In My Time - Dick Cheney [6]
We couldn’t move in with her folks, David and Clarice Dickey, because when the war began, David had closed the small restaurant he owned and signed on as a cook for the Union Pacific Railroad.
My mom’s parents, Dave and Clarice Dickey, who were cooks on the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1940s.
Now his and Grandma’s home was the railroad car next to the one in which they cooked for repair crews up and down the UP line in Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. After the war Bob and I loved visiting them. Grandpa Dickey knew how to turn the most ordinary day into an adventure. He would take us fishing for catfish, using a special combination of blood and chicken guts for bait.
With my uncle Elmer and my brother Bob on Elmer’s farm in Dawson County, Nebraska where Bob and I stayed when our mom went to visit Dad in San Diego during the war.
For dinner he’d fry up our catch, or on the rare occasions when the blood and guts failed to get a bite, he would make a big batch of spaghetti. Afterward he and Grandma would bed us down on the oilcloth-covered tables where we’d just eaten, and we would fall asleep to the raucous laughter of my parents and grandparents playing cutthroat games of pitch by lantern light in the railroad car next door.
But those good times lay ahead. Right now we were headed to Sumner, population 296, to stay with Grandfather and Grandmother Cheney, and Mom must have known that the cigarette she was enjoying—the one that had so astonished me—was going to be her last one for a long while.
My mother had grown up in a laughing, card-playing family, with a dad who drank bourbon, smoked Camels, and had an endless store of jokes. My Cheney grandparents, Thomas and Margaret, on the other hand, had probably been staid even in youth. Thomas had been a schoolteacher before going to work in a bank. Margaret was the product of a rigorous Baptist upbringing and did not believe in tobacco, alcohol, or gambling. Nor, as we were about to learn, did she believe in comic books for her grandsons. Grandmother Cheney, her hair pulled back in a bun, was sixty-eight, and my white-haired grandfather, his back ramrod straight, was seventy-five. They had been enjoying the tranquility their years had earned them before my mother arrived accompanied by two rowdy little boys.
THE CHENEY FAMILY HAD originally come to America from England as part of the great Puritan immigration of the 1630s. For seven generations, the family lived in and around Massachusetts, but in the middle of the nineteenth century, Samuel Fletcher Cheney broke the mold, moving west to Defiance, Ohio.
My great grandfather, Captain Samuel Fletcher Cheney, who served in the 21st Ohio from 1861-1865
Right after Fort Sumter he signed up to defend the Union, and he served all four years of the Civil War. He was at Stones River and Chickamauga and in the campaign for Atlanta. He marched with Sherman to the sea. In May 1865 he camped with his 21st Ohio Regiment just outside Washington, D.C., in Alexandria, Virginia, and he was among the one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers who took part in the Grand Review of the Armies. He marched past the White House, where President Andrew Johnson and his cabinet, along with Generals Grant and Sherman, saluted the brave men who had just won the war.
Samuel had remained unscathed through thirty-four battles and had managed to avoid the terrible sicknesses that plagued most and killed many of his comrades. But not long after he returned home to his wife and two daughters in Defiance, Ohio, he stumbled into