Leveraged Intelligence

Manchester: Nothing to Fear…Except…

Everything from the kid’s point of view that I have written about Manchester has probably seemed pretty idyllic so far.  It was.  But…all great stories have another side, lest there be no dimension, no depth.  And, that all-important dimension for Manchester, Kansas in the 1950’s was…DANGER!!

And, what exactly did a kid need to watch out for and what was the kid’s take on it?

Tornados

There was a reason that they put the Wizard of Oz in Kansas.  Tornados were everywhere!  Fortunately, if you ever have the joy of flying over Kansas, you will notice that there is  a whole lot of open space out there.  Sometimes, though, they came a little close – and I will let Mom tell you about the time she was driving on Interstate 70 and she had a tornado in front, a tornado in back, a tornado on the left and a tornado on the right.

Most tornados wandered around in pastures and very few were huge.  And, a tornado is a hit-or-miss affair, unlike a hurricane.  You pretty much either get hit or you are totally fine.  Just in case we got hit, we had drills at school.  Every place had a siren, even Manchester.  And, if you ever fly to the Kansas City airport, you will notice signs to the tornado shelter.  Otherwise, if you get hit, you often only get hit once…

Atomic Bombs

The cold war with the Soviets threatened to heat up at any time.  Again, there were the drills at school where you went to the center of the school, ducked and covered.  If there was no time, you went under the desk.  Now, that leaves an imprint on a kid and came back to haunt me some after we moved to Abilene.  I can remember being around 12 or 13 and lying awake at night thinking about it.  It was a pretty terrifying thought.

The storm shelters served double duty.  They were supposed to be bomb shelters, too.  Remember the movies of the kids walking home from school when there would be a flash and they would hurry to crouch down behind a concrete wall?  Even the President of the United States coming from just down the road wasn’t very reassuring when you thought about that.

So, we didn’t.

Snakes

There are four kinds of poisonous snakes in America: rattlesnake, copperhead, cottonmouth moccasins and coral snakes.  The only one of these we didn’t have was the coral snake.

To make matters worse, it was the King Snakes or the Bull Snakes – it’s been awhile – that looked just about like a rattlesnake.  Outside of that, we had something called a blue racer – and it wasn’t a sports car.  I swear I can remember one chasing me on my bike.  I know one got after Mom.

We town people were more scared than the farm people.  I’m telling you, those folks were tough.  You remember GL telling us about his dad getting out of the car every so often to go kill a rattler.  He was a farm guy.

Spiders

At most houses, people did not have an indoor privy.  Wild creatures sometimes take up residence in your outhouse and one of the least desirable is a Black Widow spider.  Gives a new meaning to kiss your butt goodbye.

I think Mom caught a couple in a jar while we lived up there.

The Frankenstein Monster

I kind of had an active imagination.  Well, one night I watched the original Frankenstein movie with Boris Karloff.  Oddly enough, he visited me during the night for awhile after that.  About until I got married, I think.

Lockjaw

One of our kids stepped on a rusty nail.  Why, we would step on most anything around there and the souls of our feet got about 2 inches thick during the summer.  But, a rusty nail could find its way through.

So, they told us he might get lockjaw!  Lockjaw!  Bad as tetanus is, it turns into something else once a kid hears the term lockjaw.  We would discuss it amongst ourselves:

Kid 1: They say he could die from it.

Kid 2: How do you die?

Kid 3: Well, it’s lockjaw.  That means you can’t eat.  You starve to death!  Real slow…

Outside of social ostracism – which was worse than all the above stuff – what were you afraid of as a kid?  What was it that could do you in?

All pictures public domain or clip art.  No animals harmed in the writing of this post.

Only a few kids injured.

Manchester: Time to Move

The above is a satellite image of Manchester as it looks today.  To refresh you, we lived in the apartment above the grocery store when we first moved to Manchester in 1953.  It is where the rectangle that I have in maroon above sits.  And, my friend and classmate, Connie, took some pictures in Manchester last week, so I thought I would share with you at ground level how some of it looks today.

This is Main Street and the first big building on the left is the store and apartment.  The smaller building on the left is where the phone operator lived – and operated!

The next picture is from Main Street of the store and apartment as they look now:

Alas, nothing lasts forever and in 1955 it was time for us to move.  The distance wasn’t that great, but it was a move probably halfway across town.  I mean, it was two blocks.

The yellow line on the map above is the path we followed for the move.  First, it takes you past the city park (the aqua box by the yellow line):

The next picture is a close-up of the swings and gazebo.  What is less obvious is that the space between the gazebo and the swings was the width of our pickup football field.  It was also the city movie theater seating:

Moving on up the yellow line, at the end is a two box outline in fuchsia of where the school was – and turning right, you go to where our rental house was.  Our property was in the blue box, if you can see it.

To this day, I’m not sure why we moved.  Maybe it was the lowered rent, from $25 to $15 per month.  Maybe it was the yard.  But, my best guess is that it was so Dad didn’t have such a grueling commute to work!  Across the street from the school was the PERFECT location for us.

Now, stay tuned, because the next Manchester entry will be Manchester: The Dangers!

To be continued…

Manchester: Standing for Truth, Justice and the American Way!

my little superman Originally uploaded by David M. Zuber

When we lived in our Manchester apartment, my mother made a cape for me from a red scarf. It was the cape of my favorite superhero, the only REAL superhero – Superman! I flew all over the apartment with hands out front and my cape flowing behind. As I flew, I made those “whooshing” sounds like they had on TV.

The beauty and magic of childhood is that ability to “become” the character you are emulating.  When you make believe, you do it with all your heart.  I had X-Ray vision, was invulnerable, could fly, had super strength.

Later, it was the comic books.  Again, Superman led the way!  For a dime, you had a treasure to be read over and over.  You could read it in your room, on the couch, sitting under a tree, sitting in a swing… And you were transported into their super world, totally into your new surroundings!

Then you become an adult!  End of fun, right?  No way!  You know me better than that.  It just doesn’t give me the same buzz running around with a scarf tied around my neck saying “Whoosh!” if you know what I mean.  But, what does turn my crank is imagining what it would be like to have Superman grow up in our world, our world as we find it.  Not with super villains to confront, but with our everyday concerns.  Along those lines, I have a series of questions to ask you about what Superman might be like in our world and I would love to hear some of your ideas:

Would he dismantle Al Qaeda?
Would he make the North Korean missile moot?
What relationship would he have to world leaders?  Would he go to the G20 Summit?
Would he force an end to armed conflicts as people started them?
Would people get to point of saying it was "just" Superman flying up there?
Would his "job" ultimately bore the crap out of him?
What would his religious beliefs be like?
Would he endorse political candidates?
Would he have an audience with the Pope?  Would the Pope have an audience with Superman?
Would he support positive technologies?
Would he have causes that he backed?
Would he be willing to kill one or some to save many?
Would he identify as American or take more of a global identity?  He has a super brain. Would he invent things?

What do you think, gang?  Have at it and I’ll jump in with you!

Addendum: I just have to throw this in, because it is so funny for this topic:

Manchester: The Cure for Boredom – Take 1

Ramana Rajgopaul, over at his blog Ramana’s Musings found this marvelous YouTube piece that you can see by clicking the link at the end of the sentence and it is a comedian talking with Conan about Everything’s Amazing, But Nobody’s Happy.  I really encourage you to look at it before reading this piece.  It is a very fine indictment of major mistakes we are making in modern culture.

Ramana – and maybe Jean – dealt with the idea of boredom a few posts back.  We agreed that boredom for children was a fairly modern phenomenon.  Why?  What did kids do in earlier days that was so interesting?  It would seem that a small town would REALLY bore you.  It didn’t, and this is the start of a mini-series that will be inserted sporadically into the larger series on how kids of another time occupied themselves.

Manchester wasn’t really a small town.  Manchester was a village.  There was always something to do.  Here’s part of what a kid did – and it’s no wonder that obesity wasn’t a problem!

Saturday Night Movies in the Park

Manchester had a “City” park.  It was a for real park that was so cool!  It had a gazebo that we played in.  It had a whole forest of trees.  It had an open area to mark off for sports.  But one of the absolute best things about it was the Saturday Night Movie!  You heard me correctly.  A town of just over 100 people had Saturday night movies.

The idea was simple: in the summer, if the weather was good, the evenings would be balmy and nice!  From some magical source, an 8MM movie projector would appear and a screen like you would see in a classroom would be set up.  And, also from some source totally unknown to me, a reel-to-reel movie would be produced.

Everyone was on a lawn chair or a blanket on the ground and everyone had picnic baskets.  The sun would set and everyone watched a movie, as a community.

The park was right out back of our apartment across the alley.  This was special.  GL and I both remember going to watch the movies as little kids.

Roller Skating at the Beanery

This was a building, The Beanery, that was used to store grain or beans or something.  We kids didn’t care.  The key was that the town would have roller skating parties there.  We had the old style skates that had metal wheels and clamped onto your shoes.  You had that key to tighten them.

We would skate in a big circle and fall down on the concrete every so often.  Nobody had pads like the picture or helmets, and we would go home with puffy elbows and joy in our hearts!

By the way, kids back then always had bruises!  It was part of living!!!

Riding Bicycles Anywhere, Anytime

Every kid had a bike.  We were on them constantly!  They were built like tanks and had balloon tires.  The first thing you did was take off all the extra weight so you could ride the thing.  We were peddling through gravel most of the time, but “the town” was mostly indistinguishable from countryside and it was a rider’s paradise.  We were making strong legs, but never thought about it.

Sometimes you’d try something and fly off into a ditch.  Man, that hurt!  Especially when you flew up on the handlebars!!!  But, when you had sufficiently recovered, you tried the stupid thing you had just tried to pull off again.

Climbing Trees

Everyone climbed trees.  It was just assumed that you climbed trees.  We would climb up in trees to talk.  And, here was the bonus that made it even better: many of the trees we climbed were fruit trees!  We would be talking while we ate pears and we even had a mulberry bush that had become so big that you could climb into it and eat mulberries!

Sometimes you fell out of a tree and broke your arm or something.  It didn’t happen very often, so nobody worried about it.  That’s how life was then – it was made for activity, not fear.

Root Beer and Peanuts

Now, why in the world would I include Root Beer and Peanuts in this series?  Because, for a dime, you could get a bottle of Root Beer and a bag of peanuts at the grocery store.  You poured the peanuts into the top of the bottle and it would foam up.  You sipped the foam – then you moved the bottle back and forth until it made some more foam to sip.  Eventually, you drank the Root Beer and the peanuts remaining (to the last drop and peanut!) and life was good!  Summer was hot.  But, here’s the key – simple works for kids.  All that we were doing was hanging out and drinking root beer and eating peanuts.  That was enough!

It seems to me that as a society we have forgotten so many of these truths of life.  Life is made to take a piece of, to work with, to play!  Simple works best.  Take time away from multitasking and just do what you do for awhile.  In these economic times, it is good to remember that enjoyment isn’t measured by cost or toys.  It’s measured by involvement and sharing.  And hanging out with nature really helps!

As time goes by, I’ll toss in some of the other things we did.  This is really a very small sampling.  What did you do as a kid???

Manchester: The Apartment – The Rest of the Story!

Hang with this story, gang.  It has more nuggets than a California gold mine!  You not only get to hear about Manchester living, you get to meet my mother more fully.  Imagine yourself sitting in the living room as she tells the story…  Both of my folks are a lot of fun!!

Get ready because you are going to hear more about "The Apartment", lol

I had to quit working the other night because my head was starting to ache……I’ve been having small cancers removed from my face (I think the doc doesn’t like my face because for the past 30 years he has been taking off small pieces of it) and this last time he had to take some skin from the left side (he called it my "laugh line" and we all know it is a wrinkle) to graft over a hole he made in the right side of my nose. The bandage on my nose makes it hard to see through my glasses unless I twist my head around a lot. I wish I had known when I was young what I know now about the sun and the problems you can have from having a fantastic tan….blonde hair and tan skin makes you a female "hunk",lol, and since my husband likes a little diversity now and then I decided that the only place he was going to get it was at home….hence the blond hair and brown skin that has caused me much pain. It was probably in vain tho’ because one time I had a red rinse put on my hair and he didn’t notice that he was living with a redhead for two weeks and then only because the sun was shining right on my head and he had to notice it or admit he was blind. The real story is that my beauty operator was doing weird things with my hair because it was easy to work with and I was nuts enough to let her use me as a model to show what you could have done to your hair if you only had the nerve (one time she picked up the wrong bottle and I had to work (I was a reporter-photographer for a newspaper at the time) with cotton candy pink hair. My poor husband never knows what to expect…..most of our 63 years together, lol.

Now, since I’ve bored you nearly to death, we’ll get back to early living.

I think I neglected to mention that our apartment in Manchester had beautiful mahogany woodwork and the ceilings were made up of embossed metal squares. Those squares would probably be worth a lot of money now and they had sense enough to keep them and the woodwork natural…..no paint on any of it. They did paint the doors tho’ and I’m sure they were mahogany, too, because they were really thick and heavy. A gust of good Kansas wind against them would really send you flying…..either in or out, depending on the way you were going. We had to climb 22 steps to reach the porch that took you to the doors and it was really fun to go to one of the bigger towns to shop and come home and make several trips up and down to unload the car filled with kids, groceries and whatever else I could manage to afford. In those days we did not have credit cards so we were very careful to spend only what we could pay for with cash. We had a bank account but only wrote checks to pay for "large purchases" or for items that were paid by mail (utilities; rent; doctor, etc.).

When we moved to Manchester I was 22 ; Joe was 27; Con was 3 1/2; and, Viki was 6 mo. old. We would spend the week days in Manchester and the weekends in Salina with one or the other of our parents…at first. After we became acquainted with some of the younger couples we would spend the whole week there and go to church on Sunday. On Sunday I would get up early and put the beef roast in the oven, surrounded with vegetables, set the timer so everything would be cooked by the time we came home after services and the whole downtown area smelled like roast beef because I cooked enough to have leftovers for half the week. One weekend we went to my parent’s home and they had bought a 17" TV set……I thought maybe I had died and gone to heaven.

We could see Elvis and the Ed Sullivan show plus everything else that happened to be on the one channel they could get. After we went home we talked it over and decided that there was no reason in the world why we couldn’t have a TV set too……the lack of money came into it somewhere but we ignored that and figured out a way to do it by scrimping on this or that and saving money on gas because we would be entertained in our own home. We bought a set and they installed the antenna on our roof (nearly in the clouds) and we really had the monkey by the tail!! We had the first one in town and it was quite the conversation piece for awhile. We never had very good reception until we moved but ignorance is bliss I guess and we nearly always enjoyed whatever we had…….as long as we had each other and a roof over our heads.

I don’t think that I mentioned that stone buildings (and every other building) in Kansas are infested in the spring and summer with Box Elder bugs. They are little black and red bugs that don’t do anything that I know of. They don’t bite you; don’t eat your clothes like crickets do; don’t make any noise; or, leave a trail or anything. However, they were very prolific (lot’s more so than rabbits, lol) in our building and when Viki started to crawl she decided that they would be good to eat. She would take off just like a shot to catch one and Con would come running like crazy yelling, "Come quick, Sissie is eating bugs." I would go to wherever he had come from and find her sitting on the floor chomping away on what she soon learned to call "Bocky Bugs". I guess I should have left her alone, I never have heard of anyone dying …or even getting sick….from eating the darned things but it just seemed so gross to have her eating bugs that I tried every way I could possibly try to get rid of the things…..but I never did get rid of them and she finally quit (Con was pretty good at putting his finger in her mouth and scooping the bug out). I was always afraid she might eat a spider or something but I guess if she did, it didn’t do her any damage because she grew into a fine looking and smart lady. I don’t think Con could have very much luck at scooping anything out of her mouth now…..if she really wanted to eat it. She probably still has a scar on the under side of her chin from holding onto the window sill and jumping up and down on her bed…….she had been told time and again not to do that because she might fall out the window. Instead of falling out of the window she fell down behind the bed and split her chin. We had to make a quick trip to Abilene to the ER and get her stitched up……I nearly died but she couldn’t wait to show daddy what had happened to her. He always got a report as soon as he came through the door plus he got to eat whatever she had cooked with her Betty Crocker Cook Set That day……that stuff probably tasted worse than Bocky Bugs but he always ate whatever she had. One day we surprised daddy with a puppy that the man that ran the gas station across the street from our building had given us. He told me that it was a cross between a toy cocker spaniel and a Chihuahua. He was coal black and we thought we had a real prize…..we even had named him Pedro. Joe took one look at him and said, "Cork", he always calls me Cork unless he says CORKY then I know I’m in trouble, have you looked at that dogs feet? He said that dog will be big as a horse….by the time he was 6 months old he weighed 65 lbs., was still growing and we had to give him to a farmer. Our next dog was a terrier but that is another story.

It was shortly after that that we decided to see if we could find a place to live on the ground floor. Viki was trying to fly out the window and I had an occasional nightmare (Joe made me sleep next to the wall and I had to get permission to go to the bathroom during the night) because he didn’t want me flying off the porch in my nightgown like I did in Salina one time. I woke up the neighbors and told them someone was trying to cut off my head…….when they sent me home, I know Joe would like to have done just that, lol). Just like the time I decided to clean Tweetie’s cage out on the high porch; opened the door and out he went into the park next door where they showed the movies (free, all you had to do was bring a chair or blanket to sit on).

Joe announced at school that our bird was loose and if any of the kids saw him to let him know. It wasn’t long and one of first graders found the bird and brought him home…..he got to watch TV and eat popcorn for a thank you treat. Poor Tweetie, he froze because we left him at home over Thanksgiving weekend and it got too cold in the apartment. Heartbreaker!!!!

When I learn how, I’ll answer y’all individually……now I’ll just say bye till next time.

Corky

Manchester: The First Apartment

by Corky Hake

The following story is one that only Mom could tell.  I plan to have more contributions from her – and from Viki – about our Manchester days.  These were GOOD days for us.

The following picture is not of Manchester, but kind of catches the flavor.  The apartment Mom is describing looked a little like the brown two-story stone building with a store front below.  Imagine it without all the other store fronts surrounding it.  Our apartment was above the grocery store in just this manner and was brown stone.  Now…I leave the narrative to Mom.  And, when she says “you” in the story, it is this blogmeister she is referring to.

Leading up to our move to Manchester……While I was in the hospital (after giving quick birth to Viki) your father came up and said that he had something he wanted to talk about. I immediately thought there was something wrong with you or our new baby (I had developed a clot in my leg and it was propped up on a zillion pillows and I was not to move without help from a nurse) and I wanted to just get up and run out of there. Then, he told me that he had not been happy in his job at Manhattan and he was thinking about teaching school if it was OK with me and he could find an opening someplace. Needless to say I told him that whatever he could find that would make him happy I was all for it. We stopped in Abilene and he went in and talked to the County Superintendent. Then, he came out and told me that there was an opening in MANCHESTER and after we got back to Manhattan; settled in for six weeks; talked about moving, etc., we made an appointment with the school board to look at the school and talk to them. They gave him directions and said it was the only big building in town so we couldn’t miss it. We drove into town from the south and the first big building we saw was the old blacksmith’s shop (now an artist’s home and gallery) and your dad said, “My God, you don’t suppose that is the school do you?” That was our introduction to MANCHESTER and I didn’t know what to say!!

Needless to say, that was not the school; we found the school board; he was interviewed; and, hired with a drop in pay, lol. They told us about the apartment that was above the store and was being redecorated and ready for us to move into in August if we were interested in talking to the owner. We met the owner; looked at the apartment (it had seven rooms and two baths) and your dad asked him what the rent would be. He said twenty five dollars a month and your dad’s mouth fell open and before he could get it closed the man said he would drop the rent to twenty dollars…..your dad found his voice (we had been paying $65 a month for three rooms in a basement close to the K-State Campus) and said twenty sounded fine and we’d move in August first. I didn’t ask him what color he was going to paint the walls, etc., but the whole thing was a pale kind of sickly green and it didn’t bother me a bit because I could finally look out the window and see more than just dirt or snow (we had a long snowy winter in Manhattan that year).

My dad, uncle and a friend of his that had a big truck moved us from Manhattan to Manchester. Fortunately dad was driving behind the other two because they hadn’t tied some of the furniture down too well and one of my tables that we had received for a wedding gift flew off and dad had to stop and pick up all the pieces. I later glued it all back together and have it in the family room yet (61 years later). We did not know it but the two in the truck were having a fine time and by the time they arrived at their destination were drunk as skunks…..I thought your dad and my dad would like to have killed the both of them. Not only were they drunk, they were hungry so opened up some sardine cans that I had packed in a box and were sitting on top of the truck eating. After dad got through with them, it didn’t take long to get that truck unloaded and on it’s way. People were standing around watching but I don’t think any of them knew what was going on because had they known, we would have been fired before we could move in.

It was really hot but we moved the furniture around and set up the beds and spent our first night in our new place being very careful not to walk in front of the windows because we had no curtains yet……we had blinds but the were pulled up to the top and you couldn’t see them. When I could get around to it I bought a bolt of brown corduroy and made drapes and from the top of the window to the window sill they measured nine feet long. I never did really know how high those ceilings were. The floors were all tiled with black and white squares which you kids had fun jumping around on after Viki got big enough to walk (and jump). One day I was taking a bath and the landlord came up to check on a water leak in the other bathroom and you went to the door and told him that I couldn’t come to the door but he could come on in and talk to me……fortunately he heard the loud screams coming from the bathroom and didn’t come in…..the poor man would never have been the same, lol.

The apartment was over the store and built of stone so it was not really so hot in the summer (we invested in two or three fans) but it was cold, cold, cold in the winter. We heated with oil and had a really big oil stove with a fan on it but I always worried that you kids were not going to be warm enough. Consequently you looked like little Eskimos when I put you to bed at night and probably sweat all night long. My mother worried about me having tonsil problems and bought us an electric blanket to keep us warm. I put it on the bed and mixed up the controls…..I turned your dad’s heat up as high as it would go and he turned my side up as low as it would go until we finally figured out that the blanket was not defective…..we were.

To be continued………..

LOL!!!  Added note: it WAS cold in the winter in that apartment.  We came back from a weekend at Grandma’s in Salina one Sunday evening to find our bird frozen stiff!  Literally!

Manchester: Our Phone Number Was 2

This picture is a fairly accurate representation of what our phone looked like.  To call, you held down the receiver on the left and cranked the handle on the right, then listened for the operator.  She would then call out to whomever you asked for and would connect you.  It rang her with a magneto that generated an electric current when you turned the crank – a fact that will become important in a moment!

To answer the phone, you merely made sure the mouthpiece was pointed up toward your mouth, put the earpiece to your ear and conversed away.  We knew it was our call if the ring pattern was 2 rings in a burst.  So, if you heard ring-ring, ring-ring,… then you picked it up.  Why the specific pattern?  Because it was a party line and a number of people shared the same line.  And believe me, a number of people might be listening in on your phone call, one of those people being the operator!  I can remember several occasions when Mom would ask people to please get off the line.  Mike Moore has already told us his grandmother in another nearby small town did this all the time.  In a small town, gossip is the best currency!

The operator – who I’ll call Ernestine after the Lily Tomlin character, even though I would love to use her actual name – had one of those switchboards like Lily Tomlin used to sit at.

Ernestine knew everything that was going on in town.  One of Dad’s friends was named Ed Sullivan and Ernestine asked Mom if we were going to start getting calls from the President next – so you knew she was listening in!  That she knew everything that was going on was so much the case that a mom would call her to find out where the kids were or where she could find someone else that she needed to talk with.  The phone operator and the postmaster could be very handy at times.

Ernestine had the power – and she used it!  After 8:00 PM, you were NOT supposed to make or take calls.   Mom had a friend in Colorado who was an operator herself and that means three things, 1) that she was in an earlier time zone, 2) that she could call anytime she wanted for free and 3) that she really didn’t care much what another operator thought about restricting her call times.  Tension in the small town.

One paragraph to let you know just how far Ernestine took her power.  When we first moved to Manchester, we lived in an apartment above the grocery store.  It had a fireplace and Mom lit a fire in it – that place had ceilings about 50 ft high and it could get cold – but they had failed to tell her that the chimney was capped.  Pretty soon, there was smoke in the house.  Mom wasn’t sure where it was coming from, so she rang Ernestine.  She told her that she thought the apartment was on fire – so Ernestine looked out the window, said she didn’t see any fire and refused to put through the call to the local guy who served as our fire chief.  She said Mom would have to walk down to talk with him!  Mom was still young and new in town, but I don’t think that is how they treated her after a year or two!

Back to that electric current generated when you crank it.  The harder you crank, the more charge!  Well, the town kids had one that was disconnected and had the bare wire hanging out.  They put wires on the surface of a chair and would hook the telephone to it.  The idea was to see who could stand the strongest crank before they came bolting up out of that chair!  One of the kids took it to his house and since it was a farm house, it was a lot nicer than our houses in town.  It even had a bathtub!  Wait, take one step back – it even had a bathroom!  When his dad was in the tub one evening, the kid sneaked that wire into the water and started cranking!  Word was that his dad was NOT pleased.

Did anyone else have a crank telephone?  Or a town operator?  And, while no one actually called from out of town and asked to have #2 dialed up, remember the old days when your phone number always started with a word, like Congress-3-9281?

Manchester, KS: The Overview!

Statistics & Facts

The population of Manchester is approximately 102 (2000).
The approximate number of families is 42 (1990).

The amount of land area in Manchester is 0.662 sq. kilometers.
The amount of surface water is 0 sq kilometers.
The distance from Manchester to Washington DC is 1151 miles. The distance to the Kansas state capital is 92 miles. (as the crow flies)
Manchester is positioned 39.09 degrees north of the equator and 97.32 degrees west of the prime meridian.

Manchester elevation is 1,295 feet above sea level.

Location

Manchester location: in north-central Kansas, northeast of Salina.

Those are the facts!  Just riveting, aren’t they?  Why the heck would anyone want to write a blog post about Manchester, Kansas?  Because it doesn’t mesh with today’s universe.  Because it was magic!  Because you simply won’t believe it…

Let me give you an example.  You see the street names on the map above?  Well, when I lived there, we didn’t have any street names!  Seriously.  They came with the 911 system.  The only address anyone had was a PO Box, Manchester, Kansas.

Growing up in Manchester was to grow up in a place disconnected from time and its advances.  For awhile the future just had to wait while we rambunctiously and thoroughly extracted the marrow from the bones of life.  Suspension of time like that can’t last forever, but while it did we really had the greatest intersection of worlds that any kid could wish for.  We didn’t just read about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, we lived it! Even though my parents, my sister and I lived there from the summer of 1953 until the summer of 1960, we were really living in the 1930’s.  Maybe even the 19th century. 

Life was filled with improbabilities.  The President of the United States came from 15 miles down the road.  We went to watch him in a parade each year.  There was something that gave a bedrock assurance to life when it was a local guy who was President and had led the Allies to victory in WWII.  And every year, we watched the Wizard of Oz.  We knew all about farms and tornadoes and fortunately it was shown each year on the TV station that gave us reception.  I bet I’ve seen it 25 times!  As far as we were concerned, we were the hub of the universe.

Now, the next part is way cool!  At 4:00 PM yesterday, the only girl who was in my grade school class sent me a message that she had found me on Facebook.  I hadn’t had any contact with her in 49 years!  She lived in Manchester until four years ago and has started updating me on what various people around our age have been doing.  I’m telling you, Manchester wants its story told!!!

I’ll leave you with a teaser for the next entry.  We had a phone.  I mean, it’s not like we were totally primitive, after all!

Our phone number was 2!

I Come Back and What Do I Find???

First, somebody needs to get rid of that pig’s head!  Gross!

I’m not even going to comment on the comments while I was gone – but I did read all of them upon returning…Viki…bikehikebabe…Gail!  Good grief!

Well, now that we have worked ourselves into a primitive state, we are going to start our journey to a primitive State (ancient Kansas) tomorrow.  Yes, the time is upon us.  The future will become the past.  We go back to the mythical, legendary homeland.

Tomorrow, we journey to Manchester!!!

Curios and keepsakes will be on sale at the door…