At this juncture in time I'd gladly give up my television but don't even dream of asking me if I'd part with my decades old collection of 33 1/3 record albums from the '70s. I may not have the ability to play Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's album "Deja Vu" but at LEAST I know that it's there and by the worn appearance of the album cover, I know that I've listened to it more than a couple of times. I don't mind a bit if I don't have the latest of today's technology but I would really have a problem with getting rid of the over 50-year old Easter egg that I dyed at my Grandmother's house when I was only 6. It would only take a moment and the "right" person to come along in order for me to part with all of the pieces of cut glass that I have collected over the years but if you think I would, for one minute, part company with the 100-year old trophy shown below, well you would have another thing coming.
When I was a little kid, I spent many weekends at my Grandmother Brown's house at 215 Locust Street in Halstead, Kansas. Man, those were happy days filled with laughter and homemade gingersnap cookies. We were showed how to have fun, "sans" technology, by a grandmother who took the role of mentoring quite seriously. She was a "mentor" long before it became the oft-used term it is today. From teaching my little sister and I how to grow a "garbage garden" to enlightening us as to what it was like to grow up in what was THEN called the "good old days", Catherine Schilling Brown fulfilled her calling to her 12 grandkids. And when she died in the winter of her 106th year, I missed her kind and loving presence greatly.
At "grandma's house" kids were allowed to be kids and sometimes being such meant that you often got into places where you probably shouldn't have been. She had all kinds of neat and interesting things tucked away into that 8-room bungalow style house of hers. It seemed as though every room was filled with hidden treasures, the kind that would make a kid curious enough to investigate, often without permission. But if you suddenly found yourself "busted" by snooping around in one of her closets or drawers, you needn't have feared asking the question "Grandma what is this? Where did it come from?" With a smile on her face, she always provided us an answer.
That's what happened the day that I was curious about finding a trophy in a box in the hallway. I was even brave enough to pull it out and take it to her in the kitchen and that's when I learned of its message. And it was on that day, that my grandmother "planted the seed" for an idea that would find its way to fruition nearly 50 years later.
We sat at the kitchen table, grandmother and I, and as she told me the story of the trophy I learned about 5 unique characters that in my family were always referred to as "The Brown Brothers". Their photo is shown below.
Now that cute little guy in the corner is Andrew and in the years to come he would grow up to be my granddad. The other four guys, William~Ephraim~Luther~Elmer, are his older brothers. They were all just old bachelors who decided that for better or worse, they were just going to stick together all of their lives. Except for my granddad, the other four never found women who they thought could put up with them ;) When my grandparents married in 1911, they bought a huge house and all of them lived together and strange as it might have seemed, it worked out just fine. Grandmother did the cooking, washing and cleaning for them all and they were just one very big happy family.
The Brown Brothers were farmers and very shrewd businessmen. They knew how to live frugally and made an excellent living off of the land. Those boys were so good at it that 19 years later as the Great Depression hit the country, they felt little impact economically. They had already been living the lifestyle that they needed to in order to survive and they just "rolled with it".
Their passions were many~they tended their orchard, farmed their acreage in wheat and corn, hunted, trapped and fished. And oh yeah, about that trophy~they raised Morgan horses for sale to the U.S. Army at Ft. Riley, Kansas. And it was in the year 1912, the premier year of the Kansas State Fair as we know of it today, that they decided to enter their very best one in the Morgan Horse Competition at the fair. The trophy they won as the "best of show" was proof that those 5 men knew what they were doing. 100 years later in 2012, their great-niece and granddaughter remembers them and honours their memory.
I remember Grandmother remarking that day, now so very long ago, that the trophy might be worth something in the years ahead. She knew that she wouldn't be around in 2012 but that perhaps I might be. I remember her telling me to take it to the fair some day and see what would happen. When she passed away in 1997, the trophy was packed into belongings that were given to my mom. Before my mom passed away, 10 years later in 2007, she passed the trophy along to me. Come Monday morning, I'll be taking it down to the fairgrounds to enter it into a special competition being offered this year for memorabilia from the first Kansas State Fair in 1912. Who knows? Maybe it will be the grand prize winner once again~To borrow the line from Publisher's Clearinghouse (and if any of the CEO's of that fine group are reading this and are concerned that I am infringing on their copyright, please feel free to contact me) "You can't win if you don't enter!"
Good night family and friends! By the way, if you happen to be in our "neck of the woods" come beginning next Friday evening~be sure to visit our town of Hutchinson, Kansas and spend the day walking the grounds of the Kansas State Fair. There is a plenty to see and do~you'll go home tired but it will be a "good" kind of tired.
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