CHILDHOOD

I wouldn’t guess that the pictured baby is Gladys, but on the back of a similar somewhat more faded print is written, in her unmistakable adult hand, “Gladys–probably a couple of months old.” Knowing that she’s the youngest of the four girls helps a lot in finding her on the family portrait. The picture of her first grade class is tougher yet, even given the names written in pencil on its reverse. (All opinions of where she stands are welcome.) On recalling this picture, Gladys often remarked that she was born the day President McKinley was shot, and that Glenn Scott, the boy next to her in the picture, was born the day McKinley died of his wounds. Sarah Bates was their teacher, and Gladys was the last of six Borings to suffer that woman’s discipline, having been preceded by her father, aunt, and three older sisters. “A real devil” was her characterization. James Boring’s claim that he quit school after the third grade may be true, but his story about attending college is not; the school he named to a grandson doesn’t exist. He was definitely a self-made man, evidently having studied materials from an “International Correspondence School” to teach himself the building trade. Among his Fort Scott projects, Gladys remembered the Carnegie Library, First Presbyterian Church, Masonic Temple, and Conant’s Mortuary. The names “Boring Corby” impressed on its sidewalks also attest to his work in his and his daughters’ birthplace. He used the living room table to work on his plans, and Gladys recalled that she and Inez played at his feet when quite young. He also constructed buildings in St. Louis, on the University campus in Norman, Oklahoma, and at what is now a well-known school in Nevada, Missouri. Like many modern college administrators, Miss Cottie was often short on cash, so she offered what payment she could. Once it was a piano, on which the two oldest girls took lessons. Gladys recalled often joining them in singing and that her father played the guitar. Another payment was made in the form of a surrey, but whether it came with or without a fringe on top I’m not sure. Travel was too slow in those days for Dad to live at home while working elsewhere, so on those occasions Mother maintained the Fort Scott home for their daughters. She must have been as frugal as she was practical, for Gladys complained to me more than once: “I was always hungry when I left the table, but Mother insisted I had eaten enough and needed no more.” That Mother was right, as always, is affirmed by the girls’ slimness in the family portrait. Father Boring later worked as a salesman of brick-making equipment, I think in Texas, and from contacts made then subsequently became Superintendent of the Elgin-Butler Brick Company in Elgin–pronounced with a hard “g” by Gladys–Texas. Looking back on this era in later years, one of his sons-in-law wrote: “Under his capable management the brick plant in Texas became one of the largest producers of face brick for buildings in the West.” Mother and the two younger daughters joined him there in 1925, a few months after he had accepted this position; the older girls had already married. Although the two families had not yet met in the first decade of the twentieth century when both family portraits were made, their destinies, and later mine, soon enough became intertwined. In order of decreasing age, the Lynn children are Henry Clay, Roscoe Clark, Helen Hope, and Ruth Margaret. Father Lynn moved his family to nearby Redfield, Kansas in 1908 when he bought a controlling interest in the Redfield State Bank. The building housing it, appropriately enough, had been constructed by none other than James H. Boring.