| "...Mother was a lecturer, and she was actually paid
for talking. She talked well, and she could talk on a variety of subjects.
Some, she was trying to promote. Others, she was just making comment on.
She went to Larned on, I'm sure, a WCTU trip...She went and she gave a
talk in the evening. Those evening talks were part of what small towns
did to fill up the time between supper and bed. Well, one of the people
in the audience was my father who had been a widower for a year or two.
She went on and finished her lecture tour and came back to the little town
where her family lived--Walnut, Kansas--and she discovered that my father
was already registered at the hotel, had hired a team and buggy by the
week, had introduced himself to her family, and he met her at the train
and took her home from her trip. He stayed until he got permission to come
back and see her. And that was the beginning of what was , for that time
and day, a tempestuous courtship. They got married in nineteen-two and
they did the grand tour. They went to Atlantic City, Niagara Falls, and
came back and lived in Larned in a house that was strange to Mother, furnished
with furniture she didn't pick out, but which was the beginning of our
family." |