18: Interview with Dorothy Fraim Brown – Liberal Memorial Library

Date: April 2008

Place: Home of Joe Brown and Dorothy Fraim Brown

Interviewer: Donita Priefert Payne

DFB: I am Dorothy Fraim Brown. I was born in Tyrone, Oklahoma May 1, 1930. I was going to be Dorothy Ann but since I was born on the first of May they named me Dorothy May. Mother didn’t take a lot of care of me as a baby – a lady in Tyrone, Carrie French, [took care of me]. She took care of a lot of the babies. She was a heavy-set woman, the babies just fit right in her bosom. So I had her taking care of me a lot when I was just tiny. I wasn’t very big, I was just over five pounds. The one thing that Mother and Daddy had said, when I was just tiny, I was just crying and just having a fit. They looked over early in the morning and I was covered in ants. They had to get the ants off me. Things back then weren’t as important as they are today. You didn’t have your shots and run to the doctor every little bit. I once had an earache, had a real bad ear infection a lot of the times and I’d just cry and cry with earache. I remember Mother would make me salt packets, warm them in the oven and I’d put them on my ears to try to ____, and then whenever they would come to a head, call them rising I guess, it would break and that was the only relief I had. But my land, my ears were damaged from that.

We lived in Tyrone until I was a sophomore in high school. It was during the beginning of the war. Daddy had a brother [Ray Fraim] that lived in San Juan, Texas and he wanted Daddy to come down there. So we sold everything there in Tyrone. Daddy had worked for Southwestern Public Service too as an auxiliary plant operator whenever they needed something. The Tyrone plant was there and he would go and start
the engines there. He worked for the city, was a water superintendent of Tyrone. Whenever things got along toward the starting of the war things were getting pretty tight and so Uncle Ray wanted him to come down there. I started to school in Far San Juan Alamo. I had never been around anybody that was different to me. There were a lot of Mexicans, I didn’t understand them, and they didn’t understand me.
I was just like a fish out of water. Mother didn’t like it down there either. We stayed about six months. Then we packed up and came back to Hooker. Dad worked odd jobs until he ___, they were building the Panhandle Eastern plant out here and he came and worked for them for a little while. Then he was offered the job as a power plant operator for Western Line and Telephone. He worked there, I suppose,
for twenty years.

When he was growing up, my dad was Dewey Fraim, he lived in Nebraska with his sisters and his mother. He did not know his brothers out here until he was grown. He came out in 1926… [or] suppose 1924 or 1925 because Mother and Daddy were married in 1926.

DP: His father was… ?

DFB: His father was Thomas Fraim and his mother was Mimi Hoxi. She was a Sparr. They lived in Nebraska.

DP: Tell a little about that story, about that family story.

DFB: Well, when Grandpa Fraim [Thomas] and the boys, the four boys (Willie, Ross, Ray, Frank) left Nebraska [DP: it was actually lowal and came out to Kansas looking for land and went down to Oklahoma. Thomas and Mimi were divorced because he remarried, married the woman that took care of the boys just to make it look good. They moved from Welch, Oklahoma and bought land north of Liberal. They lived there for several years and then they moved the house into Liberal. It is out there on Eleventh and Washington. Across the road there where all the buildings are today, there is a vacant lot. That is where when the circus came to town they would put the circus tent out there. We’d always come up to go to the circus and see Grandpa at the same time.

My father lived in Nebraska, the town of Orchard, he and the girls. Aunt Mary married Cal MaHood. One of the other girls married Cal’s brother. What was her name? I can’t remember now.

DP: One of those Sisters died – Wilma’s mother. It sounded like she had post-partum depression.

DFB: She committed suicide, hung herself in the attic of the house. Aunt Mary had a daughter [Ellen] and she [Mary] raised Wilma. She just practically ruined Wilma because she wasn’t a good mother. When Wilma”s dad remarried he married a real nice lady and she took Wilma and had to take all that out of her. Ellen never did get over it. She still is different than the rest of us.

Daddy came out here, he was in his late 20s when he came.

DP: For some reason I thought he was 16, a teenager when he came to Liberal.

DFB: No I don’t think so because he came out and stayed with Uncle Frank and helped him farm some. Dad hadn’t been out here too long before he and Mother married. His mother came out for a while and they ran a restaurant there in Tyrone. While I am thinking about [that], if you are looking through those old pictures, if you find one that looks like a restaurant. I have seen the picture and I was thinking Lowene did. It shows Grandma and Daddy standing there. The tables had white tablecloths on. That was their restaurant there in Tyrone. It was after Mother and Daddy were married, or right along in there that they had the restaurant. She came and helped him run it, did the cooking.

We visited back and forth. When I was young Uncle Frank had the three girls and we visited with them a lot. We never did get up to Liberal to visit much, about once or twice a year I think about the only time we visited with Ross and Opal. That seems like a long time ago. I don”t remember very much what went on.

DP: My mother [Lowene Fraim Priefert] was born in 1915 so she was 15 years older than you.

DFB: Yes, so there was quite the difference in our ages there. As we got older, we got to be real good friends. Didn’t make any difference after you get older. Then of course Delbert was in the picture too. He was another cousin.

Then when we got back into Hooker, I finished school there my sophomore year and then came up here [to Liberal]. Daddy went to work for the power company. I did my junior and senior years of school here in Liberal High School. I graduated in ’48 in May and Joe and I were married in August. I went to work when I first came up here. As a junior and senior, I worked for a typewriter company. I was a
bookkeeper for them and then when we got married I went to work for Panhandle Eastern as a stenographer. Later on when I had Terry, they called me and wanted me to go back to work for Liberal Gas Company. They called me, I never had to apply for a job except my very first one. So I worked for Liberal Gas Company and I worked for them for 21 years. I quit that, stayed home with Terry for a while, couple of years I guess. Then they called me from Dr. Campion’s office and wanted me to work for Dr. Campion. So I worked there four or five years, just part-time. When he died, I went to work for Dr. Senalli. They called me and asked if l wanted to work for them. I worked for Dr. Senalli for about seven or eight years. Then I stayed home for a little while and then went to Cimarron Pathology and worked there about four years. So, I have been busy and enjoyed it. We have taken some nice vacations. Every year we plan to try to take a nice vacation. We had three weeks, we didn’t always take them all. So we have been quite a few places.

We took the car most of the time until we got, several years ago, a travel trailer, a fifth-wheel. We took that camping. We enjoyed taking it, having your own bed, having your own cooking. It worked out really nice. We still have it but we haven”t been camping for a couple of years. Since Joe had his open-heart surgery and his cancer, we haven’t done very much of that. We’ll go out to Terry’s and stay a few days
then we’re back home again. I don’t mind staying home. It is a good place especially since we have the dog. It is too hard to go traveling with her. She barks at all the trucks going down the road, it drives you crazy.

DP: Talk about your dad [Dewey Fraiml. What was his personality like and what was his life like?

DFB: You know, he was a gentle person, I guess you would call him that. He and Mother, Mother fussed at him, he never fussed with her. She was really pretty difficult to get along with. Now, Joe got along with her fine. But she would get mad at me and just, everything just had to go her way or it just didn’t go. We moved her from her house over here. She’d stay a while and then get mad at me and want to go
home. We just wore the furniture out moving it back and forth. Dad was just a gentle person and loved to garden. He put a garden out every year. After he got it out and going good he didn’t like to take care of it. So he would water for a little while until he would get it up and going good and then, that was all, he didn’t like it anymore. He worked at the power plant, swing shift, worked nights. That was difficult to
have somebody trying to sleep during the daytime. Couldn’t do anything. Joe and I looked after them. Daddy lived until he was 92. He was out here at the nursing home. He had a ruptured appendix when he was 86, got infection, about killed him. I couldn’t take care of him. He wasn’t fat but he was stout. When he was in the hospital, the little girls, she’d come up to the side of the bed, he was under that medication and he would just take one hand out and just pick her up off the floor. Like to scare her to death ! He wasn’t in his right mind a lot of the time when he was in the hospital. He was going to go home. They called me in the middle of the night and said that Dewey is dressed, and he is going to go home. I had to go up there and talk him out of it, made him get back in bed. Stayed up there the rest of the night. We spent quite a bit of time in the hospitals with Mother and Daddy both. I thought about renting a room up there! She had several surgeries too. She had cancer, breast cancer. She had two broken legs and hips and then this cancer. I stayed at the hospital with her all the time because she
wouldn’t press the button to get the nurse. She said, “l can’t do it.” She wouldn’t do it. So, we’d have to be there with her all the time in case she needed something. But Daddy, whenever I had to take him to the nursing home, I said, “l can’t take care of your wound from the appendix, it was still draining. We will just have to put you in the nursing home for a while.” He said, “Well, you do whatever you think is
best.” He stayed there four years and then his mind got bad, so I took him over to Elkhart. They had a psychiatrist over there, really a nice woman. They had overdosed him at the nursing home, Good Sam in Liberal. He just had too much medication. We took him over there and sat there for 36 hours while they took all that medication out of him. It was just like being a drug addict. He laid there with his head up off
the pillow for that long. Ever’ once in a while he’d say, “Joe, let’s go home.” Joe would say we’ve got to wait until you get to feeling better.” Finally when the doctor said, “Why not just leave him over here? We have a brand-new facility. It is just like a new hotel.” So we did, we left him there. It was kind of bitter for me because when he was here at Good Sam they would call me at any time and say to come out and give Dewey his medicine, we can’t get him to take his medicine. So I would go out and give him his medicine. In Elkhart they did all that, it was 60 miles over there. I would go to Good Sam sometimes twice a day. It was better for both of us for him to be at Elkhart, he got weaned from me a little bit, then I didn’t have all the responsibility either.

DP: Did he ever talk about his living with his sisters during his youth?

DFB: Not a lot. He was over in Orchard. So his sister in Orchard, why can’t I think of her name – Mary is the only name I can think of now. Mary lived in Neligh and was a schoolteacher. He mostly lived with the sister in Orchard.

DP: She was probably a calmer person than Mary.

DFB: Yes, she was. Aunt Mary came out here one year, one summer. We [Joe and Dorothy] wanted to go someplace so Daddy called her and asked her if she would come out and stay with them while I was gone. That didn’t turn out too well. She came out here on the bus with a paper sack and she had $35,000 in this paper sack!

Joe: Went to the bank and took it out and brought it all with her. [Laughing by everyone]

DFB: When she’d go to Ellen’s, Ellen lived in Washington D.C. or around there, she’d get on the airplane and she took Ellen two dozen eggs. I don’t know why she thought Ellen didn’t have fresh eggs, but she always took fresh eggs.

DP: I remember her coming here once, I don’t know what year that was. I was probably high school age. Her skin was very wrinkled, she was kind of thin and I just got this image of her as a comic strip character. She looked and acted like a comic strip character! Extremely talkative, kind of a loud voice, laughing and carrying-on all the time.

DFB: She was that all right.

DP: So different than your dad or my grandad who were quiet, more dignified.

DFB: Daddy was more quiet. Uncle Ross was blond, blue-eyed. Daddy was real dark and he had dark eyes.

DP: My grandad had white hair from the time I remember him.

DFB: But he was blond and more fair skinned. And Mary was fair skinned. Daddy and the other two boys were dark. I don’t know where they got that. From their Welsh ancestors. I guess they were from Wales, that was their ancestry. I guess that is where the dark skin came from. Then they settled in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and were locksmiths. Every time we went anyplace, and Lowene too, we’d look in the antique stores and find the Fraim locks. They weren’t our generation, but they were relatives somewhere down the line. It was kind of neat to find a Fraim lock – the way Fraim is spelled.

Joe: They sold out in 1957 to another company, I don’t remember which one.

DP: I didn’t know that. So Fraim locks continued for a long, long time. Did you know Uncle Frank and Clara?

DFB: Yes, they lived east of town [Tyrone]. We went out there quite a lot. Frank was a little unusual.

Joe: He was a little like Mary.

DFB: Yeah he talked a lot. He was a farmer. Aunt Clara did whatever he wanted to do. He was real eccentric, I thought. He had the three girls, Ruth, Lila and Francis. They are all dead now. Ruth was the oldest one. She seemed like the closest to me but Francis was more my age, a year older. Ruth was several years older. They [Frank and Clara] didn’t have any children for a long time. They had adopted
this boy. I didn’t know him. Then they had Ruth. Ruth was real fair and like her mother, kind of heavy-set. Lila was tall and dark like her dad. Francis had a little of both. They farmed out there east of Tyrone. Girls went to school in Eureka, a little school over in Baker. They all graduated from there. Ruth went to school at Panhandle A&M and got her degree. She taught school in Forgan and Hooker, in Eureka some. Lila went to college, it was during the war, and she could teach by going to college for two years and getting a teaching certificate. So she taught for a little while and then she got married. She married a guy that was a little different. He was in a car wreck and was killed. Lila lived in Hugoton where they were living when he was killed. Lila continued to live there until she couldn’t take care of herself anymore and
she moved to Ottawa, Kansas with her daughter and ended up in a nursing home there. Francis was a teacher, lived in Colorado, she and her husband. Her husband worked for the state of Colorado, soil conservationist for the government. They moved to Sterling, Colorado. She had cancer after she retired from teaching. She did not live long after that. They are all gone. I am the only one left in this part of the country. We had the cousin in California and one in Washington D.C. and that is the size of the Fraim family. Of course, they have children.

DP: Ray Fraim who lived in Texas had a couple of sons. They had three other children who died. The three gravestones are there where the Fraim plot is with Thomas and Polly Ann and those are their three children. My grandparents and my mother used to talk about what a beautiful little girl that one little girl was. It was so sad that she died. Marjorie. I think some of the diseases that were common in
those days. Measles, orI don’t know what it was.

Note: Ray (Dewey’s and Ross’s brother) and Flora Fraim lived north of Liberal on a farm later known as the Bozarth place (five miles north on Highway 83 and l think three miles east) for quite a number of years. Ray farmed but also had a battery business of some sort. When they moved to San Juan, Texas he made his living in the battery business. See the story about Polly Ann Fraim, mother of Thomas Fraim,
page 204. As an older woman Polly Ann came to Liberal to live with Thomas on the farm north of Liberal. He built a small house for her and a granddaughter, Mae Fraim. Mae worked at the Liberal newspaper with Maureen Tate. She married a man from Minnesota and lived there the rest of her long life. Polly is buried in the Fraim plot where Thomas and the three children of Ray and Flora are buried.

DFB: Lloyd never did marry until he was in his 30s. He married a lady that had two children. Her husband had been killed. He raised these two children. The boy is in Galveston and is a doctor. I don’t know where the girl is. She lives in Lano [?]. She moved from San Juan. Before Lloyd died they moved to Lano. He was postmaster at San Juan for years and years and when he retired he moved to Lano and bought
some property there. He fell and hit his head and never did regain consciousness. The other son died- He lived in Hickory, North Carolina. He worked for Kodak in Rochester, New York for a long time. When he retired they went to Hickory. Her name was Polly. They had one boy and he was killed.

DP: So the Fraim name is at an end.

DFB: Yes, it is gone. There is a Fraim that lives down in Arkansas that I tried to contact. We never could get together. Her name wasn’t Fraim, but she had married a Fraim, but we never could meet. I suppose she is probably not even living now.

DP: What I remember is that older men, my grandad and your dad, often got together to visit.

DFB: Yes, they did.

DP: They were probably a lot alike as far as temperament.

DFB: I think so. Their wives are similar too. Pretty clingy and wanted attention.

DP: Wanted a lot of attention.

DFB: Yes, Mother especially. She couldn’t run a vacuum cleaner. She wouldn”t. She probably could but she wouldn’t. But she didn’t want to. She cooked, but that is about the size of it. She didn’t want to go anywhere unless Joe suggested something. When she would get these really deep depression[s] she just – Joe would go get her, go over in the east part of town and drive around.

Joe: I’d take her in the east part of town and drive up and down some of those streets and look at some of those houses. She would get to feeling pretty good. We’d get back home and she thought the place didn’t look so bad after all. I could do something and it was just perfectly all right. She never did get mad at me like she did Dorothy and her dad. She was always, she thought I was part of her family, so she was
. She always did take care of me. When I would go see Dorothy she would just kind of [act] like I belonged there. She never did see anything wrong with anything I done.

DP: You were perfect in her eyes. Life must have been difficult with her.

DFB: It was. You had to just walk on eggshells all the time and trying to think ahead to get things done before she asked for it.

Joe: Tell about the skunk you raised.

DFB: Yeah. I got it when I was living in Tyrone. One of the farmers came in and he had a box with some little baby skunks that he had found. Didn’t even have their eyes open. They were just newborn. So I went to the drug store and got a paper sack, took this little skunk, about six inches long, he was just little. I took it home in this paper sack and opened it and showed it to Mother. “Look what I have got.” She almost fainted. We kept it for quite a while. I raised it, it had a grape basket and had it lined you know, had the grape basket inside a bushel basket with a blanket over the top, under the old cook stove that was up on legs. That thing would crawl out of that and I’d hear it and find it in the living room under the piano. Raised it until it was full grown. Fed it with an eye dropper. It got colic one day and just cried and cried. I didn’t know what to do with it so I got some real thin, warm soda water, used an eye dropper and squirted it down. He got over it.

Joe: Never was deodorized. As it got older I’d come over to see Dorothy. They had linoleum and had it waxed and it was slick and that skunk would run up there and try and throw its tail up in the air and I would grab him by the tail and just throw him across the floor. He’d just go sailing acrost there and he would turn around, his feet just going clickity click, run back and throw up his tail, and I would slide him
across the floor. I played with him all the time.

DP: Just like a cat would play.

DFB: He didn’t know that he had a scent. He didn’t smell. A lot of them if you have them operated on, they always have a scent, but this one never did until he got tangled up with – we gave him away and he went out to the farm and he got tangled up with a dog. The dog found out that he could spray. But he was pretty. When I gave him to Red and Gladys Mendenhall up in the drug store, they kept him and fed
him cod liver oil and eggs. He’d break those eggs. He’d throw them up against the box and break the eggs, eat the egg and that egg made his coat really pretty. We just existed for a while.

DP: Your life must have blossomed once you were able to get out of the domain of your mother a little bit.

DFB: Yeah. Of course, we just switched roles. She became the little girl and I was the mother. For a year after we were married, I took care of her more than she took care of me. I married at 18 and then just continued taking care of her until she died. Not a well day in her life and she lived to be 84.

DP: Did she have brothers and sisters? Did they experience depression like she did?

DFB: Oh yeah, she had brothers and sisters. They didn’t experience depression too much. Some of them might have. I didn’t know the older ones very well. The one that came and stayed a lot, Aunt Ella, was a widow. She was really jolly. I stayed with her a lot when I was growing up. One day she said, “Dorothy, do you want to learn a little Chinese prayer?” And I said sure. She said to get down on my knees and put
my head down and say “I know my heart, I know my mind, I know that I stick up behind.” It made me so mad, I thought I was really going to say something really profound I guess. I never did forget that.

DP: I think you must take after you dad more than your mother.

DFB: I try not to be like my mother. I almost went the wrong way, trying to not be like her because I just didn’t like being sick. I don’t like that. I’d go to work when I didn’t feel like it. Some days I’d just go whether I felt like it or not, you just did that in those days. Girls now aren’t that way.

DP: You resemble the Fraims in your physical makeup.

DFB: Except for my Grandma Wadley, I look like her. She was short. Grandma Hoxie wasn’t too tall either.

DP: The Fraims were pretty small, pretty short people mostly. I think my grandad, they said, was the biggest of all the Fraims. He was average height.

DFB: Grandpa Fraim [Thomas] was pretty short as I remember. I remember him just barely. We just didn’t go into Liberal often. Mother resented Daddy having anything to do with his family. I don’t know why. She didn’t like for him to even visit over the fence next door. He’d go out and visit over the fence and it would make her so mad.

DP: That is too bad isn’t it?

DFB: Yes, she just had a hang-up. She was jealous. I don”t know. You never can explain those things. Sometimes better that you don’t know.

DP: As I observe you and Joe together I get a sense of real peace and love between you. You really love and appreciate one another.

DFB: Yes, for 60 years after all. And I think Terry realizes that. He thinks we ought to move out there so they could look after us. I don’t want to. I am perfectly happy just to stay right here. I’ll go out there and visit but we won’t stay very long. Kathy [Terry”s wifel is busy. She is a home health nurse and then she goes to the beauty shop and she does micro-abrasion and then she is opening up a boutique in La Veta.
One of her friends was going to sell it so she bought it. Her dad left her a little bit of money when he died so she put it into this boutique. I don’t know what all she will have for sale. She is enjoying it.

DP: I remember that you play the piano. Did you learn to play as a child?

DFB: I did. I took lessons. I started when I was about ten, 12. I played the piano for church for years. But I don’t play anymore.

Joe: When she was playing for the church, one Sunday evening when Terry was about three or four years old, I usually sat about four or five rows back on the side of where the piano was, and somehow or another he got away from me and went up and sat down on the piano bench beside her. Instead of just letting him sit there, she turned around and said, “Come and get him.” I thought everybody in church
was going to fall out of their pews on that one.

The thing I like the best is somebody asked me, “How do you and Dorothy get along the way you do being together so much?” I said well, if she is not happy with something I am not either but we talk things over and we decide what we are going to do together. If she doesn’t want to do it, I don’t either. She is the same way, if l don’t want to do it, she doesn’t either. Neither one of us insists on having our own way.

DFB: With me being an only child and Joe having 13 [siblings in his family], when it came time to take care of his mother, she came here. I knew I couldn”t take care of her with my mother across the street and as jealous as she was. Mrs. Handy, she had three ladies that she took care of so I called her and I said, “Opal, can you take one more?” She said she didn’t know, that she would think about it. Two weeks to the day she called and said to bring her over. We just about had had it by that time too. It was just in the nick of time. I don’t know what we’d have done if Mrs. Handy hadn’t come to the rescue. Joe’s mother was just as happy over there as she could be. My mother wouldn”t have liked it all.

Joe: My mother, Dorothy could go and do things for her and she was just as happy as she was with me. But Pat and the other sisters would go by to do something for her but she didn’t want them around.

DFB: It was more home there, she had her bedroom there. She was real bad at taking pain pills, so I told Opal to give her the pain pills. I didn’t expect her to take them [on her own]. You”d look at her over there and she would just be jonked out. So you would look around. She would hide her pain pill under her pillow until she had four or five and then she would take them all at once. So we had to put a stop to
that. I’d go over there and she would say that somebody had stole her pants, that she couldn’t find her underpants anywhere. I said that nobody wants her pants. “Well, I can’t find them, they’re gone.” So I looked and found them in a little suitcase on the top shelf of her closet. So we would put them back in the drawer. It wasn’t but a few days until they were gone again. So I knew where to look for them again!

Joe: I don”t know how she got them up there.

DFB: So we have had some good times. ____[a name of someone] down at the drug store told somebody, “Dorothy has her Ph.D. in nursing home.” [Everyone laughs]

DP: As difficult as it was for you to take care of your mother all those years, it was an honorable thing to do.

DFB: I couldn’t let anybody else do it. Once she finally had to go to the nursing home, she never did forgive me for putting her there. Whenever she died, Dr. Campion didn’t call me until he”d gone out there and got everything ____. Then he had them call me and said I could come out now.

Joe: When your dad went out – well I guess when she went out there he said, “Don’t you think you have had enough?” [Dr. Campion said to Dorothy] He was a good..

DP: He was a very wise, sensitive person.

DFB: Yes. When your grandpa died, we were up at the hospital and he came out and he was crying. He always called him Uncle Ross.

DP: He had been my grandmother’s doctor for years. He said once that she had migraine headaches worse than anybody he had ever seen. He had treated a lot of men who had been in the war and gone through those war experiences.

DFB: He was an Army doctor.

DP: I know that you meant a lot to my mother. Of course, you and Joe helped to look after her when my dad died. So that was a very kind and wonderful thing that you did and it gave her some sense of security to know that you were there.

DFB: It was really strange when your dad was killed. I was over across the street at Marilyn Anderson’s. I had taken her some books. Joe called over at Marilyn’s. I just went across the street, I was that close to her when that happened.

Joe: She had a lot of support system. She asked us if we would come over and check and everything. It was about 2 o’clock one morning and they called us [emergency alert company] and said to check on Lowene. They couldn’t get her on the phone. We rushed over there right quick, they had given us a key to get in. So we went in, it gives you a funny feeling ’cause you didn’t know what you might find. So anyhow we went in, we could hear the TV going in the bedroom. So I hollered, “Lowene, you okay?” and went on down the hall and into her bedroom and she was laying there and I touched her and said, “Lowene.” She had accidentally rolled over on the call button. She woke up kind of startled and said, “Oh, it kind of startles you to wake up and find a man in your bedroom !” You know it is always easier to take care of someone with a good attitude [sense of humor]. She always had a good attitude. We appreciated being able to do things for her. You really wasn’t doing it for somebody, you was doing it with them. That makes a difference.

DP: When she came to Kansas City, she was a very grateful, peaceful person. It was a joy to have her there those years. She adjusted to that change and it was good for us to spend those last years with her. To establish that connection. She was always very appreciative. She was not a complainer. That made it a pleasure for all of us.

DFB: What did you do with her organ?

DP: We donated it. We had a hard time getting rid of it actually. The fellows at Faith Tabernacle south of town came up to get it and they had a little chapel that I think they put it in. This has been a good visit and I so much appreciate your stories. It is nice to be part of all this family.

DFB: You know I am so disconnected, my thoughts don’t –

DP: I thought your story was very good. I enjoyed it. It is good to talk about even the difficult things.

DFB: When we lived in Texas, that Christmas, Aunt Maude from Nebraska, Uncle Ray’s wife –

DP: I know who you mean [Flora Fraim]. She was a lovely person. My grandparents thought the world of her.

DFB: Her sister from Nebraska was there during the winter, she’d come down there, her name was Aunt Maude. Your Grandma and Grandpa came down. Lloyd was there, he was home on leave. We have a picture. It was 103 degrees on Christmas Day.

DP: Ray Fraim was an alcoholic.

DFB: Yes. Well, I think Lloyd drank some too.

Joe: Not enough, I imagine he had some but not a whole lot.

DP: My granddad never drank at all

DFB: My dad didn’t either.

Joe: We was in the car one day and parked on East 2″d Street on the south side of the street and some drunk came out of that joint there and came walking over to the car. Her dad had his window rolled down and this guy came up and wanted some money and boy, he just put that car in gear and just knocked that guy . That is one thing he couldn’t stand.

DP: You know there was another brother, I think his name was Willie. He was killed in an accident of some sort. I am not sure what it was, I thought it was a motorcycle accident.

DFB: It was a car.

DP: I don’t know if he drank or not.

DFB: I think so.

DP: There was a lot of that in those days just as there is now. The Eickmans, my Grandmother Priefert’s family, were teetotalers. There were a lot of sisters in that family. My grandmother said, “There will be no liquor in my house.” Other Eickman sisters said the same thing. That has carried through at least for some in the following generations.

DFB: This Eickman, Ruben… are they related?

DP: Not that I know of.

Well, I am going to have to say goodbye today. It has been a delightful occasion.

Joe: I’m glad you came by.

DP: I think these oral histories are wonderful. I will make CDs and will provide them back to you so that you will have an oral history for Terry and your grandchildren. I think they would find it interesting.

DFB: I hope that you have time to call Terrin. You would really enjoy her.

DFB: We use our cell phone to make long distance calls. We have never used the 300 minutes a month except the time Joe was in the hospital in Wichita.

Joe: But I didn’t know I was doing it.

DFB: He’d get the phone and poke buttons. He was allergic to the morphine, and he lay up there and sang Home on the Range at the top of his lungs, just as loud, they heard it all over the hospital. He remembered the whole thing. I just stood there and laughed. He didn’t know he was doing it. I couldn’t keep from laughing, it was so funny.

Joe: I didn’t know anything for about three days. They finally took me off it. That floor was the dirtiest place I ever saw in my life.

DFB: He saw all kinds of bugs!

DP: I have known other people in that situation. It was an overdose or a response to the medication.

DFB: I thought that was pretty good for him to sing Home on the Range and he was in the Kansas Heart Hospital.

Joe: At least I wasn’t cussin’ like some do.

DP: I have to say good bye. Thank you very much.

Update September 2019:
Joe and Dorothy are living in their home on Roosevelt in Liberal. Joe is 93 and Dorothy is 89. They recently celebrated their 71″ wedding anniversary. Dorothy has macular degeneration and does not see anymore. She also has arthritis. Joe also has serious health issues. Neither of them drives anymore. Friends look after them, they have Meals on Wheels. They no longer go to church because of their
frailties. Their son, Terry, lives in Wakenburg, Colorado and sees them often.