1951 to 1958 Stories Home
Wayward Wind, Gorgi Grant, 1951
This is the home page for this eras stories as they accumlate until it works in a way that would require an update. And of course just like the home page, this at the moment starts actually at the beginning.
Recently, I started asking my mother questions, yet have had no where to really captured them for posterity, not that anyone else may care. But, I do because, regardless of all the unpleasant things my Mother can sometimes be, for her bravery in the face of adversity and doing the right thing will always stand tall above all else she may do. Over the years we've been close enough to talk nearly daily, and distance enough to barely talk and scream and yell at each other. And, while we can debate all kinds of issues, what is done is done and she done good.
So, it is with this in mind that the stories that flow from here and follow me to college are those stories that shaped me as an adult for good or bad, and for the most part are centered around a noble deed done in early June 1959. Everything in a way leads up to that point, is centered around and flows from it till I am my own, especially once I came north to live in the City.
I am unsure of exactly how many there will be, nor all they will tell, but they will not be linear, since I don't remember generally that way, nor do most people I presume. You remember something, you ask someone still living and bounce around the good, the bad and the insane, which was Kenton Station.
Bought by my grand parents in 1950, it was, until San Luis Obispo, the only place I ever thought of as a stable home. A southern masion overlooking a dairy farm, a small valley with its own dam and lake and the purported well that had never gone dry. That would certainly explain why it would be the final homestead of Simon Kenton, first settler of Kentucky, and nearly the first white man to really see it in detail after Daniel Boone, who had long since moved on.
On of the few things my father ever gave me was a book, called the Kentuckian, I believe, which I loaned to someone and forget and never got it back. However, if you really want to know what life was like, what the relationship between the white man and Indian was really like, why it was most offensive for whites to have settled Kentucky, which is Indian for hunting grounds, but to see how easy it was for it to be so difficult for both sides, then you should read this definitive historical novel, written in narrative form, extensively footnoted. There were times that I had to put it down because of the cruel abuses on both sides, although while we were conquerors and having nothing to be proud about, the Indians were quite savage on their own.
From birth until about three or thereabouts, I lived with my parents, until they became too unstable, and one of my first memories was from when we use to drive and we'd go to the coast, but I believe mostly it was just to drive and get away from Maysville. And for whatever warped mindset he possessed, he enjoyed driving, being on the move, and maybe just anything to get away from his parents worked in that equation as well, and while it wouldn't have been new, top forty turnover probably wasn't what it is today either, I remember and fell in love with Gogi Grant's "Wayward Wind." I would have been about two or thereabouts, which puts the date around 1953 or 1954. So here's to Gogi Grant, and the song that probably really describes my father best of all, or at least the life he seemed to wish he had. I do not believe that my Mother would have felt the same way. Another question I suppose.
