Friday evening my Uncle lost his quick fight with lung cancer and today he was laid to rest. I was able to share these memories with him a few weeks earlier.
One of my cousins said how she will miss the twinkle in his eye. She was right. Check the photo at the bottom and see for yourself.
Uncle Ralph
Naturally I have been thinking about you a lot these last few weeks. Most of these memories go back to the late 1950s when we were all living on West 53rd Place in Mission. I thought I would share them with you here. I hope you enjoy them.
My family moved there in 1956 and Grandma and Grandpa Lavery moved into their new house across the street the following year. I still have vague memories of it being built. I grew up immersed in lots of family. For a brief period I had in my house at 6023, my parents, my brothers, my maternal grandparents, and one uncle. My paternal grandparents, two aunts, and four more uncles were living directly across at 6024. Whew !! The two houses were practically extensions of each other. Going from one to the other was totally fluid. Doors were never locked and no one ever knocked. There was always someone around and I was never lonely. In those days no one had more than one television set and only three channels to choose from. If the adults were watching something we didn’t like at our house we would go to Grandma’s to see what was on over there. I can only think of one time going into Grandma’s house when it was empty. I was probably seven or eight years old. I let myself in as usual and eventually went through every corner of every room of the house on all floors calling out, “Is anybody home?” As if someone would have been unaware I was there.
Somehow with all this family around Ralph still stood out to me. For one thing he was my godfather. Not that I had any idea what that really meant but that fact was always mentioned. “You know, Ralph is your godfather”. I am not sure how the selection process went or if anyone else was even considered. He must have been the first sibling with the godparent designation at the ripe old age of fifteen. Anyway I guess that gave me some special claim to him. I thought that he gave me a little extra attention and always made me laugh.
It seemed that there was always something going on and all of us had lots of fun all the time. But when Ralph got involved things were ramped up a bit. For one thing he was a shutterbug. He always had a little Kodak camera around to chronicle everything. It used pop in flash bulbs about the size of your thumb that looked like pretty blue cotton candy under glass when they were new. After they were used they would go dirty grey and be white hot and we were cautioned not to touch them. We would also have spontaneous ‘chicken fights’ in Grandma’s back yard. My brothers and I would be hoisted up on the uncle’s shoulders to make teams and ram and tug at the other teams until just one was left standing. It was pretty exciting to feel so tall and strong. The game was mostly a giggle fest as we would fall slow motion like a giant tree into a dog pile.
Even after Ralph and Patty married and moved to their tiny doll house in Roeland Park he was still around a lot. There were long games of catch with Frisbees every evening in the summer. Often a couple of dozen neighbor kids and the aunts and uncles just gathering in the street to mindlessly toss the new toy back and forth for hours. There were intense bouts of shuffleboard in the basement years before it was replaced with the pool table. There were marathon Tripoli games that would carry on until the morning hours or sometimes for days. There were huge piles of pennies stacked overnight waiting for the play to resume.
Of course, Ralph always had the best fireworks. One time my brother and I went with Dad and Ralph to a fireworks tent. It was after dark but the tent was lit up and busy. They were off to the side talking with some man as I wandered through the aisles lusting for all the bright packages and odd spinning and flying contraptions. The next thing I knew we were behind the tent and the man opened the trunk of some old Chevy. Boxes were filled and money exchanged and we were on our way home. In those days all the kids would be shooting off firecrackers in the street for days. We would be blowing up little safe stuff like Lady Fingers and Black Cats and the smell of smoldering punks filled the air. The ‘kids not playing with matches’ rule was suspended. Occasionally Ralph would march out to the street from Grandma’s house with a coffee can of water and a soup can. All of us kids would stop and stand back while he set things up in the middle of the street. The can of water went down first then a cherry bomb with a water proof fuse was lit and in one quick movement put into the smaller can and place upside down in the water. A few seconds later the explosion would shoot the soup can straight up and we would scream with approval and beg for more. More would eventually follow but he would only do one at a time. I think that he spaced them out so that Mrs. Woodward would come storming out of her house and give him hell.
Then there were the wonderful summer weekends at Lake Annette. What a playground that was. I am sure that had a huge influence on my buying a house at Lake Quivira and that turned out to be the second biggest decision of my life.
Maybe someone would like to step up and tell the story of Ed Schranz and the bat or share the many legends of the great Fourth of July parties in De Soto.
There are lots of fun memories. Nothing was ever planned or scheduled. It just happened. Eventually things changed though. Everyone got married and spread out and had families, a whole lot more cousins. Life got complicated. Invitations started to precede events, doors were no longer left unlocked, we called ahead to make sure someone was home, and we started ringing doorbells. I am not sure when I got too big for a chicken fight. Of course we had no way of knowing when we had played our last chicken fight and all the other things. I don’t think it would have mattered anyway. We couldn’t possibly have had any more fun at it than we did.
Thanks Uncle Ralph.
