City Lights Again

Abstract

Fortunately for my family, in 1934 my father resumed his job in Wichita about the same time that the bank foreclosed on our farm. The gain would exceed the loss, even for me, for I now had playmates, and we still had our ever-reliable felines, Lady and Mandy, and Glory, my faithful terrier. I was just turning seven. If I had stayed on the farm, Mr Hemberger would have had me skip grade two entirely. That was a bit of an overreach for my Martinson school principal, but she advanced me a half grade. I look back gratefully on her wisdom, as that made me the youngest in my class through high school. Any younger and I would have been a total outcast in high school society where sixteen-year-olds think they are going on thirty, and the girls only date the older boys. Wichita, as I gradually learned—growing up only a few blocks from Clyde Cessna’s west side plant—was a ferment of thriving innovation and entrepreneurship. Gradual indeed was that learning, because my mother, family, and close friends were all socialists, active in the American Socialist Party. Wichita’s household names included Cessna, Beech, Stearman, Coleman, Garvey, Dold, Love, Vickers, Koch, Innis, and more. However, we knew and saw none of Wichita’s “rich” as they lived on the east side; we lived on the west side—on the other side of the railroad tracks. However, when my sister Billye became active in the Wichita Art Museum she came to know and greatly respect Mary Koch, mother of Charles, David, Bill and Fred Jr, and Olive Ann Beech. Growinng up socialist, I would eventually see its error in opposing economic freedom. Nevertheless, American Socialists were wise in opposing most of American adventurism abroad and resolute in their support of free speech, assembly, and association , and in opposing discrimination based on race, religion , national origin, skin color, and so on.