The family in White Cloud, 1988

The top photo is Aunt Jean taking a picture of Grandma Breeze, Uncle Robert, Aunt Doris, mom, Uncle Hap (barely visible) and Cousin Doug.  They are all in front of the Legion Hall with the Missouri River in the background.

The bottom photo is Uncle Lloyd, Aunt Jean, Cousin Doug, Uncle Robert, me, Aunt Doris and a neighbor.  We are all standing on top of Robert's hill on the South edge of town, with the grain elevator and the Missouri River behind us.

Seven people in the top photo, and every one of them is gone.  Seven people in the bottom photo, and every one of them is gone except me.  "Just for a moment we're all together; just for a moment we're happy," says Emily when she spends a portion of a day from her previous life, Thornton Wilder, OUR TOWN.

In high school, when it rarely rained but did and we were in PE and could not play out of doors, we were hustled into the gym to participate in a brutal game of dodgeball.  My friend Richard Meyers would stand perfectly still and quickly take the hit so he could move to the sidelines right away and no longer have to participate in the "game".  I was like most of the others, trying so hard to keep out of the path of the flying ball (that actually did not hurt too much when it struck you).  But when the other side had the ball and one particular guy got control of the ball and was ready to hurl it hard, the opposition would scatter as much as possible so as not to be hit.  I'm not so sure that the last one standing meant much in that game, but nobody but Richard seemed to want to get hit too early or at all.

But I look at these pictures of the family and lament that every one depicted is dead.  They slept and awakened so many times over the course of those lives that were significant to them and the rest of us, and one day they no longer did.  Eventually no one survives.  But you keep trying to dodge the ball and survive for yet another day on this planet even though most days are unimportant, so unimportant that no one takes a picture to commemorate that particular event.

White Cloud, KS 1988

This is a photograph of White Cloud, KS, likely 1988.   Grandma Breeze's former restaurant is in the very center of the photo, the two-story building with the white metal awning out front.  This was taken from Robert's hill on the South side of the town.  To the right, off the scene, is the Missouri River.  The cemetery is located well to the West of the town, about a half-mile up the main road.

The four Breeze siblings, December 25, 1944, and May 1989

Top photograph:  Anita, Norma Jean, Doris and Robert Breeze, December 25th, 1944, together in California.  The professional photograph was taken at Southland Studios 16 East Colorado Street Pasadena 1, California, Sycamore 2-9386.

Bottom photograph:  Norma Jean, Doris, Robert and Anita, May 1989, White Cloud, Kansas.  Likely before or after the funeral of their mother, Gladys Breeze.

Mom was born July 4th, 1921.  Aunt Jean in 1923.  Aunt Doris in 1925.  Uncle Robert in 1927.  Mom had first moved to Phoenix for her health, and soon moved on to California, first living in Pasadena.

In that first photo, all four had the most important events of their lives yet to come.

Mom would have been 23 years old.  She would not marry dad until 1947.  They would settle in Southern California when dad was stationed at George AFB in 1951.  She was advised not to have children, but she produced me and the only girl offspring among the Breeze siblings before they left Florida for Georgia and then California.

Aunt Jean, at 21, likely had graduated from nursing school in Kansas.  She and a friend took the train out to stay with mom in Pasadena.  Jean had joined the Army as a nurse and would soon be stationed at an Army rehabilitation facility in the converted El Mirador hotel in Palm Springs.  She would meet her future husband, Lloyd Green, when he was recovering from battle wounds in the hospital.  They would marry in 1945 after she left the Army.  They would settle for a time in Oklahoma where Lloyd was from and Texas also before eventually settling down in the Bay Area, in San Leandro with their son, Gordon Douglas, born in 1946.

Aunt Doris would have been 19.  She would marry her childhood sweetheart, Paul Nathan "Hap" Rowe, who also graduated in White Cloud, and they would also marry in 1945.  He had been in the Navy in WWII.   Their son, Jim, was also born in 1946.

Uncle Robert would have been 17.  He would be in the Army the following year and spend some time in Japan after the end of the conflict as part of the occupation force under General McArthur.  He would return and eventually marry and have a son, Ray, named after their father, Ray Breeze.

Only Jean and Doris married for life.  Doris would take her ailing husband off life support, leave the hospital to visit a friend, suffer a massive heart attack in Highland and die on the way to a better equipped hospital in Topeka.  While we were all gathered for her funeral, Hap would die within a day and they would have a joint funeral in Hiawatha, KS.  In 2008, Lloyd Green would die, like his son, Doug in 2003, of cancer.  Jean would die of a burst blood vessel in the brain at the age of 93 in 2017.

In 1944, all of them young and hopeful, no doubt, would have no idea of the various arcs their lives would take in the coming years:  how they would lose their father in less than a decade, how their mother would live to be 86, how two of them would divorce and two would remain married for life.  How each would produce one son and one, our mom, a daughter and how three of their offspring would outlive both parents but how one would predecease both his parents.

Hap and Doris Rowe's House, White Cloud, KS, Summer 1983

The top photograph is of the front of the house, with the picture window that is featured prominently in the opening chapter of RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  OLIVE BRANCH.  Cousin Jim's wife, Ruth; my mom, Aunt Doris; Jim's daughter, Tammy, who is all grown up now with children of her own; and Grandma Breeze on the front sidewalk.

The second photo shows Uncle Hap, Ruth, Tammy, Grandma Breeze and Cousin Jim.

I included the bottom photograph even though it is of Uncle Robert and Grandma Breeze in her kitchen of her house on the main street of White Cloud only because it features a telling calendar on the wall behind them.  That calendar is dated 1983, hence the only way I was able to discern that all of the related photographs were taken that summer.  (I was also able to realize that the other aged photographs of White Cloud where Gary Kinateder was included were taken the summer before he was laid up with appendicitis in Topeka in 1983.)

Jim waited several years after his parents' death in 2003 before eventually selling the house he inherited.  That, in a way, became the final gesture that ended the direct connection all of us had to the legacy of White Cloud.  Many of the Hooks and Nuzums and Kellys are buried in the town cemetery, most of whom we never met or knew, except from the stories one or more Uncles and Aunts or my mom told us of their youth in such an out-of-the-way small town.  It was once a thriving burg, but that was a century and more ago.

Grandpa and Grandma Breeze, mom, Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap, and Uncle Robert are buried in the cemetery.  Cousin Jim intends to be buried in a cemetery in Topeka, next to his late wife Ruth, who died after repeated battles with cancer through much of her adult life.  Uncle Robert used to place flags and/or flowers on the graves for Memorial Day when Aunt Jean would send him the money to do so.   He mowed the cemetery grasses for the town, I suspect getting a modest stipend for doing so.  But since his death, no telling who tends the quiet cemetery now, disturb only by passing cars on the way to Highland or Hiawatha or the clanging casino beyond sleepy White Cloud.  

My sister and I accompanied our mom to Kansas in 1957 on the Santa Fe Railways Super Chief train.  (We were there as infants in 1950 or 1951, on the way to California; but we certainly have no memories of that visit.)  We again visited in 1966 when Uncle Robert decided to return and live there for good.  I stopped by in the summer of 1978 when I was finished with my Air Force tour in missiles in Minot, ND, and was on my way to Colorado Springs, to teach at the U.S. Air Force Academy, that fateful assignment that set me on a completely different path.  I was there again in 1982 and 1983.  In 1988, we were all there for Grandma Breeze's 85th birthday reunion.  In 1995, for Doris and Hap's and Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd's joint 50th wedding anniversary celebration.  In 2002, for mom's funeral.  In 2003, for Doris and Hap's funeral.  In 2012, for Uncle Robert's funeral.  And then, for me, the visits stopped.

White Cloud, Kansas, Summer 1982, 1983

The top two photos and the bottom one are from Summer 1982.  The rest are from Summer 1983.  Each time it was the July 4th extended weekend because that date was mom's birthday, and I was often wherever she was at the time.  Those two years my roommate Gary and I drove there and stayed.  (In 1983, however, he developed appendicitis while we visited my friends Steve and Elaine Schurr in Topeka, KS, and was hospitalized there while I continued on to White Cloud.)

The reason for the inclusion of these few photos in the blog will be explained shortly.

The photo with the Paper Moon reference painted in the background, one with my mom, were my Uncle Robert's attempt to commemorate the exciting time that a movie studio came to town, covered the main street with dirt, and filmed a sequence of Ryan and Tatum's escape from a Sheriff's office.  They jump in a car, drive to the river road at the end of town, proceed one way and then the other, and finally escape the clutches of the law.  The "Sheriff's office" had actually once been a bank.

The dining table photo with everyone gathered around the lighted birthday cake was in the living room of my Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap.  From left to right, sitting is my mother, Anita Breeze (June 2002).  Next to her, standing, is my Grandma, Gladys Breeze (1989); behind the other two standing women is my Cousin Jim's wife, Ruth (likely 1990's); standing in front of Ruth is my Aunt Doris Rowe, Jim's mom (May 2003); sitting at the end of the table is my Uncle Hap Rowe, Jim's dad (May 2003); sitting to Hap's left is my Uncle Robert Breeze (2012); sitting on the far right is my Cousin, Jim Rowe.   Everyone in the photograph except my Cousin Jim is dead, with the (approximate) date of death in parentheses.  Cousin Jim, who is very much alive, still lives in Kansas.

The second picture from the top looks north at the bending Missouri River from the Northern hill above the town.  The bottom photograph (with my roommate Gary at the time and myself standing) is of the top of the Southern hill above the town. Uncle Robert owned the hill for years until his death.  It passed to his often-estranged son, Ray Breeze, and none of us knows who owns that hill now (Ray attempted to sell off anything and everything he got from his late father before, during and immediately after the funeral).  The photo second from the bottom looks across from Doris and Hap's front yard at the town's grain elevator.  I have stood on the top on a few occasions over the years, beginning in 1966, and surveyed the town below, from the river end to the closed elementary school at the opposite end.

The photo of my Uncle Robert and mom includes the front porch of the Nuzum house that Robert later owned for a number of years, again until his death.  But like most of the historic structures in the town, it became musty and broken down because Robert could not hold back time forever.  Again, I have no idea if Cousin Ray (whom none of us knew at all until we briefly met him at Uncle Robert's funeral and did not take to him at all) was able to sell the house or if it's deteriorated well beyond repair.  (It is in front of that house where the aged black and white photo was taken in 1921--from a different angle--of four generations of Hook/Nuzum/Breeze women, beginning with Great Great Grandmother Hook and ending with my infant mother in her lap, with Grandma Gladys Breeze and her mother, Great Grandma Nuzum, standing around Great Great Grandmother Hook.)

I currently have not found any photographs of the town's Olive Branch cemetery (though my mother took so many over the years).  Grandpa Ray Breeze (Gladys's husband) was buried there in 1954 when he died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 55.

The reason these photographs are included here is because the tenth volume in the series, RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE:  OLIVE BRANCH, begins and ends in White Cloud, Kansas.  Many of the sites depicted above are featured in the book, including the Olive Branch cemetery.  Several of the super-hero characters in the book are staying there for the funeral of Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap in May of 2003.