Gladys Elnora Niece was the first of three girls born to Louis Franseigle and Florence Britta (Thorne) Niece on a farm in Ringold County, Iowa, on a Friday. It was June 14, 1895. Gladys' grandfather, George Harrison Niece, had been a pioneer to Mount Ayr, Iowa, as early as 1845 coming overland from Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. Her father was farming near Kellerton and supplemented his income as a carpenter at the time of her birth.

Gladys was a living contrast to her father: where he was affable, she was reserved; where he was a large man, she was petite; he reveled in spinning a great yarn to assembled friends or family, she wrote short, sentimental poems in quiet, solitary hours. Gladys remembered her father as, "...a jolly big fellow, laughing & joking, story teller, very, very friendly and usually in the midst of a gang laughing etc. A hard worker."1

Later in life, her father followed available jobs, working as a house painter, concession stand operator and handyman where she steadily toiled as an thrifty homemaker and mother. After his wife passed away, Louis shifted his address between his daughters homes in Kansas and Oregon, with extended stays back in Iowa. Gladys was secure in her Great Bend, Kansas home of four-and-a-half decades. It was tasteful in quiet wallpaper, dark wood furniture; the front stairs rose from a shaded room lined with glass-doored oak library cabinets, and the back stairs came down to a bright, cheerful kitchen and breakfast nook that was flooded with morning light. After her children left for college, Gladys kept up her life-long avocation maintaining the hospital library.2 She was as a "gentlewoman" with a measured, aristocratic bearing.

The woman we grandsons were careful not to upset or make nervous by our youthful rambunctiousness, noise and gamboling — sent to play outside regardless of the weather nearly as soon as we arrived at the Grandparents' Templeton Forest Avenue Victorian home — was a woman of great fortitude and industry, intellectual curiosity, familial pride and steel. This was most evident during the Depression years.

• || •

Her Aunt Ida Thorne had moved to western Kansas, where the plains are flat and featureless, whose treeless expanse and great canopy of sky can intimidate visitors from more genteel landscapes. "Niece" visited and decided to stay, along with his young family, "the great adventure — big things ahead," as Gladys remembered.3

The America of 1903 was a nation of farmers. Eighty percent of the county's population made their living from the earth, and most of those that were employed at other pursuits were living in Philadelphia, New York, and the metropolises of the East Coast. Niece was on the plains of Kansas, and he was not inclined to farming. He enjoyed the company of others too much to find satisfaction in the solitary hours, days, weeks and seasons that made a stranger of the isolated plains sod-buster.

Gladys remembered her father:

Niece worked as a wallpaper hanger and house painter. Following his move to western Kansas, Niece moved frequently from town-to-town, following opportunities for work. The 1900 Census found his family in Fredrick, Kansas. They settled in Dighton, seat of far-western Kansas' Lane County, long enough for Gladys to start school. In 1910, they were living in Sylvan Grove, and in 1913, was appointed Postmaster of Natoma, Osborne County, keeping the post office in the back of the crossroads dry goods store. This is where Niece's eldest daughter completed high school.

Childhood for Gladys was a "normal, common, every day routine where a new hair ribbon was an event." She always had neighborhood girl friends with whom to share the days' events. "I always played with dolls, had a playhouse and such, just as you had," she wrote to her daughter, Loverne, many years later. Music was very much a part of her growing up, as well as the adventures to be found in books.

His daughter reminds us that Niece, "...after hours, was reading. He was a reader. News plus books, magazines, et al." Niece was a man that was engaged in the ideas and trends of his time. He was an avid gardener, keeping his house embraced by the exuberance of seasonal flowers as well as producing a bumper crop vegetables in a plot out back.

Florence Britta (Thorne) Niece was content with her family's new life in Kansas, and the household was often filled with her song while she busied about the house doing the never-ending chores that filled every day of the week. Gladys hearkened back to her mother's example, speaking of her own love of music: "[S]he had a lovely voice and I remember her as usually singing as she went about her work. Alto voice. We three girls also sang and were always in programs. Mama learned our songs and sang with us." Florence wasn't given to visiting outside the home, much, but was a gracious entertainer of her husband's and daughters' friends, since there was "usually someone at our house," according to Gladys.

Gladys recalled, "My last two years in high school, I worked in [the] Postoffice; up at 5 am and to bed late. Healthy and busy. Sang in all the groups, also church choir and was busy indeed. Did most of the serving at home; made most of our clothes (enjoyed this). If I wasn't ironing at home, I had the sewing machine going. Mama kept at me to slow down: "Gladys, you don't get enuf rest." "You must give yourself more time to eat." "Gladys you must get to bed." ... On and on... . But the clock didn't regulate my days. I loved school and was in the plays, programs, all the "school affairs." I wasn't content sitting around resting — unless a book or lesson was in my hands."4

New Year

"[My] teen-age years were very, very busy and important to me. And not unkind," Gladys wrote. "The going and doing was constant; don't know how so much could be crowded in. But was always well, husky, could eat & sleep normally (perhaps too much). My dates had to pass Papa's decision or approval.

"Mama always talked with us and felt we would be 'good girls' wherever we were. She wanted to (& did) know our friends, and visited with them every time they came home with us. The one close friend of mine (in our quartette) she didn't like, she explained to me [the reasons for her opinion]. Eventually her idea about the girl developed as she had mentioned, Maude never did a thing 'when she grew up' but marry and become a recluse if compared with the other friends. Am so glad I had a busy life and am still a clock watcher."

Clock Work

______Tick-tock
____tick-tock
______dust-floor
________shake-mop
__________wind-clock
________wash-dish
______mend-sock
____make-bed
__iron-shirt
Cook-meal
__mend-skirt
____check-phone
______dust-floor
________shake-mop
__________wind-clock
________wash-dish
______clean-floor
____check-phone
__Tick-tock
____tick-tock-tick-tick

• || •

It was at Sunday School that Gladys met the young, MU-educated engineer that had been sent into western Kansas to supervise the construction of Natoma's first municipal electrical system. She was a Methodist, and Frank H. Templeton sought out the congregation closest to his faith. Templeton was smitten by the, large, intelligent blue-eyes and lively charm of the girl behind the counter at the dry goods store Post Office, and he was sure to engage her in conversation on his frequent visits to collect his mail. Her father was quick to notice the young man's interest in his daughter, and "insisted that I must 'let strangers alone,'" as she later wrote.

It was not lost on Niece that the young man exchanged frequent correspondence with his folks at Rich Hill, confirming his steadiness as a family man. And that he was '"tending to his business' and doing a fine job at it," in his supervising engineer responsibilities, as Gladys remembered her father's warming to her beau.

Gladys and Frank H. Templeton were married by his parent's family friend, and Disciple minister, Burris Jenkins, in Jenkins' home study at Kansas City, March 12, 1917. It was a small, family ceremony.

"Temp" returned to a community where he'd headed the engineering of the municipal waterworks in 1915, a town where he felt he could make a difference, and his new wife followed. The newly-married couple set up housekeeping in Spearville, Kansas.

• || •

Spearville sits on the place where the Santa Fe Trail traverses the high land between Cow Creek — that empties into the Arkansas River — and White Woman Creek, that flows toward the Kaw. In early days, stage coach traffic followed the Arkansas River, but the drovers soon found out that by cutting off from the Ark River-bottom near Kinsley and following the route known as "Dry Ridge," a whole fifteen miles between Wichita and Dodge City could be cut out. The Dry Ridge stop was to become Spearville.5

In the late 'Teens, Spearville was transforming from a frame and clapboard town into a metropolis of brick emporiums and bank buildings. A movie house was put in, and T. H. Stein completed a new store with a sixty foot brick front. The local newspaper wrote of a significant development in the town's hygienic habits,

It was a couple of years later that the barbershop announced the acquisition of electrified clippers that made it a thoroughly modern facility.

Electrification was just one of the fruits of modernity coming to fortunate Plains towns after the Great War. The 'Twenties was a decade of rapid change in the rhythm of country life in Kansas. Henry Ford's automobile was slow to penetrate the vast farmlands, but John Deere's tractor won early acceptance. A 1924 advertisement of T.W. Woodward's International Harvester dealership in Spearville read, "Selling horse-drawn implements is like getting your wife to wear last year's hat. It can be done but it is getting harder every year." Radio stations were distant and the "tuned radio frequency" system (ironically known by its acronym, TRY) made them difficult to receive. But head-of-household, the engineer F. H. Templeton, was an early owner of all the latest conveniences.

George Louis Templeton remembered life in Spearville:

Temp made his sales calls driving a Model T Ford, the first automobile of most of his rural Kansas customers. But the young George Louis Templeton remembers a family friend, "a banker," had a grand, highly polished black electric automobile that was kept covered in the owner's carriage house. It sported lavish comforts with "plush upholstery, large glass windows, and was taller than the Ford car." Perhaps this was the Leidigh family car, a Baker electric, that was bought in 1915?6 The years between 1917 and 1922 saw a great proliferation of automobiles on the roads of Ford County, such that an auto safety association took on the job of marking roads and intersections to regulate traffic.

The annual chautauqua provided musical and cultural programs for the citizens of Spearville. In 1917, the same year that F.H. Templeton helped organize The Perkins Hospital Association to buy and maintain the hospital that his children were to be born in, the program featured the renown orator and Presidential Candidate, William Jennings Bryan and Captain Vickers of the Seaforth Highlanders on a speaking tour from the front in France. The Henshaw Opera Company presented The Mikado, and "Reynaud's Franco-Balkan Band", along with a marine band from Boston entertained. A singing group "from Europe" were accompanied by a stringed orchestra. These programs were given in a large tent erected on the school grounds.7

The Great War mobilized the countryside in Red Cross drives for funds and used clothing "to cover the nakedness of thinly clad Belgians," and other drives including the collecting of nut husks and fruit seeds that could be converted to charcoal for gas masks. Women and girls gathered to sew and knit, and Spearville's Red Cross chapter produced twenty-nine comfort kits to send and thusly equipped an additional eight young men leaving from town, then supplemented Dodge City's chapter with twenty-five more kits. Other articles of clothing were made for "our boys leaving for the front," before the town suffered its first battle casualty in October of 1918.

Influenza was the great killer during World War One, and its spread did not spare Spearville. Schools were closed and public gatherings were banned from October until well past the Armistice. A municipal songfest to celebrate the end of the war had to be put off for a number of weeks.

Nineteen-eighteen ended on a celebratory note with townspeople's first view of heavier-than-air flying machines. "On December 28, two aeroplanes flew over the city, causing much excitement and craning of necks as the machines with the roar of engines came over the city from the southwest and circled over the town," wrote The News. The first plane was flying low, about 1,000 feet, causing the excited "craning." A second appeared "about 5:45 p.m. at a very high altitude, perhaps two or three thousand feet and traveling much faster than the first." These planes were scouting routes for an air mail service, it was reported, and it was until August of 1919 before an airplane landed in Spearville. This was a plane owned by one H.S. Shepherd of Hutchinson, who was over from Dodge City where he'd been taking passengers on ten minute flights for ten dollars. It was just minutes before a crowd gathered around his plane on the baseball diamond south of town. "Mrs. F.H. Templeton and her sister, Miss Adelaide Niece" were two of the four "local passengers" listed in The News story covering the event.

• || •

Gladys' mother died July 24, 1922, at Natoma. Gladys had a four-year-old son and two-year-old, "one-each" twins by then. Frank H. Templeton had decided that the constant travel and long stays at far-flung towns across Kansas was not conducive to family life, so he went into the real estate business in Spearville, and began selling insurance for Penn Mutual Insurance Company. Later he elected to become a salesman for the Northwestern Mutual Life. The family moved to Great Bend, Kansas in 1926 where he was promoted to District Agent. Temp continued to serve his NML clientele from his Forest Avenue office in Great Bend for sixty years.8

Frank H. Templeton contracted the building of a modest, but roomy Victorian home on a large lot at 2522 Forest Avenue, within walking distance of his office. It was a happy home with a brick garage nestled against the back fence at the end of a long, curved drive from street, and a white play house with open windows and a green roof built by Niece to the side next to a tall trapeze and swing hung from a tall 2-inch pipe frame sunk in concrete.

George remembers:

Gladys was an excellent seamstress, although it was a skill she employed as a homemaker and not as a home industry. George "vividly remembers her quietly sitting near us as we studied while she darned holes in our socks, or patched our damaged clothing." It was a home economy that contributed to getting through the tough days of the Depression.

• || •

The Depression years hit Great Bend with the vengeance of a Kansas dust storm. Drought cut like Death's Scythe across the wheat fields of Western Kansas throughout the 'Thirties, and with it came great clouds of dust. Towering walls of dust swept in from the bare, baked fields, carried by winds that scooped up farmland by the ton and carried it for hundreds of miles. Fine, gritty, and omnipresent dust when the big storms roiled through. There were days when, "one could look out the living room window at high noon and not see shrubbery planted next to the house." Folks stuffed wet rags at the base of doors and taped windows in a futile effort to keep the stuff out of their houses. In 1935, housewives gave up in despair, stacking all but necessary furniture and utensils in the middle of the parlor and covered the stack with an old bedspread, just to reduce the cleaning load.10

George remembers the dust:

In 1931, the bottom fell out of the wheat market. Price supports held a bushel at about fifty-four cents a bushel — it went for $1.50 a bushel in 1921 — but the supports were removed the week of June 18, and the price plummeted to a low of twenty-six cents.12 Farmers went broke. And when farming economy went bust, so did the business economy of the towns.

A restless migration of men and boys began along rail lines and roads of the Midlands. Dodge City, down the Santa Fe Trail and along the Santa Fe rail line, west of Great Bend, fed more than one thousand transients in the month of May, 1932, at the town's Salvation Army kitchen. Spearville collected men's clothing to be stored at City Hall to outfit the old, young and middle-aged men that passed through town looking for work. These "hobos" could be found at night sleeping in haystacks, along hedge rows, in stock yard mangers, and in city jails.

The only bright spot in the economic life of Great Bend was the continuing boom in oil exploration surrounding the town.

Temp was able to "keep up" his insurance sales through the 'Thirties, but the whole family contributed to the household income. The garden not only provided for the table, but George remembers the taking the surplus turnip crop to neighborhood back doors and selling them for spending money. His older brother, Bob, and he did odd jobs for neighbors earning the princely sum of fifteen cents and hour. Hand-me-downs were sewn and darned, and the kids used their earnings to buy new clothes "when needed." Lights did not burn needlessly. (George remembers "we never exceeded the minimum amount of electric power usage each month," in a paean to frugal Dads everywhere. "We always studied in the library room of the house, all members were present, reading, writing and studying, using the ONE light bulb suspended from the middle of the ceiling.")

Kansas Oilfield

The prairie is disturbed;
Her grasses have been rooted up
And cattle find no place to graze.
Small creatures now have scurried off;
Confusion fills the sunny days.
The floral carpet gone;
No cactus, primrose, purple sage,
No sunflowers edging each roadway.
Stark, giant towers against the sky
Now rend the earth — man's greed to pay.
The prairie is disturbed;
Such barren wealth without it's joy,
Forgetting peace and lineage.
Must gold be weighed by weary hands
And man forget his heritage?

Gladys pitched in by preparing one of their five bedrooms to let out to long-term guests, men in town "during the oil boom in Barton and neighboring counties," George remembered.

As her children moved out to college and jobs, she converted the downstairs formal dining room to a master bedroom for herself and Temp, freeing up another bedroom upstairs for rented lodgings. The Depression didn't begin with the Stock Market crash in '29 and end after a year or two of FDR's enlightened administration on the Great Plains. It ground on from about 1931 until the War production of WWII kicked in (and the rains came) in 1942. But, in the way of children in every time, Bob, "Bud & Sis" and Marlin were unaware that their chores and youthful moneymaking enterprise was anything but the normal lot of kids of all times. It wasn't until Bob, Loverne and George were away at college, earning livings of their own, that, "about 1940, Mom wrote us requesting that we help Dad pay off the mortgage. That was the first inkling we had that he was in a financial bind."

• || •

Difficult finances did not dampen the Templeton family's ability to find opportunity to enjoy themselves, however. Bob was a standout athlete and the whole family enjoyed watching his gridiron feats for the Great Bend High School Argonne Rebels. During half time, they reveled in George and Loverne's school band performance. Bob was a fine singer, and Loverne accompanied him in performances, and George was a regular member (on trumpet) of the Civic Band that gave summer performances at the band shell on Great Bend's town square. Temp's business could be combined with family fun, as well:

It was on these Wisconsin trips that the boys enjoyed the tutelage in the ways of the woods by their Uncle Victor Streator at his hunting lodge and music camp on his private island, a short boat trip across Lake Michigan.

• || •

Spring is gala in my garden,
Shrubs and borders in array;
Birds are chanting in the branches,
Skies are blue as fairest May.

I have counted joys and blessings,
Yet my heart can't sing a lay:
Loneliness fills every corner,
All my boys have gone away!

When high school graduation came, George and Loverne found their way to Manhattan, Kansas, to find jobs that would support them through their studies. But it was World War II that made Gladys feel that her children were far away from her for the first time. Bob was an Army engineer in the Pacific, George a Signal Corps man in Iceland, and Marlin waited to leap off for the promised invasion of Europe in England. Even Loverne found employment with the Government in Washington DC in support of the War. The large Forest Avenue home fairly echoed with the emptiness left by their absence. With the end of the War, each of her children found opportunities hundreds, if not thousands of miles from Great Bend. Gladys was busy as ever, though, with her work at the library, afternoon card-playing and teas with friends, and with church activities. She became a shrewd marketer of antique furniture she'd accumulated over the years. And then there were her flowers, always abundant, edging the drive and circling the fountain in the garden.

While driving on a country road, Temp and Tempie survived a scary auto accident. The heavy '50s car was totaled and the windshield was spider-webbed by the impact of the 115-pound Gladys against it. She was in the hospital for quite a while recuperating. Thereafter, her health was compromised. She powdered over white, hairline scars on her forehead, though she adopted no conceits by styling bangs or wisps of hair to conceal them, and she moved gingerly through rooms and over stairs. "She suffers much pain (principally in her back)," Granddad Temp wrote this grandson in 1971. "...spends about 3/4ths of her time in bed. Letters from those whom she loves, and who show interest in her and her condition, mean much to her, and lighten and brighten her day."15

• || •

Though her formal education ended with high school,16 Gladys valued higher education very much both as an accomplishment in its own right, and as mark of social standing. After her children had struck out on their own, she was able to save money that she made through her librarian's wages and set aside more from antique sales. This fund grew, and when her grandchildren began to enter college, she had established trusts to be administered for each of her grandchildren specifically, and exclusively to contribute to postgraduate degrees "at one of the finest schools in their field." (I remember being grateful at her suggestion of Yale as a model since that university did indeed have one of the most respected art programs in the country at the time of my Baccalaureate.)

• • || • •

The prairie wind sings a merry song
To the bride of the open plain;
Who, like Mary of old
Chose service to gold,
And happiness far above gain.

The prairie wind croons a lullaby,
As she nestles her sleeping child
On her loving arm.
Secure from harm,
With never a thought of the wild.

The prairie wind whispers hopefully
Though the brassy sky does not shield
The touch of her hand
On the thirsty land;
"He shall clothe the grass of the field."

The prairie wind moans a requiem,
As her hands are folded in rest;
Time has paused in flight,
For a brief Goodnight —
As earth gathers her to its breast.

There was a contradiction inherit in the person of a pioneering Plainswomen that had probably, in fact, haunted the women that followed adventurous husbands westward from the earliest days of the Colonies: the ever-westward push to the untamed frontier was characterized by high-minded ideals and a hard-scrabble life. The theological and ideological rectitude that fueled their determination contrasted with the grit, dirt, and privation that attended the carving a life out of an hostile wilderness. But they had an abiding faith in themselves.

A pioneer woman's devotion to her church, her family, to the civilizing value of music and literature, an insistence upon a semblance of style and fashion in her person, and the dogged determination that her children should be properly educated met a harsh and demanding reality in simply providing food, clothing and shelter for the family. And yet, they persevered. They organized musical fetes. They established annual chautauqua cultural festivals. They joined literary societies and contributed to homemaker magazines the recipes and poetry, gardening tips and cleaning secrets that brightened, if not lightened, their lives. They saved for the tomorrow and cherished what bounty they enjoyed today. This was the character of a Plainswoman.

The Wild West was long gone by the time Gladys arrived in western Kansas; the buffalo nowhere to be seen and the boundless range transected by barbed wire. But, Gladys was of the last generation on the plains that knew what unbroken sod and endless expanses of buffalo grass looked like. And, the whole panoply of contradictions that characterized earlier Plainswomen could be found in her.

Gladys survived her "Temp" by five years. Years that she filled by entertaining her fellows playing the piano in the large, formal parlor at Presbyterian Manor, by reading, and visiting family and Manor friends.

October brings the pageantry of fall,
Cloaked in her tawny colors rare;
Trailing, flaming reds of every hue —
Over fields and meadows — Autumn fair!
Be brave, dear heart, and trust anew,
Even as the years slip to their close —
Rich harvest, our reward, God's promise true.

 

- - || - -

<--Back to "Biographies"

<--Back to "Family Tree"

Home

NOTES:

1. 0093 FHT-GLT Papers, "Letter from Gladys E. Templeton to Loverne Cunningham," 19__.
2. 0089 FHT-GLT Papers, letter notation: "Gladys Niece Templeton July 1973", salutation to "Don".
3. op. cit., 0093, Gladys E. Templeton.
4. op. cit., 0093, Gladys E. Templeton.
5. Fry, Eleanor, Spearville - City of Windmills, Spearville News, Spearville, Kansas, 1975. P. 10.
6. ibid. [Fry] p. 106.
7. ibid. [Fry] p. 112.
8. 0121a RMT, Templeton, George Louis, "20 Questions", 2001.
9. ibid. 0121a.
10. op. cit. [Fry] p. 146.
11. op. cit. 0121a.
12. op. cit. [Fry] p. 147.
13. op. cit. [Fry] p. 149-50.
14. op. cit. 0121a.
15. 0147 FHT-.RMT, letter, 01.12.1971.
16. op. cit. 0121a.