Volume 4, Number 6 - Winter 1971
The Editor Speaks
Permanent address of Mrs. Wanda J. Davis is 1550 No. Terrace Drive, Wichita, Kansas, 67208.
Eva Bruner asks if among the ancestry of Mrs. L. D. Burns there was a Lucinda or Henrietta Burns or Amy Burns who after the death of their mother in the early 1820’s were boarded out to separate families and their father with the sons left their home for parts unknown to the girls? She says, "Lucinda became my great-great-great grandmother. She was born in 1817."
Amy Johnson was born at Forsyth, January 27, 1889. She married William R. Miller, in Chanute, Kansas in 1916. Their family was born and reared there. Later the family home was at Bethel, Kansas.
Mrs. Miller was always active in all civic movements. She was president of the Women’s Work of the Bethel Presbyterian Church; District deputy—President of the Cornelia Rebekah Lodge No. 50., and Member of the Central Reading Club.
I knew Amy first when we attended a writing seminar at Drury College, likely near twenty-five years ago. Mrs. Porter Lucas of Crane was there, and Mrs. Skaggs, too.
Mrs. Lucas, Mrs. Skaggs, and I likely went home to enjoy our knitting, but Amy wrote her book.
The last I heard of Amy she was living in North Kansas City or some part of Clay County, some what crippled with arthritis.
John Rulketter’s father and mother left their mark through our area from Springfield to Branson and far beyond, but the Quarterly must limit its territory.
We came to the area too late to learn to know John’s parents, but we have learned to love, respect, and admire John and his lovely wife.
In a way John’s story reads much like a combination of a Horatio Alger book, a Grace Livington Hill novel, a "he man" western, and an article from Fortune Magazine.
Now retired, Mr. and Mrs. Rulketter come each spring and fall to Branson. Each day they go out to the Rulketter farm. Years ago we would have used the sentence, "There they commune with nature." Likely those words yet express the thing that the couple does. In between, going to the farm they "visit". They go to see all and everyone John knew during the years he lived with his parents, and the summers he spent with J. K. and Mrs. Ross, at Garber.
Surely John’s parents and Mrs. Ross, too, taught John about the brotherhood of man for John always tells only good and clever stories. Too, he must have been a precocious child to have seen and remembered just everything and everyone who crossed his path. We will keep after John to tell more stories of Garber.
And of course other parents bore precocious children. Each of you members of the WRVHS knows that your parents produced at least one such child. Now, will you, like John, write down the stories you recall that we may enjoy them in the Quarterly.
"I saw a movie of the ‘Shepherd of the Hills’ many years ago and will never bother to see another. I did at that time re-read the book to see if I could get the picture completely out of mind. The portrayal of Aunt Molly bothered me in particular. Even H.B.W.’s torsion of the real Mrs. Ross bothered me." John Rulketter.
Jewel Ross Mehus
[Inside Back cover]
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