In My Time - Dick Cheney [7]
In 1883, as the country struggled through a long economic depression, the sash and door factory he co-owned had to be sold to pay its debts. At the age of fifty-four, Samuel Cheney had to start over. He gathered his wife and his four youngest children, all sons, and moved eight hundred miles west to a homestead claim in Buffalo County, Nebraska.
The Cheneys built a sod house, planted trees and crops, and slowly began to build a new life on the Great Plains. Within two years they had proved up their 160-acre claim and acquired an adjacent one to plant trees. The properties flourished until the early 1890s, when drought struck. Then the crops withered and the trees died, and finally, in economic circumstances even harder than those that had driven him under before, Samuel found himself unable to pay his debts. As he testified, despite his excellent record, “The banks will not loan to anyone at present.” In 1896 he saw all his possessions auctioned off on the steps of the Kearney County Court House.
In 1904, after spending several restless years cooped up in Omaha, he claimed a second homestead in the Nebraska Sand Hills. A friend who fought beside Samuel at Stones River had written that “Cheney is clear grit,” and he showed it to the very end: He proved up the Sand Hills homestead before he died in 1911 at the age of eighty-two.
Samuel named his second son Sherman, after the general with whom he had marched to the sea, and his third son, my grandfather, was Thomas, after the great Civil War general George H. Thomas—the “Rock of Chickamauga”—under whom Samuel had served. My granddad’s middle name was Herbert, so everyone called him Bert for short. A teenager when his father first homesteaded, young Bert helped cut the sod bricks from the prairie for their house. He helped plant the cottonwood trees that died when the rain didn’t come. He resolved to live a different kind of life—one in which he wouldn’t have to get up every morning and anxiously scan the skies to figure out his fate.
In Sumner he prospered, becoming cashier and part owner of Farmers and Merchants Bank. After his first wife died of tuberculosis, he married a teacher and church leader, who was, like him, a pillar of the community. On June 26, 1915, forty-six-year-old Bert and thirty-eight-year-old Margaret Tyler Cheney became the parents of my father, Richard Herbert Cheney.
My dad’s parents, Thomas Herbert “Bert” and Margaret Cheney, on the front porch of their house in Sumner, Nebraska.
Despite all his plans and success, Bert Cheney found that, like his father, he couldn’t escape the terrible power of nature. When drought struck in the early 1930s, farmers couldn’t pay their debts, storekeepers had to close their doors, and Farmers and Merchants Bank went under. Years later my dad would tell me about the day the bank failed. He’d been in downtown Sumner and had run into the bank examiner. It was 1:00 p.m. and the bank still hadn’t opened its doors. The examiner asked my dad where his father was. People were starting to talk, the examiner said, and somebody better do something fast. My father ran home and found his father and the bank board in the living room, making the painful decision to close the bank down. My grandparents lost everything except for the house in which they lived.
Richard was a bright kid who taught himself to type and then paid his way at Kearney State Teachers College by cutting stencils and running the mimeograph machine. He majored in commerce and got good grades, but having to work while going to school meant that it was going to take him five years to graduate. Impatient and strapped for funds, he took the Civil Service Exam and was offered a job as a senior typist with the Veterans Administration in Lincoln, the state capital. After scraping by for so long, he found the prospect of a $120 monthly salary and the security of a government job too good to turn down.
Before long he was offered a job with another federal agency, the Soil Conservation Service. The SCS taught