from so we would buy carpet and sell it and install it. The guy that we were buying from hit me up one day and said how would you like to get into this sales business. He had a lot of good ideas but not a lot of money and so he asked me if I would like to buy part of the business. I had never been in business before. I had a little money and said I might be interested in doing that, so I bought 40% interest in his business. He wanted somebody to manage it, so I took over the managing. I knew about managing and furniture stores. A couple of years later, in ’79, he was in trouble again and he came to me and wanted to sell the balance. I had a friend who had been regional manager for a truck line, and they consolidated with Yellow Freight. So, he didn’t have a job as they brought in their own people. We got together and decided, you know trucking and I know carpet and let’s see if we can get a trucking business going. We bought the 60% out. I was the principle owner and he bought into it. This was in 1977. I still have it. That has been 30-some years ago. We truck carpet – specialized carrier. We just haul it, we don’t sell it, we don’t install it, we don’t clean
it, we just haul it. Most of the carpet is still made in Delton, Georgia. We haul it into Denver for the dealers. Also Salt Lake City. We had to get interstate commerce authority. We can haul to 48 states. It has been a good business for us, and we have customers that have been with us for the 30-some years. Their kids are running their business for them just like my son is running my business. Still the same company. Sort of by accident. You know, I never did have to look for a job. Everything just kind of happened.

DP: The values you learned in your family carried you through.

DK: Yes. I remember Dad did deals with a handshake. I expect it was the same with your dad. I remember when we were running some cattle, we would buy in the fall and sell in the spring. So, we needed money to buy cattle. We would go to Chet Naylor at Peoples Bank and say we wanted to go to the sale on Thursday and buy some cattle. Don’t know how much money we need but just wanted to let you know. Okay, whenever you buy them let me know how much you need. I think at that time $17,000 okay here is the note, give it to Helen and she will put it in the bank. Nothing to fill out. When we sold the cattle, we paid it off. Dad was that way, that kind of guy.

We used to have what we called knights of the open road, hitchhikers who just traveled the country. We lived close to town and they would come and want to sleep in the barn. We had that old bunk house and said, yes, they could sleep there and then Mom would say we are going to have supper in about an hour. Come and have supper with us. She loved that, she met some really interesting characters. She
loved to talk to them, find out where they were from, what they were doing, their background. Some were fairly well educated but just got tired of life in general and started traveling around. Dad was the same way, inviting these people for supper. So that is something that I remember about Mom and Dad both. They were interested in people. It rubbed off on me. I am a people person.

DP: It made you a good salesperson.

DK: Yet, I didn’t like sales.

DP: Talk about Gail. She was from Liberal. You were high school sweethearts.

DK: Didn’t know that until our senior year. We began to date. Her dad was a cement finisher. Velda worked at the Fairmont creamery. Gail worked for Panhandle Eastern Pipeline. She studied business subjects in high school. She was one of the fastest typists and she did shorthand. She was secretary to Cliff Horn, one of the managers at PE. After Melody was born, she went to work for Farmers Insurance.
Then after Greg was born, the same. When we moved to Denver, she got a real estate license and worked for a real estate company. She never did sell houses but wanted the knowledge about how to write the contracts, etc.

She was a lovely person. We had a good time, did a lot of things together, camping, theater, the arts etc. I never got into sports. I am interested in music and that sort of thing. In Denver there were a lot of opportunities and things to see and do.

She became ill. They did all kinds ohests. Finally, did a cat scan or something and discovered a tumor. By the time it was discovered it had metastasized. She died in ’96.

We had two children. Melody got married a few months after high school. Greg graduated from college with a degree in forestry and land management. That was the time of a big shutdown. He worked in a business for a while and then we took on the warehousing carpeting company. He became our warehouse manager. He has been working for me ever since.

Dale has six grandkids. He talked about their families and occupations, and where they live. They are all doing well.

Dale and his second wife Janet have been married 16 years. They met in a singles adult class at the church where Dale and Gail were the leaders many years before Gail’s death. There was further general conversation that is not transcribed here.

DP: Do you remember that we used to ride horses together? We had old Daisy.

DK: And we had Boots.

DP: We also had Judy, but Paul rode her. I didn’t ride her. But old Daisy – I remember the time that you and I were riding your horse, Paul and Jay were on Old Daisy. We were out in your pasture riding bareback and I started to slip, I had a hold of you trying to hang on, but I just continued slipping and I fell off into a cactus patch. Knocked the breath out of me, I couldn’t catch my breath, but I remember lying there in the cactus patch, I looked up, you and Paul and Jay were standing there terrified. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I will always remember the look on your faces. Of course, I broke my arm, got back to the house and your mother picked some of the cactus out of my skin.

DK: I was telling Janet about that when you called.

DP: That was the year that there was a lot of rain and that pond on the Salley and the Brown land went over the highway and the highway was closed. There I was with my broken arm and the rest of you guys were out riding the bikes up and down the highway and roller skating up and down the highway and I couldn’t do it because I had a broken arm!

DK: I remember that. There were no cars on the highway to run over us.

DP: I remember a time or two riding our bicycles through that sandy road over to my grandparents, Grandparents Fraim. Maybe we only did that a couple of times. When we got there my grandmother took hot bread out of the oven and we had butter and honey on our hot bread.

DK: That is what I remembered about Mrs. Franz. I always liked to walk home from school on Monday or Tuesday with Marlene and stop at Franz’s and she always had fresh bread. She was one of the few that was still making bread and she always offered us bread with jelly. Always liked to do that.

I remember one Sunday Delbert came over and we rode our horses over where the sand hill plums were by the river. There was an old buffalo skull or something in a bank there, I think we dug it out.

DP: That was a day’s adventure. We didn’t do that often.

DK: Maybe when we got back from that ride was when I got the measles.

DP: Remember the hay mow, playing basketball there-

DK: We had the haunted house there. That was a 4-H thing I think.

DP: Maybe even school. I think the school did that once. I remember the teacher helping put that together. Mr. Crippen – the county agent. He took us so many different places.

DK: When we were going to Manhattan, it might have been 4-H Round-up. We were going down the highway, he wasn’t the best driver in the world, we were passing, I think it was a gasoline tanker, and a car came and he just kind of scooted over in between the front and back wheels of that tanker. There was room enough then for the car that was coming to get around us.

DP: I remember he was not a very good driver. He was a good guy. He really enjoyed kids. He was very active. He was an old man by then.

DK: He was.

DP: He enjoyed being with the kids. He was a very encouraging, good leader. He encouraged us to square dance. He was the one that initiated that. Some of the other 4-H clubs did that and he was the one that got our club doing that.

DK: When Gail and I were dating we went to a square dance at Arkalon or someplace out there. I got two left feet, I couldn’t keep allemande left and allemande right.

DP: One thing I regret about my childhood. I never learned to dance. Our religious teaching didn’t encourage that. My parents were good dancers. They didn’t go to public dances. My Grandpa Priefert loved to dance. When they built the first barn that was there, they had Saturday night dances in the hay mow. Then the barn burned down. He rebuilt the barn so the barn that is there is the rebuilt one. He
loved to dance, and my father learned to dance from his parents. He taught my mother how to dance and some of her friends. So, they danced around the house. They were good dancers. But they didn’t ever teach us.

DK: On the farm, I didn’t have time for a lot of activities. When I was in high school in band, I did play in the dance band. We played at a lot of the proms in the schools.

DP: I will say one more thing. I think about you and Jay and Paul and I playing together, growing up together. We were good kids. We didn’t quarrel, we were kind to one another, I don’t remember fussing or fighting. We didn’t do naughty things. We weren’t reckless. We didn’t damage things. We had a wonderful time together.

DK: That is something kids miss now because they have their nose stuck in the computer or something like that.

DP: We ran around the whole farmstead.

DK: I remember I had a new pair of overalls. We liked to get up on that old tin shed, it’s still out there at the Fitzgerald’s, and slide down. We’d crawl up to the top and then just sit down and slide on that tin roof. There was a nail and I caught that thing. Marlene was there. I was very embarrassed. Mom scolded me real good for ripping my overalls.

DP: Time for us to go to the reunion dinner. Wonderful memories and images of past times that may never recur again. Community life. The qualities of families in our community were kind of unusual. They were peaceful families. There wasn’t drinking. There wasn’t wild living. They were very temperate people. Good marriages, not perfect but good solid marriages. Cruel things did not go on, there was not
abuse. The women were strong women, the men were gentlemen.

DK: The older kids in the community that you think about, the Swans – Richard, Medford and Allen, and Delbert and Hugh Harnden, who else, the older guys in that community, they all went into the Service, into the military in WW2. The quality of guys -that means a lot.

DP: In the city where I live, I get some royalty checks and I go into the bank, they wonder where I get this money, what are these checks, they have not seen things like this in the city and don’t know what those are. I said the story goes back to who my ancestors were, my parents, my grandparents and even my great grandparents.

Thank you very much. We are now going to the dinner. Janet you will have to listen to this.