In My Time (4 page)

With my uncle Elmer and my brother Bob on Elmer’s farm in Dawson County, Nebraska where Bob and I stayed when our mom went to visit Dad in San Diego during the war.

For dinner he’d fry up our catch, or on the rare occasions when the blood and guts failed to get a bite, he would make a big batch of spaghetti. Afterward he and Grandma would bed us down on the oilcloth-covered tables where we’d just eaten, and we would fall asleep to the raucous laughter of my parents and grandparents playing cutthroat games of pitch by lantern light in the railroad car next door.

But those good times lay ahead. Right now we were headed to Sumner, population 296, to stay with Grandfather and Grandmother Cheney, and Mom must have known that the cigarette she was enjoying—the one that had so astonished me—was going to be her last one for a long while.

My mother had grown up in a laughing, card-playing family, with a dad who drank bourbon, smoked Camels, and had an endless store of jokes. My Cheney grandparents, Thomas and Margaret, on the other hand, had probably been staid even in youth. Thomas had been a
schoolteacher before going to work in a bank. Margaret was the product of a rigorous Baptist upbringing and did not believe in tobacco, alcohol, or gambling. Nor, as we were about to learn, did she believe in comic books for her grandsons. Grandmother Cheney, her hair pulled back in a bun, was sixty-eight, and my white-haired grandfather, his back ramrod straight, was seventy-five. They had been enjoying the tranquility their years had earned them before my mother arrived accompanied by two rowdy little boys.

THE CHENEY FAMILY HAD originally come to America from England as part of the great Puritan immigration of the 1630s. For seven generations, the family lived in and around Massachusetts, but in the middle of the nineteenth century, Samuel Fletcher Cheney broke the mold, moving west to Defiance, Ohio.

My great grandfather, Captain Samuel Fletcher Cheney, who served in the 21st Ohio from 1861-1865

Right after Fort Sumter he signed up to defend the Union, and he served all four years of the Civil War. He was at Stones River and Chickamauga and in the campaign for Atlanta. He marched with Sherman to the sea. In May 1865 he camped with his 21st Ohio Regiment just outside Washington, D.C., in Alexandria, Virginia, and he was among the one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers who took part in the Grand Review of the Armies. He marched past the White House, where President Andrew Johnson and his cabinet, along with Generals Grant and Sherman, saluted the brave men who had just won the war.

Samuel had remained unscathed through thirty-four battles and had managed to avoid the terrible sicknesses that plagued most and killed many of his comrades. But not long after he returned home to his wife and two daughters in Defiance, Ohio, he stumbled into a circular saw and lost all the fingers of his left hand.

In 1883, as the country struggled through a long economic depression, the sash and door factory he co-owned had to be sold to pay its debts. At the age of fifty-four, Samuel Cheney had to start over. He gathered his wife and his four youngest children, all sons, and moved eight hundred miles west to a homestead claim in Buffalo County, Nebraska.

The Cheneys built a sod house, planted trees and crops, and slowly
began to build a new life on the Great Plains. Within two years they had proved up their 160-acre claim and acquired an adjacent one to plant trees. The properties flourished until the early 1890s, when drought struck. Then the crops withered and the trees died, and finally, in economic circumstances even harder than those that had driven him under before, Samuel found himself unable to pay his debts. As he testified, despite his excellent record, “The banks will not loan to anyone at present.” In 1896 he saw all his possessions auctioned off on the steps of the Kearney County Court House.

In 1904, after spending several restless years cooped up in Omaha, he claimed a second homestead in the Nebraska Sand Hills. A friend who fought beside Samuel at Stones River had written that “Cheney is clear grit,” and he showed it to the very end: He proved up the Sand Hills homestead before he died in 1911 at the age of eighty-two.

Samuel named his second son Sherman, after the general with whom he had marched to the sea, and his third son, my grandfather, was Thomas, after the great Civil War general George H. Thomas—the “Rock of Chickamauga”—under whom Samuel had served. My granddad’s middle name was Herbert, so everyone called him Bert for short. A teenager when his father first homesteaded, young Bert helped cut the sod bricks from the prairie for their house. He helped plant the cottonwood trees that died when the rain didn’t come. He resolved to live a different kind of life—one in which he wouldn’t have to get up every morning and anxiously scan the skies to figure out his fate.

In Sumner he prospered, becoming cashier and part owner of Farmers and Merchants Bank. After his first wife died of tuberculosis, he married a teacher and church leader, who was, like him, a pillar of the community. On June 26, 1915, forty-six-year-old Bert and thirty-eight-year-old Margaret Tyler Cheney became the parents of my father, Richard Herbert Cheney.

My dad’s parents, Thomas Herbert “Bert” and Margaret Cheney, on the front porch of their house in Sumner, Nebraska.

Despite all his plans and success, Bert Cheney found that, like his father, he couldn’t escape the terrible power of nature. When drought struck in the early 1930s, farmers couldn’t pay their debts, storekeepers had to close their doors, and Farmers and Merchants Bank went under.
Years later my dad would tell me about the day the bank failed. He’d been in downtown Sumner and had run into the bank examiner. It was 1:00 p.m. and the bank still hadn’t opened its doors. The examiner asked my dad where his father was. People were starting to talk, the examiner said, and somebody better do something fast. My father ran home and found his father and the bank board in the living room, making the painful decision to close the bank down. My grandparents lost everything except for the house in which they lived.

Richard was a bright kid who taught himself to type and then paid his way at Kearney State Teachers College by cutting stencils and running the mimeograph machine. He majored in commerce and got good grades, but having to work while going to school meant that it was going to take him five years to graduate. Impatient and strapped for funds, he took the Civil Service Exam and was offered a job as a senior typist with the Veterans Administration in Lincoln, the state capital. After scraping by for so long, he found the prospect of a $120 monthly salary and the security of a government job too good to turn down.

Before long he was offered a job with another federal agency, the Soil Conservation Service. The SCS taught farmers about crop rotation, terraced planting, contour plowing, and using “shelter belts” of trees as windbreaks—techniques that would prevent the soil from blowing away, as it had in the dust storms of the Great Depression. My dad stayed with the SCS for more than thirty years, doing work of which he was immensely proud.

He was also proud of the pension that came with federal employment—a pride that I didn’t really understand until as an adult I learned about the economic catastrophes that his parents and grandparents had experienced and that had shadowed his own youth. I’ve often reflected on how different was the utterly stable environment he provided for his family and wondered if because of that I have been able to take risks, to change directions, and to leave one career path for another with hardly a second thought.

The SCS moved my father from Lincoln to Syracuse, a small town in the southeastern part of Nebraska. As a young bachelor living in a
rented room, he took most of his meals at Dickey’s Café, where one of the waitresses was Marjorie Lorraine Dickey, daughter of the café’s proprietor. My father was, like his parents, somewhat reticent. He didn’t give away a lot on a first meeting—or a second or even a tenth—but that wouldn’t have mattered to my mother, an open, outgoing person, who probably engaged my father in conversation the first time he walked through the door of Dickey’s Café. It’s easy to imagine her taking his order for chili and talking to him as though she’d known him forever.

Mom was something of a star in her small town.

My mother, Marjorie Dickey, with one of her softball teammates, in front of Dickey’s Café in Syracuse, Nebraska. My mom’s folks ran the café before they started work for Union Pacific.

She was one of the famed Syracuse Bluebirds, a female softball team that had been state champions for two years in a row and had gone all the way to the national semifinals in Chicago. Syracuse loved the Bluebirds. They gave people something to hope for and cheer about in the lingering gloom of the Great Depression.

My pretty, high-spirited mother and my quiet, handsome father fell for one another and got married on June 1, 1940. I was born the next year, and my brother, Bob, followed fourteen months later. Our sister, Susan, joined us in 1955.

WHEN WE ARRIVED IN Sumner in 1944, my mother was given the bedroom my grandparents usually rented to a teacher, and Bob and I slept on cots in a storage room. The house was small, and the weeks must have seemed endless to the grown-ups until on Sundays both sides got a break. In some kind of dispensation from my grandmother, my grandfather would start the day by reading the Sunday funnies to Bob and me. Then after church, my father’s half sister, Mildred, and her husband, Elmer Ericson, would pick us up and take us to their farm just outside town. There were horses and cows—big Holsteins for milking—and two white collies and several cats. There were also platters of food I think about to this day. Mildred’s specialty, fried chicken, began in the backyard, where she’d chase down a chicken and chop off its head with the hatchet she kept stuck in a tree stump for precisely that purpose. A few hours later the chicken would appear all fried up on the table, together with biscuits and gravy, all of it topped off with rhubarb pie.

At the end of January 1945, my father was given a week’s leave, and he arrived in Sumner just in time for my fourth birthday.

Bob and me after a successful fishing trip standing in front of our 1947 Frazier.

I had never seen him in his uniform, and when I asked him why he had been gone, he pointed to the patch on his arm—an embroidered white eagle above a red chevron—and said that now he was a yeoman. I still remember trying to process the startling information that my father had apparently spent the last several months as a bird.