Sidewalk Story #2 ~ My Dad

1953~Our Family

In North Platte LeRoy Henry was a short-order cook. He was not a farmer and never had been.  The Greyhound Bus Depot was one of the meal stops for buses that crossed the country on Route 30. Day after day, he and his waitress Eunice waited on one load of travelers after another. There was bacon, eggs & fried potatoes, hot roast beef sandwiches or hamburgers, french fries & malted milkshakes. And probably chili soup. And probably some kind of pie. And certainly coffee. The large U-shaped counter had a dozen or so seats and one row of booths. We ate at the depot once in a while.  The smell and taste of a hamburger with catsup and dill pickle with a chocolate malt is forever in my memory.  I also loved the taste of his gravy: thin brown sauce poured over hot mashed potatoes that had a little dip pressed into the top where the gravy pooled. Once I told my mother her gravy was so good it tasted like restaurant gravy. Once, only once. 

1953 ~ Judy, Jane, Priscilla

He worked six days a week and came home for supper every night.  Early each morning he walked the mile downtown to the depot on the corner of 6th and Dewey. He wore a brown leather jacket that zipped up the front.  I often sat at the breakfast table  watching him eat corn flakes from the blue Pyrex bowl. When he left I crawled into bed with my mother. She frequently begged me not to wiggle around so much. For years it felt like she didn't like me, but I realized eventually, as granddaughters climbed into my bed, she just wanted me to please lie still and go back to sleep!

My dad sometimes worked at one of the other restaurants my uncle Oscar owned: The Bronco, a bar and smelled like beer (I was rarely in there), the Step-In, a diner with a counter and red stool seats, or Oscar's Fine Foods, a steak and baked potato kind of restaurant. 

Sometime during the fall or winter, before our move, he was taken to a hospital ninety miles away in Kearney. I don't remember him actually getting or being sick, but I eventually learned he had somehow contracted spinal meningitis.  It was unusual to recover from this disease, but when he did, the restaurant business was too much for him. Somewhere along the line he was prompted to buy some land 30 miles south of town along Hiway 83, a farm known as the Tumbleson Place. He was probably influenced by getting to know the Dempsey and Doyle ranch families, but what he chose or could afford was a small dryland farm, not a ranch. It's not clear exactly what my mother thought of the idea. And it's also not clear that life became easier, it did not become better.* My dad could cook, and cut up meat (I think he worked for a butcher when he was in high school), hunt rabbits, squirrels and antelope.  He learned how to become a farmer. Both parents were only 32. 

*Better to me, when I was nine, it was not.  We were suddenly poor. We had a '36 Plymouth, barns and outbuildings with no paint, an outhouse and I slept in a bedroom on the porch with no heat. I even lived away from home starting at age 14 because there was no high school nearby. But as I've grown older I realize how very much I learned from living on that farm.  Two things jump out at me: I've learned how to land on my feet (my therapist assured me of that) and I love growing stuff!

First Draft Summer 2010. First Revision May 2020.