I think there was only one time that I actually went shopping with Dad. I was about eight. We would go to the hardware store, CO-OP, Midland Store, welder (when it was too big a job to do ourselves), John Deere Dealer, and mechanic (usually for cars), but never shopping. I had gotten some cash for X-mas and wanted to get a car for my train set. We went to Ernst & Son Hardware store, which is unusual in that we usually went to Green Brothers Hardware store.
Bill Green, half of the Green Brothers, was mentioned in installment one about the scorpions. Bill and Venita were some of Mom and Dad’s best friends. Unfortunately, I could not find any good photos of the inside of their store. It was THE coolest hardware store I have ever been in! But they didn’t carry train cars, so we went to Ernst & Son which was a hardware and toy store. I found a great yellow box car for carrying ice blocks.
It had about 10 ice blocks and a chute to load them into the boxcar. The one I wanted was on display on the wall. When Mr. Ernst brought the box out I inspected the car and said I wanted it. He told me the price and I asked why it was more than the one on the wall. Dad didn’t say a word. Mr. Ernst stammered, but could not offer a valid explanation. I told him I wanted the one on the wall at the price displayed. He sold me the new one in the box at the displayed price. My train set was set up on a 4×8 sheet of plywood and sat on saw horses in the basement of the red house. It was a simple figure eight with a side spur for the ice boxcar. I had the train set for several years until I gave it away. One of Dad’s hired hands had three sons who were all younger than me. The family was dirt poor and I asked Mom and Dad if I could give them my train set. The boys were ecstatic! So was I. Giving that train set to three boys who literally did not have anything was an amazing experience for me. The basement then became the site of the ping pong table. I never could beat Dad, however, Mike and Jennie were no problem.
Basement Shower
The ping pong table in the basement reminded me of another story. We had a shower in the basement where we took showers after coming in from a day at work. We could get really, really dirty so we would shower there before going in the house. One evening I was in the shower where there were two huge oil tanks for heat. The tanks were raised a foot off of the floor. They were about five feet tall and six feet long. In the middle of my shower I glanced at the top of the nearest tank…
At the top, about three feet from me, sat a copperhead that was about two feet long – an adult. No, we did not catch and release.
Water Filter
Since we are in the basement…Our water came from a well across Mud crick. It was pumped to the basement into a large cistern. There were three cisterns or tanks – I do not know a better word for them. They were each about four feet square and about five feet high and were made of bricks. The bricks between the first and second tank were soft, and the bricks connecting the second and third tank were softer yet. The water was pumped into the first cistern or tank then percolated through to the second tank and then into the third. The well water was crystal clear, clean, cool, refreshing and delicious!
Remote control bulldozer
The coolest toy I ever had was the remote control bulldozer. Mine was a Caterpillar and it was yellow.
I am not sure where Dad got it but it was in my pile one X-mas. Santa would sort our presents into piles by person. The piles were positioned so that we could not see them from the stairs and none of the presents from Santa were wrapped. We had to sleep upstairs on X-mas eve so we could not spy on Santa. We usually woke about 6am X-mas day and and would come downstairs and stop on the bottom step. Oh how we wanted to peek around the corner, but oh how we knew better! That was the first step. Once we finally woke Mom and Dad we had to wait until Grandma and Grandpa arrived before we were released from the stairs. It always took them FOREVER to get the mile from their house to ours. Fast forward about thirty years…There are three steps to the living room in the Donee Diego Drive house and we, rather I, as Tracey thought it silly, made the kids sit on the steps on X-mas morning waiting for Grandma Cloyd. They hated it. I loved it!
Coonskin cap and chaps
The third coolest thing I had was a coonskin cap, aka Daniel Boone.
(The absolute best was the bike in installment one, but it really was not a ‘toy’ and second was the train.) Daniel Boone really did not wear coonskin caps. He thought they were unstylish so he actually wore a beaver skin cap, but it was a marketing thing.
Right behind the coonskin cap were my Hopalong Cassidy chaps,
which I still have. Hoppy, as he was known, did not wear chaps and I do not know why mine were Hopalong Cassidy chaps, but they were!
Central Junior High
Since this has involved stories about Dad, I remembered a couple of shenanigans he was known for. When he was in high school, which became Central Junior High 
when the new high school was built, he and several of his friends carried a teacher’s car (I think it was a Model T), upstairs and put it on the roof. Another great story was that he and his friends would get in drag races then speed across the Kaw bridge to North Lawrence then wait for the cops to get there to chat with them. Ok, they didn’t ‘chat’ then they shot-the-shit. The cops did not have jurisdiction in North Lawrence so could do nothing.
Weaver’s Department Store
Shopping with Mom was a different matter. I usually got drug along when I needed new clothes, which I just loved to shop for, not. Her shopping trips usually included a stop at Weaver’s Department Store. Weaver’s had an elevator that had an elevator operator, which made shopping a bit more bearable.
The store had four stories, including the basement so the elevator was really a luxury. The operator would call out the floor and what could be found on that floor, as if we did not know. One time I was “being a pill”, which was one of Mom’s favorite monikers for me. We were on the operator operated elevator and Mom was pissed. She slyly pinched me on the butt, which was her favorite thing to do when I was being a pill. I said, probably quite loudly, “Stop pinching my butt”! After turning several shades of red, she stopped, but I got a royal tongue lashing when we got outside. One did not mess with Mom without consequences!
Round Corner Drug Store
When I was older, maybe 10 to 12, I got to take Larry Tripp along several times. We were ‘older’ so could go out about town on our own and would go to the Round Corner Drug Store for a soda. It has a round corner and is still there. It had a café/soda shop with these cool red swiveling stools. Larry and I would get sodas with plain water instead of carbonated. The soda syrup was in bottles and the water or carbonation was from a tap, like a beer tap. I am sure the plain water was Larry’s idea.
Ice House
Since Lawrence is the subject of this installment, I will tell about how we got started farming. One of our family had an ice house on Vermont St.
They would drive a team of horses onto the frozen river, 
cut huge blocks of ice,
(both of these tools hung in Grandpa’s barn for years)
then drag it to the shore and load it on wagons. It was then transported to the ice house where it was stacked in layers of sawdust. This would keep it frozen well into summer. A bank was trying to get started in Lawrence and they went to our family to borrow funds. They repaid the loans by giving us the deeds to the property in Jefferson County. The original farm was one-mile long by one-half mile wide. It was divided between three brothers, Grandpa, Uncle Herb and I cannot remember who got the third, but it ended up with Uncle Buggy. His name was Earl Bussing and he got his nickname because he was known for having fancy horse buggies. Before he died Dad used to complain about how fast he drove, “like a bat out of hell.”
Underground Railroad
Lawrence was known as an abolition town and along with many other cities in Kansas served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The UGRR was a network of imaginary routes not found on the railway guides or railway maps. Freed slaves were carried from station to station till they reached the Canadian line. Slaves arrived via the railroad or were escorted by the likes of John Brown and went from the Bowersock dam via tunnels under Massachusetts St. to various stations or safe houses.
Mark’s Jewelry Store
One of the stops frequently made when we went shopping with Mom was Mark’s Jewelers.
One time Mr. Marks (Sol Marks the original owner) took us into the basement, which he said was a station on the UGRR. The basement was a bar right out of the old west. It was magnificent! It was made of dark, almost black, wood with incredible woodwork. I recall these big, fancy, round posts on each side of this huge mirror with shelves on each side for all of the bottles. The bar had a gently curved edge about 8” wide for resting your arms, then a flat area about 18” wide with a 4” wide tray on the bartenders side. To get an idea of the elegance of the bar, look at the photo of the jewelry cases above then multiply that by about a hundred!
Quantrill’s Raid
Jayhawkers were guerrilla fighters who clashed frequently with Border Ruffians, pro-slavery groups from Missouri. The Lawrence Massacre, more commonly known as Quantrill’s Raid, was one of these skirmishes. 
The motivation for the raid was to plunder and destroy the town in retaliation for the Union attack on Osceola Missouri. Between 300 & 400 raiders arrived in Lawrence about 5am, captured the Eldridge Hotel as Quantrill’s headquarters, and then burned about a quarter of the buildings in town including all but two businesses. They looted the banks and stores and killed between 185 and 200 men and boys. On their way out of town they burned the Eldridge Hotel.
We have a cradle that was in the Eldridge Hotel and survived the raid and the burning of the hotel 
Several generations of Shultzes slept in that cradle.
Worst Flood in US History
1951 saw “The Great Flood”, or ” The Flood of the Century”. 
The Kaw (Kansas) River, and four others, flooded – big time. Lawrence,
Topeka, Manhattan, and Kansas City were all flooded as were many small towns in Kansas. Seventeen lives were lost and 518,000 people were homeless. Damage at that time was $935 million, or $8.52 Billion today.
The flood started in Hays, Kansas in May with eleven inches of rain falling in two hours. Heavy rain continued into June and July with sixteen inches falling between July 9 and 13. (for the record, I did not remember that, I googled it.)
The underpass on the North side of the river was flooded to the roof of the underpass. The railroad tracks atop the underpass were above water. We took a boat to Rusty’s IGA grocery store. This is the grocery store where Mom always shopped. It had a kid’s area that was like a big sandbox filled with – wait for it – comic books! I loved to go grocery shopping and would sit and read comics while Mom shopped. One day it seemed to be taking her an unusually loooong time. I got up and explored the aisles, but couldn’t find her. Then I went outside and our car was gone! I stood there wondering what to do for a few minutes then figured she knew where I was so went back in and read some more comics. Mom had gotten to about Midland store, maybe five miles away, before remembering that I had been with her. The ice cream was softened perfectly when we finally got home. Back to the flood…On the East side of Rusty’s parking lot was an eight-foot cement block wall that Larry and I sat on. The water was about three feet below us so we could not quite dangle our feet in the water.
North of Lawrence at the junction of US 24 and 59 is a fifty-foot-tall concrete Tee Pee.
You can see the high-water marks.
This later became the go-to place to drink and dance.
Well, one of the go-to places.
Jefferson County Fair
The year after the flood Dad “gave” me an acre of land that had been under about four feet of water. It was the first field over the Douglas/Jefferson county line on Wellman Road and right by Mud Crick. There was a ton of silt left by the flood waters. Combine that with a very generous helping of fertilizer and the resulting corn was a bumper crop to say the least. We picked several gunny sacks of corn and carefully sorted through it one ear at a time to select ten ears to enter in the Jefferson County Fair. Those were carefully sized and cleaned of all silks.
The result was a blue ribbon!
One of the highlights of the fair was the tractor pull.
I do not recall any steam powered tractors like this and unlike today’s tractor pulls, that feature hot rod tractors and fancy pulling sleds, the tractors then were stock and right off the farm. The sled was a flat piece of thick metal about eight-feet-wide and maybe twenty-feet-long with a chain on one end and a bar about four-feet-high running down the center of the sled to hold onto. Men lined both sides of the track and as the tractor passed them, they would step onto the sled. That continued until the tractor could not pull any more men. I never got to step on the sled.
Leo Beuerman
Leo was 38” tall, deaf and eventually blind.
Despite his physical limitations, he was not one to indulge in self-pity but was determined to be self-sufficient. He wanted to be independent so he built a cart and had a tractor converted to be operated entirely by hand so he could transport his cart from his home on a farm the eight miles to downtown Lawrence. There he sold pencils, pens, and other items. I bought several pencils from him. He also sold watches and repaired watches and clocks. He could talk, but it was difficult to understand him, so he mainly communicated by writing on a pad of paper.
In 1969, a film by Centron Films, “Leo Beuerman” was nominated for an academy award and in 1970 received national and international film festival awards.
He was very intelligent, although not formally educated. A couple of his quotes:
”An action need not alter the course of human events to become heroic.”
“Courage is a factor in many activities which are seemingly insignificant.”
And from his autobiography, “I think everybody is lonesome and feels sorry for themselves at times, but I never did believe in being a quitter. If one thinks it all over and sees a way through, let nothing stop you until you get what you set out for.”
Next: Guns and Stuff
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