A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [12]
Ralph said he had doubts about another Stanley story, recounted in Dreams from My Father. According to that story, Stanley was thrown out of high school by the time he was fifteen for punching the principal in the nose, and spent the next three years living off odd jobs, hopping railcars to Chicago and California and back home, and “dabbling in moonshine, cards, and women.” Ralph Dunham remembered all that rather differently. He said Stanley dropped out of the El Dorado High School class of 1935 in his senior year, most likely because he was not doing well academically, and returned some years later to graduate. “I won’t say that he hadn’t been in trouble and maybe had seen the principal,” Ralph said. “But I think that’s a story that was made up. My brother could have told Barack that, of course. My brother wasn’t always truthful about stuff like that.”
STANLEY ANN’S MATERNAL grandmother, Leona, was the sixth of seven children of Margaret Belle Wright and Thomas Creekmore McCurry. Leona grew up on the McCurry farm in Peru and became a teacher, as did her unmarried sister, Ruth, who taught school for fifty years in Kansas and in Commerce, Oklahoma.
Thomas and Margaret McCurry, great-grandparents of Ann Dunham, in Peru, Kansas
Their brother, Frank W. McCurry, who climbed derricks as a child in Peru and went on to become a pharmacist, a chemical engineer, and an oil company vice president, acquired a certain degree of fame, as an adult, for an unusual hobby. Over forty-five years, he built, fine-tuned, and continually updated a fully functioning scale model of an oil refinery, made largely out of glass. The model refinery, which had two catalytic cracking units and actually produced gas from oil, traveled to high schools and colleges all across the country. Frank McCurry’s daughter, Margaret McCurry Wolf, told me on a sweltering summer day in her kitchen in Hutchinson, Kansas, “Next to godliness and cleanliness, my dad was for education.”
Leona’s mind, too, ranged far beyond the four walls of the little house in Augusta where she and her husband, Rolla Charles Payne, raised Stanley Ann’s mother, Madelyn, and her three siblings in the 1930s and 1940s. To her children, Leona seemed uncommonly bright. She took them outside under the vast night skies and taught them the constellations. She stocked the house with good books and planned car trips during her husband’s monthlong summer vacation—trips to Civil War battlefields in Missouri; to Yellowstone Park; to the Black Hills; to Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana; to Washington State. In the summer of 1934, in the midst of the Depression and before the youngest Payne was born, the family drove to Chicago, along with two schoolteacher maiden aunts, to see the World’s Fair. “I think that World’s Fair was a transforming event for all three of us kids,” Charles Payne, Madelyn’s brother, said. “It was so far beyond the experience of Augusta, Kansas, that it was a true eye-opener. We were exposed to art, anthropology, intellectual stuff. I remember eating lunch at a German beer garden—all the dancing girls with German accents. At the Swedish pavilion, we watched them make a ceramic sugar bowl and creamer in a sleek, modern design. We still have them, and they’re damn good-looking. I remember seeing models of ships—was the Field Museum open then?—in such fine detail, down to bolts and knobs, and marveling at the fact that anybody could do that. There was probably a drive, for all three of us after that, to get out of small-town Kansas and into a more cosmopolitan setting. I remember trying to tell some friends about it and finding I was not able to convey the magnificence of it verbally.”
That trip, he said, probably helped ensure that he and his siblings left Augusta behind them “almost as soon as we could.”
Madelyn’s father, Rolla