CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning
The beginning of my own life was long before my birthdate on November 17, 1917. The genes, attitudes, habits of thought, behavior, and moral values that formed me were hammered out through countless generations of struggle — of which I know only a few. On my father's side, our ancestors immigrated to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from Southern Germany in 1795. Successive generations migrated westerly so that my grandfather (Grant Colfax Rodkey) was born in Indiana (son of Joseph Christian and Esther Dohner Rodkey) and moved with his family to Blue Rapids, Kansas. He married Kate Tyler, daughter of an itinerant preacher. My father, Joseph Verne Rodkey, was born in Blue Rapids, Kansas, in 1895, graduated from the Irving, Kansas High School in 1912, and attended one year at Kansas State Agricultural College in Manhattan. In 1914, the family moved to the high plains of Eastern Colorado to take ownership of a large cattle ranch twenty miles north of Limon.
My mother's ancestry included Mary Chilton, an adolescent (age thirteen) aboard the Mayflower in 1620, who married John Winslow (? in 1624) and is buried in the Winslow tomb in the graveyard of King's Chapel, Boston. Successions of pilgrims who migrated west included Wealtha Allen and Yardley Hough, who traveled by covered wagon from home in Heath, Massachusetts, to pioneer in Elkhart, Indiana. Their daughters — my grandmother Helen Elizabeth Hough and her sister Mary — were members of the first graduating class of Park College (Missouri). She became a schoolteacher where she met my English immigrant grandfather, Alford John Piper, who was a stone dresser for the water-powered flour mill, part-time postal transport driver, beekeeper, and horse stable (livery stable) owner in Irving, Kansas. My mother, one of six siblings, and her younger sister Caroline, walking, attended twelve years of school in Irving without a single day tardy or absent — surely a sign of the discipline and morality of the times!
Mother attended two years at the normal school in Emporia, Kansas. In 1916, she married my father and took up the life of ranching. In those days, this included laundry with a scrub board, cooking (including baking) on a kitchen range fueled by dried buffalo or cow chips, gardening without irrigation, canning in mason jars for the winter's supply, baking bread, shopping in Limon two times a month (on rare occasions traveling by team and wagon — a sixteen-hour expedition), and cooking for the family and the hired hands (cowboys). Mother was also an expert pianist, a trained vocalist, and a certified elementary school and music teacher. She had an Emerson upright piano on which she practiced faithfully every evening after bedding the children — an exercise that would rock the whole house and which I later described as "rocking around the house with Rachmaninoff! " She was particularly fond of Rachmaninoff, who was only twenty-two years her senior.
There were seven children born into the family. Following me in succession were Lee, 1919; John, 1921; George, 1922; Mary Jane (who died in infancy of congenital heart problems), 1928; Elizabeth, 1930; and Kathryn who was born in 1932. More of their lives will be brought into the story as we progress.
CHAPTER 2
Weaving the Tale
On the occasion of my ninety-fifth birthday, I resolved to record for my children (and those of others who may be interested) some items that I have learned and that may be interesting to them. Not that I expect them to learn from my advice — that would be contrary to my theory of education, which goes approximately as follows: "You can't learn nobody nothin'!" Without active input from the learner, nothing sticks.
Experience and observation have convinced me that there is a transparent, semipermeable membrane that separates generations. We can see through it and hear what is said. We can touch and feel and hug each other, but the membrane as barrier says, "No wisdom can come through here!" Each individual seems required to learn many lessons by his own (sometimes) painful experience before he can understand the meaning of advice given by someone who has walked the same path before him.
But I have lived a long, active, and observant life during a century that has changed the thinking and behavior of the world. Perhaps a nugget of description or insight here or there will strike a spark in the minds or hearts of my younger brothers and sisters to help them understand themselves or the world in a different light through the prism of my experience.
At the outset, I shall describe my general outlook and beliefs. As we proceed, the reader may understand how I came to hold these convictions and their relationships to my life.
First, I have absolute faith and belief in the power of the living God who created, and is still creating, the ever-changing universe and all its creatures, of which Man is the most highly endowed. Sir Isaac Newton, in his Philosophy naturalis principia mathematica (1687), expressed his shocking conclusion that "space is the consciousness of God." This, I believe and all that is within that sphere is his creation — a complexity unthinkable to man.
But God also is a present power and interested party within each one of us. From the moment of our conception when that spark of life is transmitted to us, the unbroken chain from His creation — the living, pulsing power of God through the DNA in each cell of our structure — has directed our form, development, function, and thought. Regardless of friends, family, beloved companions, crowds, or loneliness, each of us walks the pilgrimage of life alone in his deepest recess. There is an inescapable emptiness — my hollow spot — deep within each of us that yearns for the companionship of God. It has been said that "we come into the world with nothing, and we leave it with nothing." How wrong! We come into the world with the fire of the living God surging in our veins, and we leave in the arms of his mercy and love!
The psalmist has said it best:
O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither...
