When I explain that I came from a family of 10 children, my listeners usually do some kind of gasp or at least register some astonishment. Even for mid-20th Century, 10 was a large number of children. But we did not come all at once. We seemed, as I grew up, to have a lot of aunts and uncles that fit neither directly into the batch of 9 children my mother came from, nor the 5 that my father came from.
In time we became aware that there were all kinds of layers of family around. We called my father's uncles and aunts, "Uncle" and "Aunt". We called his brother and sister-in-laws "Uncle" and "Aunt" as well, and his father-in-law. "Papaw Kidd". even though he was technically not our own grandfather. We were as apt to see them as to see our mother's or father's family.
Our father's first wife, Modena, had died in her 30's from colon cancer. She left behind their two sons, Son (James Frank) and Jack. Our mother was, as I observed earlier, possibly the first Southern Baptist woman to ever get a divorce, and had two children Nina, and Doyle, to support. It was war time, and she and Daddy met while they both worked at Walker Air Force Base. They married in Roswell, and built a little house, bringing their four children together. As they married, Son was 14, Jack 9, Nina, 6. and Doyle, 2.
Their first baby, Alma Jean, was born in 1945 with insufficient lung surfactant. She did not live to come home from the hospital. The war ended, and so did their civilian jobs. For some reason unknown to anyone in the family, they moved to the Ozarks of Missouri.
Following close behind them were our paternal grandparents, and one of Daddy's sisters and brother-in-law. They spent several years in the Ozarks at Exeter, a bucolic piece of Eden where the very fence posts would sprout leaves if not painted to prevent it. I think the kids were all rather happy there. Nina and Doyle were enrolled in school with Walker for their last names, although their birth father would not give them up for adoption.
Mother had another baby in 1947, Betty Ann, who was born with a serious heart defect. Although it was possible to surgically correct the problem it was necessary for her to be bigger and healthier than she was to have survived an attempt at surgery. She died at 8 months. As an adult, Doyle would be reduced to tears as he remembered that tragedy. He was 6 years older than Betty Ann.
Son was home on leave when she died. That had to have been another shock for him. As we grew up he remained rather distant from us, never really engaging. It was not until I was grown that I understood how tentative relationships must have seemed for him.
Mary Beth was born in the first month of 1949, only 4 months after Betty Ann's death. She failed to thrive, not being able to tolerate any milk or formula until they tried goat's milk. She was so fragile that one of Mother's sisters made and sent a dress to have her buried in. She was healthy and beautiful in a short time.
I was born about 3 years later. We were still on the farm when I came, and a drought had plagued the area for a few years. To tie the farm over, our father bought a number of piglets from an individual who may have known they all had Hog Cholera. They were all dead within a short while, and Daddy lost the farm. At the same time his sister and her family sold out, moving back to Texas.
Mother's ex-spouse proposed she allow him to take the two children to live with him in Ft. Worth, where he had a " good job with General Dynamics. " . Through mother's family he reported that they would have a "better life" than they could hope for under the dire circumstances they now faced. Unknown to her, that life reportedly would include caring for an invalid grandmother and some rough treatment from an unkind father. Mother must have felt defeated. Certainly when she and I had the conversation that gave me this information she expressed that she had no other choice at the time. She allowed them to go, only to have to face a judge later in a failed attempt to regain custody.
Jack was with us for a few months when we first moved to Denver from Missouri, but not long. He went on to New Mexico to finish school, living with his mother's sister and her husband, who was my father's cousin.
He was happy to be there, and once done with school, joined the Army. He was stationed at Ft. Carson, in Colorado Springs when he began to experience medical problems that foreshadowed the ultimate battle that lay ahead for him. Despite the medical history of his mother, the Army did not focus on the possibility he could have cancer.
So, although by way of explanation I have digressed, we left the farm about 1953, before I was old enough to have more than one or two impressions of ever living there, with just we two girls and Jack, who soon was in New Mexico. Son was in the Military, Nina and Doyle in Ft. Worth.
There was not a job waiting in Denver. Daddy had an aunt and uncle there who must have helped him get on his feet. The job as an airplane mechanic he had hoped for at Stapleton Airport went to an ex-GI, of course. Mother and Daddy both became door-to-door salesmen, selling Filter Queen vacuum cleaners, and Tupperware. David was born in early 1954, and now our family looked like 3 small children. After a while, I could not remember I had an older sister until I saw her at a family gathering when I was 4.
Doyle could not bear his father's house, and left, hitch-hiking to Denver. At 13 he looked quite a bit older than he was, already nearly 6 feet tall. He had mailed a letter to Mother telling her he was coming, and she was truly happy to have him home. He played and "roughhoused' with us, but we seldom saw him because within a very short time he was working as a bell hop at a nearby hotel. We lived just blocks from the Capital. So Doyle went to school during the day, came home for a meal and then on to the hotel til late at night.
He later told us that Mother and Daddy scarcely could make a living when we first moved to Denver. It is true that they did not prosper until the few years we lived in Pueblo, and that did not last long because of the closing of the steel mill. Their plight might have been much like that of others of their generation. The war had brought a number of people off the farm and out to work as civilians on the bases. The majority of them had only a high school education, and were not prepared to do any certain thing in the cities. But with the advent of the G I bill and FHA for housing, vets everywhere were climbing the economic ladder to a growing middle class, and it is true that encyclopedias, vacuums, spices, and any number of other household goods would be sold door to door. But Daddy's salvation was selling life insurance.
Mother and Daddy took in a boarder, our beloved Azhar, to help us make ends meet. Doyle stayed with us until he married, rather young, about 1959. He was the last of the "big kids" to live at home.
My first memory is of the green bead board shelf or cabinet top by the back porch water pump in Missouri. The next is of living briefly in a basement apartment before my parents found the house on Cherokee, in Denver. I remember Jack, a tall older brother just briefly living with us on Cherokee, and then he is gone. From that time I have a steady trickle of memories, Mother coming home from the hospital with David, (I am then 25 months old then), watching David's face as he plays, his brow furrowed with deep concentration on his objective. Mary is always beautiful, her dark chestnut hair shining and curly, her beautiful smile dimpled. I think she is prettier than Shirley Temple. Then Doyle comes to live with us sometime following our move to East 12th Avenue. Finally, a young, beautifully dressed woman comes and speaks with my mother, calling her mother. I am astonished. After she leaves, I ask, "Mother, why did she call you Mother?"
Although I had been standing right there when Mary Beth had that conversation with Mother about being a flower girl at Nina's wedding, I could not summon who she was from my short memory. I loved to look at the faces of my siblings. What I had processed on Mary's face as she was trying to understand that Nina had already married, and that she could not be her flower girl was something I can now recognize as resigned disappointment.
I knew about Son and Jack, because we had seen them at our grandparents in Missouri at Christmas. But Nina was now married and living with her husband, Donald in Ft. Worth and we saw her less often because it was another 12 hour drive from New Mexico on to Ft. Worth. In years to come, if we were home at Christmas, it would be a difficult time for our mother if Nina was not able to come. The only time I ever saw her cry was when Nina could not be home for Christmas.
So, as you see, we were from a family of 10. There were not any half brothers or sisters in that family. We all belonged to each other, even the ones we couldn't see often. Neither of my parents ever referred to the children brought to the marriage by the other spouse as "step-children" . Not ever. Nina said that after they left the farm in Missouri, they were heartbroken to have the last name they were born with once again. In Missouri it had worked, but when they moved in with their natural father it was not the same.
Both Nina and Doyle called our father "Daddy". Doyle did see his natural father occasionally in years to come. Nina did not. But Son and Jack called our mother, "Ann". Of course that would have been natural as well.
For both sets of kids, there were periods of happiness and delight, followed by sometimes shattering disappointment. In the end, we collected one another up and made sure each other were OK and forged on.
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