"In the Beginning ........"

I was born October 18, 1943 at Research Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. My family lived on an eighty acre farm located six miles south of Oak Grove, Missouri, some thirty miles east of Kansas City near the unincorporated town of Sni Mills. The farm is located on Jim Cummins Road off F highway west.

I am the last in line of four children born to my parents, Harvey Warren Grayum and Mary Aileen Lawson Grayum. My oldest sister Betty Elaine Grayum Powell, my brother Walter Edward Grayum, and another sister Norma Jean Grayum Cummins Horner are my siblings. My sister Betty died of ovarian cancer in 1972. She was just forty-one years old at the time of her death. She is buried in the Oak Grove Cemetary located in Oak Grove, Missouri.

My father, Harvey Warren Grayum, was born on a farm near Lone Jack, Missouri on November 16, 1910 and died at the age of seventy-seven in 1987. He is buried at the Holiness Cemetary near Lone Jack, Missouri in eastern Jackson County on Colburn Road.

My mother, Mary Aileen Lawson Grayum, was born on a farm in Carroll County near Bosworth, Missouri on May 20, 1913. She died on October 28, 2008 at the age of ninty-five. She is buried in the same cemetary next to my father.

My childhood years were good, fun years growing up on the farm. My life was fairly normal. (Someone told me one time that "normal" is only a setting on a clothes dryer!) My dad was a sharecropper and worked the eighty acre farm that was owned by Charles Pewitt and they split the profits from the crops dad grew and the cattle and the pigs he raised. The sharecropper deal was fifty percent of the profits to the owner and fifty percent of the profits to the tenant. The tenant bought all seed, feed, and necessary items for the operation and did all of the farming furnishing his own equipment, etc.

I didn't know it at the time but we were "dirt poor" and barely harvested enough crops, beef, pork, and garden items to stay alive. My father never had enough money to purchase things at the grocery store except for the very basic necessities. I wore "hand-me-down" clothing from my brother and my cousins. I seldom ever got anything new. Shoes were the only item I remember getting new when I was a kid.

We always had enough to eat because my mother and sisters worked a garden plot and canned vegetables from the garden each season. We had an underground cellar where we stored the canned vegetables that were "put-up" in glass jar containers. Dad would butcher a beef and a couple of hogs each fall so we could have meat to eat. My mother raised chickens so we could have eggs and she would kill a chicken once in a while so we could eat some pan-fried chicken. Dad always kept a milk cow or two so we could have fresh milk.

Our means of transportation included a 1934 Pontiac with hard rubber tires and wooden spoke wheels. It rode like a broken down log wagon. Rough. No heater, no air conditioner. It didn't even have a defroster for the wind shield. You had to crank the motor to get it started. It had a gas-feed lever on the steering column. No foot accelerator. The other means of transportation was a farm tractor, an Oliver Row-Crop Model 88. Dad drove the tractor to town about once a week to get some basic groceries and other farming supplies he needed. We only used the car to go to church on Sunday's at the First Baptist Church in Oak Grove. Mother used to give me "spit baths" on the way to church because I would miss some dirty places on my face. Her spit! Yuk, yuk! When the Pontiac quit running I remember dad bought a 1933 Model-T Ford. It looked like the ones Al Capone and the mobsters of Chicago drove. It was cold black. It was cool.