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By Root 1042 0

town, where there were drugstores with soda fountains and booths, a couple of them with jukeboxes stocked by the late 1930s with the music of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey, and even a small floor for dancing. In the booths, some of the high school students played bridge. During the Depression, people in Augusta went to the movies several times a week. There were cowboy movies at the Isis Theatre on weekends, and the Augusta Theatre, which opened in the summer Madelyn was twelve, was the first to be lit entirely by neon. People flocked to movies starring Bette Davis, from whom teenage girls picked up a veneer of sophistication and learned how to hold a cigarette for maximum glamorous effect. For a time, an instructor from a dance studio in Wichita came in to teach a dozen children ballroom dancing and the jitterbug on the stage of the theater. On Sundays, the Paynes attended the Methodist church. They were not poor—Mr. Payne worked through the Depression—but there was never a lot of money. Madelyn’s brother Charles worked in a grocery store up to twenty hours a week and full-time in summer all through high school. Jon was probably in the eighth grade, he said, before he wore “store-bought pants.” Leona made many of her children’s clothes. Charles Payne, a lifelong Democrat, told me that his mother’s family voted Republican but that his father was a Democrat. He remembered the family listening to radio broadcasts of the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 and later his fireside chats. When Alf Landon, the then governor of Kansas, became the Republican presidential nominee running against Roosevelt in the 1936 election, the Paynes backed him: “We were waving sunflower flags.”

Augusta, with a population of several thousand, was not the cul-de-sac that the small-town Kansas stereotype might summon to mind. Mack Gilkeson, who grew up in Augusta and knew both Madelyn Payne as a child and Stanley Dunham as a teenager, went on to become a professor of chemical engineering in California and a consultant in places like Papua New Guinea. As many as half of his high school classmates, he said, eventually moved away. Their teachers encouraged students who were academically gifted. Asked when he had first felt the urge to move beyond Butler County, he said, “I was led on that path.” Members of Stanley and Madelyn’s generation not only left Augusta behind, they abandoned their parents’ political views. Mack Gilkeson’s parents were Republicans, as was everybody they knew. When they went to Topeka to visit a relative who worked for the newspaper chain owned by the Republican United States senator from Kansas, Arthur Capper, Mack was under orders not to utter the name Roosevelt. That sort of rigidity did not appeal to him. “I just found it distasteful,” he said. “When I encountered it, I would say, ‘That’s not what I’m going to do.’” Because there were no private or parochial schools, everyone in Augusta went to the same high school—children of bank presidents, oil company executives, doctors, farmers, and oil-field workers. “I suppose that led me to be more egalitarian than I would have been from other circumstances,” Gilkeson said. Children reared in Augusta had some understanding of class differences. Virginia Dashner Ewalt, an oil pumper’s daughter who grew up on the Sinclair oil lease southeast of Augusta and was in the Augusta High School senior-class play with Madelyn, went to elementary school with twenty other children in a one-room schoolhouse heated by a single large coal-burning stove. “Country kids were a little different,” she said. She sometimes felt a distinct chill from some of the crowd that had grown up in Augusta.

Leona and R. C. Payne had expectations for their children. They were to be good, study hard, get good marks, and make something of themselves. “My mother had high aspirations,” said Margaret Arlene Payne, who got a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas, a master’s degree from Teachers College of Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. The