Herman “Ike” Crawford 1

HONEST IKE

by Herman “Ike” Crawford

2 Honest Ike

Honest Ike © 2002 Herman “Ike” Crawford All rights reserved by the author.

Editing assistance: Rita Pearce

Layout assistance: Robyn Boyes

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Herman “Ike” Crawford 3

If I had a moral in my life that I would pass on to others, I would tell them to always be honest. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, just face it with honesty and it’ll work out.

—Herman “Ike” Crawford

4 Honest Ike

I was born in Sumner County, Kansas. That’s the adjoining county, just south of Wichita. The doctor didn’t really get there on time, but when he did, he said that my grandmother did a great job. My early childhood was on the farm, and through the fourth grade, I walked with my cousin to a country school a mile and three-quarters from our home. Our family walked us all the time—they didn’t take us to school. This school was not the district that I was supposed to go to—that one was even farther away, so we had to pay tuition for me to go to school there through the fourth grade.

My Dad was constantly working for consolidation of this school with the larger one and finally got it done. By the time I was in the fifth grade, I started to school in the little town known as Anson, which is gone now. The school hauled us in a horse-drawn vehicle that looked quite a bit like a stagecoach. We called them “kid wagons.” We felt we were really first class because the vehicle that we rode in had glass windows that pulled up and down. The wagons that the other kids rode in were more like covered wagons with a canvas top. They’d put comforters and hay in there to keep the kids warm while going to and from school. So, we were kind of living it up with the glass affair that we rode to school in.

I went to school at this little town through the eighth grade. After that, I went to high school in Belle Plaine, which was only about 12 miles away from our farm. This was in 1926, and things were a lot different than they are now. You didn’t just take off. Today a kid’d have a car, drive the 12 miles, and think nothing

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of it. One of the first years I went to school, I roomed with an aunt on her farm outside of Belle Plaine. I walked another couple of miles to school in Belle Plaine. Those four miles were a long way. The last three years, I roomed with a lady that lived right back of the high school so close I could almost wait until I heard the bell ring, and then make it to school before it quit.

I graduated from high school in 1930. There were only 35 in our graduating class. They had a reunion there once a year, but after a while most of us didn’t go but every five years. They make special recognitions for five-year classes, and I’ve been back to my 65th anniversary. Out of the 35 in our class, we’ve had eight that have made it quite regularly for the last several years. There are others that are still alive, which is pretty good after 65 years really. I’ll go in the year 2000 again, God willing. I got a letter from one of the girls who did attend last year. She said that there were five who attended. I didn’t go because it wasn’t my time. Another one was ill to the point that he couldn’t make it, and one who was there at the 65th had died since then. When you graduate from high school, 65 years later, you’ve got to be in your 80s, and a lot of people don’t make that.

In the summer, I went back to the farm, which I detested. There was very little money in those days, and I had no hopes of being able to go to school somewhere after graduating high school in 1930. The stock market crash was in ’29, but we didn’t have a lot of money in the stock market. Still, the bottom dropped out of everything at that time.

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I can remember when we raised wheat on an upland farm. There was no commercial fertilizer at the time. All the fertilizer you got, you dug out of the barn, and this was pretty hard to deal with. We thought then that 12 bushels to the acre at 25 cents a bushel was a pretty good crop. We just got word the other day that a farm we own now in Sumner County made 50 bushels this year. We’re saying that we are making 50 bushels to the acre but it isn’t worth anything. But it’s worth about $2.59, which is considerably more than 25 cents.

My Uncle Walt was my favorite character, probably because he was as ornery as I was. But, I enjoyed him. I used to work for him some as a teenager in the summertime on the farm. We’d been putting up hay and it was a real dry time. There was dust four or five inches thick around the barn. We had a sling that we’d put hay on to pull up into the barn, a half a load at a time.

One morning we’d been out to the barn milking. I went up to the door with a bucket of milk in each hand, and there was the little pony that belonged to a kid down the road. They just let it run around and eat wherever it wanted to. I walked up to the barn door with my two buckets of milk and this horse was standing there. It was right next to the tall barn sill and by me stepping upon the sill; I could throw my legs up over its back with out getting a hold of anything.

I thought, Uncle Walt’d think this is pretty good, so I’ll ride to the house with two buckets of milk. I get on the horse with two buckets of milk and she still just stands there. Well, the rack wagon that we’d been hauling hay in was about three feet from the barn—

Herman “Ike” Crawford 7

maybe a little more than that. I kicked the pony in the ribs to get her started and she spotted this distance between the rack wagon and the barn, which was room enough for her to go through, but it was hardly room enough for me to go through with two buckets of milk sticking out. So she charged into this opening. I got drug off into that three inches deep dust—with two buckets of milk poured all over me. Obviously, I was quite a mess at this point. My uncle got more good out of those two buckets of milk than anything he ever sold in this life. He thoroughly enjoyed this.

One time we were headed into some maize with butcher knives where Uncle Walt had cut it. But it was too wet down in there to get to it and we were chopping the heads off with a knife and throwing it in the wagon to clean up this wet place. It was right along a little spur of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad that probably had a train go through there twice a day—one going down and the other one going back. We heard a train whistle, and Uncle Walt said, “Aw, we don’t want them to see us out here working like this. Let’s get up in the wagon. We’ll lay down where they can’t see us. This is kind of demeaning work we’re doing.”

So, we got up in the wagon and lay down on the maize that we’d cut. The train blew the whistle about that time and the mules ran away with the wagon. My uncle obviously had to stand up to try to get the runaways stopped, so that plan didn’t work too well.

Speaking of the runaway, at a different time when I was working for Dad, I was using a Lister to help keep the topsoil from blowing away. The Lister required the use of some six horses. We only had six

8 Honest Ike

draft horses that we used to work with. I had an old buckskin pony, and Dad had a long-legged mare that he rode, so he decided that he’d hitch these two up to a wagon by themselves. But they were not used to working as a team at all. Dad pieced together some old harness, which was not very good, and harnessed up this team. He hooked them to a wagon and put two barrels of water in the back of it, because it was extremely dry, the ground was hard, and he was going to try to dig postholes with an old post auger. Dad would dig down about eight inches, fill it up with water, and go on to another one. When the water would soak up, maybe he could dig the hole a little deeper.

I heard him cussing and hollering at these horses—his old long-legged mare had always been a balker, and the old buckskin pony had never really worked like that before, but he caught on awful quick. I looked down there and Dad was trying to get the horses to go and they’re balking. You can’t make a balky horse move, and so he’s hollering and swearing at them and pretty soon I saw him out pulling up dead grass and I knew what was going to happen, so I stopped my team. I was working up on a hill and I stopped to just watch this. He gathers a bunch of grass up and sticks it under this old mare. He lit it on fire, jumped into the wagon, and right after a balk, he got a runaway. The horses took off across the lister wedges that I’d just done. The water from the two open barrels in the back of the wagon was flying up in the air, and I’m just lying on the ground dying from laughing up there. One minute Dad was trying to get the horses to start, and the next, he’s trying to get them to stop.

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Things on the farm were just plain discouraging in those earlier days. I’m sure that by the time I spent one more summer at home, showing very little interest in what was going on, my dad told Mother, “Hey, we got to do something with this kid. He ain’t never going to make it on the farm.”

We found out that I could go to business college, sign a note for tuition, and then start paying on it when I finished school. A friend of mine that I’d gone to high school with at Belle Plaine had a dad who didn’t want him to go any farther in school, but his mother and sisters were not opposed to it. My friend got in a bunch of little chickens and raised them. He got some money together and went to business college the year after I started there, and we roomed together.

I did a little bit of everything to work my way through school. I got a job in a restaurant—a little place back down the alley from the business college in the first block of North Market. The Miller Theater was on Broadway, and Kress’s was on the corner where the empty Kress Building is now. The little restaurant was back down the alley, which was not a particularly prominent spot for a restaurant.

I remember that everybody just thought a lot of a colored doorman that worked at the Miller Theater. But he couldn’t eat in the restaurant dining area. He went in the little restaurant joint from the back off the alley. He’d come down there, get a meal, and take it out or maybe eat back in the kitchen where I washed dishes.

I got three meals for working there three hours a

10 Honest Ike

day. The meals were not particularly big meals. About the best thing the restaurant had was a hot beef or hot pork sandwich or something like that and maybe a piece of pie. My folks worked their tails off raising money to pay my room rent, which was probably two and-a-half dollars a week.

I’d go home over the weekend. Mother would fix up a bunch of stuff and did my laundry. We kept everything as simple as we could and just cheap as we could.

Not only did I work at the restaurant, but in order to help out a little bit with cash expenses, I started carrying a Beacon paper route, also. I had to put up a bond for it. It cost 15 cents a week at that time. I was just getting back from working at the restaurant during the noon hour and I’d have to leave in an hour or so to carry my paper route. So I missed out on a lot of my accounting work, which they did in the afternoon. It took me a little longer to make it through school because of that.

I had an awful poor route. It went from the railroad tracks up to Washington Street. I didn’t know much about the town, but it’s where Old Towne is now. The Beacon only had an evening paper, except on Sunday.

There was a casket company on the route, and there was just something about going by it. We’d start out on Sunday morning at four o’clock in the morning and most of these streets, Santa Fe, Mosley, and some of those up through there were where my route was. It was a terrible route, but the newspaper paid a bonus on it because you just could hardly collect. People’d get

Herman “Ike” Crawford 11

five weeks behind and move. They’d move to keep from paying the paper bill. I couldn’t make any money on the paper route, but before I could get out of it, I had to find somebody else to take it. Anybody smart enough to carry papers was too smart to take my route.

I went home one time though and I was carrying extra papers because the newspaper wouldn’t cut my draw (the number of papers that the carrier orders for subscribers). We had to pay for the papers we got, whether somebody was still taking the paper or not. My dad picked it up, read the headlines, and I said, “You know I read those this morning by the headlight on a train.”

Dad said, “You what?” I told him again and he said, “I want to come up and go along that route with you.” So Dad came up and saw what kind of conditions that I was carrying newspapers under. He said, “You get out of there as quick as you can.” I finally got somebody to take over my route and got out of the paper business.

I got me a job at a pool hall across the street from the business college. I’d open it up in the morning, sweep out, and brush off the table. That was back in the days when the pop was in bottles and they put the bottles in a container with ice in it. I’d clean out the pop container, get it ready for the man to bring the ice and more pop, and then I played pool for the house, if somebody came in. I got fairly good. Later when things got better and I was married and had a home, I had a recreation room with a big snooker table.

One evening I asked my friend if he wanted to go

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play pool at my pool hall, because it didn’t cost me even if I lost. It would cost him though if I could beat him. That was the purpose of it.

He said, “I’m not going over there. You’ve got your own cue, and you know everything about it. I’ll play you somewhere else.” So we went to another pool hall, and I was pretty good, but I wasn’t really that good. He never made a ball. I made every one of them, so he decided it didn’t make that much difference where I was playing.

I ended up graduating from the business college in the spring of 1932, but there just were no jobs available. I looked every place, and the college was supposed to help you get a job, too, and they couldn’t find anything. They did have a provision in the contract that claimed the whole tuition came due if a student didn’t have a job six weeks after going to the school. Well, of course, we couldn’t face that, but there was another provision in the contract that stated you could review any subjects that you’d had without paying any tuition.

I took my six weeks and went home. I still didn’t have a job, so I came back to the business college and started reviewing. This was in the summertime, and there were not near as many students then. The college had six offices that they were keeping open with hired help, because they didn’t have anybody else to do it. There weren’t that many students in school, so they put me in the bank. I ran the bank and they didn’t have to hire anybody to do it that way, and we posted the records in the bank on an old Burrough’s posting machine. I got pretty good at this and finally one time

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along in the fall, the president of the business college called me up and said, “Hey, do you think you can run a posting machine well enough to hold down a job at the Fox-Vliet Drug Company?” It was a wholesale drug house.

I said, “Hey, if I can’t, you never graduated anybody from here that could! I’ve been reviewing it all summer!” So, I went out and made an application at Fox-Vliet. There were two elderly ladies working there, running the posting machines. They were Catholic and going into a convent to become nuns. They made no bones about telling me, “Hey, you’re going to do the work that these two ladies have been doing. For that you’re gonna get $10.50 a week.” There wasn’t any such a thing as health insurance. We got no sick leave. We had no paid vacation. We got nothing for overtime—it was just $10.50 a week for 44 hours.

We were supposed to work four hours on Saturday, but that was a big joke. We rarely ever got out of there at noon, and the 44 hours were made up if you started at eight o’clock in the morning. The president, the vice-president, and the big shots got there at eight o’clock in the morning and if you hadn’t already been there, opened, sorted, and distributed the mail on their desks, they’d call in some of the ten guys that applied for the job when you got it, because they probably still didn’t have a job. Things were not really too good, although we lived cheap.

Again, I was only paying two dollars-and-a-half for my room. (Incidentally, the landlady where I roomed just celebrated her 100th birthday a while back, and I went to see her.) While I lived there, I’d eat

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breakfast at a little restaurant where I could get big doughnuts for a nickel and a cup of coffee for a nickel. Grant’s had a stand-up lunch counter and I could get a hot dog for a nickel and a root beer for a nickel and that was my lunch every day. It’s amazing that I ended up as healthy as I did what with the way I had to eat during those times. In the evening, I’d get a big meal at a restaurant up on North Main Street where I could get a meal for a quarter. That included potatoes, gravy, meat, a vegetable, bread, butter and a cup of coffee.

I worked for Fox-Vliet for four years, and one time when the office manager was on vacation, one of the vice-presidents came to me and said, “Hey, we think the head bookkeeper is stealing our money.” The head bookkeeper had been awfully good to me. I was just a kid and he had helped me get started in the business. I’d played bridge with him and his wife. As a matter of fact, I went with his wife’s sister for a while.

Now I was supposed to find out how this guy was stealing the company’s money. So I give it a little thought and finally figured out how I thought he was doing it. I’d go check on some invoices whenever he’d leave the office. The company had an awful loose system and anybody could make it work if they wanted to steal the money. I got to thinking that some people had been in that generally paid cash, but the next morning when I listed and added the invoices up, the ones were not there for the cash customers.

When the head bookkeeper went to the restroom or someplace else, I’d go check what tickets were in there. The bookkeeper would go back into the vault at night and take some of the invoices for cash orders that

Herman “Ike” Crawford 15

had accumulated during the day. The next morning, there would be one or two missing, He was making a lot more than his salary.

I went to the vice-president and said, “Yes, you’re right. He’s stealing your money and there’s no way you’re ever going to know how long he’s been doing it, or how much he’s taken, but I know that he is.”

I told him how, so the vice president fired him and he said, “Well, the office manager is gone and until he gets back, I’m going to put you in charge.”

In the meantime, the month end came and the books had to be closed out. I’d been running my little posting machine and tying it in with the general ledger, so I had very little knowledge of how to close the books at month end. However, I was fresh out of school and knew a little bit about accounting. I decided to go over the books to see what they did the month before, and then if it was reasonable, I did it for that month and I got the books closed out for Wichita’s Fox-Vliet, which was the home office as well as the other places in Oklahoma City and in Pueblo, Colorado. When I’d get the reports from them, I’d have to consolidate them with mine and do a big report for the month.

For these reasons, the office manager didn’t ever change my new assignment after he returned from his vacation, but he and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye. We had a few words one time. The Chamber of Commerce put on an income tax school and the boss mentioned it to me, but there was a charge for it, so I didn’t go. I talked to one of the vice-president’s sons and he said,

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“Well, unless you were already a tax man, it was over your head anyway.”

One day, the office manager said to me, “Well, I was a little disappointed that you didn’t go to that income tax school.”

I said, “Yeah, I can understand that and I wanted to go, but I’m still paying tuition to the last school I went to. I really couldn’t afford it. Besides that, Wayne Dixon told me that it was over everyone’s heads if they weren’t taxmen anyway.

The office manager said, “Well, if you’re always going to be afraid of something that’s over your head, you probably ought to look for a different field.” He said that to the wrong fellow. While I was making a car payment at General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) that day, I asked them about a job. I told them that if they wanted to check up on me, don’t say anything to Fox-Vliet, because they would fire me. Only talk to them if you want to hire me.

They said, “Yeah, we know about that, and we won’t until we’re ready to hire you,” and it wasn’t long until they said, “Hey, you can go to work anytime you want to.”

I went back and told my boss, “Hey, do you remember when you told me if I was going to be afraid of things that were over my head, I ought to look for a new field? Well, I did and I found one. Now I can give you two weeks notice or I can go to work up there Monday.”

The office manager said, “Oh, my. Two weeks won’t be a bit too much. You’re the last person in the

Herman “Ike” Crawford 17

world I ever thought was going to quit.” I said, “You’d begun to act that way, too.” Even Mr. Fox came to me and told me that I was

making a big mistake. I was married just about the time I changed jobs

in 1936, and I wasn’t making but $90 a month with GMAC when I got married. I worked for four years in the accounting department, but they paid better money in the credit department. Finance people were considered to be just a necessary overhead, but not moneymakers. During the six years that I was there working for GMAC, only three people ever had the opportunity to transfer from the accounting department to the credit department, and one of those was the accounting manager. I got the opportunity, and it paid better money, but I had had no experience in credit at all. They sent me out into the field, and I headquartered out of Great Bend.

At the time, Great Bend was a booming metropolis in the oil industry, and there was absolutely no place to live. I looked and looked. We had been renting a house in Wichita for $20 a month, a five-room bungalow house on the West Side. In Great Bend, they’d tell you, “We have no places for you to live.” So we stored our furniture in an old vacant bowling alley and lived in a room in Great Bend for several months.

I finally found a house that faced an alley. The old man who built the house had started to build a garage, but places were so hard to find that people started coming to him right away to see if he would rent the garage. Immediately he started excavating and turned

18 Honest Ike

the garage into a house. I managed to get it because the people he rented it to did not pay the rent well. By paying two months in advance and having a pretty good background, we got a place to live finally.

I worked in the field as a collection man, which I was not very good at. I thought everybody was too honest. One of my supervisors in the office told me one time that whenever you realize that most of the people you’re doing business with are scoundrels, you’ll get along better. I’d call on somebody and they’d say (these people were experienced at this), “Well, we got some money coming. We’ll send a payment next week.” Well, that’s fine—I wrote this on a report and mailed it in. But they didn’t send the money the next week!

My supervisor said, “You know, don’t overlook the fact that they’ve already signed a contract—a piece of paper—and said that they’d pay this on such and such a date, which was 30 or 60 days before you were out there, or you wouldn’t have been there.” So, they already have not done what they said they would.

It was difficult for me to deal with people that I thought were having a hard time. In 1940, I called on a fellow one time that had a 1936 pickup that he’d bought new, and he’d renewed and renewed the account until he only owed $10.50 on this truck.

Somehow the papers got mixed up and they had not gotten with him soon enough so they told me to go out and collect that. I went out to the place, and it was a tough looking joint. This was back in the dust bowl days, when all of the topsoil had been blowing off from it. The top of the ground looked like the top of a table. I

Herman “Ike” Crawford 19

went to see this man and drove out to the field. He said, “You’re probably the GMAC man.”

And, I said, “You got it!” He told me, “Well, it’s down there in the shed.

Just go get it and take it with you.” I said, “You gotta be kidding! You owe ten dollars

and a half on it—that all I want is $10.50.” “I haven’t got $10.50.” “I’ll renew it for you,” I told him. “I’ll extend your

contract. It’s worth a lot more money than that. Why, haven’t you got chickens or cows?”

He said, “Mister, I haven’t got anything that’s not mortgaged for more than it’s worth.”

I asked him, “How about this guy that’s here with you today—he’s over here to borrow something from you.”

The farmer said, “I don’t think there’s $10.50 in Rush County!”

I told him, “There is today because the GMAC man is here, and I can’t take your truck for 10 dollars and a half. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll pay the $10.50, and give you a receipt for it. If you ever get it, send it to me. Don’t send it to the company, because after today they’re not going to think you owed anything. I don’t really know how they feel about their man coming out here and paying somebody’s truck off.”

So I paid it for him, and several months later, I got a poorly scribbled letter in the mail one day, and he'd sent me $12, because he wanted to pay me some interest on it. He said it kind of renewed his faith in humanity, because he didn’t know there were any

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people left like that. All of my experiences in the field were not sad

ones, although I had some very strange ones. Some were worse than this.

I worked at GMAC until the war came, and General Motors was starting to take an interest in airplanes. They were sending people to the plane factories in Dallas, and they partly owned North American, an airplane place in Kansas City. That’s when I went to work for Boeing.

My wife’s family and my family were still alive down in Sumner County and getting kind of old, so we didn’t really want to leave Wichita. I left GMAC and went out to Boeing and got a job keeping time. GMAC tried to talk me out of that, too. Fortunately every place I left, I left on my own, and so I never missed a day’s work from the time I started until I finished.

I thought that GMAC was a good place to work, and that when the war was over, I’d go back to work for them. I left under good terms, but I was only at Boeing probably two years when I worked my way into management.

By the time the war was over, I was doing well enough at Boeing. I was in the finance department in charge of property accounting. We had the records on all the equipment—the office furniture, the typewriters, the chairs, the tables, the files, and all of the equipment in the plant—the lathes, the mills, and even the real estate. We had the records on when we bought it, what we paid for it, where it was, and what was supposed to be moved when. Because we were

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supposed to be able to go right to any of it, and there are a lot of acres of plant out there. So we had a crew of people who inventoried it.

Meanwhile, my wife and I never had any children. We were all set to adopt in about 1949. We had an appointment to go to Kansas City, as a matter of fact, for an adoption interview. At the same time, we got notice that my wife had tuberculosis. So we went to Norton, KS to the TB Center there to check this out, and everything indicated TB.

After many months, it seemed as if most of the treatments didn’t work on her. The things they were doing at that time were still pretty primitive compared to today. A lot of the drugs and things that we now have that have almost wiped TB out were not available, and they were collapsing lungs, and giving patients bed rest. I was still working at the time and I’d drive back and forth to Norton every other weekend. It was a long, terrible trip really.

She would have been there a lot longer if we had children, but they finally decided that they’d let her go if she’d check in with the chest doctor here in Wichita, and it turned out that actually her TB was not in her lungs. She’d had a pleuralafusia back in 1939 and fluid formed on her lungs that they drained six times with a needle. It turned out that what she really had was a tuberculous ulcer in her bronchial tubes. The chest specialist here went in and cauterized it six different times with what they called a bronchoscope type thing. They’d go down in there with mirrors and they could see what was going on. Afterward, we both had to get chest X-rays every so often—she, for a good many

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years. It finally got all right. Later on, Boeing expanded my field, and though I

still had the group of people that I had before, they also gave me material records. So, at this point, I was not only supervising supervisors, but I also had material inventory and government stores. There were four different groups that reported to me. Later on from time-to-time, they’d change things. For example, they put government stores under the production department, because that’s the way it was done in Seattle, and I took over surplus sales and salvage. This was interesting work to me, because it was something that I had no experience with and had never done anything with. I worked at Boeing for 34 years, and retired when I was 63.

In 1976, I belonged to a retired manager’s club. I had a big mouth and everybody picked on me a little. At one of the dinners that we had, somebody hollered, “Ike, how long have you been retired?”

At that time I said, “20 years.” They yelled back, “I don’t know how anybody

could live so long!” So, now I’m an old man, but after I worked at

Boeing for a while, we built us a house over in Riverside. I lived there for forty-some years. We’ve been at Larksfield Place now for eight years. It is always hard to leave a place that you’ve been in for forty-some years, but we made the right decision, because things are starting to happen to us a little bit now. I’ve been extremely healthy but last December, I stared having a paralysis in my arms and legs and it

Herman “Ike” Crawford 23

took the doctors two months to find it, but finally it showed on an MRI, which I’d been strongly resisting. I’d had two of them before, and they’re not the greatest things in the world when they roll you back in that thing for 45 minutes and leave you there with a lot of pounding. I had a ligament that was twisted around my spinal chord and cutting off my nerves. I had surgery then. They split me from the top of my head down to my shoulder blades. They got in there and straightened out that ligament. The doctor said that I could be showing improvement for as much as a year, but it seems to me like I’ve almost reached a plateau, and I may not be getting any better. I still have difficulty getting up, walking, and moving my hands, but for an old man of 85, I’m doing all right. I’m not about to let it get me down though because I can look around and see a lot of people in much worse shape than I am—I’m still moving.

And in telling my story, I’m thinking that it’s kind of good for us to recall a few things once in a while—while we can still remember something, and while we are still moving.