In My Time - Dick Cheney [8]
He was also proud of the pension that came with federal employment—a pride that I didn’t really understand until as an adult I learned about the economic catastrophes that his parents and grandparents had experienced and that had shadowed his own youth. I’ve often reflected on how different was the utterly stable environment he provided for his family and wondered if because of that I have been able to take risks, to change directions, and to leave one career path for another with hardly a second thought.
The SCS moved my father from Lincoln to Syracuse, a small town in the southeastern part of Nebraska. As a young bachelor living in a rented room, he took most of his meals at Dickey’s Café, where one of the waitresses was Marjorie Lorraine Dickey, daughter of the café’s proprietor. My father was, like his parents, somewhat reticent. He didn’t give away a lot on a first meeting—or a second or even a tenth—but that wouldn’t have mattered to my mother, an open, outgoing person, who probably engaged my father in conversation the first time he walked through the door of Dickey’s Café. It’s easy to imagine her taking his order for chili and talking to him as though she’d known him forever.
Mom was something of a star in her small town.
My mother, Marjorie Dickey, with one of her softball teammates, in front of Dickey’s Café in Syracuse, Nebraska. My mom’s folks ran the café before they started work for Union Pacific.
She was one of the famed Syracuse Bluebirds, a female softball team that had been state champions for two years in a row and had gone all the way to the national semifinals in Chicago. Syracuse loved the Bluebirds. They gave people something to hope for and cheer about in the lingering gloom of the Great Depression.
My pretty, high-spirited mother and my quiet, handsome father fell for one another and got married on June 1, 1940. I was born the next year, and my brother, Bob, followed fourteen months later. Our sister, Susan, joined us in 1955.
WHEN WE ARRIVED IN Sumner in 1944, my mother was given the bedroom my grandparents usually rented to a teacher, and Bob and I slept on cots in a storage room. The house was small, and the weeks must have seemed endless to the grown-ups until on Sundays both sides got a break. In some kind of dispensation from my grandmother, my grandfather would start the day by reading the Sunday funnies to Bob and me. Then after church, my father’s half sister, Mildred, and her husband, Elmer Ericson, would pick us up and take us to their farm just outside town. There were horses and cows—big Holsteins for milking—and two white collies and several cats. There were also platters of food I think about to this day. Mildred’s specialty, fried chicken, began in the backyard, where she’d chase down a chicken and chop off its head with the hatchet she kept stuck in a tree stump for precisely that purpose. A few hours later the chicken would appear all fried up on the table, together with biscuits and gravy, all of it topped off with rhubarb pie.
At the end of January 1945, my father was given a week’s leave, and he arrived in Sumner just in time for my fourth birthday.
Bob and me after a successful fishing trip standing in front of our 1947 Frazier.
I had never seen him in his uniform, and when I asked him why he had been gone, he pointed to the patch on his arm—an embroidered white eagle above a red chevron—and said that now he was a yeoman. I still remember trying to process the startling information that my father had apparently spent the last several months as a bird.
A few months later, my mother decided to visit my father in San Diego. Aunt Mildred and Uncle Elmer, good and gracious people with no children of their own, offered to look after Bob and me.