Marshall’s dad passed away while we were living in Kentucky. This left just his mom at home alone on their eighty-acre homestead in southern Missouri, five hundred miles from us. The decision was made to move back to Missouri where he would be closer to his mom and other family.
Marshall secured a job as an electrical supervisor at a coal mine, and we found a home on sixteen acres a mile south of the city limits of Butler, Missouri, fifty-five miles south of Kansas City on Highway 71. We moved there in the summer of 1973, the summer before my seventh-grade school year.
The first time we went and looked at the house, I remember sitting on the stairs thinking, “This is the one,” and hoping that Marshall and Shirley could hold things together until I could graduate and go away to college, my escape plan.
The house faced west on a pie shaped lot with Mound Branch Creek on the south side, the road on the front side of the house, and the third edge running straight back along the north side of the house from the road to the creek. The house was a newer four-year-old two story with four bedrooms and a full basement.
There were two fields of about three acres each, with the rest of the acreage in trees, where I learned to hunt rabbits and squirrels in what I called, “My Little Forest”. We didn’t fish much in Mound Branch as it was mostly full of carp, but there were caves close to it that were fun to visit. These are well known throughout the area.
The pecan tree in the back yard shaded our dog pen and separated the house from the garden space where we grew our strawberries, lettuce, onions, carrots, green beans, peas, etc. The field on the south side of the house was where we grew sweet corn, pumpkin, watermelon, sunflowers, and a lot of potatoes, both red and white, as well as lots of sweet potatoes.
Harvesting, freezing, and canning helped us eat the best I have ever eaten in my life. I made a few dollars selling pumpkins, watermelons, and cantaloupes. Jan’s specialty was strawberries and we made jam and froze a bunch of them.
The neighbor next door had a son my age. He had a motorcycle and within a year I was able to get a bike too. We rode in the far south field many times, as well as on his five-hundred-acre farm. They had several well stocked fishponds with one they called “The Lake,” which had an island in the middle and where we went camping and fishing.
They had a small flat boat which we used for fishing, but also, we would have one person stand in the boat while we stood on the island and threw hedge apples trying to knock him out of the boat. Those hedge apples hurt. A bit crazy I know.
I earned my first dollar working outside the home helping his mom haul bags of seed corn to another farmer. I saved that first dollar and framed it. That summer I also helped them haul and store hay for a dollar per hour. We put up over 4,000 bales that first summer and I earned $63 for helping.
I started 7th grade in the fall and went out for football, wrestling, track, and took band. I also became an avid chess player with the band teacher during study hall. I walked home the mile or so from school after practice, and over the next five years I must have walked that road a thousand times.
Shirley taught school for the Junior High School home economics and gym. She also started Butler’s first high school girls’ basketball team. Marshall worked at a coal mine about thirty miles away and he spent a lot of time at the airport where I was able to go at times. I learned a lot about planes and flying over those years.
Mr. Robertson, the local flight instructor, and major antique collector whom Marshall knew from the airport and Shirley knew from local auctions where she went looking for antiques, offered me a job at his office supply store.
I worked there the summer between my seventh and eighth grade school years where I cleaned up, helped stock shelves, and learned how to work on typewriters, both manual and electric.
When school started, I went in before school to clean up and worked Saturdays. I also helped the neighbors haul hay that summer again.
My eighth-grade summer, I signed up to de-tassel corn. This is where a farmer plants six rows of one type of corn and then two rows of another type of corn, then removes the tassels on the six rows so that the two rows of corn would pollinate the six in order to cross breed the two types of corn, which would then produce seed corn. It was long hot days, but I was making a lot more than a dollar per hour removing tassels.
I also hauled hay for the neighbors again that summer, as well as for a couple of other farmers.
My ninth-grade year I worked as a DJ part time at the local radio station, which was owned by a family that went to our church. They had seen me in a church play and had offered me the job. I was required to commit to the four years of my high school which meant I would not be able to play sports if I accepted the job.
I passed my Third-Class Operators License with a Broadcast Endorsement on my first try. Marshall was an electrician, so I had help from him studying the particulars of how it all worked.
I went through training sort of okay, but I was always so nervous and self-conscious on the air that I never really got comfortable, and in the end, gave it up and went back to playing sports instead.
That year a friend of mine got killed when the truck he was riding in slid off the road and rolled. It was Mother’s Day weekend, and he had told me on the Friday before about this blue suede suit his mom had bought for him up in Kansas City the week before.
The next time I saw him, he was in his casket wearing it. The whole class mourned, as he was well liked. This was both my first funeral and first-time coming face to face with the death of someone I knew.
That summer I hauled hay for a farmer that cut, baled, and hauled hay for other area farmers. He owned self-propelled hay wagons with an auger out front, running up the middle to the back of the wagon. One driver and two stackers could haul a couple thousand bales a day on a good day. We were paid three cents per bale and were making $40-60 per day, which was great for the time.
Near the end of the de-tasseling season the previous summer, I heard about some guys that contracted out to do it on their own, not for wages but paid by the acre and they made a lot more money. So, the next year, I contracted out and hired my classmates at a higher wage than we had been paid the year before. Shirley drove us to the job and the tractor-carrier in the field. So, for that help, I gave my sister a third of what I earned. At fifteen, this was my first business venture.
I had saved up a bit of money and early that next year, as I had been looking at stocks deciding I wanted to invest some of my savings. Because I wasn’t eighteen yet, I went to Shirley and asked her to buy a stock. She refused to let me buy stock stating that I didn’t need to buy stock. Near the end of the conversation, she asked me what stock I wanted to buy.
I told her it was a younger company and that I had a really good feeling about and that it would do well. It was Walmart where we had shopped when we went to Springfield to see her sister and we had bought some of our school clothes and supplies at. She didn’t think much of it, and I am pretty sure she thought I was nuts.
Spring came around and I was about to turn sixteen when Shirley took me to a Corvette car dealer, which was my favorite car. It came down to a 1974 convertible or a 1975 T-top. But when I thought about it, I told her I would rather buy a self-propelled hay wagon and earn the money to buy a Corvette.
She agreed and I found a UMI self-propelled hay wagon at a dealer in Tipton, Kansas and started my second business venture hauling hay that summer. It was the best summer of my life up till then. We worked hard and earned good money for me and my friends who joined me to help.
My junior year of High School started out okay except Marshall and Shirley weren’t getting along at all; that fall she filed for divorce. On January 7, 1978, it was to be final.
Marshall was “losing his marbles” going through the process and kept threating to kill all of us if she signed the divorce papers.
The day before the divorce was to be final, he had come home and left his truck in the driveway taking the car. Shirley came to me and asked me to break into it and see if he had any guns.
She explained that there were guns stashed all over the house, about thirty of them loaded and ready to go; she thought he was preparing for a shootout just in case she signed the papers. I got into the truck and found seven pistols with boxes and boxes of ammunition.
That evening I began to wonder if I should be prepared to defend myself and the family. I might just have to shoot this guy to stop him, I had been having dreams of the house filling with demons and was extremely concerned. It was looking like things were about to get as bad as they could, and no one was going to help.
That night I had a dream where I was standing on a sidewalk in Kansas City playing chess with an elderly black man called, “Ole Moses,” as I had just gotten out of prison. Just then a truck drove by with a family in it and I saw myself in that truck driving.
I decided to follow the vision of the truck and started off following it. Ole Moses asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to follow that truck and see where I would have been going had I not gone to prison and had a family. I told him that I would come back but he looked me in the eye and replied, “No, you won’t”.
It was clear in the dream that if I shot Marshall, I would end up in prison and lose my opportunity of having a family. Which also showed me that I would survive if I didn’t. But I was still worried about the family.
The next morning, I woke up with Shirley announcing that she was going to sign the papers. Marshall was still living at home and would now be ordered by the judge to move out. She also told us that she would not be home that night and recommended we find another place to go as well. Jan went to stay with a friend, but I decided to stay home and help Marshall move.
A friend of Shirley’s called that afternoon looking for her, but I informed her she wasn’t at home and that I did not expect her that evening. After about five minutes she called back and asked me why I was still there and wasn’t I worried about Marshall. I told her I wasn’t worried and that I was going to be ok.
She didn’t believe me and said that she was either going to come pick me up or call the police. I asked her to come pick me up and she gave me a place to stay for the night. She had a stack of Moody Blues records of which I had never heard, and I listened to them late into the evening. One of my favorite bands still to this day.
That morning after my dream and thinking through my situation, I decided that I would rather be shot than to have to take another man’s life. Hence January 7, 1978, ended up becoming the beginning of me becoming a pacifist.
That Spring after school was out, Shirley’s parents were over helping us, and we loaded up the moving truck to move to Springfield. Right as we were almost completely loaded, Marshall drove up in his truck with that look. I knew right away he was here to gun us all down. We had no phone and no gun to defend ourselves with and sheer panic filled Shirley’s face.
Almost instantly, I decided to go to him before he got out of his truck thinking at the very least, I could buy everyone time to try to get away. I ran over and jumped in the passenger side of his truck. He had a newspaper laying on the seat between him and the passenger side and I bumped it knocking it off, exposing a sawed-off shotgun revealing my worst fears .
I decided to try to get him talking and asked him where he had got it, asking him if he had bought it or made it, knowing he had obviously made it, and his pride would demand his explanation as to the detail of how he did it. It worked and he told me the whole story.
The conversation got him cooled down a bit; I brought up that I still planned to come back next summer and work in the coal mine asking if that would be okay with him if I did. He lit up and told me he would look forward to it. I got out of his truck and went in the house.
Because of the divorce I was required to sell my hay wagon. I actually looked around for a place to live so I could stay in Butler for the summer but failed. I used some of the funds to buy a car, a Volkswagen Square-back.
The irony was, that year they stopped making convertibles and it turned out, I would have had more profit purchasing the corvette convertible and reselling it at the end of the summer than I did hauling hay. How could I have known though?
I had never taken a study hall in high school so by the end of my Junior year I had enough credits to graduate, and I put in to the school board for permission to graduate at the end of my Junior year and was approved. However, Shirley wanted me to wait so I could play football in a bigger school. So, we went off to Springfield for my Senior year of High School.
Butler was a great place to live, and I have always been grateful for all the people I knew there, experiences, and being able to learn about farming. A really great place to have come of age.
My ten dreams continued to play through the years there. Also, there were two more dreams that were added but they did not play with the other ten but were related to them. One dream I had only one time when I was fifteen and the second dream I had once in Butler, and three times over the years since.
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