- The Journey Is The Reward – Installment 1 of 6 -
Jean Courter Marchand was born in 1921 and grew up in the Climax area. In 2000, she wrote this article on her memories and perspective of events and people she came in contact with, focusing more on the first twentytwo years of her life.
“My earliest memory is of an event when I was three years and nine months old. My cousin Dean Taylor was born March 23, 1925 on a farm about three miles east of my family’s farm. I remember going with my mother to the house of his parents, Murry and Alice Taylor, and seeing the new baby. Alice was lying in bed, as it was considered important in those days for the new mother to stay in bed for fourteen days following delivery.
“In the summer of 1925, my cousin June Titus, born in 1915, came from her home in Manhattan, and stayed with us for perhaps six weeks. The idea was that she could help some with child care as well as have sort of a vacation on the farm. She played the violin and I remember her practicing her music on some of those hot summer days. A few years later, when my parents wanted me to have some music education, the only instrument I knew anything about was the violin, so that is what I chose to play. An instrument was ordered from Montgomery Ward catalog, (I think it cost something like eight dollars) and I took lessons from a teacher who came to Climax on Tuesdays that summer vacation to give lessons. I recall they cost fifteen cents each. The next summer, my parents took me, each week, to the home of my next violin teacher, Ethel Taylor, who lived a couple of miles east of Eureka. I was in seventh grade when Iola Sears, the music teacher at Climax Rural High School, arranged for some of us younger children to participate with the high school orchestra. I played second violin in that group. Unfortunately, I was not blessed with great, or even minimum, musical talent and the violin was probably the worst possible choice of instrument for me, because I have very little sense of pitch.
“It was shortly after brother Clayton was born that the folks bought their first car, a Model T Ford. It had belonged to Luey Hohimer, another farmer in the community. The Model T had side curtains made of cloth with rising glass inserts for windows, and they buttoned onto the car. Side curtains did help to break the wind somewhat, but the car had no heating system and traveling over the rough dirt roads of the time was not comfortable, even in moderate weather. It was more comfortable and faster than riding in a box wagon or buggy.
“The summer that June stayed with us, dad had a hired man about nineteen years old, Marvin Ferguson, working for him on the farm. Also, Henry Lee, age fourteen, from Emporia, spent a week with us. There was a lot of teasing between the two. Marvin grabbed Henry’s red bandana handkerchief and tied it onto the lightning rod on the roof of the house, a challenge to Henry to get it down. Another memory is of June and me in the feed lot on the back of old Pat, our riding pony. I was in front and June in back. When Pat didn’t move, and I didn’t know how to get him to go, June kicked him in the flank, just in front of the back leg, a very ticklish spot for a horse, and Pat reacted. June and I ended up on the ground. I remember that my chin had a scab on it for several days. I don’t think I tried again that summer to ride Pat.
“Mom sewed all the clothes for herself and for me, both because it was cheaper and because it was the custom for farm people to be as selfreliant as possible. She made me a dress (I was four) and late one afternoon after I had a bath, she dressed me in a brandnew small print blue and white dress, and told me “Now don’t get it dirty.” I went out to the barn and sat on the threshold watching my dad and Marvin, the hired hand, milk cows. Marvin said something jokingly to me and I ignored him. He got my attention, however, when he directed a stream of milk from the cow’s teats right at me, fairly well soaking me and my new dress. I screamed and ran crying to the house, yelling that “Our moo boy milked on me!” I imagine that Marvin was as surprised as I was by the episode. My parents had many a good laugh in the years to come about the event.
“Mom was a member of the local women’s Farm Bureau Unit, which rotated its meetings among the homes of its members. One warm day, Mom was hostess; I and the children of the guests played outdoors. The previous day Mom had painted the roosts in the chicken house with coal oil (kerosene) to destroy or discourage the mites which thrive on warm blooded animals and fowl. We had kittens and I, with my fouryear- old logic, decided that if kerosene killed mites on chickens, it should be good for mites on kittens too. I gave at least one kitten a bath in kerosene before Mom was called from her hostess duties to give the poor kitten another bath, this time to hopefully save the life of the kitten. I don’t remember whether the kitten survived.
“After Mom and Dad married, May 1920, they lived in the same house as my father’s parents. In preparation, Grandpa and Dad had built an addition onto the west side of the house to include a new kitchen and pantry, and on the northeast corner, an addition of a pantry and a bathroom to the original kitchen. Each kitchen was equipped with a sink and a pitcher pump which got its water from a cistern, a concretelined hole in the ground which caught rainwater from the roof of the house. Very few farm houses of the area had such modern convenience. Unfortunately, rainfall was so uneven that for part of most years the cistern was dry. The grandparents lived on the west side and my parents on the east, sharing the three upstairs bedrooms with my grandparents. There were connecting doors between thetwo“apartments.”Idon’t know if the arrangement was harmonious at the beginning, but when the first child (I) came along, considerable friction developed. When neighbors came to “see the new baby” and Grandma Courter wanted to wake me from my nap, Mom objected, with resulting bad feelings. As I grew older Mom insisted that I was not to enter the grandparents’ apartment without an invitation and Mom’s permission. Grandma Courter felt she was being denied access to her grandchild. Then one day, unknown to others, I slipped through the connecting door into the grandparents’ home, saw a pair of scissors and a cutwork dress collar my aunt had embroidered and I did what many a two-year-old child would do, I experimented with the scissors on the collar. Grandma thought I should be spanked, my mother disagreed. There were harshwords,resultinginmy father renting an adjacent farm, and Mom, Dad and I moved to the Lamb place. I don’t remember any of this, but I heard the stories many times. A few months after Grandma Courter died, my family moved back to the home where I was born. My Grandfather Courter lived and slept in the built-on room which had been the kitchen for the grandparents after my parents married. Dad’s sister, Anna, slept in the downstairs bedroom. Mom, Dad and we children slept in the upstairs bedrooms. Mom cooked the meals and one of us children would be sent to call Grandpa and Anna to the table to eat with us.
“Grandpa Courter was born in New Jersey in 1843 and in the 1860s left to go west. He worked in logging in the Great Lakes states and mining in the Mesabi Range before he got to Kansas in 1868. He homesteaded near the Nebraska border and lived there until 1875 when the grasshopper invasion wiped out the crops. He then went to the Dakota Territory where he met and married Barbara Ritz, my grandmother, in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory in 1882. They moved back to Washington County in Kansas in 1889. In 1903 they moved to a farm near Topeka, so the children could get a better education. After Dad graduated from Topeka High School, they moved to a farm about five miles east of Climax. Grandpa Courter had traded his farm near Topeka to a man who had the farm near Climax, that they moved to. They loaded furniture, wagons and livestock into a boxcar and took the train to Climax.
“The 1920s were a thriving time for much of the country, but not so much for Kansas farmers. The stock market crash in October 1929 did not directly affect most of the farmers in Kansas because they owned little stock, yet the ability of small Kansas banks to obtain money to loan was directly related to the troubles of the larger financial markets and the Kansas banks had little money to loan. Many small banks failed, including the Climax State Bank in which my family had small deposits. I remember my mother telling my Grandfather Courter that the Climax bank had failed.
“Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 and one of his first acts was a bank holiday in March 1933, where all banks were closed for a few days so order could be established in the banking industry. The Climax bank never reopened, although some funds were later made to depositors.”
