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My father, Canadian born, had been brought from Chatham, Ontario, to Kansas City when he was only five or six. His forbears had founded Chatham; the family stock was German; eight generations back of me there had come to America one who spelled his name Greisler, a German Palatine. He was one of a group of Protestants who had left their homeland in the Rhine Valley, gone to the Netherlands, thence to England and embarked, finally, from Plymouth for New York. After the Civil War began, when my father was twelve, he ran away from home to Armourdale, Kansas, and enlisted in the Twelfth Kansas Regiment as a drummer boy. His father tried to get him out, but he drummed for the regiment until the end of the war. I used to listen to him tell about the times when he went hungry or had to sleep in snow or rain with just a blanket. He was not injured by the hardships. I suppose there never was a man more healthy. In the twenty-seven years that he had that passenger run out of Ellis, I never knew him to lose a day. Nevertheless, what happened to him in the war was a visionary part of my young life. My brother Ed and I pumped out of him every scrap of what he could remember of his life as a drummer boy in the Civil War.