Newspaper

My parents and their siblings went through my paternal grandparents' home in Valley Falls, Kansas, in the mid-1970's moving all the furniture out to various family members, which I got the last of the bedroom sets from the 1880's with a rocking chair (their wedding present), and wholesaling out the rest of everything in the house.

Before the wholesaler's crew came they went through the house one last time. The basement was full of everything they saved from the day they move in after my grandfather had the house built around 1910 before sending for his future wife.

In the attic, more of the same, boxes and cupboards full of everything they saved. Surviving through the depression my grandmother never threw anything out she could save. In one cupboard in the attic they found this framed page from the Valley Falls Vindicator newspaper, dated September 28,1949.

They had no idea why she saved that page and had it framed, but they set it aside. Later reading the page they found the reason buried in the public notices.

My birth announcement. It's been hanging on my bedroom wall the day I got it to remind me one day those years ago someone cared to remember me. My parent would eventually go on to kick me out of the house in 1968 for failing their expectations in college.

I would enlist in the US Air Force and rarely return home, only for family reunions or emergencies, and my father rarely spoke to me during those visits. I would later learn his treatment of me was because his father (my grandfather) did the same to him as he did to me.

In 1940 after failing his father's expectations in college (one of the Kansas univerities) my grandfather kicked my father out of the house. He joined the US Army and later transferred after the war ot the US Air force when it was separated from Army (Air Corps). 

My father also rarely went home again, and rarely spoke to his father, not even attending his funeral in the early 1950's when we were stationed in Virginia prior to being transferred to England. I never knew the reason my father acted toward me as he experienced with his father, only that he did

But I always knew my grandmother loved me and kept a reminder I keep today to remind me to thank her.