| Notes |
- The following from "The Melia Family" an autobiography by Kay Melia. Th
is reporter has taken some license in taking small excerpts from the original to provide notes regarding Gordon Melia and his wife Lula..
"...the second child born to Grandad Newt and Grandma Grace. His name was Gordon Bisbee Melia, and he was born on January 30, 1900, Just a few days short of being a part of the 19th century. He was my Dad. Grandad Newt was 32 when Dad was born and Grandma was 26. He, also was born on the home place, in the same house as his two sons would be born later. Dad's days of growing up, logically, were concerned with helping on the farm. As every other farm kid at that time, he always had chores to do. I suspect he was working horses in the field soon after he became old enough to go to school. Grandad was in the process of building quite a nice herd of cattle, what with all the good grassland he had acquired over in the sandhills, so I'm sure Dad helped with that project. Since he was the oldest son in the family, some of the heavier work may have been on his assignment sheet."
"Dad attended Fonda Country school, just like the rest, along with all the neighbor kids. Being only a mile away, it was just a short horseback ride for him and his brothers and sisters. Fonda school had a good size barn where the horses would be kept during the day, and there would always be a stack of hay nearby, provided by the families who had kids riding there everyday. Country school was quite a bit shorter than the present day term of school. School started in Mid-September, after the wheat had been planted and the fall crops were mostly harvested, and would let out in early April so that the kids would be available for planting season. "
"Dad started high school in 1915 in Bucklin, only the 4th year that there was a high school there. There was an enrollment of 90 students in the whole school, in a town with a population of 712. That indicates that there were still a lot of kids going to country grade school. ......"
"There was no football team in Bucklin until 1919, the year Dad graduated. His class was only the 8th graduating class of Bucklin High School, and consisted of seven boys and eight girls."
"Track and field was the big sport in Bucklin High for many years, and Dad excelled. .....Dad's specialty was the 440 yard dash, and he was nearly always the anchorman on the relay teams. We still have several of the trophies he won in high school."
"After high school graduation, Dad headed off to the Fort Hays Normal School at Hays, now of course known as Ft. Hays State University, also my alma mater. As the name "normal" would imply, it was strictly a school to train teachers, and that was the sole reason Dad was there. He wanted a teaching certificate so that he could pick up a little cash, an opportunity he didn't have while working on the farm. ...... He came back home in the spring of 1920, and began teaching that fall, at Fonda, and perhaps also at Daisy Dell, and maybe at Liberty south of town."
"By this time, Dad had met Mom. Her name was Lula Sarah Skeen, daughter of David Jonathon and Charlotte Maria Skeen, who had come to the Bucklin-Bloom area before Mom was born. She was actually born in Bucklin, in a dugout over on the west side of town...... She also graduated in Bucklin, but in 1922, and attended Hays Normal briefly and was also teaching country school. She was teaching school shortly after her 18th birthday."
"While in high school, Mom made trips to Hays with a girl friend of hers to see Dad, so they were actually courting for several years. Between themselves, they were slowly accumulating some cash that would help them get started at a later date."
"That later date was August 3, 1924. Dad was 24 and mom was 19 when they tied the knot at the Methodist Church in Ford."
"On Grandad Newt's homeplace, it was begining to get lonesome. Jessie already had kids and was living on her own farm not far away Oscar graduated for high school in 1922, the same year as Mom, and had struck out on his own. Mabel, graduating in 1921, was away in college, Elmer had just graduated in 1924, and was at Emporia at college. Gene was in high school and Pauline was only 2. So, Grandad Newt and Grandma Grace, lacking the deep pool of farm labor that had seemingly always been around, packed it in and moved to town ......... and Grandad would begin the job of overseeing his farm for the final 25 years of his life, from the comforts of his home in town."
".......but my Dad and Mom must have been thrilled to have the opportunity to begin their life together on this big farm, with a grand home, and with all the horses and machinery already in place........So there they were, Dad and Mom in that big modern house, alone."
"On November 15, 1926, Dad and Mom became the parents of a 9 1/2 pound boy. They named him Phillip Max, and he was born there at the house where Dad was born, attended by Dr. Ebert, the family country doctor who was an osteopath. On May 9, 1930, Dr. Ebert was back on the job to deliver me. I was more than a month overdue and weighed in at 12 pounds. Dr. Ebert called my brother and I "Max and Climax."
".......Grandad had given Dad and Mom the start they needed by moving off the home place and welcoming them into that big house when they were first married. And now, (in 1932) it was Elmer and Pearl's turn for the same sort of start up. Dad and Mom moved to a small farmstead I have always referred to as the "sandhill place." .....and the three of them Grandad, Dad and Elmer continued to farm together until 1938, when Dad got his own farm."
" .....but by 1936, the rains stopped. The thermometer rose. The wind blew. Banks had been closed by the stock market collapse a few years before and the country was in the middle of a catastrophic depression. Americans everywhere, but especially the midwest farmer, were in serious trouble. There were no crops. There was no money. The top soil would whip into huge drifts, much like snow during a blizzard, but this stuff would not melt. The stamina and patience of every farmer and his family on the plains were severely tested, and only the strong would still be around when the rains came and the wind stopped blowing. From 1934 through 1937, it was almost impossible to raise a crop. People relied on carefully attended gardens for sustenance. To add to the misery, summer temperatures were extremely hot. There are more record high temperatures on the books for the mid-thirties than any other period of time on record........."
"Max was asthmatic most of his life, much worse when he was very young, and there was very little question in our family about what caused it to be so serious. Day after day of breathing fine, sifted dust certainly took it's toll everywhere............"
"To add to our family's difficulty, it was in the summer of 1935 that our home was badly damaged by a tornado. The following day, neighbors arrived and began the process of rebuilding the home, and we lived there for 2 more years, and later that house was moved to the Kirkpatrick farm and became the home of Jessie and Glenn. There were still a couple of more moves that we made for the next year or so, then........."
"1938 arrived and, right on schedule: Dad rented the Bantz place just a half mile north of the home place, and life for me, began. It was the place that our family would, thrive and begin to enjoy life. The drought was about to end, the depression was about to end, and there appeared hope for the future again."
"During the war years of 1941 through 1945, of course the whole country and it's people lived through the age of the rationing of everything, and in many ways the farmer fared better than many, in so far as day to day living. We had our huge garden, we butchered our own beef, and had chickens and cows for eggs, meat and milk. Clothes were about the only commodity that the family couldn't grow,
but we did the next best thing. Mom made most of them."
"In 1944, Dad wanted to buy his own farm and Mr. Bantz would not sell, so Dad bought the old Taylor place about 2 1/2 miles east. It had a fine barn, a garage, 2 chicken houses, storage shed, and of course a house and an outhouse. We set about remodeling and wiring the house for electricity which was soon to come to rural America, thanks to the Rural Electrification Administration. We added a bathroom, built on a nice new kitchen (complete with hot and cold running water) with new kitchen cabinets."
"Needless to say, Dad and Mom thrived in their new place. What a change....an electric range, refrigerator, washing machine, and even a bathroom! The war was over, crops were good, market prices weren't too bad, and Dad was able to pay off the contract on the place several years in advance."
"Sadly, my Grandfather Newt passed away on May 1, 1949, when I was a college student. The day marked the passing of a great man, and the end of an era in our family."
"When Grandma Skeen died in May of 1956, Dad and Mom bought her little house in town, and completely reworked it. In the spring of 1957, they moved to town. Dad was 57, Mom was 52. Dad continued to farm the Taylor place by himself until he died in 1968. It was on May 1, 1968 and Dad was driving his pickup from the farm to town after a day's work. He knocked off a little early that day because they were going to Dodge city that night for some kind of concert. Dad pulled onto the highway, just a mile from from the farm. He didn't see the Cadillac coming from the east, and the pickup was hit broadside. Dad was thrown from the pickup(there were no seat belts in the pickup) and rushed by ambulance to the Bucklin Hospital, where he died within a couple of hours from internal injuries. There wasn't a mark on his body."
"Mom would handle the affairs of the farm, which was worked by the Austin brothers. Mom would become incapacitated in the early 80's and spent the final 8 years of her life at the Hilltop House in Bucklin. She died on January 9, 1991, just short of her 86th birthday."
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1900 - 1968 (68 years)
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