An Unforgettable Triple Date in our 1929 Oldsmobile

Barnes, Kansas - Late May, 1938

There has been a "favorite girl friend" in my life since the first grade. At that time,it was Beverly Sawyer and we wrote three or four-word notes to each other, even using the 'f-word' without either of us having a clue what it meant! I seem to recall that we did take a joint trip to our outhouse in Morrowville, just to take a quick look at genitals - that was all there was to that.

We moved to Beattie for my third year of school and I had a succession of friends who were girls. There was Cleo Thorne, a cute petite blond in the 4th & 5th grades; and Mary Harrison, a brunette with a neat smile in the 5th and 6th grades. Well, I should mention Ione Sunderland with beautiful blue eyes in the 7th, and so on.

I never had a date with any of these girls; we were just friendly classmates. And then in my freshman year of high school in Barnes, along came Arline Rodick, a farmer's daughter from out south of town. She really did not know I was her boy friend until our sophomore year. By that time I had my driver's license and was getting the urge to take that pretty girl out for a date.

My two best friends at that time were Harold Poland and Vic Roper. They, along with Stanley Knedlik, made up what we referred to as the "Four Musketeers". Stan lived on a farm several miles north of Barnes, so he didn't join us often. But Harold lived right across the street from me and Vic was just down in the next block.

It came time to leave. We loaded up and headed up a rather steep slope to make our exit, when the car engine died on me and we started rolling back down toward the Lake! I slammed on the brakes, but the brakes never had worked very well and they did not work well at all at that point. We weren't going fast at all, and I was looking around backward to see how much room we had before we'd be in the water, all the while pushing the floor board down with all my might. I saw a short stump back there and guided the rear of the car toward it, hoping it would help me get that suck stopped before a catastrophe happened.

Well, the stump stopped all right, but when the car hit the stump, it knocked the plug out of the bottom of the gas tank and all the gas was running out on the ground. In panic, we looked for a bottle or other contained to catch the gas so we would be able to drive back to Barnes. No such luck, we were stuck there.

Finally, I reasoned that there would be enough gas in the line to get us at least up out of that predicament. So I got the old car started - no problem there - and Vic and Harold gave it a push to be sure we got off the stump. Once we were free of the stump, they hopped beck in the car and I gunned that son-of-a-gun, and we made it out of there burning rubber! Ah-ha - what a relief!

I knew we didn't have enough gas to get us back to Barnes so we bagan looking for a good Samaritan, and there he was parked with his girlfriend down near the dam right on our way out. He volunteered to tow us back to Barnes with his newer Chevy coupe and we were saved!

There was some program at the school that night, I don't remember what. But after the program, Arline and I went for a walk down on mainstreet and sat together in the wooden seat in front of Wolverton's hardware for a while before she had to join her folks and go back to the farm. It was a pleasurable tryst and we both thought we were in love, or something.

Sometime that summer, on a Sunday afternoon, I drove out to the Rodick farm to see Arline. She was out in the barn yard playing with her little brothers and sisters and came over to the car to talk. We were glad to see each other and chatted in a friendly way for a couple of minutes. Then she told me her Dad, who was a strict Lutheran, told her he did not want her running around with a Methodist preacher's kid. All those sweet dreams blasted!

In October of that year, 1938, our family moved to Keats. And you know what? I found pretty girls in Keats too! And my three musteteer friends came down to visit me from time to time, so all was not lost.

Omar Knedlik"s Sousaphone and the Barnes City Band

Barnes, Kansas 1935-1938

We moved from Beattie to Barnes in the summer of 1935 and at Barnes there was a pretty fair city band in existence. There was not band in school, but Jean Gilbert Jones did teach some small groups. I remember being in a clarinet quartet (four B-flat clarinets) when they took a piece to contest - my first experience in the competitive world of music.

The city band performed every summer Saturday night in the City Park just north of the supping district where there were probably eight or nine businesses. Charlie Meyers was the lead trumpet and he often did some conducting when we performed. Mostly he'd just get us started and then would sit down and play. His daughter Lila was the best clarinet player we had. She was two years older than I, but she became my clarinet teacher. The xylophone had lost its luster for me as a band instrument, and I did not want to play cymbals anymore. My sister Charlotte played her clarinet for a while, but when she dropped it, I grabbed it! I think it was at Barnes when I first had dreams of being a band director, and it was there I played several different instruments. Whatever they needed, I took it up. Clarinet was my main instrument, but I also played the mellophone, the baritone, a little on the saxophone, and then we got a sousaphone! The band had had only a tuba until Mr. Johnes talked them into getting a new SOUSAPHONE! That instrument had been designed by John Philip Sousa himself and was made specially for marching purposes (Sousa had just died in 1934).

It was a wonderful horn. Big and shiny. The regular player on the instrument was Omar Knedlik, and he was pretty good. I played it in school groups and also when Omar couldn't be at a band rehearsal. That horn was so big and I was so small, I had to use one of Mamma's sofa pillows to hold the horn up far enough on my left shoulder. When I expressed an interest in learning how to play it, Mr. Johns, who was a pianist of some sort, said he had no idea how to finger it. He told me to go home, sit on the piano bench with the horn on my shoulder, and work out the fingerings for the B-flat scale, plot the open notes on the staff first and go from there. ah-hah! I discovered the fingerings, but they were really weird. Finally, Mr. Johns brought in a Tuba Method book that had the right fingerings.

Eventually the whole band had turned around to see what was Omar's problem, and everyone knew right away because they could see the pillow in the bell. Finally, someone said something like, "Omar, if you remove that pillow from the bell, I'll be it will play." Everyone had a good laught over that - and Omar wasn't even angry with me!