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By Root 994 0

message was, Arlene said, “You’re going to college. And there’s no question.” Jon, Madelyn’s youngest brother, said, “I don’t think they had an expectation of us staying in Kansas. I think they expected much more out of us—to get to college and then do whatever you could.” But the Depression and the shadow of war colored the children’s sense of their future. Clarence Kerns, historian for the El Dorado High School class of 1935, said there were so few jobs available when his class graduated that nine of his classmates became ministers. Many others became teachers in one-room schoolhouses across Kansas. Few went straight to college. Long-range planning seemed pointless. “The news month by month was always bad,” said Mack Gilkeson, recalling the years leading up to and during World War II. “You’d go out and get the morning paper at seven a.m. and look at the headline. It would be: ‘The Germans have invaded Norway. The Germans have invaded Greece. The Allies are retreating. Things are going bad in North Africa.’ The future was very uncertain. So you would make the decision, ‘I’m going to do this,’ and not worry about what two years from now will bring.” Some couples married early, craving permanence. Girls who had expected to go straight to college, instead had to find work. “I can remember Madelyn fretting over the fact that some of her friends, who were more well-to-do than we, were planning to go to some fancy college or other, and she knew she couldn’t,” Charles remembered. “So the question was: Would she go to the local junior college? Should she go to work? That sort of thing.” As for himself, he said, “I knew from about the seventh grade on that there was going to be a war and I was going to be in it. So I never really thought a whole lot about going to college, because I just figured, ‘Okay, I’ll grow up and I’m going to go off to war.’ Truth is, I didn’t really expect to survive it.”

R. C. Payne had a particular attachment to his firstborn daughter, according to her brother Jon, who was born fifteen years later. She was the only child born in Peru before Mr. Payne’s job brought the family to Augusta. A notice published in the Sedan Times-Star on November 22, 1922, announced, “Charles R. Payne [sic] and wife are rejoicing over the arrival of little Madelyn Lee, an 8 lb daughter.” She was bright, lively, and strong-willed. She got good grades if she wanted to, Charles Payne said, but she was not above taking off the occasional school-day afternoon with a friend, precipitating a row with her mother, who wanted her children to do their best at all times, not just when they felt like it. Slender, tidy, and well turned out, Madelyn affected a kind of worldliness, at least toward her siblings. “Madelyn in high school always had boyfriends—usually a couple, maybe three different ones,” Charles said. “She was nice-enough-looking, no great beauty, and quite vivacious, lively, and fun. Her various boyfriends bored her, to tell you the truth. They were Kansas boys. She tended to view herself more as a Bette Davis type.” By her senior year in high school, with the country stuck in the Depression and war on the horizon, Madelyn’s options for higher education may have looked limited, at least in the short run. “I think she was looking for a more exciting life, wanting to escape small-town Kansas,” Charles said. “And I think she really didn’t see her own future. She didn’t see anything other than going to school and getting a teaching certificate, which my mother assumed she would do, because that was what she had done. It was either that or be a clerk in the dry goods store.”

Stanley Dunham, flamboyant and seemingly worldly, may have looked like just the ticket. After dropping out of high school, he had hit the road for a time. According to Ralph, Stanley, who was four years older than Madelyn, had gone to California and spent some time with a Kansas friend who later became a Hollywood writer. He returned to Kansas, others said, with grand tales of hobnobbing with John Steinbeck, various playwrights, and other California writers