by Rocky Macy
Part 3: Chasing the Dream
Garland MACY was honorably discharged from the US Army Air Corps on December 18th, 1945, and returned to Neosho, Missouri, the place where he had been living when he joined the military in December of 1942. Though he was at times loathe to admit it, Garland had been deeply affected by growing up in poverty in the Great Depression, and for the rest of his life he would consider the accumulation of wealth to be the ultimate indicator of success. That was the dream he was chasing.
Camp Crowder was still active and teeming with soldiers, and one of my Dad’s first moves on the road to wealth and success was to buy a half-interest in a “yellow taxi cab” (a 1941 Plymouth) that his cousin, Dalton MACY, (also a World War II veteran) owned. He said the car needed a new engine, and his investment of $500 helped to secure that. Not long after, according to an entry in Dad’s journal, Dalton ran a stop sign on Camp Crowder and their taxi was banned from the base, a situation that led to the doom of the fledgling cab company. He said that he believed the cab was soon repossessed by someone.
Dad had saved around a thousand dollars from his military pay, but once back in Neosho he began running around with three of his cousins, all war veterans, drinking beer and carousing and his savings were soon almost gone. He realized early on that if he was going to achieve his dream of having a family and becoming prosperous, he would have to abandon that lifestyle.
Dad’s cousin, Dalton MACY, the cabbie, had married a SREAVES girl, Betty Lou, from Seneca, and Dad, soon met and became attracted to Betty’s older sister, Florine SREAVES, who was a waitress at the Hopkins Cafe in Neosho. At the time they met, in very early 1946, my Dad had a steady girlfriend who was a “WAC soldier” stationed at Camp Crowder, and he said that Florine had several boyfriends. She was an older woman, twenty four, and Dad was twenty-one. Dad described Florine, who was to become my mother, this way:
“She was small, 100 pounds, with long dark hair, beautiful and fun. We hit it off right away.”
They were married in Columbus, Kansas, on March 31st, 1946, less than three months after they met. He described the day of their marriage in his journal:
“It was a hot day, although it was spring, March 31. We took my cousin Dalton Macy and wife Betty, sister to Florine, with us. We drove from Neosho to Columbus, Kansas, and went to one of those quickie wedding chapels.
“I believe it was a Sunday. Not sure.
“We were both nervous and scared. We drove all around town in Columbus looking for the place. Had to ask several people for directions, embarrassing. When we found the place it was kind of like a carnival. The yard was full of couples, laughing and hollering, waiting for their turn. It’s a wonder we didn’t both back out.”
Dad and Mom started married life on almost nothing but love. Dad said that he had a little over a hundred dollars and a half-interest in a cab company that was going under. Mom had $500 in the bank and a 1940 Studebaker Champion that was paid for. (Not long after their marriage, one of Dad’s cousins borrowed the Studebaker - and got drunk and wrecked it.) Dad spent most of his savings on a set of wedding rings for Mom. By the time of their marriage he had gotten a job at Pet Milk in Neosho, the place where he had worked during his senior year in high school, for $35.00 a week, and Mom continued waitressing at the Hopkins Cafe on North College Street in Neosho. Dad said that neither one of them missed work on the day after their wedding.
(At Pet Milk Dad was forced to join a union, and he felt that he got nothing of value for his dues. He spent the next seventy-odd years complaining bitterly about the awfulness of unions. He referred to unions several times in his journal as “the ruination of America.” Over the years he and I had several spirited disagreements on the topic of unions!)
My parents initially lived in a couple of apartments in Neosho, but soon after their marriage they decided to head out to Brentwood, California, and get some seasonal work at the orchards where Dad had worked before the war. Dad said that they drove a 1939 Ford to California, and that it was a “good one, the first model with hydraulic brakes.” I know they stayed in a worker’s camp in Brentwood because one time when I was young and still living at home my mother asked me out of the blue if I remembered “Spike?” I asked her who Spike was and she said, bashfully, “Oh he was a kid at the camp in California where we picked fruit. He was always getting into trouble. You weren’t even born yet.”
Spike made an impression on my mother. I hope that he had a good life.
After the fruit was over they drove down to Dad’s uncle and aunt’s (Bob and Gladys NUTT) in Baldwin Park, California, and stayed with them a couple of months. Dad described that part of the California trip this way:
“Bob was a foreman over a construction job in Venice, on the west coast, building a jetty out into the Pacific Ocean for boats to park. He gave me a job as a time-keeper, and I checked dump trucks in and out. We stayed at their house for two or three months. Kind of a boring job, so I finally quit and we came home.”
(That would have been my mother’s first trip to California. When we went there as a family in 1958, I remember Bob and Gladys were trying to convince them to pack up and move to Los Angeles. They had found a house that was reasonably priced and convinced my parents to drive by and look at it. I can remember all of us peeking in the windows of the vacant house. My mother desperately wanted to live in California - or Florida - or anyplace warm, but she could never blast Dad out of rural Missouri.)
When the newlyweds returned to Missouri they “leased-purchased” a twenty-acre “rabbit patch” with a small house. They bought five milk cows and began selling milk and making about twenty dollars a week. They also went to a sale and bought twenty little pigs which the hauler delivered and put in a wire pen - and the pigs escaped and scattered about the neighborhood. Soon they began to meet all of the neighbors as people called to report pigs in their yards, gardens, and even in their homes! Dad and Mom remained on their farm for about a year before finally giving it up. He said they never managed to accumulate enough for a down payment on a loan.
Dad said that he then borrowed several hundred dollars from his cousin, Herschel MACY, to lease a small grocery in Neosho. The lease only had six months to run, and they assumed that the owner would extend it. But after my parents got the place cleaned up and going good, the owner decided that he wanted it back. That was another false step on the hard road to success.
After their adventure in the grocery business, Dad went back to work at Pet Milk and Mom, who was pregnant with me, stayed home. At that point he received a surprise check from the government for $450 in back “furlough pay,” and they used that money as a down payment to buy a small house at 510 Park Street in Neosho, a place which sat right next to the US Fish Hatchery and a busy set of train tracks. My parents gave $3,500 for that house and sold it a couple of years later for $4,500. Our family lived in that small house until the arrival of my little sister in the fall of 1950. Dad, who always liked to work with his hands and make things, bragged in his journal about the cement and block front porch that he added to that house. He was working on that project when I was born in March of 1948.
Dad said in his journal that he and Mom discussed having a family and that they agreed they wanted one boy and one girl. When my sister Gail (now Abigail) was born in October of 1950, their family planning had been completed - successfully!
My earliest memories are of walking by the Fish Hatchery in Neosho and throwing rocks at the rainbow trout. Dad said in his journal that I would throw in handfuls of gravel and the fish would rush to the surface thinking they were being fed. One of my mother’s worst memories was undoubtedly of the time when two high school girls knocked at the front door with me in tow - and told Mom that they had found me playing on the railroad tracks!
(I was living in Neosho forty years after they sold the little house on Park Street and was riding a bicycle past there one day when I saw a woman working in the yard. I stopped and told her who I was, and it turned out that she was the daughter of the woman that Dad and Mom had sold the house to - the same family still owned it! The lady took me through the house, but it didn’t stir any memories. The last time I drove by there was four or five years ago with my grandson, Boone, who was a high school student in Neosho at the time. It looked as though the house was about to be torn down.)
We left Neosho shortly after my sister was born and moved to Goodman, the next town south. There we lived in an old two-story frame house on a couple of acres. My folks bought a pair of calves, and Dad continued to work at Pet Milk in Neosho. I can remember two incidents at that place, both traumatic. One day when it was storming, my mother asked me to telephone someone about something. I got up on a kitchen chair to reach the old crank phone on the wall, talked to the operator whose name I think was Violet, but she couldn’t get the call to go through. Just as I hung the receiver up, a bolt of lightning came out of it and left a black mark on the wall! Another time I crawled under a neighbor’s barbed wire fence to get a better look at his mule. The mule promptly kicked me in the chest, and I ran home crying - and had a perfect hoof mark emblazoned on my chest!
It was while working at Pet Milk that my dad had his only serious vehicle wreck. He had a new 1950 Dodge pick-up truck and was coming home late from work one night when he saw a horse running in a field next to the road. What he didn’t see was another horse running parallel to the first horse at about the same speed, only out in the road. The horse and truck collided head-on with the horse’s head coming through the windshield. The pickup got the worst of the deal, and the stunned horse trotted off.
Dad bought a work truck next and also a couple of milk routes. He would get up before daylight, drive his routes collecting ten-gallon cans of milk, deliver them to Pet Milk in Neosho, then park his truck and spend the rest of the day and into the evening working at Pet. I would sit up late at night with my mother listening to her scary radio programs (like “Inner Sanctum”) while we waited on Dad to get home from work. He was finally getting focused on the dream.
It was while Dad worked at Pet Milk that he made his only donation to a blood drive. The plant manager was trying to get one hundred percent of his workers to donate and he talked Dad into volunteering when his shift ended at midnight. He had finished donating and was doing the mandatory sit-and-wait while enjoying a cookie and some juice when he began to feel funny when he noticed the nurse grinning at him. The next thing Dad knew he was waking up on the floor. He had to wait another hour before being allowed to drive home - and then get up and go to work again before daylight.
Dad sold his milk truck and he and Mom started another business venture in 1953. Mom’s sister, Christine DOBBS and her husband Bob, were running the Linwood Cafe on Highway 71 at Goodman. They owned a house and property across from Linwood Corner on the other side of Splitlog Road. My parents and the Dobbses decided that piece of land would be a perfect place to build a truckstop cafe and gas station - and with an $18,000 loan from the DX gas company, they did just that. A few years later they added a bunkhouse for tired truckers.
My Dad and Bob DOBBS set up a pair of sawdust pits for pitching horseshoes out in front of the station. It attracted horseshoe pitchers from around the area, as well as some truckers who would just pull in off of busy Highway 71 to pitch horseshoes for a while. It was quite a popular attraction!
The Macys and Dobbses ran that truckstop complex, “La Bella View,” up until 1958 when Dad and Mom sold their interest in the business to the Dobbses and bought a tourist cabin court (eight units) four miles north of the tourist town of Noel, Missouri, in Ginger Blue Village. Our cabin court was called “Riverview” because the property bordered a beautiful stretch of the Elk River.
My folks had built a nice ranch-style rock home by the truckstop, and when we moved to Noel they leased that home to a couple who managed a large local feed mill. A few years later they sold the house to the Dobbses, and many years later Bob and Christine sold it to another of the SREAVES sisters, my aunt, Mary Ruth, and her husband Fred MARBLE. All told, that house stayed in the family for over forty years!
During the years that we had been in Goodman we were able to take three summer vacations: one to San Diego in 1955 to see dad’s brother Wayne and his family. Uncle Wayne was dying of leukemia and that trip was the last time that Dad was able to see him. In 1957 we took a drive through the South that included New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast. (My parents in later years took several trips on their own - and one with the Dobbses - to a favorite place of theirs in Panama City Beach, Florida, on the Gulf.) Our final trip as a complete family was back to San Diego in the summer of 1958 to visit with Wayne’s widow, my wonderful Aunt Mary, and her daughters, Janet and Linda, and then on to the Los Angeles area where we saw some of Dad’s aunts and uncles - and stayed with Bob and Gladys NUTT who took us all to Disneyland!
We ran the tourist court near Noel for six years, from August of 1958 until August of 1964, and those were easily the best years of my young life. - although because it was a summer enterprise, there were no more family vacations! An old widower named Frank DUNCAN had owned it, and the place was in general disrepair when we moved in. Dad enjoyed sorting things out and making repairs, but after the first winter it became obvious that a second income would be needed. He leased a DX service station in town where he sold gas, serviced cars, and did general automotive repairs, and Mom and Gail and I ran the court.
Our family made many friends with the regular tourists, the ones who would return every summer. Most of our business was out of Tulsa and Kansas City, but we also had two special families from Texas who came and stayed with us each summer. After the morning and early afternoon work was done - emptying the trash and garbage, cleaning the cabins, doing laundry, and mowing, Gail and I would often head to the river with our tourist friends or with one of two sets of weekend neighbors who had cottages adjoining our place.
Dad said this about Riverview in his journal:
“We all worked it, and the kids helped a lot. Both Rocky and Gail learned to swim in the Elk River. Our summer neighbors, the Bledsoe’s, taught them to swim. Rocky would stand on the dock and catch sun perch by the hour. They would bite on anything - worms, shrimp, bread. He would fill a five gallon bucket and then dump them back in the river. Gail would spend half of the time on the bottom of the river, looking for turtles and pretty rocks. You could holler for her and if there was no answer, just wait a little while and she would pop up. Scared us half to death!”
Dad bought a building on Main Street in Noel in 1962 and started an appliance store where he sold kitchen appliances, televisions, radios, and eventually lawnmowers, tillers, and many other items including furniture. Two years after Macy's Appliance Store opened we sold the cabin court and moved into town. After that my mother worked with him in the appliance business, and Gail and I and even her future husband, Bob SMITH, also worked there at various times. It was another Macy family affair!
The appliance store was going strong when color televisions started coming on the market. We had one of the first ones in our own home - to spur on sales - and Dad would open the store on Sunday nights and invite the public in to watch two of the first color programs: “The Wonderful World of Disney” and “Bonanza.” He was also the primary local dealer of CB radios when that craze hit.
A Kansas City Southern freight train blew up in downtown Noel on the night of August 3, 1969, causing one death, many injuries, and five million dollars in property damage. That blast was so powerful that it did some damage at our house a mile-and-a-half out of town, and did major damage at the appliance store in town. But it also provided a big economic boost to local businesses like my Dad’s. As people began to repair and rebuild they needed to replace appliances and furnishings. I also remember that he and I worked daylight-to-dusk replacing television antennas because every single one in town had been destroyed by the blast.
But nothing lasts forever, and the death knell of the appliance store was Walmart. It reached a point where Walmart was selling small appliances - things like crockpots radios, televisions, and even lawnmowers, cheaper than my dad could buy them from his wholesalers. Dad said he began with a $6,000 inventory, eventually worked it up to $100,000 and accumulated $50,000 of debt from locals on his charge book. As Walmart grew stronger Dad could see what was happening. He quit replacing merchandise, and in 1982 sold what was left (on credit) to his TV repairman.
Dad’s next venture was selling real estate, an activity that dovetailed nicely with his purchasing of rental properties, something that he and my mother had been doing for several years. Mom helped in the real estate business answering phones and managing the office for a couple of years until she became ill and could no longer work.
As my mother became increasingly ill, an illness that lasted over three years and finally culminated in her death, Dad worked days at the real estate office and paid people to take care of Mom at home, and he took care of her in the evenings. He had reluctantly placed his own mother in a nursing home during her terminal illness ten years before, and he was determined not to do that with Mom. (I think that he was also consciously sending a message to my sister and myself about the importance of not putting parents in nursing homes.)
My mother passed away in December of 1986, and in the next twenty three years before his own death my father had a couple of long-term girlfriends, but never remarried. During his final years he began selling off some of his rental properties and started concentrating on making money through investing: church bonds and publicly traded stocks and bonds. By the end of his life he had achieved the level of security and comfort that he dreamed of since his childhood days of trapping rabbits.
Throughout his life my, and especially during the half-century that he lived and worked in Noel, my dad was a fairly ruthless businessman and trader, although he undoubtedly would not have described himself that way. He seldom lost in any negotiation. But he also had a big streak of humanity that was often evident. He took good care of his renters and responded quickly and personally to any problems.
Not long before he died there was a big power outage in Noel due to an ice storm - and Dad’s big house was one of the few places that had electricity. Many homes were out of power for several days. Dad invited a large, three-generation Hispanic family to move in with him and share his home. He told me later that the grandmother of the group had made him some wonderful meals during the several days that they were there.
Dad began his last full day on this earth carrying out his Christmas tradition of delivering candy to his renters. While he was doing that he slipped and fell on one of the rental house porches and hurt himself. During our regular evening phone call that day he told me about the fall and said that he was going to bed early. I encouraged him to go to the doctor the next day if he still did not feel better. That was our last conversation. My sister telephoned me at my home in Arizona in the middle of the night and said that she had a call from the hospital. Dad had become worse, phoned for his own ambulance, and made it to the hospital in Neosho, the place where both of his children had been born, and died soon after his arrival. It was several hours before dawn on Christmas Day.
Dad’s obituary was composed by my sister and myself:
“Garland Eugene Macy”
“Garland Macy was born in rural Newton County, Missouri, on October 19, 1924. He passed away on Christmas morning at Freeman Hospital in Neosho.
“Mr. Macy was preceded in death by his wife, Florine (Sreaves) Macy who died in 1986, his father and mother, Charles E. Macy and Hazel (Nutt) Macy, and two brothers, Wayne Macy and Tommy Macy. He is survived by his sister, Mrs. Betty Lankford of Seneca, a son, Rocky Macy, of Litchfield Park, AZ, and a daughter, Gail Macy, of Fayetteville, AR.
“Other survivors include seven grandchildren: Nick Macy of West Plains, MO; Heidi and Jason Petcher of London, England; Molly and Scott Files of Salem, OR; Tiffany and Nathan Burke of Lowell, AR; Tim and Erin Macy of Kansas City, MO; Justin and Lisa Smith of Springdale, AR; and Reed Smith of Las Vegas, NV.
“There are six great-grandchildren: Boone Macy, Lauren Pfetcher, Sebastian Files, Brieanna Burke, Ruby Pfetcher, and Judah Files.
“Garland Macy was a staff sergeant with the Army Air Corps during World War II. He served in England and France and was awarded the Purple Heart.
“Mr. Macy was a prominent businessman and real estate broker in Noel for many years. He was a past member of the Noel School Board, the Noel Chamber of Commerce, the Noel City Council, and the board of Directors of the State Bank of Noel.
“Garland Macy will be mourned and missed by his family and his community. He was a good friend and neighbor to the people of Noel, the town that he called home for over fifty years.
“The family will hold a visitation at the Ozark Funeral Home in Noel this Tuesday evening from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. The funeral service will be Wednesday, December 30th, at 10:00 a.m. at the Ozark Funeral Home in Noel, followed by burial with full military honors at the Noel Cemetery.
“Pallbearers will be grandsons and husbands of granddaughters.
“Contributions may be made to “Friends of the Department of Social Services of McDonald County,” through the Ozark Funeral Home. The organization helps to meet the needs of children in foster care.”
My parents are at rest at the Noel Cemetery, just feet from a parcel of land that they once owned. Noel was their home for many years, and so shall it remain.
1 comment:
Wonderful story
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