"Trading Places"
The only memory I had of my dad before we were taken was of a walk we had gone on. He was carrying a long gun and was drinking from a can. We were walking down a path or small road.
At one point, he sat his can down by the side of the road and shot the can with his gun. It flew off down the hill and I ran up to see where it had gone. I could see it and I told him so. He came and took my hand, and we started walking back.
We spent some time in foster care; I can remember a couple of the homes. We visited this huge brick house where lots of kids were playing. A car was setting out front of the house and I climbed into the car behind the wheel and was playing with the gear shifter. When the shifter gave way, going out of gear, the car rolled backwards into another car. All the other kids started screaming and the adults came out to see what was happening.
Someone came and got me out of the car and started explaining how dangerous it was to play in the car. He then showed me the damage that had occurred to the other car. I remember looking at the dent made by the headlight as I was being asked, “See what you have done? How are you going to fix that?”
I looked at the dent and had a vision of myself as an adult looking at that same dent and thought that I could not fix it then but knew I would see this car again someday, and I could fix it when I did.
The next place we stayed was with Marshall and Shirley Reynolds as they were trying to adopt us. I remember the day Shirley told us they had been granted the right to adopt us. This meant we didn’t have to move again, and Jan and I liked it there. That was a big day!
Right before we were adopted though, we were taken to see our mother, Vivian. Jan and I were taken into a room where she was, and Jan ran up to her and gave her a big hug. The social worker asked me if I would like to go see her and I asked her, “Will I ever see her again?” She told me that I would not be able to after today and that this was my last chance to say goodbye.
I told her I would rather not then. I remember it well as I was thinking that I just couldn’t handle being torn away again and having to deal with the pain of it. And so, we left without me having said goodbye to her.
Marshall and Shirley grew up in southern Missouri on the northern edge of the Ozarks. Marshall’s grandfather had come west after the Civil War and homesteaded near Racine. He built a log home which is still there today. Emmit, Marshall’s dad, had built a house on the same land where he had lived all his life and in turn, raised his family there. Emmit’s house had a dirt floor, and you could see through the siding boards. The house had no electricity or running water.
They lost their home and the land during the Great Depression due to back taxes and rented it back from the man who had bought it at auction. Twenty years later, Marshall helped them buy it back and built them a new house on the land. That was the house I knew when visiting Grandma and Grandpa Reynolds.
I remember looking in at the old house (which they used for storage) and reading old Joplin Globe newspapers dating way back. Coming through the depression, they didn’t like throwing anything away and it was packed full of all kinds of things.
We used to go there on Christmas and Thanksgiving. It was a wonderful Grandma and Grandpa farmstead. The day Marshall’s dad quit farming, he hung up his equipment in the barn and it was still there till the day he died.
Marshal had purchased a Model-T Ford in his youth and it was in the barn. Every once in a while, he would let us take it for a ride around the farm. A favorite for us all.
Shirley grew up outside Diamond, Missouri. Her dad was a farmer-sharecropper until she went to college; he then took a job in a large meat packing plant and moved to Joplin.
That is where we knew them to live, and it was always a joy to visit them.
Marshall was working for Empire Electric as an electrician, and Shirley was a schoolteacher in Baxter Springs, Kansas, where they lived when they adopted us. Our first home was a small rental house where we lived while Marshall built a red brick house of their own. The new house had a shop out back where he rebuilt airplanes, as he was a major airplane enthusiast.
The first year was fun, but soon Jan and I came to fear Reynolds, as at times it was a very stressful home. Jan was scared a lot at night, and she would ask me to hold her hand until she fell asleep. A very sad situation.
Shirley took Jan and I to church almost every Sunday, at an Assembly of God Church, a Pentecostal church. They had a fun children’s church.
They would have an alter call every week and they would call us to come forward to confess our sins. They believed one could lose their salvation should a person have any unconfessed sin. Marshall didn’t care much for church. In fact, he didn’t go at all. He complained that preachers just wanted his money.
It was after about a year, I started feeling weird about going forward every Sunday. One day, I said this prayer, “Please God, forgive me, but until I understand all this more, I won’t be coming forward every week. I hope you understand.”
That seemed like the right thing to do. I never went forward again until I was nineteen.
Sometimes they didn’t have a children’s church, so we had to sit with the big people. Those wooden pews made us a bit squeamish, and we would make more noise than Shirley wanted us to. She would pinch us to get us to quit making noise and even harder if we cried. We didn’t like going to the big people’s church.
One day, Marshall had a friend die by electrocution while they were working together at Empire Electric. Shortly thereafter, Shirley’s sister’s husband died at a young age of a heart attack. They had been planning to put in a radio station with him.
They started looking around for another opportunity and decided to open a Western Auto store in Fort Scott, Kansas where we ended up moving there.