Both
of the children seemed to instantly know their father. Albert picked him
out from a group of soldiers who came in on the same bus with him. It had
been 18 months since Albert had seen his dad, but one would never have
known it. Mary Ellen let him take her immediately, which was strange, as
she was wary of all strangers and definitely afraid of most men.
The days following Woodrow's return were a rather unstable time. Many decisions had to be made. For a short period Woodrow worked at a glass shop in Ottawa, but when August came, we sold our house, then left for Washington State where Woodrow harvested apples in the Yakima Valley. He had been there during the war, so it was something he knew how to do. But Woodrow had taken a civil service test before the war and he was given an opportunity to take a job in the U.S. Postal Service, so we came back to Kansas and he began his work in the Kansas City Post Office sorting mail. It wasn’t long until he became a railway mail clerk. Most of the time he sorted mail on a Missouri Pacific train, but some on the Santa Fe. By Christmas time, we had bought a house in Kansas City, Kansas, where we lived for 2 ½ years. After that, we moved to the farm where we were to spend the next 40 years plus.
During the years we were in Kansas City, Albert started to school—a year of kindergarten and a year in the first grade. On July 20, 1946 Allen was born. It seemed like allen had "something wrong with him" most of that first six months. Colic first, then an ear infection, but after that he was a small, but wiry, child. Mary Ellen watched him like a mother hen to see he didn’t come to harm even though he was born in July before she was two in September. All three children had chicken pox in that period and Allen had scarlet fever. The two older ones had had scarlet fever when I was in Ottawa during the war and Woodrow was overseas.
On Memorial Day of 1948 we moved to the farm and although
it was an old run down farm to begin with it became home to us. Woodrow
spent many hours improving it—new fences, controlling weeds and shrubs
in the pastures and reseeding all of it, building ponds and terracing.
He had 
electricity
put in the house before we moved in and soon (before another year) installed
a water system. In anther year we had a sewer system and indoor bathroom.
He tore off all the old plaster and put up plasterboard walls and did a
general re-arranging of the rooms. Every minute of Woodrow's life away
from his work as a railway mail clerk was spent improving our farm. He
enjoyed clearing our timber and using the wood he cleared away to heat
our home. We put in a furnace in the ½ basement under the house
which he had finished, new cement floor and pointed up the walls. The house,
although nearly 100 years old, was well built of good material. He used
the old flooring as subflooring and put hardwood floors in all the rooms.
In the basement he put me in shelves to store my canned fruit and vegetables.
There were several kinds of fruit trees on the place including an apple
orchard and peach trees. We added to it over the years and put out a couple
rows of grapes. We always planted "enough potatoes to do us" through the
year. I tried to can 100 quarts of green beans and one hundred quarts of
tomatoes and lots of peaches and apples. With in a few years we got a freezer
so I froze my peas and corn and also had our meat (beef) butchered for
the freezer. We also raised chickens some years. For a number of years
we milked a cow, but homogenized milk from the store was so good and stayed
fresh so long that we gave up milking our cow. I always made lots of jams
and jellies. I really enjoyed it. the children all attended Oakland Grade
School. Sometimes they walked (especially Albert in the first couple years)
but when Mary Ellen started, a good bit of the time I car-pooled with Kathleen
Howell and we took them. The children had some really good teachers in
that little one-room school and they were all ready when the time came
for them to go to High School. When Allen was ready for the seventh grade
and Mary Ellen was in High School, Oakland School closed. One-room schools
were rapidly becoming history and schools were consolidating. Albert had
already been going to Pomona High School on the school bus. The other two
now made an easy transition.
(About the time Albert started high school my folks moved
to Pomona. They had lived on a farm just north of us. They sold it and
bought a house in
Pomona. My mother died when Albert was a senior and my dad lived 2 ½
years after that. My dad had had Alzheimer’s for several years and spent
nearly all the time after my mother died in a nursing home.) Albert and
Mary Ellen were class valedictorians and Allen was near the top. Allen
graduated with a group of exceptionally smart children and they were a
good percentage of them boys. So many of them went on to graduate from
college. I really can't remember just how many, while Albert and only one
other from his class went to college and not very many from Mary Ellen’s.
lots of little stories can be told about the happenings in the children’s growing up years. But maybe I can write them down later.
Albert went to Emporia State, Mary Ellen went to Emporia State and Allen went to Kansas State. Albert graduated in three years from Emporia State and started teaching. In a couple years he married Nina Jean Whinery and our first grandchild, Lisa, was born in December 1965. Mary Ellen graduated from Emporia three years later and Allen from Kansas State in two years after that. Allen married Priscilla Miller his junior year of college and our second grandchild, Timothy, was born in 1967. After he graduated from college in 1968 he moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and started working for PPG Industries and two years after Timothy was born our third grandchild, Christopher, was born.
Mary Ellen had gone to Wellsville when she graduated, but a year later she went to Manhattan where she taught several years before she married in 1971. She married Harold Kline then and continued to teach in Manhattan until Harold graduated from Kansas State. Harold had gone to college one year and then spent three years in the army before continuing college. He became a district soil conservation supervisor. Their only child, Mindy, was born in 1978.
Allen’s first marriage lasted only five years and in 1972, he married Laraine Piedle. They had three children—Jane (1977), Ann (1980), and Robert (1982). Mostly they have lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but the last three years they have moved to the Kansas City area where Allen heads up the LYNX Corp. a division of PPG Industries.
Woodrow, after our three years of living in Kansas City
continued to be in a Railway Mail Clerk until near the time of the ending
of the Railway Mail Service which gave way to airmail and big truck service.
He spent the remaining years as a rural mail carrier out of the Pomona
Post Office until his retirement June 30, 1973.