heading how i played the game - larksfield place · my mother told me that she had been an athlete...

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By Elinor B. Amstutz

How I Played

the Game

How I Played the Game © 2002 Elinor B. Amstutz

All rights reserved by the author and her heirs.

Editing assistance: Rita Pearce

Design and Layout by Terryl Asla

Published as a public service by I, Witness to History, The Online Library of our Lives, a program of The Cramer Reed Center for Successful Aging, 7373 East 29th Street North, Wichita, Kansas 67226. 316-636-8943

We encourage you to download this large print book from our website, http://iwitnesstohistory.org, and print it out for the education and enjoyment of yourself and others subject to the following conditions:

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LARKSFIELD PRESS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction page 1

A Happy Little Kid page 2

The Model T page 6

Beginning School page 8

Hard Times page 13

Good Influences page 17

Thoroughly Modern page 19

Early Ancestors page 24

Back to School and into Nursing page 27

A Vietnam Experience page 31

Home Again page 45

INTRODUCTION In 1997, a charming student interviewer from Wichita

State University came to our home at Larksfield Place with her tape recorder to chat with me about the subjects on a questionnaire I had received earlier. The time went fast and pleasantly and we thanked each other at the end. But the transcribed record of what we said was very disjointed and disconnected. I am grateful for the opportunity to rearrange and expand that conversation to hopefully produce something readable and of interest at least to members of my family.

Elinor B. Amstutz 1

A HAPPY LITTLE KID I was born in Pretty Prairie, a very small Kansas town

about 25 miles from Wichita. I don’t remember much ab out the house where I was born, but the last time I was in Pretty Prairie it was still standing. It was a stone house.

I’ve lived most of my life in Wichita, Kansas except for a year before I was married and the next five years, when we lived elsewhere. Thanks to my father, who wrote down what he could recall of his life, I can record where our family lived during those years that I don’t recall.

In the summer of 1916, my parents and my big brother, Albert, moved to Pretty Prairie where I was born January 22, 1918. My father was principal of the newly established rural high school there for the next four years. Then we moved to Anthony where he was high school principal when my little brother, Lawrence, was born.

By November 1922 we were living on a farm near Pretty Prairie where my little sister, Dorothy, was born.

My father had been farming for about six years, as well as teaching, with as little results as those who were devoting their entire efforts to agriculture in the aftermath of World War I. I remember how we lived then, but, I didn’t know how rough it was because I didn’t know what I was missing. I did not have an unhappy childhood. Quite the contrary! I was a happy little kid.

My father wrote that it became apparent to him that his family would starve to death if he continued to raise so much grain. Since they could not live on bread alone, something would have to change!

My mother told me that she had been an athlete in college

2 How I Played the Game

and that she had an aunt, a physical education instructor, who had impressed upon her the importance of physical exercise. In those days it was taboo for pregnant women to be seen in public on many occasions. Because she was an experienced maker of handmade lace (by the art of tatting, which involves thread and a shuttle), to get her exercise while she was pregnant with me she spent many hours walking around the dining room table —tatting as she walked!

Later, we lived in a very small house on a farm just a few miles from Pretty Prairie. That was where, at about two and a half years-old, I climbed up on the opposite side of a wheat binder that my father was repairing. He could not see me. When he turned the cycle over to see if it would work, it did! It cut off the end of my finger! That’s when he learned where I was. I had very healthy lungs! Of course, he felt terrible. They rushed me to the hospital in Hutchinson, but, in those days they didn’t try to reattach a finger the way they do today. I wouldn’t go back to those good old days in medicine for anything!

When I was about two and a half years-old, we drove to Oklahoma to visit my father’s twin brother and his family. Having arrived after dark, my father carried me into the house and when I looked from my father to my uncle at that elevated position, I exclaimed, “Two Daddies!”

I remember our house and how it was heated. It was a two-story house. There was a steep stairway to the bedrooms upstairs—and grated openings in the ceiling from the living room below allowed the heat from downstairs to travel up to the bedrooms. We had a large baseburner stove that burned coal or wood. It was round and pot-bellied. It must have been two and a half feet in diameter at its largest part. About two feet from the floor, a guard railing extended out to prevent

Elinor B. Amstutz 3

people from walking into it. Although the railing protected us from the hot part of the stove, it made the heater take up considerable space in one corner of the living room. One time when I was around three or four years-old, I was dancing around in the living room and I remember flinging my hand against the hot stove; my right hand not only has a short middle finger, but also a few scars. They hardly show at the age of eighty-four!

Our water well was in back of the house with a windmill attached to the pump. It filled the stock tank where the cattle and horses drank. Water was carried in buckets to the kitchen, which also served as a bathhouse on Saturday nights when everyone bathed in a washtub that was set on the floor. Water was heated on the wood-burning cook stove. Usually, the smaller children were bathed first—and then on up the line. Being number three, I hardly ever started a bath in fresh water. It was somewhat used by the time my turn came, but I didn’t know or care about how sanitary it might be. My big brother fell into the bathing line after me. Anyone willing to carry in and heat clean water was welcome to do it! There was plenty of water in the well.

We had a washbasin where we washed our hands and face or took birdbaths in between those Saturday night baths. This was in the kitchen in the winter and on the back porch during the summer.

While on the subject of the water supply, I’ll mention a story I’ve been told, although it’s hard to believe that such an ideal child as I would have done such a thing! My father had taken two water buckets in one hand and carried me on the free arm out to the water well. It required both hands to carry the full buckets back to the house so he expected me to walk. But I wanted to be carried. My first protestations were ignored


as my father continued onward to the house so I tried a trick that had apparently worked quite well on my mother: I held my breath and turned blue! But my father was not impressed. He kept heading toward the house where my mother (having heard my vocalization prior to holding my breath) was waiting in the doorway. She would have come to my rescue, but my father set down the buckets and restrained her while I keeled over and passed out! It is said that I shortly regained consciousness and then sheepishly walked to the house on my own—and that I never tried that method of persuasion again.

We used coal oil lamps to light our house.

The outhouse was out back and far enough away from the house for modesty’s sake. Thunder mugs were kept under the bed for those nightly needs and during inclement weather.

Elinor B. Amstutz 5

THE MODEL T There is one occasion I recall that required a little

deception on my part to get my own way. When I was a little less than five years-old, my father was making a trip in the old Model T to Wichita and, for some reason, I was going along. We were going to stay overnight with some friends and I must have been too excited to have an appetite because I was told I had to clean my plate at lunch or I couldn’t go. I was sitting at the table all alone after the others had finished eating. Finally, my plate had no more food on it—and as my father and I were walking out to the car, my mother noticed a pile of fried potatoes on the floor beneath my chair. Later, she said that she hadn’t called me back because she remembered I’d been told to clean my plate—and I had!

Daddy cranked up the Model T Ford with a crank handle located below the radiator on the front of the car. There was no need for the isinglass curtains because it wasn’t raining, so they were stored under the rear seat and we rode in the fresh air. I probably slept all the way to Wichita because of that big lunch, but I was wide-awake after we arrived at the home of our friends. I was amazed by the bathroom—with a fancy bathtub and stool and washbasin—and running water that came out of the wall!

I’m just surmising, but it’s possible that the purpose for the trip to Wichita was so my father could apply for a teaching position in the Wichita Public Schools. But for the time being, it was back to the farm to feed the chickens and help gather the eggs and feed the household garbage to the hogs. The dishwater was added to the garbage because there was nourishment in it, too.

Homemade lye soap was made from grease rendered from


the fat of slaughtered farm animals or that which had been left over from cooking. Laundry was done in a galvanized washtub up on a bench so Mother could bend over the scrub board that was leaning in her direction from inside the tub. The technique was to get the clothes wet, rub on the soap, and then rub the more soiled parts against the corrugated surface of the washboard. When I was sixteen, I visited my grandmother on her farm and got the chance to try my hand at this task. I had very little skin on my knuckles at the end of the first washday. We only washed on sunny days because she heated her wash water in a black three-legged cast iron kettle outdoors, under which she built a wood fire.

While we lived on the farm, I remember playing in the barnyard in my denim overalls. To this day, I can’t think of denim as material for dress-up clothing. It’s incongruous that anyone would put rhinestones on denim. Likewise, after nurses training, I had a hard time feeling dressed up wearing white because that was the color of my work clothing. Maybe that’s why I have such an affinity for wearing bright clothing now.

The Reno County grade card I received when I was four

years-old.

Elinor B. Amstutz 7

BEGINNING SCHOOL I attended school a short time in 1922 when we lived on

the farm because my mother was expecting her fourth child. Even though I can’t believe that I was any trouble, it seemed somebody thought it would be easier for her to care for just one young one; so, my older brother and I went to school. It was probably because my younger brother was such a handful!

Anyway, my brother and I rode a couple of miles to and from school on the back of an old broken-down horse called Old Dobbin. While we attended school Old Dobbin was tied to a post to await the return trip home. In addition to our own lunches, we carried lunch for our horse. The saddle was loosened while the horse waited for the end of our school day —and it would have to be tightened before we mounted him for the return trip.

My brother rode in front with the reins and I sat behind the saddle with no stirrups for my feet. I held on to his waist to stay on the horse. We proceeded at a leisurely pace because that’s the only gear Old Dobbin had, which is probably the only reason two so young were allowed to ride him. On one particular trip the saddle began to slip to one side very gradually until by the time we were in sight of home we were about to fall to the ground. Mother had been looking down the road waiting for us and she started running to our rescue. Too late! Both of us fell under the horse. He stopped immediately. I ended up with a cut in my left eyebrow. We both had a few bruises. But we went back to school on Old Dobbin the nex t day.

Our school was a one-room country school with one teacher who taught all eight grades. There weren’t always students in each grade, if the population in the district didn’t


produce students in the right age distribution. It seems there were three or four in the first grade. There was no such thing as kindergarten. We were seated according to age and then called on in that order, starting with the oldest. At first it was thought that I was learning to read at a precocious age until someone noticed that I was reciting from memory, being the youngest in line.

In October 1923, our family moved to Wichita to a house in the sixth block of Lulu, just south of Kellogg. I don’t think we lived on Lulu very long, but I have a report card from

Kellogg School with just average grades. The house is still there, as are all but one of the houses I lived in while growing up. One house was torn down to make room for the canal

route. It was at 1915 East Second Street.

We moved to a house at 1510 East Ninth Street that was within walking distance of Central Intermediate School where my father was teaching. Always after that, we lived within walking distance of his school and my father seldom drove the

Elinor B. Amstutz 9

car to school even in winter weather. This gave my mother the use of the car to carry on her church work, P.T.A., and teaching music lessons, as well as transporting children. We were never a two-car family.

The first two years at the university, I rode the streetcar to school and often walked home to save the nickel streetcar fare. At that time, we lived at 340 North Ash. During my last year at the university I was trusted to drive to school —and I picked up four passengers on the way; each paid me five c ents!

I now drive past the house on Ninth Street when I leave the Canal Route at the Eighth Street exit, driving to and from church. For several years, it looked very ramshackle and dilapidated, but, it’s been renovated and the yard has been cleaned up. Now, it’s the neatest house in the neighborhood. When we lived there, a vacant lot was next to it and, with the agreement of the owner, my father staked out a cow to graze so we had plenty of milk for four growing children. There must have been some kind of shelter for her in the winter. And I’m sure that she furnished plenty of fertilizer for the garden! I never knew my father to live anywhere that he did not have a garden. My older brother and the neighborhood playmates had a cave in that vacant lot, too. I was allowed only limited access to it, being the only girl.

There was a large field across the street, and then as now, there was only one structure in it. Then it was a somewhat deserted shed where the neighborhood children played. Now, it is a church. At that time, I wore black sateen bloomers as under garments, which were practical for not showing soil acquired by sitting on the ground, etc. in my usual childhood pursuits. They provided no protection from splinters in the board I propped up against the shed and started to slide down one day. Mother probably had to sew a new pair of bloomers,


but it was up to me to sit gingerly while the wounds healed after the splinters were removed and my wounds properly treated.

I continued school at the original Ingalls School at 923 Cleveland. It is now known as the Dunbar Campus. First grade was located in a white annex at the time. I must have narrowly escaped molestation one day after school when I went back into the room alone and was confronted by a man who was exposing himself. My instincts kicked in and I backed out of the room and high tailed it for home to tell my mother. I don’t know what happened after that, but I’m sure my mother took it up with the authorities immediately. I wonder if the man was apprehended...?

At that time, the black community was expanding from the area along North Main, Water, and Wichita Streets to include the area east to Cleveland Street between Third Street and 21st Street. I don’t recall any black students in Ingalls School, though. The polite term then was “negro” and that was used to replace the term now relegated to profanity. My parents taught us that blacks were equal to us in every way. I remember quoting my mother to a friend walking home from Washington School one day and the response was, “They may be as good as you, but they are not as good as I am.” That was a good many years before race problems would be paramount across the country.

Elinor B. Amstutz 11

I pour lemonade for my father and my brother (L.) while they take a break from digging the basement under our new home. This picture was taken in 1932.

HARD TIMES My father was working to repay the debts incurred from

unfortunate agricultural pursuits. Just when he was about to get his head above water, along came the Great Depression. When my father was transferred to Roosevelt Junior High School, we moved to 222 North Minnesota where I attended Lowell School. Many years ago, that building was demolished.

Later we moved to 1915 East Second where I attended Washington School. Now that building is about to be demolished.

Then came a year when the Wichita teachers did not receive their paychecks because taxes were not collected. The grocer across the street kindly extended credit to our family during that time and when the back pay finally arrived our grocery bill got paid. I don’t know whether there was interest due. We only charged what we couldn’t raise in our gardens.

Once again, there was a vacant lot next door that got planted to a very large garden. My big brother raised rabbits in hutches against the garage and Daddy acquired the use of a vacant lot at Ninth and Piatt where we raised sweet and Irish potatoes. That lot is still vacant. Many vegetables were canned or preserved. The root vegetables were buried in the ground and dug up as needed during the winter. Canning preserved many fruits and vegetables.

We children raised a little cash by peddling fresh vegetables in the neighborhood. One year, the potato crop was so large we couldn’t use or sell all of them, so Daddy bagged them up and took them to the Community Chest to be distributed to the needy.

My father would work in the summer time as a farm hand for one of our many farming relatives. We bought our shoes


from Sam, the Shoe Man in the 800 block of East Douglas. I just read in the paper that the business is quitting after 72 years. We got along—and we never lacked for the necessities. Each of us learned to pull our own weight. To this day I can’t stand to have a faucet drip or an electric light burn unnecessarily. I don’t know how much of that is due to my Scottish ancestry, though.

My older brother only lived until he was seventeen. We were living at 341 North Ash when the neighbors across the street were moving, so my father bought the house at 340 North Ash—the first one he ever owned. There was no basement or furnace, so it was back to the old baseburner stove until my brothers and father could hand dig a basement and install a furnace. This was accomplished the summer my big brother became seventeen. There were two reasons I know of that inspired him to labor so hard: One was to build strong muscles in preparation for playing football in the fall—and the other was the promise of a room of his own in the basement, where he finally wouldn’t be sharing a room with his little brother.

The back part of the basement was partitioned into a bedroom where my brother settled in. I don’t think he had slept there more than three or four nights when, on a Saturday evening he wanted to study the Sunday school lesson for the next day. He’d gone straight from taking a bath to his room, with his body still somewhat moist. There was a gooseneck desk lamp plugged in and turned on. He decided to move it. He was standing on fairly fresh cement that contained more moisture than aged concrete would. When he grasped the gooseneck part of the faultily wired lamp, electricity went through his body and down into the floor. Because his arm was flexed, the electricity contracted his arm muscles, pulling the lamp forcefully across his neck at the location of the jugular vein. At the same time he was thrown to the floor with great force.


My open bedroom window was directly over the basement window and the head of the bed was at the window to access whatever breeze there might be. I was horrified by what the doctor later explained was the involuntary death scream that I heard.

My father and I were out of bed at the same time, he preceding me down the stairs to the basement. From the steps I saw my brother lying inside the doorway to his room with the lamp shining on his face.

My father grabbed the gooseneck with his arm extended, causing the muscles to contract his arm in the extended position. Possibly because his body was not moist and conducting as much electricity, he was able to back out through the doorway, but I saw electricity jump from his body to the nails in the wood of the doorway making blisters on his skin before he managed to fall backward, pulling the lamp from the wall socket. He survived, whereas my brother was electrocuted instantly. All kinds of emergency efforts were made to no avail.

My older brother and I were the big kids and we were often in charge of the younger ones. I felt the loss of my brother and pal mightily, but of course, the whole family was crushed. It took a long time to remember to set the table for five instead of six. Such an experience makes the family closer I’m sure as each one tries to console the others. Our religious faith, our relatives, our friends, and our neighbors were extremely important in getting through the next months.

When he was about three, my older brother had had another close call when he’d inhaled a grain of corn. We would have been living on the farm at the time. I think he was taken to the hospital in Hutchinson because one of my father’s cousins was a doctor there. This was long before antibiotics, so he was a very sick little boy when pneumonia and then an


abscess developed, but they managed to pull him through.

My younger brother still lives in Wichita. He was rather rebellious as a teenager, but when he decided to go to college, he followed in the footsteps of Dad and got a teaching degree. He was ineligible for the service because of breaking a leg one summer when he was working on a relative’s farm, so he worked at Boeing during the Second World War and later at Learjet until he retired.

My sister and her husband live in Shell Knob, Missouri now, but they lived in Wichita while our children were growing up. She had two girls. My brother had three boys and two girls. We had two girls and a boy.

Our oldest daughter’s husband was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1997 and—Praise the Lord—chemotherapy was successful. With five years free of symptoms, he has been pronounced cured.


GOOD INFLUENCES Thinking of people who have been influential in my life

aside from my parents, I think of two doctors. One was the family doctor who made a house call on my mother when she was ill. That’s unheard of now, but it was the way of life in my early childhood. At the time we lived at 1510 East Ninth. He was going to make hospital rounds at St. Francis Hospital just a few blocks up the street and he took me with him. From that day forward, it was my undying ambition to be a nurse.

The other doctor was my great uncle, who was a missionary doctor in China for over 40 years. He was stationed first in Canton and established the first sanitary sewer system there before he went to Shanghai, where he started St. Johns Medical School in connection with St. Johns University to train Chinese students in the art of western medicine. The school was still in existence when I was in Shanghai in 1985 and we worshipped in the Community Church, for which he had chaired the fundraising committee for its construction.

One of his eight children wrote a book about his life in which I learned more about his wife, Helen, than I had ever known. She didn’t care for the wind and heat in Kansas, so when he came to visit his brothers and sisters (his sister, Alla, was my grandmother) in Sterling, she would stay in the East with relatives. He attended Cooper College (now Sterling College) and initiated football in the sports program, so the playing field bears his name.

Each time Uncle Joe came to Kansas was cause for a family reunion and it would always include the entire group gathering at a church dinner where Uncle Joe was the featured speaker. That is when I learned about his activities in China.

After the Japanese occupied Shanghai during the early


days of the Second World War, the Japanese interned him, one daughter and his wife. Later they were repatriated on the Gripsholm, a Swedish ship, that performed that service for several countries.


THOROUGHLY MODERN

I’ve lived to see many modern developments that have changed the way we live. On the farm, we used the rural telephone service that had several customers on one line. Each party had its own ring to answer: one, two, and so on. If a customer couldn’t count or was just plain nosy he or she might lift the receiver every time the phone rang to keep up on what was going on. It was not uncommon to have multiple conversationalists on one call. It was the original conference call, I guess. We called it a party line. It was a long time before we had another fancy gadget.…

When I was about 10 years-old, we visited relatives in Sylvia, who had a crystal radio set. We would all huddle around it to listen to the programs. The reception faded in and out and was full of static, but it seemed like magic.

Our neighbors across the street, who lived in the house my father later bought, had a cabinet radio and invited all four of us children over to hear Amos n’ Andy one evening. That was a comedy in Negro dialect that, of course, would be politically incorrect today. Apparently I fell asleep before the program started at nine o’clock, our hosts let me sleep all night, and I missed the program. I don’t remember when I first got to hear it, but it wouldn’t have been at home for a good many years.

Another radio story that took place years later: Pete and I were married in August, 1941. We lived in a two-room apartment on the second floor of a home in Lawrence, Kansas where my husband had a scholarship at the University of Kansas studying for his master’s degree in petroleum engineering. I was a visiting nurse in Topeka, so I lived there during the week and spent weekends in Lawrence, traveling


back and forth with other Lawrence residents who worked in Topeka.

Our place had an outside stairway, but in icy weather we used an inside stairway up from our landlord’s living room. On Sunday December 7, 1941 I was listening to the radio when the program was interrupted to announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor, so I rushed down the inside stairway to tell my husband who was visiting with the family who lived in the rest of the house. They turned on the radio and we all listened together as the horrifying details were described. What we heard was unbelievably alarming!

A few years earlier, there had been a radio broadcast, War of the Worlds, that started out without explanation. It was about an invasion of earth by aliens from Mars. There was considerable panic on the part of some who thought the radio drama, which was done as a “newscast,” was real. It had taken several days to calm things down. So this time, most people waited for confirmation, and eventually President Roosevelt made his famous “Day of Infamy” speech and we all began to try to assimilate the facts. European countries had been trying to get the United States to participate in defeating Hitler in the

This photo appeared in the Wichita Eagle in 1953. We had the basement of our home fixed up like a little movie theater at the time for the kids and their neighborhood friends.


Second World War, but our country was somewhat isolationist in those days. There was no question of our involvement after Pearl Harbor!

My husband registered with all other young men for the military draft. By the time they started drafting married men, Pete was in the oil industry, which was considered an essential industry because they needed lots of oil to fuel the war efforts. So he was deferred from service. Both my husband and I lost many friends and some relatives in that war.

Many of the people I grew up with went into the service. We had a large group of young professionals and college students in a Sunday school class taught by Mr. Gail Carpenter at First Presbyterian Church. As a matter of fact, that is where I met my future husband. Fifty-eight young men from that class were called into the service and received a letter every month from their teacher until the war ended. Those letters were edited by William Sloan, Jr. and printed in the Kansas History magazine in 1988. One descriptive poem was:

In the opinion of many thoughtful civilians, the longest shortage of all

Is the one, yards and yards of which are missing fromthe bathroom wall.

How we miss you, Soft Northern Tissue!

When our first child was on the way we wanted more living space so we rented a two-story house that had three rooms upstairs and four downstairs. We converted the s econd story to an apartment, which we rented out and we lived in the downstairs rooms with access to the basement where the coal -burning furnace was located. My husband’s job as landlord was to keep the furnace stoked to heat the whole house.

The couple upstairs had a little girl, too, so the two babies


were playmates. The only new thing we bought to furnish the house was a kitchen stove. Everything else was donated from home or bought second-hand.

The refrigerator, in particular, was old and rickety. The only freezing compartment was for ice cubes so I froze a small roast in one of the shelves for ice cubes. When I tried to pull the roast out, the whole freezing compartment came out in my hand.

Fortunately, my husband was a good car trader, so every time we needed extra money, he would sell the car and buy a cheaper one. To get the money to fix the refrigerator he had to make a car deal.

By the time our baby, Grace, was six months-old, my husband had his Master's degree and had taken a job with Standard Oil Company of Ohio, so we moved to Cleveland, Ohio. That was the first of two places I have lived outside of Kansas. Although I had traveled outside the state, I had never lived anywhere else. In two years, we moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma where our son, P.T., was born and two years later we moved to back to Wichita where another daughter, Suzi, was born.

In 1947, when we moved back to Wichita, television was new. We resi sted it as long as we possibly could. We had a movie projector and we’d rent films from the City Library to show to the neighborhood families on Friday nights. Even before all the trash that’s available today on television, we wanted to control what our children watched. Our neighbors, who had televisions, were cooperative and didn’t expose our children very often.

I didn’t have to work so I had the time to keep our children occupied with things other than TV and while my


grandchildren had opportunities to see very unsuitable things on cable TV in their younger years, their parents usually kept them too busy to absorb very much of it.

We didn’t have air-conditioning until the early 1950s. We bought a two-story house that was built in 1928 at 3928 East Elm. We installed an attic fan in the ceiling of the second floor hall and turned it on in the cool of the evening to pull the cooler air from outside in through the open windows. We had window air conditioners on the first floor in the kitchen and the living room. We had our first central air conditioning after all the children were off to college and we bought another house.


EARLY ANCESTORS My early ancestors on my father’s side of the family came

to the United States from Scotland and from Ireland on my mother’s side. Nothing is known about the McCrackens and Ramseys in Ireland, but we know quite a bit about my father’s family from Scotland. The family home is Terfoot near Glasgow.

I’ve been there to see it. It is not far from the field where the Battle of Drumclog was fought on a Sabbath morning in June 1679. Sir Walter Scott immortalized the battle in the novel Old Mortality. He wrote that the Covenanters murdered a gallant officer “who came as the flag.” The Brownlee version is that the Covenanters were attacked while gathered in the field for a prayer meeting. I guess they just happened to have all their weapons with them. According to the Brownlee account, they put the enemy to rout.

My mother started researching family genealogy before she died in 1942. My father and stepmother continued working on it and eventually they looked up the family home in Scotland.

(A technical note: They printed all their work on a hectograph. That was the predecessor to the mimeograph that I used in nurses training to produce our school newspaper. A hectograph was made by pouring a gelatinous material in a paper sized shallow pan, letting the gel set up and then applying a stencil, on which was printed what one wanted to duplicate, to the gelatin. The ink from the stencil would soak into the gelatin so one could lay another sheet of paper onto the gelatin and a copy would be transferred to the paper. Today all that labor is accomplished by the use of the copying machine or a computer.)


We know of a captain in the Revolutionary Army who was killed by the Indians. We even have a murder mystery that occurred in 1796. Our ancestors lived on a farm and all went to communion on Sunday except one daughter who was left in charge of the house. Her stepfather had left without his tobacco and rode his horse back to retrieve it and then caught up with the rest of the family by the time they were arriving at the service. When the family returned in the evening they discovered the gruesome scene of the murdered daughter. The extremely upright stepfather might have been suspected, but it couldn’t be proven without a witness. He lovingly ministered to his wife in her long lasting depression for years afterward. That’s on the Brownlee side of the family.

My grandmother was a McCracken and she married a Ramsey. Both families were from Ireland and lived in the same community in more than one place in the eastern part of the United States. It was common for many families of a church to immigrate with their minister to the United States and stay together as a congregation settling in one place and moving on together somewhere else if conditions dictated. So, I presume this was the case with the McCrackens and Ramseys.

The ancestors of both my father and mother came to the United States for religious freedom, I guess. There were lots of ministers on both sides of the family. The Brownlees of my grandfather’s generation who came to Kansas were The Wichita Eagle, 1940. 1940.


Presbyterian. Couples often dedicated their first son to the ministry. Whether he was dedicated by his parents or not I don’t know, but I had a cousin who was a first son and a minister. He is not living. He was at the School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, Jordan, when the first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947—and he was one of the first two people to suspect what they were and did some of the first translations from the pictures his colleague made of the scrolls when they

had them in their possession briefly. He became very well known as a translator of some of those manuscripts. Of course, Jerusalem is no longer in the country of Jordan, but in Israel.

There were many Presbyterian ministers among my forbears, and I married the son of a Presbyterian minister who came from a Swiss Mennonite community in Ohio.

My Wichita University graduation photo.


BACK TO SCHOOL AND INTO NURSING Except for the few months in the country school, I

acquired all of my education in the City of Wichita. I finished grade school at Washington School and then went to Roosevelt Junior High.

Most of my family had musical abi lity and could sing or play the piano. But, I tried out twice for the glee club at Roosevelt unsuccessfully. When I returned the third time, Miss Flemming decided she could put me between two people who could sing and who wouldn’t be bothered if I sang off-key; that way my bad notes could be drowned out by the other voices. And that’s how I got to sing in the glee club!

I graduated from East High School in 1935. When it was time for college I started to the University of Wichita, which was a municipal university with all of 1,300 students by the time I graduated. I couldn’t afford to go away to school to get an affiliate degree in nursing, so I started talking to officials at WU about creating an affiliation with Wesley Hospital because I wanted both a nursing and university degree.

During my freshman and sophomore years in a pre-medical course at the university consultation went on without success. My father was teaching chemistry to the student nurses at St. Francis Hospital. He had urged me to talk to Sister Gonzaga, Superintendent of the School of Nursing, which I finally did close to the end of my sophomore year.

Almost immediately, she said, “We are starting a new preliminary class in June. I suggest you enter that class and by fall we ought to be able to decide, with the university, on requirements for an affiliate degree in nursing.” So I did and they did!

When fall came, I went back to the university for my


junior year and then took two years of training at the hospital. In the spring of 1940, I graduated from both the hospital and the university. I received an RN degree from the hospital and an AB from the university; two separate degrees! The photographer who took pictures of the graduating nurses thought it was notable enough that he used his picture of me in an article in the newspaper. “Like mother, like son.” Our son persuaded officials at M.I.T. to start gymnastics when he was a student there.

I had been so persistent in getting the affiliated course started that my daughter and her husband thought I should be in the Plaza of Heroines in front of the library at Wichita State University, so they made a contribution—and my name is on one of the bricks in the walk.

It’s quite a remarkable enterprise to recognize contributions of women. I’ll be represented among some real notables. Larger contributions will provide a plaque or a bench with someone’s name. Some of the alumni are contributing to a memorial for Dr. Branch. She was my biology professor when I was a pre-med student. There is a computer nearby where you can read particulars about the people whose names are in the plaza, so I wrote up a little biography to accompany my brick.

I didn’t work long for pay as a nurse. I started out as a public health nurse, which was good preparation for the various volunteer opportunities that arose throughout my life. I had a great desire to help out during the war, so I went to work at a large hospital in Cleveland, Ohio when we moved there.

I started to work in the nursery of the obstetrics department on Friday. Monday, they put me in charge. It was quite a challenge, but somehow we got the job done for several months. The problem was that our little girl, Grace, didn’t do


very well in the nursery day care. She was small and spindly for her age and kept getting bladder infections. So, I decided to stay home and care for her.

When she was almost five years-old, we moved back to Wichita and the pediatrician discovered a heart murmur caused by a Patent Ductus.

It’s one of the earliest heart conditions correctable by surgery. One of the miracles to emerge during the horrible Second World War was the technique for doing this type of surgery. It was made possible by the development of anesthetic administration under pressure so that the lungs didn’t collapse. By the time our little girl needed it, it was available. She grew up to be a physical education instructor.

Most of the time, I did what is known in the trade as “warm nursing,” that is, not for pay. I did private duty with the wife of a doctor friend who was very ill after surgery. I took care of relatives who had to go to the hospital needing special care and couldn’t afford to hire someone. When our daughter had heart surgery at Mayo’s, I was allowed to put on my uniform and accompany her to surgery and care for her afterward. That was educational for me.

I even accompanied my husband to surgery and gave him special care when it was needed. I served as a nurse at camp and on school train excursions to Washington D.C.

I served 22 years on the board of the Presbyterian Foundation of Kansas, which evolved into The Presbyterian Manors of Mid-America. That board was required to have a registered nurse among its members. It oversaw the construction and administration of nursing homes under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church in the states of Kansas and Missouri.


A VIETNAM EXPERIENCE In 1967, Dr. Jim Turpin spoke in Wichita about the work

of his organization that served needy people in Mexico, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. As a doctor in California, he had become aware of the need for medical care among poverty-stricken residents in Tijuana. He found satisfaction in offering free care to them. He had been motivated by a poem of the English poet and clergyman John Donne in 1624 that contains the famous lines about “for whom the bell tolls.” But, the two lines that inspired Dr. Turpin were: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” So his organization became Project Concern with the motto “Involved in Mankind.”

I bought his book called Vietnam Doctor—and on our way home from the lecture I asked my husband what he would think of my volunteering to serve in Project Concern. He didn’t hesitate long before saying that he’d be proud of me. I was particularly impressed with the method of operation that involved training local people in skills that offered rudimentary care in sanitation and health care and the tools for getting advanced care for people who needed it. So, I wrote to their headquarters and received an application. In early November, 1967, I returned it with the expectation that I’d be needed in Mexico or the Appalachians where they were starting operations.

Shortly, I received a letter saying I seemed like the right kind of person for their operation in Vietnam where they needed someone badly. This request was cause for much prayerful consideration by my husband and me. We really hadn’t had this in mind, but being quite religious in our outlook we took time to seek guidance of a higher power. We considered the fact that my husband would be living alone because both daughters were married and our son was at college in Boston.


If I volunteered to serve at least six months, there would be some remuneration. However, I felt three months was as long as I should be away from obligations at home, so travel expenses would be up to us, but, food and lodging would be furnished when I got there. Other people were working there, so we decided to rely on the efforts that were keeping them safe to keep me safe, too.

We had three nephews in the service, who were definitely at risk of losing their lives for their country. The risk for me seemed negligible compared to theirs and that of all our people in the armed services.

I began getting all my inoculations and immunizations preparatory to leaving January 30, 1968 which would mean finishing one of them after I arrived in Vietnam. I went through the holidays having chills and fever (reacting to one injection after the other) until the Tet offensive, about January 29 put off my departure indefinitely—that was when North Vietnam started a concerted offensive all over South Vietnam to defeat American and other forces. So, it was considered too unsafe for personnel like me to enter the country. Before I expand very much on my Vietnam experience, I should tell you what happened in the interim while I waited for it to become safe enough to go to Vietnam.

One day the phone rang and a voice said, “Elinor, I don’t suppose you know who I am, but I have been talking to Dee and Bill Cauble and I know how disappointed you must be that you didn’t get to go to Vietnam. My name is Harriett Price. Have you ever thought of working with the American Indians?”

It was sheer modesty that would make Harriett think I wouldn’t know who she was. Her husband was on the board of directors of the bank where my husband was a senior vice president. She didn’t have any particular place in mind. Her


mother was part Indian and she just wanted some experience with American Indians.

I said, “Sure, where do you want to go?”

I was serving as literature chairman for the Presbyterial of Southern Kansas. My job included distribution of information about our church’s missionary work, some of which was on the Navaho Reservation where we had a school and a hospital.

I called our church headquarters and found out who was in charge at Ganado, Arizona. My husband and I went to Dick and Harriett’s house, and cal led the hospital superintendent. Harriett was talking to the doctor and explaining that we would like to volunteer for a month on the reservation if we could go for the month of April so she could be home before their son returned from college for the summer.

The doctor inquired about her skills that might be useful and she told him that she liked to work with children and could help out in the school, but he didn’t seem very impressed, so she suggested that he talk to her friend who was right there. I took the phone and he asked what I could do. I said that I was an RN and he asked, “When can you get here?” One of the nurses there could have a much-needed vacation if I would come. I told him that I didn’t want to come without my friend. Further conversation revealed that Harriett had filing and office skills, so he decided he could use her in the office at the hospital.

Pete and I loading the wagon with medical supplies for the reservation.


The doctor would decide about us if we would fill out the usual applications, which we did in short order. We soon found that we were accepted as volunteers without pay, but room and board would be furnished. So, her husband Dick supplied us a new station wagon from his Ford agency. We filled it with various medical supplies and hit the road for the reservation.

When the missionaries heard that two women, who couldn’t bear to be apart, were coming to the mission they were prepared to help us with whatever problem we had by locating our rooms as far apart as possible—at

opposite ends of a long hall with several other missionaries in between us. Actually, we made very good friends of many of the missionaries who were very kind to us.

I worked in the clinic at first and then in the obstetrics department. There was a dearth of babies being born on the reservation at first, so it was a week or 10 days before I had a chance to help with

Our Navaho "acquired" son (L.) with his cousin on a visit to Wichita in 1975.

Harriet (R.) and our favorite patient with a nurse at Sage Memorial Hospital.


the delivery of a baby. That was a very good brush-up experience to prepare for my tour in Vietnam.

Homes in the interior of the Navaho Reservation (called Hogans) were eight-sided structures of stones or logs with dirt floors and sod roofs.

At one of the church meetings at Ganado we met a young man who was graduating from high school and had a scholarship to Sterling College, less than one hundred miles from Wichita. So, we made arrangements to get together when he came to Kansas. He allowed the two of us to be his mother away from home and we visited him on campus. We thought we might have to criticize his housekeeping but it wasn’t possible because his room was immaculate. He had attended missionary boarding school on the reservation. We entertained him and his roommate in our homes.

Through the years, we have visited him on the reservation and he visits us.

After our return, Dick and Harriett were very instrumental in starting the Mid-American All-Indian Center as part of Wichita’s celebration of the Bicentennial. I worked with that effort, too.

I didn’t go to Vietnam until October, 1968. Project Concern occupied a compound that had been constructed by U. S. Special Forces that no longer needed it. It was near a village named Dampao. Across the road in front of the compound was a Vietnam outpost with U.S. Army advisors. The Dung River formed the back boundary of our compound. Across the river was another Vietnamese military outpost. The compound contained several cement buildings, which had been converted into a hospital and clinic, office and dormitories, and dining room. The quarters, that I shared with another nurse, were in


a wooden dormitory.

Windows in the cement buildings were glazed, but not screened, so all the patient beds had mosquito netting. However, my wooden building had screen wire tacked over the windows so I only slept under netting when I went in to the city of Dalat.

Following the Ho Chi Min Trail from North Vietnam to the area around Saigon were underground tunnels used by the Viet Cong to move personnel and supplies from the North to the South. They had underground kitchens and medical emergency facilities connected by tunnels with smoke stacks so well-camouflaged that the smoke was dispersed invisibly.

The VC emerged from the tunnels under cover of night to perform acts of war and then retreated to the safety of the tunnels in the daytime. When we had a reunion 25 years after I was there, we were shown these facilities, some of which had been enlarged to accommodate bodies the size of western foreigners. I had been in tunnels and underground rooms in the fortified compound across the road from our hospital at Dampao—these tunnels were constructed large enough to accommodate the western advisors. We stored our medical supplies in their tunnels so the Viet Cong would not be tempted to raid our hospital for supplies.

Dwellings of the natives were dirt-floored and thatch-roofed, with walls of whatever material was available. I saw some buildings near army outposts with walls made of

Pang Ting-Mum (L.) the Montagnard woman we sponsored. Note the five rows of barbed wire surrounding the military outpost behind her.


flattened-out beer cans. Much of the population around Dampao was made up of refugees from North Vietnam. The permanent population around Dampao was Montagnard, mostly of the Ko Ho tribe. They are people of slightly larger stature and browner skin than the oriental population of Vietnam. Their eyes are not slanted, but their noses are very small, so they referred to Caucasions as “big noses.”

My husband and I brought a 22 year-old Montagnard woman over to the U.S.A. after I returned. She had about a third grade education when she arrived. Now, she is an LPN at St. Joseph Hospital. She learned her multiplication tables from

her husband after she was married. She used her Christian name, Jeannine, after coming to the U.S.A. She married a good-looking blond named John Emmons.

When we were watching a television program about the Navahos one day shortly after she arrived, she said, “They

look like Montagnards.” However, most Navahos have large noses.

When I arrived in early October, it was the latter part of the rainy season. One of the first things I learned was, “If

The hospital at Dampao. Note the wire spring cots and netting. The two children in the picture had the mumps and their parents stayed with them.


everything is working, there is something wrong.” So the pump that drew our water up from the Dung River to our filtered water tank was not working. We caught the runoff from the roof and filtered and boiled it for drinking. To cover up the boiled taste, I added Kool Aid.

Nutrition was greatly enhanced by the military’s contribution of expired C-rations. The C-rations had an expiration date on them for the soldiers, but they were still good and a special treat for us. They would contain a dry biscuit or crackers and canned meat or beans and cheese and always chocolate. At Thanksgiving time they gave us canned mincemeat, so I made a pie.

Sometimes, the American sergeant who was the cook at the outpost across the road invited us over for home co oked meals—that’s when we ate fresh lettuce, bread, butter, and roast beef. Those items weren’t available on the local market, nor would they have been safe to eat even had they been available. One contribution was a gallon can of dried cabbage that I rehydrated and made into coleslaw. Of course, it made very good soup, too.

The hospital beds were wire spring cots for the patients and the mattress was a straw mat over the wire on which the patients would lie. They often slept more than one to a bed if they were of the same family. If a patient came from very far away the whole family might stay at the hospital sleeping on the floor and cooking on little fires in the area surrounding the hospital.

We had a barbed wire fence around the building to keep the men from urinating against the hospital wall. It was taboo for Montagnards to defecate more than once in the same place, so the toilet that had been built for their use went unused—and there we cleaned up after humans just like we do after dogs in


this country. As a result, the ground was infested with parasitical worms carried in the intestines. In order to render the care these people needed so badly, we did the best we could under the circumstances because the Montagnards were not accepted at the Vietnamese hospitals; they were not considered human. They were called “monkeys.” Many of the race problems in our country were blamed on slavery, but that was not the case in Vietnam—and the discrimination there was just as severe as it has ever been at home. The Montagnards were treated badly then—and they still were when we returned twenty-five years later after the communists had taken over the area. In fact, they did not treat us very well and we eventually aborted our intended stay after two of our group had video cameras confiscated and our whole group was put under house arrest. The Montagnards had fought alongside the U.S. and the S. Vietnam allies during the hostilities.

When Dr. Turpin started operating at Dampao it was strictly on the basis of nondiscrimination. The staff was international and the students were from Cambodia, as well as Vietnam and of both races.

Many of the Vietnamese in our area were refugees from North Vietnam; such as the Catholic nuns, who taught school in the village next to our compound. They taught knitting to the girls in the school.

In Wichita, I had helped pack barrels of supplies that were shipped to Dampao and I unpacked some of them when I got there. One of the items that were being sent was knitted footlets. When the Montagnards received them they did not find them very practical on the dirt floors of their homes so the yarn was salvaged and re-knit into sweaters. I wrote back to the ladies of my church—and they collected a whole barrel of yarn that arrived before I left. I distributed it to the nuns.


Diapers were sent over, so the nurses started sending newborns home with diapers on. But, when the babies came back for checkups, the folded diapers often had holes cut in them to allow the accustomed method of caring for the natural functions. And that was with a bare bottom!

The barrels of donations also contained darling outfits of children’s clothing. When these were distributed the crotch seam was usually ripped out in the trousers for the toddlers not yet trained. Warmth, not modesty, was the reason for clothing.

The women had looms that they used by sitting on the ground with legs stretched out in front holding one end of the loom between the toes. Weaving was done on the other end held in the lap. A strip of cloth about 18 inches wide could be woven. Two six-foot-long strips were sewn together to make a wraparound skirt. A loincloth was 10 inches wide and 12 feet long, not counting the fringe.

Father LaLiberte was a Canadian missionary priest who served the area and us with generosity and love. His vehicle was the only one in the area that would travel at night with lights turned on. Our vehicles traveled only on moonlit nights without our lights on for safety sake as the Viet Cong didn’t seem to distinguish our vehicles from the military at night. Father LaLiberte would make night emergency trips for us. We had three vehicles: an open Jeep, a covered Jeep, and an enclosed British Land Rover. The ambulance was “being repaired” all of the time I was there.

I recall one night when a Montagnard soldier, who had drunk too much rice wine, decided to ride his Honda motorcycle. The resulting accident broke an arm and a leg and scraped his skin deeply, so Father made the trip to bring him to the hospital where we patched him up.


The most tragic cases I saw were not unlike the ones I saw on the Navaho Reservation in which babies and small children were very ill. Some were dying of the dehydration accompanying gastrointestinal infections—this is prevalent in underdeveloped societies.

There was a storage warehouse in the city of Dalat about 30 miles from Dampao where the hospital supplies were stored under military protection. We only kept minimum amounts of supplies on hand in order to discourage the Viet Cong from raiding the hospital for supplies.

There was a villa in Dalat for the use of our personnel in case we needed to stay overnight. One morning, our supervisor took the jeep to go to Dalat and from there on to Saigon by plane. It was arranged that he would leave the jeep at the villa there and we would pick it up in the afternoon when we went in for supplies.

Four of us went to town together, two would return in each vehicle. The Jeep was not at the villa so we drove around the city until we spotted it at another military headquarters but the keys were not in it.

Communication was difficult with the Vietnamese soldiers there, so we flagged down some American soldiers and explained our dilemma. They couldn’t help us with getting the keys, but, they knew how to hot-wire the Jeep, making it possible for us to drive it. So we stole our own Jeep and drove it back to the hospital! The American soldiers across the road rewired it for us after we got the other set of keys. Those fellows were very nice to us.

We weren’t allowed to receive packages in the APO mail, but there was no limit for the soldiers. So, they would let us receive packages addressed to them and then they would


deliver them to us.

I was allowed to go to Vietnam because military action had been pushed back away from that area and things were considered under control. I had promised my husband I wouldn’t take risks and that I’d be honest in letting him know what was happening while I was there. The president of the United States had called a halt to bombing in Cambodia early in November—and what happened on my next trip to Dalat ended my stay prematurely…

We were entertaining the village chiefs from the area, trying to encourage them to send students from their villages to the mid-wife training class that was about to be offered. We would also send medical supplies back to the village medical workers with those chiefs who had trained workers in their villages. This required a trip to the warehouse for supplies…

Another nurse and I took an interpreter with us in the enclosed Land Rover. The other nurse was driving. She was Philippine, so her skin was dark, much like that of our Montagnard interpreter. I sat between them, hoping my white skin would be less visible through the windows. We always wore our hospital whites to make it obvious that we were medical personnel in case the worst were to happen—and the Viet Cong were to apprehend us.

The VC would usually keep captives alive, press them into service, and treat medical people rather well as prisoners. Project Concern personnel felt that we had probably treated some VC in our hospital —and they were well aware of everything we did. Knowing our neutrality, they usually left us alone.

We had traveled about 12 miles from the compound and were about to pass a sawmill on the left hand side of the road.


There were two entrances to the sawmill. We were just past the first entrance, when suddenly, up out of the elephant grass, rose a man in a khaki uniform pointing an AK-47 at us. He was wearing a North Vietnamese hat, motioning for us to go back to the entrance we had just passed and come into the sawmill.

As soon as she saw him, our interpreter said “VC”.

I asked, “How do you know?”

She said, “A South Vietnamese wouldn’t have to point a gun at us.”

The nurse at the wheel said, “What do I do now?”

By then she had stopped the car so I said, “Back up, but when you get to the driveway don’t go in headfirst. Back in. And when you are facing the other direction, gun it as fast as you can.” While we were talking two more men appeared about five yards beyond the first one. It was obvious that we shouldn’t go forward. So our plan went into action and when we gunned it in the opposite direction, the men didn’t shoot. We learned later why...

During the night the sawmill had been occupied by a contingent of North Vietnamese that came down from the mountain behind the sawmill. At the other entrance to the sawmill, they had stopped a bus carrying 38 passengers. All were taken into the sawmill and interrogated.

We had a Chinese friend on the bus. That evening at dinner he filled us in on what had happened. Although he was fluent in Vietnamese, French, and English, he spoke only Chinese when he was interrogated. The interrogators released him, the bus driver, and the driver’s wife (who paid ransom money) and after that the bus was allowed to continue on down the road.


However, not all the passengers were released. Twenty able-bodied young men were taken prisoner and probably became bearers on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Along with the bus, the North Vietnamese had stopped all other travelers going toward Dampao, including some village chiefs on the way to our open house. One of the chiefs tried to escape on his motorcycle and was killed.

As for the three of us, we were thrilled with the response of our vehicle when our chauffeur put the pedal to the floor. You see, that old Land Rover was a balky performer to say the least. Time after time, it would stall for no apparent reason. The road we were traveling was deeply rutted and we had picked our way carefully and slowly to the sawmill, but we barely hit the tops of the ruts as we sped down the road to safety! We stopped at the Vietnamese outpost about two miles away to report our experience. There we were told that American soldiers were on their way from the opposite direction to take care of the situation at the sawmill. Tha t was46 probably why the V.C. had not used the guns that they had pointed at us, lest the firing would be heard by the approaching American military. Hearing firing, the Americans might have sent helicopters that could have cut off the planned withdrawal of the V.C. from the sawmill.


HOME AGAIN There had been a few incidents of hostility in villages

beyond Dampao, but because the two outposts were so close to our compound, we were not considered at risk of attack. This incident, however, was between our location and our destination for safety or escape.

I had promised to keep nothing from my husband. I could not imagine writing what had just happened and expe ct him to feel good about my staying. So I left Dampao in a military helicopter and from Dalat, I flew to Saigon. While there, I called my husband and told him I was on the way home. He wasn’t surprised. He had had a premonition that something was happening. A few days later I was home again.

A plaque that hung on the wall of every home I lived in while growing up influenced me greatly. I don’t know who said it originally, but it was my father’s motto: “For when the one great scorer comes to write against your name, he writes not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.” The previous paragraphs of my story explain how I played the game.

My husband and I’ve had a long and wonderful life —one of the greatest honors is to have a Vietnamese lady and a Navaho man who call us Mom and Dad. Our “borrowed” daughter lives in Belle Plaine. She and her husband have three boys including twins. Our Navaho “acquired” son has worked in various capacities for the tribal government and serves as an elder lay-preacher in the Christian church to which he belongs.


This story is the result of my efforts to put an interview into readable form. Another effort will have to tell about our

greatest satisfaction in life: our pride in the three children we raised, and, of whom, we are inordinately proud.

—Elinor B. Amstutz, June, 2002. Larksfield Place, Wichita, Kansas.

My first grade report card.


heading how i played the game - larksfield place · my mother told me that she had been an athlete...

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