Two Sides, Part One

Every person has two sides of their history. The things that make them who they are, that help them act the way they do, are often passed down to them through the two sides of their family tree. I don’t know about anyone else, but the two sides of my family tree are quite different. Is it the same with yours?

Now there certainly were similarities. I came forth from farmers. Both my grandfathers were men of the land. While farming wasn’t the totality of their lives, they were both men tanned brown under the huge sky of the great plains. They were also both bald (which might explain why I am follicly challenged). Emery “Pa” LeCrone, homesteaded a farm in the Oklahoma panhandle with his parents. When he was 12 years old, his parents decided they’d had enough and left the farm to pursue a more agreeable lifestyle. Young Emery stayed on the farm by himself, trying to save it. Can you imagine that? 12 years old, miles from the nearest neighbor, with no electricity, no radio, all by himself, doing a man’s job, trying to save the family farm.

James Clifford “Cliff” Kear made his way from the mountains of eastern Tennessee, through Oklahoma (where he labored as a bricklayer, paving the streets I would later drive on in Ponca City and Tonkawa), to a homestead on the high plains of northeastern New Mexico. He raised his family on an 1,100 acre farm 27 miles west of Clayton. The farm had a 12-volt electrical system that was driven by the windmill. My Dad said that when the wind blew, they had lights and radio.

Both sides of my family tree were poor. They were not ashamed, however. Poverty simply made them self-sufficient. Pa LeCrone ended up owning a café and a Texaco service station. Grandpa Kear ended up as a mechanic who was able to sock away a good retirement. And thus endeth the similarities. Well, not really.

I was raised laughing. That was something passed from both sides of the family. But the humor itself was different depending on the fork in the tree. The Kears were fairly staid in their humor. They liked to tell stories with a humorous twist, but there wasn‘t much jovialness. Grandma Kear believed that if you laughed too much that you were inviting calamity; happiness and joy were always counterbalanced with sorrow and trouble. So, less laughter, less pain. The four Kear boys, of whom my Dad was the youngest, had what you might call a “closeted humor.” They developed a sense of humor that was sometimes hard to understand by outsiders. They even had a unique fraternal vocabulary (of which I will someday write), the terminology of which was firmly based in silly joy.

My Dad said that he got his sense of humor from the Ogle side of the family. The Kears didn’t laugh much, he said, but the Ogles did. Which made my grandmother nervous. This isn’t to suggest that Grandma Kear was humorless. She would get “tickled” to the point of tears, but just hated to let it loose.

But it was the stories that the Kear family loved, stories that would elicit a laugh, but not a guffaw. My grandfather loved to tell whoppers the truth of which you could never be quite certain. My Dad’s tales were always blatantly true and typically funny. He told us about the only time, being in trouble, that he ran from his mother. It tickled him to recall to us how his grandfather, Pinkney Kear, was working in the field when he ran by. “He passed me like a dream,” Pinkney recalled. This recollection always made Dad laugh. I asked what happened when his mother caught him. Dad, suddenly not so humorous, said, “She blistered my hide.”

Dad liked to tell stories of his childhood. I remember the ones about how he made the dogs and cats fight by rubbing their noses together, or how he would toss them in the cow tank to watch them swim. He like to tell stories about his dog “Murt.” Murt was named after a character in a Saturday serial, Murdock. Murt would smile, my Dad insisted, if you touched him on the scar he had on his side. Murt also ran sideways, and would find himself running in the shape of a horseshoe when vigorously chasing cats, his back legs outrunning his front legs.

The LeCrones, on the other hand, were almost slapstick. They were practical jokers and loved a good belly laugh. They had their stories, too (which usually involved someone’s misfortune). I remember the one about Pa LeCrone smelling smoke as he drove down the road. Thinking something was wrong with the car, he pulled over to inspect. Getting out of the car, his family roared with laughter as they noticed the back of his pants on fire. He had accidentally dropped a cigarette ash into the cuff of his trousers and had caught himself on fire. Ah, yes, the LeCrones loved that kind of stuff.

And somewhere between the two is where I landed. I am a very humorous person. I love stories, and I love quick little quips. Laughter is a way of proving that we are alive. It’s a tiny Zen moment of enlightened awareness. It brings me joy to elicit a laugh from a person - proof that you are also alive. “Did I ever tell you about the time…?”