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My father and mother were a great pair of people; hard-working partners devoted to the job of bringing up a family.

My mother's pumpkin pies were famous out in Ellis, but Henry Chrysler was known, I guess, from end to end of the Union Pacific. Certainly he was the best locomotive engineer on the division. When the railroad bought its first coal-burning locomotive, he was the engineer chosen to leave the cab of a wood burner and take command of that grand mechanism that snorted in an even cadence when it went puff, puff, puff, puffing eastward out of Ellis at 7:30 in the morning. I used to watch him then and still be thinking of him when I got to school at eight o'clock.

Often when he left the house I walked beside him, lugging his dinner pail. What he carried rested on his hip—a great big six-shooter that sagged below his coat. It had a black butt of a size to fill his fist. When I was ten, the handle of that weapon hung on my father just at the level of my stubbly, home-cut hair, above my eager eyes. I always called him papa. He was no swashbuckler, just a railroad man who had been a soldier, as I used to boast, "when he wasn't as big as Ed." That was a fact.