Stories my grandmother told me.
My grandmother Grace told me a lot of stories of when she was a child. She was born in Hastings Nebraska to Orlando Cloud Kirkbride and Sara Ann Kinser in the year of 1890 and lived part of her life in Kansas. Her father was a handsome man that had a beautiful singing voice and was considered the best singer in Kansas. But he always had severe headaches and when my grandmother was about 9 years old, he died a mysterious death. Later, she told that his grave was moved and they discovered his hair had grown to his shoulders. They thought that was strange. Grace told many stories of how mischevious she was as a child. Once, her older brothers were going have cow sired by a bull and she wanted to go with them but they said no,it wasn't the proper thing for young ladies to see. But Grace followed them anyway and watched, but she never said if she was caught peeking or not. Then another time, she followed her brothers to a swimming hole where they were skinny dipping. She climbed a tree to have better view and they saw her and her older brother pulled the limb she was perched on and flipped her into the water. Once, her mother, Sara made her a pretty white dress and her brothers pulled her up and down a dry creek bed by pulling the dress over her feet and pulling her up and down the creek. The dress was ruined and she was spanked. Then once, she was with her family working in the garden during a hot summer day. Grace decided she was tired of hard labor and sneaked a rock in her jaw, pretending she had a tooth ache. But Grace's little trick failed when she sneezed and the rock fell out, so she ran to the house and hid in a flour barrel. Her mother came in later and went about her housework, apparently forgetting about what happened. Then, Grace climbed out of the flour barrel, since she thought her mother had forgotten her little trick and she was safe. But her mother promptly grabbed her and gave her a well deserved spanking. Later, Sara remarried to a man named Joe Pyle and he turned out to be a very abusive,cruel man. One day, her stepfather sent her younger brother Charley and she to look for cattle, but they were slower than he thought they ought to be and he went after them with a buggy whip. He caught her brother and whipped him severely but Grace ran from him, as she told it, 'like a scared wolf.' He chased her to a large pile of hay and she ran right through it, but he had to run around it. She ran straight to the house to her mother and when he came in with the buggy whip, Sara stood up to him and told him," if she needs a whiping, you do it right and not with that buggy whip." He backed down. Once before he'd whipped Sara hands with the belt because she'd not picked enough cotton that day. He often made his family work hard in the fields while he wondered around town with a big cigar,pretending he was a bigshot. Grace said once that some neighbors put a bundle of switches on their door step indicating they knew what he'd been doing and it was a warning to him that they were going to give him a whipping because of the way he was treating his family. He straightened up somewhat but her mother knew Grace wasn't safe around her stepfather so she sent her to Kansas to live with one of her father's sisters.
Grace never said why she didn't stay with her Aunt but she left when she wasn't yet in her teens to find work. She went from house to house asking for a job to clean the house or to cook for them. One house she went to, told her to go to the back door to come in. She prepared their dinner and when it come time to eat she naturally thought she would eat with the family. But the woman told her no she had to eat in the kitchen, so Grace promptly picked up her bag and left, leaving them to serve and clean up after themselves. She figured if she wasn't good enough to eat with them, she wasn't going serve them or clean up after them. Once she worked for a railroad engineer by taking care of his children and staying in his home. One night while she was asleep, she awoke and saw the image of her dead father standing at the foot of her bed looking down at her with a sad face. It scared her and she told one her neighbors about it. They told her to get out of that house immediately because something very wrong there. She packed her bags again and left. She never said how she met her husband, Tom Hunter, but probably at a dance because she told stories of them going to dances and dancing all night. At one dance she and her partner won a contest by dancing the longest, but when she had girls of her own she never allowed them to go to dances. She and her husband Tom often played music and sang together at a cafe one of her relatives had. She told of how they were married in a small town in Oklahoma on the Texas border. The way she described it was, 'it had been raining and on their wedding day they stood in the street in the mud up past their ankles and Tom was drunk.' Tom and Grace had 12 children but only 6 lived beyond babies, but one of them, a boy died of diabetes at the age of 17. Their only remaining son,died at 19 in world war 2. Only the girls remained alive to raise families. All are dead now except one and she is 98 years old and will be 99, October 19, 2011. Tom died May,1967 and Grace died May,1979. Grace leaves behind many descendants.
