KANSAS BEGINNINGS
Growing up I didn't know what I found out later "growing up"
I was born in Emporia in the flint hills of southeastern Kansas at 6:38 p.m. of April 18, 1944.
(For those who don't know, Paul Revere made his famous ride on the 18th of April in '75, a few years before) I was delivered by Dr. F.D. Lose of Madison, who had delivered my mother, Helen, and was the Edwards family physician.
As you will read, I was the first child of two first children. What a perfect set-up to be the "PERFECT FIRST".
My mother, Helen Lorraine Edwards, was the much younger first child of
the second family of my grandfather William H. Edwards, after whom I take my middle name. W. H. Edwards was a successful
farmer/rancher in Greenwood county and his first wife, Maud, died in childbirth with the second child, my mother's half-brother John. The first child had been born three years before. My grandfather subsequently married a 16 year younger school teacher from Gridley, Bertha Mudge; and when my mother was born she had a half-sister, Mertie who was 13 and John who was 10. Thus no surprise that she grew up with essentially four parents as what I would later describe as the "Princess of the Prairie". (as in photo)
She was the darling of her father's eye and I'm sure of her other three family members as well. Photographs of her throughout childhood show her always dressed in the
"style" of the day. Probably the first real disappointment of her entire life came just as I was born when her father was committed to a mental hospital in Topeka for what was I'm sure Alzh
eimer's disease. She was very angry with her mother for a long time for "putting him away", but stories of my grandfather, the gentleman rancher, walking naked along country roads sound like it was a necessity. Aside from this event and his death two years later, my mother won almost all of the contests in her life, including the last time she played duplicated bridge at the age of 90 about 6 months before her passing. This probably had something to do with her wanting her sons to succeed in all that we did.
My father, Gail (no middle name is recorded on his birth certificate, although he says in his autobiography that he was born Gail Robert after his fathers middle name; the Navy insisted that he have one and gave him back Robert), came from a completely different upbringing, the son of an ice delivery man with an interest in farming. He was likewise born in a small town near Kansas City and had a 16 month-younger sister Lois and an almost 5 year-younger brother Norman. (Of interest is that all three siblings would later come to the end of life within 18 months of each other.) He remembered helping with the growing of crops on the small plot beside their house and delivering papers twice a day in high school on foot and with a wagon for the Sunday papers. He also worked at a local drug store as a "soda jerk" to save money for college since his parents were not able to afford anything beyond high school. In Emporia, where he and my mother attended Emporia State Teachers College, he continued to work at Cole's cafe and where he could get a meal each day.
In my father's family the men either died early (my grandfather, Frank Shannon at 51) or left the family as in the case of my great grandfather who left his family when my grandfather was only six years old. As a result the Shannon families were in general run by Matriarchs. It always bothered me growing up that my mother always seemed to make the decisions, but I guess that had probably been set up in my father's life.
Since my father was in the navy at the time of my birth, the second place i lived (shortly after birth in Greenwood country) was Corpus Christi, Texas, where my father was assistant to the chaplain and in the Navy band. His undergraduate education had been in music and he was working as a band director in a town west of Emporia when WWII broke out. I remember being told about my parents being in Emporia with Dad's band at a festival, when the director of the festival came out on stage
to announce that Pearl Harbon had been bombed. After the war we returned to Kansas and he became the high school band director at Garnett, Kansas. My earliest memories (I think I remember) are of the bandstand in the city square in Garnett, a set of alphabet blocks that I got for Christmas there, sparklers on the 4th of July, and getting into trouble with my mom for talking the grocery man into pulling my wagon home with the groceries - my mom had sent me to the store just over the tracks at the ripe old age of 4. Of course it was different times.
My brother, Mark, was born on March 26, 1946, while we were still living in Garnett. At exactly the same time, my mother's hero (her father) died from pneumonia in the mental hospital. My parent's left Mark in the hospital and took me to the funeral in Hamilton. There is no chance my mother could have had happy eyes for months thereafter.
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