Farm Lives

Ten years ago, I wrote manaically. This bit about heritage, name, and family remains readable.

I've traced our clan back 350 years to Jorg Kaelor's migration from Germany. Jorg’s boys re-spelled Kellar to match its English pronunciation—before America's states united. My line, the part noted by genealogists, includes teachers, preachers, innkeepers, storekeepers, pioneers, and Revolutionary War Captains. No matter their day jobs, the Kellars farmed, and continued to farm after the population moved to town.

My roots became interesting after I saw the work of a frontier photographer commissioned by my Great Grandfather. The family photo celebrates the two-story house the Kellars built to finish their homestead obligation in 1909 Frederick, Oklahoma. There are hens scratching on the back porch. One of the boys sits astraddle a cow pony. Horse drawn equipment stands ready by the house. Some trim needs final painting, but the family lived well two years after the Oklahoma Indian Territory opened by statehood.

The men’s jaws, chins, and noses reflect back at me when I study the picture. The look is western—pressed shirts, tucked ties, boots, and brimmed hats. My Gramps, Price Clarence Kellar, Sr., or PC, wears a black suit that shows him older and smaller than his 12 years. Uncle Billy, a toddler dolled in ruffles, grins from a rocking chair. Great Grandma Matilda shines beside her slender girls in store-bought dresses. The girls look from under hats with a Sears & Roebuck’s stroller at the ready.

The picture emerged from a box Gramps opened when I visited on the way to Arizona. As my 90 year-old Grandfather dug through the memories, youth came to him while he shared stories.

William Joel Kellar

Great Grandpa took our Kellar name from his Mother, Mary. Illegitimacy for a proper lady, even at age 24, would tarnish chances in 1859. Mary and her Baptist Preacher father kept Joel learning through finishing school’s eighth grade. He used that credential to teach when few could read, write, or figure. Joel took our name across the frontier and left a traveling gene in our blood.

Joel lost his first wife soon after she bore him a son. An unsuspecting Matilda Berryman Smith fell for the widower, 10 years her senior. She raised eight children in Joel’s wake when he rode off to grow opportunities. He traded or lost school posts for grubstakes and stores from his birthplace in Scotland County, Missouri to the river basin of Oklahoma. The family followed by wagon to work Joel’s vision into reality. Joel stayed until his project took form, and then rode to next thing.

Gramps

PC’s birth on July 3, 1897, put him in an outfit that pushed on to possibilities. PC knew early how to drive an ox team and wagon. He turned ten in Southern Oklahoma where Joel held the Frederick Schoolmaster’s Position and homesteaded a half-section. The growing seasons cooperated and corn fed the family. Tillie loved her farmhouse. The Kellars prospered and enjoyed stability, for a while.

The wind blew trouble in 1909, PC’s 12th summer. Grandma Mary, who made Joel her life and never found a husband, died of “old age and cancer.” June blew too hot for corn in Tillman County. No rain saved the crops. They chopped the stalks for the milk cow. After a nine-month summer that cracked the ground and settled soil in drifts, winter turned mean. Tillie feared her family's failure—hunger does that.

Joel traded away the farm for a well-stocked store in Missouri’s Ozarks, sight unseen. The family loaded what they could on a flat and steamed to Rolla by train.

The stocked store shelved one sack of cornmeal and some molasses. The boys shot the squirrels and rabbits by November. Rolla sits high on the Plateau that defines the Ozarks and keeps the region cold in the winter. The Kellars struggled through another hungry winter.

Tillie’s boys plowed a corn patch and she set a garden when spring came. She refused to suffer another near miss and grounded Joel the next time possibility looked like opportunity. With Tillie dug in, a half-section in Rolla became the Kellar Farm.

Every town put together a baseball team during the sport’s heyday. Joel’s boys raked rocks and preened pasture into a ball diamond. Uncle Jean pitched and a Rolla team grew around his fastball. Gramps sparkled, “I couldn’t have had more fun as a teenager. Between baseball and barn dances, hardly a day went by without company. I don’t know how mother fed them all.”

The baseball team disintegrated when the World War enticed Jean to volunteer. The war straggled enough to draft PC three years later. The day before PC’s orders would march him to port for an overseas post, the war ended. PC came home by train wearing a new doughboy uniform. Jean came back by ship, carrying the medals, decorations, and nightmares of a hero who led troops over Germany.

PC sewed seed on the railways after his army hitch. Mary Jane Harvey, a girl he liked from over by Camp Creek, didn’t appreciate his absence or understand why he ran. Mary Jane loved PC, but her Pa, Judge Harvey, held the Kellars in low regard, “They live too well, prefer fun to work, and waste little time following the Lord on his day.”

Mary Jane challenged her Pa; “Your jealousy of Mr. Kellar’s education, business sense, and pack of hardworking young people is showing.”

The insolence pushed Judge Harvey to forbid the coupling. Mary Jane snuck out to court PC and play at the Kellar place. She broke an ankle at a barn dance and walked it well rather than face her Pa.

PC trifled with skipping to California, stuck between the Judge’s resistance and Mary Jane’s promise that she’d not wait around if he hopped another train. He stayed in Rolla, resolved that, “Mr. Harvey was a turd. He told Mary no good would come from me. I worked hard to prove him wrong, and rub his nose in it.”

Gramps laughed at his story, “Mary and I hitched without Harvey’s blessing. He set it up so he won either way—I took good care of Mary.”

We'd moved on in the tale when Gramps came back to Harvey, “He wasn’t a lawyer, either. Just nosey and elected.”

Why I relate to great-grandfather Kellar over great-grandfather Harvey is curious. The Judge preceded me in law, though I knew nothing of him when I chose law school. Without the Judge’s influence on PC and Mary Jane, I’d have a different biology. Well, if my Gramps called him a turd, he must’ve been one.

The 1920’s economy exploded and Gramps followed it to St. Louis. He drove a streetcar and remodeled houses to rake it in. PC went by Price in the city. He and Mary Jane moved to parlay better housing. Eventually, the home place became a tree-story Victorian on Emily Avenue, hard by the tracks separating Maplewood from St. Louis.

Dad

Price C. Kellar, Jr. first breathed on March 3, 1931, the youngest, and only male of three children. Gramps nicknamed him Sonny-boy. Emily Avenue developed the Victorian home’s estate, but two acres remained for the Kellar’s use. Mary Jane raised poultry for market in a four-car garage she converted to agriculture. At age nine, Sonny rebelled against poultry chores.

When forced to catch a goose, he traipsed the honker through his sister’s kitchen to share his misery. If he scraped manure, he wiped his feet on the carpets of the Victorian’s stair treads. His folks sent him to find a work ethic on Uncle Jean’s farm in Rolla. When Uncle Jean sent him back, he promised to be good if he could have a pony. Sonny rode along the railroad tracks to throw rocks at the house and passing trains to slack his anger.

Gramps took a third job and worked 20 hours a day to fight the great depression. Grandma became ill with diabetes and sick headaches. Aunt Kathern, the middle child, never advanced beyond age three after fever damaged her brain. Sonny’s older sister, Helen, raised them because nobody else was there. It couldn’t have been easy—Aunt Helen's stories center on trying to make Sonny happy during an unhappy time.

Sonny first ran away from home at age 10. He ran so much they should have let him go. He braved it to New Mexico at 14, before he burned up the motor in the family Pontiac. Gramps bailed him out with bus fare when he called. At 15, he changed the year on his birth certificate, and convinced a girlfriend’s mother to pose as his when he needed parental approval to volunteer him at the Marine Corps recruiting office. By the time the USMC discovered the fraud, Sonny’s age qualified him to stay.

The Marine Corps fit “Kel’s” personality. He pulled easy duty boxing and playing football on base teams. He found harder times fighting in cold-ass Korea. He learned to smoke four packs a day and wash down evening mess with a twelve pack during his four tours. Navy doctors stripped his varicose veins to keep him in sickbay, and set him up for a lifetime battle with phlebitis.

Kel came back from policing Guam with leg pain. Doctors parked him at Camp Lejeune Hospitals in North Carolina. His charge nurse, Navy Lieutenant Patsy Jane Humphrey, graduated from nursing school and received her officer’s commission three months before they met. He ignored her brass and flexed his muscle as a Master Sergeant with 12 years done to a career of 20. He pushed until she agreed to go on “just one picnic” with him.

Price and Patsy married August 23, 1958, three months after they met. The Navy drummed Mom out for fraternizing with enlisted and getting in a family way. Her discharge says “honorable” because pregnancy wouldn’t let her fight a war.

Dad tired of the night duty the Marines assigned to him for breaking ranks. He used his legs for a medical discharge. They left Mom’s birth state of North Carolina for Missouri. When Gramps moved closer to the hotel he built, owned, and operated, it made room for my folks to move into the Victorian on Emily. My birth followed on May 13, 1959. Everyone counted the months, but Dad swore Mom said, “No,” until he said, “I do.”

My Times

Farm meant Gramp’s 300 acres in Rolla by the time I recognized Butch as my nickname. Rolla fields taught me the difference between a copperhead and a black snake. I caught my first bass at Grandma’s pond by the farmhouse. We skinny-dipped at Camp Creek, where I learned to avoid Water Moccasins. The creek’s crawdads tasted great. The snapping turtle I wrestled in on a crawdad line tasted better.

Dad taught me to find Indian flints like Gramps showed him. My "Daniel Boone" Mom took me hunting for red squirrels that weighed in like tomcats. We ate them with dumplings and dandelion greens. Aunt Helen and Uncle Fran’s horse, “Spades” became the first horse I ever rode when I hung on to Dad in front of me.

When Dad took us from St. Louis to pursue opportunity in Ohio, we left behind Rolla. They chose farm lives in New Albany, and then Logan. Dad coached my little league teams. Mom and I shot squirrels and rabbits on frosty mornings. We started Horseman’s Hideaway, a dude ranch, and horses became my love. Every day from age eight to 18 started fun, and stayed that way.

Horses fell off my list of worries while I coped with spinal cord injury. My siblings rode while we grew, but horsemanship never became their religion. When they went to college, keeping horses at Horsemen’s Hideaway couldn’t be justified.

My contest pony, Jeep, wore a gray muzzle by the time he needed a home. I hoped to find someone to love him and feed him to horse heaven. A teenager named Cheryl called me. She made promises, and gave me a dollar for Jeep’s bill of sale. Jeepers found a 4-H buddy he could make into a barrel racer.

Farm life ended for me.

As I worked through college and gutted out law school, I knew the life I wanted back. I earned a farm life—10 acres, critters, beautiful Becky and three kids—in Republic, a flat place in the Ozark Mountains.

Bob’s World

When Becky married me, nine-year-old Amanda and five-year-old Courtney didn’t know what to expect from their step-Dad’s farm. Two-year-old Austin climbed up in my lap and pointed which direction to explore. For six years, my boy has asked about frogs, bugs, stars, and hunting. He sees the shotgun I grew up using and asks how long until it’s his. He riffles through my Dad’s tackle box and lets me coach him on fishing. Bob will understand how nature works as he grows up being part of it.

Amanda and Courtney came to appreciate farm life—the quiet, if not the chores. Keeping the three kids after it put me as close to passing on the Kellar way as I’ll get. Close enough!

The second Christmas with the kids, we added horses to our farm to become parents like my Mom and Dad. A week later, Cheryl surprised me with a call. Jeep nickered at her as she fed on a winter night, like he did when I carried his grain twenty years earlier. As Cheryl walked up, the horse screamed and slammed his stall. She watched him flail the air and headed him as his eyes rolled back. The vet said a heart attack took Jeep. Remembering the horse was born in 1959, same as me, gave pause to appreciate my 36 years and life’s brevity. Traditions comfort because they live on—the best reason to keep them.

Bobcat will be a horseman. Our mare foaled a filly built like her name: Rocket. They should be able to do anything when he is 12 to her six. I can’t wait to see what happens. The boy says he’ll never leave our farm. If he stays, we hope he’ll do chores. I can tell him how, but he's our hands until the job gets done.

The kids might all grow up to seek farm lives. They know how to plant a garden, saddle a horse, and midwife a nanny goat. They can spot wild turkey, deer, and coyotes. They know the difference between a red fox’s yip and a barn owl’s screech. They know how to catch frogs and play a bass to shore. My people know when the Spring Peepers holler, winter is all done.

Peeper frogs helped me answer questions on a February home visit from the rehab center in 1978. I felt sorry for myself, sitting in a wheelchair, facing a move back to my Mom and Dad’s farm as a quadriplegic. It was a freak hot day after a warm week—the puddle ponds hit 45° and the boy frogs came out singing. Mom smiled when I noticed. I realized if a dime-sized frog could survive winter, I’d do all right.

I told that story to the kids to explain why nobody should hurt God’s creatures on our farm.

There is tradition behind me. I want to teach like Joel, love work like PC, and handle Sonny’s charm with a Judge’s reason. I want to love my wife and raise great children. I want grandkids to come and see us because it’s fun.

Farm life holds us together.
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As this is my first entry, an update is appropriate, or maybe mandatory.

My law practice did well. In 2005, I settled a few big cases. We made a family decision to buy a well appointed cafe and convert it to a sports pub. All the why's will emerge, but today, I don't have my farm, family, booming practice, or pub. I salvaged 30 horses and saddled up enough debt to ride awhile. I now live in a small town close to gramps' 300 acres.

I'm starting over.