La semana pasada dos personas me dijeron que sólo debemos hablar inglés en Estados Unidos. No estoy de acuerdo. Creo que todos en Estados Unidos deben tratar de hablar inglés porque la mayoría de la gente habla inglés en Estados Unidos y es más fácil vivir aquí si lo hace.

Eso no es lo que quiero decir. Mi problema es con las personas que tienen un nosotros contra ellos forma de pensar. Dicen que en Estados Unidos “ellos” deben hablar inglés. Creo que hace que los estadounidenses parecen ser muy ignorante y feo.

He aquí algunos comentarios que muestran lo que quiero decir de Yahoo-Answers:

• It irritates me when i look at a business sign on the side of the road and its in Spanish! and i have no idea what was is being said! I mean if you want to advertise for a restaurant , do it in English!

• If we all spoke wut ever our native tongues where would we go to school? i think english is a must because it brings us all a little bit closer adn with English we are all able to communicate. What if something were to happen and i din’t know ur language and i was helpn u out. There should be something common in all of us, if not the culture/reliegion than language.

• because this is America. that is the language are ancestors spoke. they didn’t have to , but they did. so we Americans adopted that language. all other LEGAL immigrants adopted the English language. some one comes up to me and starts talking like they got crap in there mouth i tell them shut . . . up

El problema es que tienen miedo, creo. Miedo de aprender. Miedo a crecer. Miedo al cambio.

Creo que en los Estados Unidos sólo hablan inglés, ya que no quieren aprender otro idioma. ¿Por qué? ¿Debido a que no tenemos razón para aprender? Tal vez. Podría ser porque no es necesario. Pero creo que es porque no vemos los beneficios. Creo que es porque no veo cómo otros lenguajes nos hacen pensar de forma diferente. Creo que es porque no conocen los beneficios de pensar de manera diferente, también.

¿Por qué tenemos que ver a Estados Unidos como un país solo idioma? Creo que es bueno hablar inglés en Estados Unidos pero yo creo que debe estar abierta a los beneficios de aprender otros lenguajes, también. Un hombre que conocí en Israel hablaba ocho idiomas para poder hablar con los clientes. Fue bueno para su negocio.

Si se aprende a hablar otros idiomas, podemos:

• A entender mejor otras culturas

• A entender mejor nuestra cultura

• Cambiar la forma en que pensamos acerca de nosotros mismos

• Si hablaba español se puede leer esta columna

Si usted aprende otro idioma, no quiere decir que no son todavía Americanos.

Several years ago my family traveled to the Philippines. Though we enjoyed the experience, the food left a lot to be desired. We tried hard, but really did not enjoy much of anything. Then, one day, we found a McDonald’s.

Unfortunately, what should have been an oasis turned into another part of the culinary nightmare. We wanted hamburgers and french fries, but we got boney fried chicken and rice – though they did offer free gravy refills! Needless to say, we were not impressed.

When we arrived back in Dallas, I found a McDonald’s in the airport and we ate while we waited for our next flight. We felt like we were home.

Fast forward to this past Sunday:

We left our Disneyworld Resort and didn’t look back. We were so tired of standing in lines, fighting crowds, and paying three times more money for everything that we forgot what it’s like to be free. If you have ever been to a resort then you can relate. We felt as if we were in a beautiful prison – not allowed to leave or make any choices on our own. Everyone was sickly sweet and nice, and things were just too . . . clean and nice.

Not our normal vacation, to say the least.

We arrived at the Orlando airport and rented a car — headed for the beach. Then we saw the McDonald’s and we were reminded that there is a real world out there. We were reminded that things can be greasy and messy and bad for us. We were reminded that life isn’t a nice, neatly wrapped package where things always work out. We were reminded that the good things in life are messy.

I told my wife that I wanted to go somewhere where there was a chance that a fight would break out, where I might possibly get hurt, where things might possibly go terribly wrong. And that’s what we got.

The cashier greeted us with a frown and a “what . . ?”

We ordered. She snarled, “What to drink . . ?”

We told her. She snapped, “for hear or not . .?”

We responded. She walked away, gathered our food and then helped someone else.

We smiled. Broadly.

Before we left, we ordered cookies for the road. As my wife paid, I made a joke to the mean cashier and she actually smiled at me – a well earned smile, I thought, just like I like them.

Then we ended up on a deserted beach, sand between our toes, wind in our faces, birds overhead. I could still taste the greasy food and I thought that everything was absolutely perfect. My wife commented that it was nice to be on a beach that God made rather than on concrete that Walt Disney made, and I couldn’t have agreed more.

There will be a McDonald’s in heaven, and it will make everything that much better.

We all like to think of ourselves as free people, able to make choices for ourselves – we want to see ourselves as masters of our own lives. In fact, our country is bound up in ideas of freedom, liberty, and the right to choose for ourselves what is best.

Yet, despite all of the debates, discussions, wars and demonstrations on liberty – here I sit on Sunday morning at 6:30 a.m. knowing full well that it’s actually 5:30 a.m.

Free? Not so much. I don’t even have the right to choose what time it is, apparently. Yesterday at this time it was 5:30 but today it’s 6:30 and the only thing I did was go to sleep – at 12:30 a.m. which tomorrow will be 1:30 a.m. which means that the sleep I get will be directly proportional to my inability to accurately keep time.

Tonight we should have more daylight during the hours that we are supposed to be awake, yet I will still find it difficult to believe that when 8 p.m. comes around that I’ve really been given a gift, knowing full well that it’s actually 7 p.m. and that the amount of day I’ve lived hasn’t been changed – or has it?

Also,” Daylight Saving Time”? Where and how has any daylight been saved? Shouldn’t we call it “Daylight Manipulation Time”, or “Random Shift of Daylight by Arbitrary Means Time”, or – better yet “Daylight We’re Doing This To Make You Know We Still Have Control and Your Time is Not Your Own Time”? That would be more appropriate, I think. We aren’t really saving any daylight, are we?

I lost an hour somewhere, yet not long ago we were given an extra day, February 29. That means that I was given 24 more hours, which means that I’m still ahead, unless we take into consideration the previous leap days, daylight time changes, and – oh, man – domestic and international travel in which I’ve both lost and gained time in increments from one to twenty-six hours.

But that doesn’t change the fact that, today, I am being bullied into changing my clock whether I like it or not. Here I sit at 6:30 a.m., knowing that all I have to do is get up and walk into my kitchen, where, because it doesn’t update automatically, the clock on my stove still says 5:30 a.m. I can time travel simply by walking into another room of my house. But then, unless I want to stay in my kitchen for the rest of my life, I’ll have to go back to the inequality of world governed by automatically updated clocks.

Freedom? Our time is one of the things we should have control over, yet we certainly don’t. For me, though, this year – I’ve had enough. I’m not changing – I’ll adjust and translate my time to everyone else’s, but if you ask me the time and I say 5:45, you’d better make sure to clarify – “your time or mine?”

I have tried hard over the years to try and get my youngest son to watch sports. I have not pushed him to play sports or like sports, but I have tried to get him to appreciate sports.

Mostly, he isn’t interested. He is the kid with the big imagination that doesn’t have time for organized games that other people take so seriously. While we watch sports on television, he is usually upstairs making up his own games or reading a book or doing something that only he really understands.

Last weekend, however, I asked him to watch the 49ers play the Saints in the playoffs and he looked straight at me and asked: “Why?”

Why? That’s a good question, isn’t it? Why do we watch sports? Why is it important to me to watch games played by people I don’t know, will never know, and which have absolutely zero tangible relevance to my life?

What I told him is that sports give us a shared cultural experience that makes each person connected to single event that can be shared both during and after the event. When we watch a game we become part of a societal discourse that identifies us with a group of people. It gives us a common dialogue that can be shared, a common experience that can be discussed and evaluated, and provides a way to examine human behavior in all its bad and good – sportsmanship, teamwork, individual achievement, perseverance, focus, frustration, glory and defeat.

I told him that by watching this one game on television, a whole different set of experiences will open up for him when he goes to church or school and talks to people who also watched the game.

“Just try it,” I suggested. And he did.

Perhaps lucky for me the game was exciting and came down to the last possession. The 49ers won on a touchdown pass with about 9 seconds left to send the Saints home. We were all yelling at the television, screaming, and watching in awe as both teams pushed the game right to the last second. We watched the 49ers’ Veron Davis, who caught the pass for the last touchdown, cry in his coach’s embrace afterward. We watched the Saints stare in disbelief and try to gracefully accept defeat.

We watched it all together, along with the millions of other people watching at the same time.

On Sunday at church, my son walked right up to our friend Tony and said, loudly, “hey, did you see that 49ers game yesterday. It was amazing!”

Long live sport.

When I say I feel like I’m getting old, I know many people, those older than me for example, will laugh and say I have no idea what I’m talking about.

But I do know what I’m talking about. I feel like I’m getting old. My hair is going away, many of my students were born after I graduated high school, and can’t seem to remember things like I used to. The most obvious change, though, are my priorities.

Sunday during my morning walk I came upon a frog. It was sitting in the grass by the curb, and I stepped to the side so I didn’t startle it. As I walked by, though, I heard a voice telling me to stop.

I stood in the road and looked around but I didn’t see anyone. Then I heard the voice again, “down here, down here,” it said. I looked down at the frog and it hopped toward me. “Pick me up,” it said.

Hesitant but curious, I bent down and lifted the frog in my cusped hands. I lifted the frog to my face, examining it intently. “Did you say something,” I asked.

“I did,” replied the frog. “I’m a rich princess and an evil witch put a spell on me. Unless a handsome man kisses me, I’ll stay a frog forever. If you kiss me, I’ll turn back into a beautiful princess and we’ll live happily ever after together.”

I stared at the frog, contemplating my options. Then I put the frog in my pocket and continued my walk.

From my pocket I heard the frog yelling for me so I pulled her back out. “What?” I asked.

“Didn’t you hear me,” she said, “if you kiss me I’ll turn into a beautiful princess and we’ll live happily ever after.”

“Oh, I heard you,” I said, “but at this stage of my life I think it would be cooler to have a talking frog.”

I am quite fond of my boots. I wear them for most of my walking around time. They are comfortable, both physically and mentally – I am used to how they feel and I’d rather wear them than anything else. So far, they’ve been to Mexico, Ecuador, and about 16 States including a motorcycle trip to the Arctic Circle.

But Sunday morning, I felt like I needed a change. I just felt off. Most of us have felt that way, but on Sunday I was off enough that I couldn’t think of a way to get back on track. I needed something to get me in a good mood.

Then a Paolo Nutini song, “New Shoes,” popped into my head. The lyrics of the song resembled the start of my day:

Woke up cold one Tuesday,

I’m looking tired and feeling quite sick,

I felt like there was something missing in my day to day life

Nutini then goes on say that, while getting dressed for the day, he realized that his shoes could be the problem. So, to try and make things better, he got some new ones. The chorus goes like this:

Hey, I put some new shoes on,

And suddenly everything is right,

I said, hey, I put some new shoes on and everybody’s smiling,

It so inviting,

Oh, short on money,

But long on time,

Slowly strolling in the sweet sunshine,

And I’m running late,

And I dont need an excuse,

’cause I’m wearing my brand new shoes

I figured I could do the same thing, so I ditched my boots and grabbed a pair of shoes that I’ve never worn out of the house. I bought them a year ago for some reason and they were just sitting in my closet.

I put them on and went to church, feeling confident and renewed. At least five people commented on how much they liked my new shoes. One person said they looked “swanky.” I felt like my day turned around from the beginning, just because of my shoes.

As I write this column, I’m still wearing the shoes. And I still feel good about myself. Who knew that simply changing shoes could make such a difference in my day? Perhaps Nutini is really on to something.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell claims that the trick to being successful is not to just work hard, but to work really hard. He states that successful people don’t work harder than other people, they work “much, much, much harder than most people.” This is not good news for us if we seek quick solutions to difficult problems. But Gladwell is right.

Several years ago I found myself severely out of shape. My wife and I had a new born baby and a toddler to deal with, I was working long hours, and I didn’t eat the right things at the right time. I was about thirty pounds heavier than I wanted to be before I realized that I needed a change.

So I changed.

I started to eat better things less often. I started going to the YMCA at 5am three days a week to take Boot Camp classes, and I would work out in the afternoons, as well. I took it seriously, even though some days I didn’t feel like working hard. The results were slow coming, but they came.

Since then I have run several ultra-marathons, completed a 24 hour mountain bike race, competed in multi-hour adventure races (mountain biking, trail running, kayaking, orienteering) and have maintained that lifestyle. It was hard work, but it paid off. I realized that the only way to get in shape and stay in shape is through hard work and sacrifice. If something is difficult, then the only way to tackle it is through patience and perseverance.

I have joked about writing a diet and exercise book and include only two page: 1) Eat less; 2) Exercise.

Currently I am learning Spanish. I’m in an immersion class where all we speak is Spanish (save a few instructions given in English). It is really difficult and aggravating. Sometime it seems that I don’t know anything. In class, as I’ve written about the last few weeks, I find myself locked-up linquistically – unable to even remember my name.

But it seems to be working. During a recent trip to Orlando, I semi-confidently engaged in a Spanish conversation with a woman from Peru, and found myself communicating better than I thought I could.

I study whenever I have a chance. I conjugate verbs when I don’t feel like it, I study my vocabulary, and I try to translate random English phrases during the day. It is not always fun, but I have discovered that it is the only way to learn.

I feel like writing a book about learning a new language with one page: 1) Study every chance you get and then study some more.

I see commercials on television for products that claim to be “the quickest and easiest way to learn a new language,” and others that promise to help “lose weight and get in shape fast.”

Both claims are complete jibberish. The only way to learn something well, the only way to get in shape, the only way to do anything difficult is to not just work hard, but to work really, really hard.

A dream that began prior to February of 2011 has now become a reality.

Along about that time Mary Kay Johns began thinking about the possibility of a café in Lane. In conversation with Garry Crouch, she found he had also thought along the same lines.

They put their heads together and ground was broke for the new building on the east side of Main Street of Lane in early February of 2011.

As a result, there is now a business called the Lane Cafe Convenience and Liquor housed in a well-built large metal building .The liquor store, which opens to the back of the building into an alley, opened in July.

The Lane Café, with a full menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner, opened Jan. 10.

Johns and Crouch are partners in the business.

Members of the wait staff are Delphia Sweeney, Tess Shoemaker and Jana Brown. Sherry Goodwin, helps with the bookkeeping as well as waits tables when necessary. Esther Scherff is the head cook, assisted by cooks Marcella Hampson and Kimberly Cawby. Nan Bewley is an all-around staff member, serving wherever needed.

The café is open from Tuesday through Thursday from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturdays, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sundays. The estimated seating capacity is about 40 people. The interior of the café is attractively decorated.

Opening hours for the liquor store are from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday; from 9 to 2 p.m. Friday and Saturday; and from noon to 5 p.m. Sundays.

After her birth in 1952, Maxine Goodwin of Lane remembers a childhood growing up in what, even then, she knew was an historic house.

Our family, Goodwin said, always knew the house was old and historic. “As a child I remember how my parents and family referred to it as being 100 years old,” Goodwin said.

From what her family knew, Goodwin said, the house had been built by an Evan Gilbert as a hotel.

“Gilbert thought, as many others in those days did, that the railroad would come through Stanton. He wanted to have a hotel ready and waiting. The bricks were made on the property from what we’ve learned,” Goodwin said.

The railroad, Goodwin said, chose a different route on the other side of the river away from Stanton, but from that day on it had been known as the Gilbert Place.

That is until the Caylors moved in.

Her grandfather, Elmer Caylor, Goodwin said, was born in 1885 and had lived there for many years.

“I’m not sure when he bought the place but my grandparents (Elmer and Altha), my uncle Raymond and aunt Freda and their son, Sam, were all living there when my parents married in 1947,” Goodwin said.

Instead of moving elsewhere to set up house after their marriage, Marvin and Mary Caylor, Maxine’s parents, moved right in with the rest of the residents of what was already known as the Caylor Place. “Mom moved right in and pretty soon, they began a family. I have a sister, Marilyn, four years older than me and a brother, Jim, a year older than me. I was the baby,” Goodwin said.

The brick structure almost looked out of place from the earliest days.  Maxine said the family always believed construction began in the 1830s. When the house was destroyed in a Jan. 1, 2012, fire, the fire report mentioned 1865.

Generations of families from Stanton or from western Miami County, where the house sits overlooking 327th Street at Stanton Road, could not help but see a house that mirrored similar homes in northwest Missouri’s tobacco country.

Or in any number of southern states with a colonial architecture!  Not least, a rural home built, when everybody else in the country had been living in log cabins or simple wood-frame houses.

“The rooms were huge with tall ceilings. And the window sills were at least a foot or so deep. There was nothing small or crawly about that place. The mop boards were at least a foot tall, too,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin’s childhood home fit a familiar design: a two-story, rectangular structure with a centered front door and symmetrically placed windows. Many homes based on this same style from Virginia west to Missouri and beyond included chimneys on both ends, as did the Caylor home until the fire struck.

And, no doubt, building a brick house of this size in this location in those times stood as a mark of a successful business person.

Cedar trees grew all around the property, Goodwin said, and always smelled so good, as did the lilac and peony bushes.

“Now, the land in front of the house is all pasture land down to the road, but when I was growing up the trees and bushes added a lot of a decoration to the front of the house,” she said.

Trumpet vines, Goodwin said, crisscrossed the front and east side of the structure. Green shutters, white trim and an entry porch (long gone) welcomed visitors to the house.

“The front door was always open in the summer, as were all the windows. We didn’t need air conditioning, not if you opened the place up. And not with that normally strong breeze blowing up the hill from the south,” she said.

But, even with their welcoming front door open in warm weather, the everyday entry to the house came on the side facing east.

“A driveway brought visitors in along a drive right in front of the house and then around to the east side, where they could park. A little sidewalk led up to the door on the east side. People seldom used the front door,” she said.

The east door, Goodwin said, led through a small screened-in porch. “The cellar entrance was to the right with a cover you had to lift and the hot water heater was down there. From the porch you stepped into the dining room and the small kitchen was in an added-on section on the back of the house, as was the bathroom,” she said.

If a visitor actually entered the house through the front door, Goodwin said, they would step into an entry hallway.

“My parents’ bedroom was in the room to the right or the east and the living room sat to the west.  The hallway led back to the dining room straight ahead, but a stairway to the right of the front door led up to four bedrooms upstairs,” she said.

Goodwin’s sister, Marilyn Stevenson of Garnett, said the kitchen and the dining room areas had been the gathering points for family and friends.

“We were always in the kitchen ready to eat. Or to talk,” Stevenson said.

Grandpa’s popcorn, Stevenson said and Maxine agreed, had been something special.

“He popped the corn in bacon grease on the stove and smothered it in cow butter,” Stevenson said. “It just dripped butter, but of course people didn’t realize what healthy eating was then,” Maxine said.

Normal meals, Stevenson said, had consisted of homegrown chickens, eggs and milk.

“I wish we would have known what we do now about what people will collect. We used to throw those Log Cabin syrup tins out the back door and into the trash. I wish I had a few of those tins today, as much as they are worth,” Stevenson said.

Although much of the interior of the historic structure was destroyed in the recent fire, Goodwin was thankful her niece, Julie Roach, an Osawatomie Middle School teacher, had taken the banister from the home and had it in storage.

“Julie and her husband wanted to use the banister in their home, but it just wouldn’t work,” Goodwin said.

Roach admitted to being disappointed about not getting to use the banister.

“It is magnificent and big. It really did go up and up and around in the old house. When we built our house, I had asked about having 10-foot ceilings, so I could use the banister from the old place, but we just couldn’t do this,” Roach said.

The banister, Goodwin said, was a dark, almost black wood and very thick and wide. “It went up, curved around on the second floor, and went on around a landing. When we were kids, we loved sliding down the banister railing from the second floor,” she said.

As Stevenson pondered her sister’s description of the “huge rooms,” she said they were large with tall ceilings.

“The rooms were big but from the perspective of a little child,” Stevenson said.

The sisters described the interior of the home in their youth as wide and white painted woodwork with wallpaper.

“I’m not sure why wallpaper, but every few years Mom had to redo the wallpaper. She would make Dad haul the sawhorses inside and set up for pasting. She even papered the ceilings,” Maxine said.

As much as Maxine said she enjoyed the summer’s cooling breeze, the bedroom she shared with Marilyn upstairs on the front west side was cold in the winter.

“It was cold in the winter for us kids. The house was heated downstairs by propane, but we had electric blankets so that helped. The upstairs was still the best sleeping,” she said.

Running water was something they had in the house, Goodwin said, but there were also two wells.

“We didn’t use the one right by the side door on the east. It sat right next to the door. But there was another well a few feet on the other side of the sidewalk closer to the porch. Dad hauled water and kept that one filled and we could pump water from that one,” she said.

Once a year when the well they used dried up, Goodwin said, her father always had her brother go down to clean the sides of the well.

“Dad would lower my brother, Jim, down to scrape the sides clean. He’d always run into small snakes that didn’t bother him. But, Dad hated snakes so it’s a good thing Dad had my brother to go down there,” she said.

There were plenty of other buildings around the main house in her youth, including a garage, chicken house, smoke house and assorted other small buildings.

“We called it a smokehouse, but it had probably been a wash house to do their laundry in earlier times. And, we didn’t use the garage at all,” she said.

Their mother still used the wash house to do the laundry when Marilyn was about four. Maxine was not born yet, and Jim, Stevenson said, was a toddler.

“Little boys still used to wear shoes with very hard soles. One day, I was helping our mother, and Jim was playing and got his foot stuck in the drain. Mom couldn’t get his foot free, so she decided to run for help. But before she could leave, she ran into the house and grabbed an empty baby bottle.

“She gave it to me and told me, ‘Stick this in his mouth and it should make him happy till I get back.’”

But Stevenson said she had no plans of staying their alone without their mother.

“I stuck the bottle in Jim’s mouth and ran after Mom. Luckily, our uncle had been coming up the drive and was already running back to the wash house with mom,” Stevenson said.

Stevenson said her relief turned to alarm when she saw what her uncle had in his hand.

“He had a hammer, and I just knew he was going to kill Jim!  Keep in mind, I was only four. No, he wasn’t going to hurt Jim, he was going to use the hammer to break up the concrete around the drain,” Stevenson said.

Fortunately, Stevenson said, our uncle was able to wiggle Jim’s foot loose without using the hammer. “And by the time, I came along our parents had bought a washer and dryer for inside the house,” Maxine said.

Christmas brought back special memories of going out to chop down their Christmas tree.

“We always went out in the timber as a family to find the best tree. Cedar trees always smelled so good but any fresh cut tree smelled good, too,” she said.

The only Christmas disappointment came in the 1960s, when her parents brought home an aluminum tree.

“You know one of those trees with the colored lights. “That was a crummy tree. I missed the real trees and the scent of pine,” Goodwin said.

Her father, Marvin, had been a country boy, born and raised to farm. “Over his lifetime, Dad had three professions usually ongoing all at one time. He worked at the army ammunition plant in Olathe, farmed, and owned Caylor Brothers Hardware in Osawatomie,” Goodwin said.

And her mother, Mary, raised chickens. “If we wanted chicken for dinner, she just went out, picked out a chicken, killed it, and cooked it for dinner,” Maxine said.

From listening to Goodwin talk, she had no need for town or city living.

“We had games to play as children in and outside of the house, but most of our time was spent running down to the river, playing in the creek, or just going all over the countryside on our bikes or horses. If we wanted we’d just saddle up some horses and just go,” she said.

A pond located in the pasture down slope from the house has been long gone, but Maxine said it had been good for fishing.

A Shetland named Smokey, Maxine said, could be the orneriest horse. “He was meaner than dirt and loved to throw you off,” she said.

Right down on the corner at 327th St. and Stanton Road sat Brassfield’s Service Station.

“Brassfield’s was also a store with groceries, cigarettes, pop and ice cream.  We had it made, but we also learned not to abuse our privileges.

“Mom and dad had a charge account at Brassfield’s. We could charge a pop and an ice cream for each of us kids when we would get to go down there, and our parents would pay up each month,” she said.

Of course, as Maxine said, it only cost a dime for a bottle of pop and a candy bar in those days.

Goodwin had to chuckle about everyday attire for girls in her childhood and even out on their place.

“We had to wear dresses a lot! And, even though my sister was older by four years, Mom made us dress alike all the time. My sister hated it, too. She didn’t want to be dressed like her little sister. Plus, I was always getting my sister’s dresses when I grew into them,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin, who said she graduated from Osawatomie High School in 1970, said she left the historic house, when she turned 17.

“I got married in 1969 to Gary Goodwin from Osawatomie,” she said.

Trying to bring another fond memory into the sad story about the loss of an historic Miami County home, Maxine recalled when her husband-to-be first drove up to the house.

“He came to pick me up for our first date. When he saw the vines and the tall brick walls, he said, ‘Oh my God, she lives in a castle,’” Goodwin said.

But her brother continued living at home, Maxine said. “Mom and dad waited until us kids had grown up to build their new home, which they started doing in 1976 and finally moved out in 1978,” she said.

Marvin and Mary Caylor built the brown house that sits to the east of Stanton Road, just north of 327th Road.

“When our parents moved out, my brother and his family moved in. My brother was a bull-dozer operator, so they were only able to continue living there for about four years,” Maxine said.

Her father, Goodwin said, refused to rent out the old house. “He stored all the records in the old house from Caylor Brothers, as well as unsold stock and display items and equipment from the store. He also kept his military uniforms with all his medals from World War II in the house,” she said.

After her brother and his family moved on to another job, Goodwin said, the house was vandalized. “They stole Dad’s uniform, ripped down electrical wiring which destroyed ceilings. They broke out windows. Somebody had done this just for the fun of it,” she said.

Goodwin’s greatest regret and loss in the present fire has been not going back to retrieve the old marble counter slab in the kitchen.

“Nobody ever took that out, and I remember working in the kitchen, preparing food, and working on that marble. It’s probably all broken up and buried in the collapse of bricks,” Goodwin said.

Life in a piece of early Miami County history, built during or before the Civil War and Bleeding Kansas, had been memorable in the large house with plenty of land to run over with abandon. School had been the one-room school house in Stanton, a short walk away.

But when she was diagnosed with pneumonia during her eighth-grade year, she spent three weeks in the hospital over Christmas.

“I had missed so much school that I could not graduate with my Stanton class by the end of that year. To make up time missed, I had to transfer to the Osawatomie Middle School. Talk about culture shock. To go from my country school of several grades in one room to two classes of only eighth graders! I didn’t know a sole, either,” Goodwin said.

Admitting how much she cares about her family history and her family, Roach, who is Marilyn’s daughter, said she has fond memories of the historic home, too.

“I always think of it as my uncle and aunt’s place because, when I was little, they lived there.  The place was huge to a little girl, and we used to go over there all the time. I really liked to sled and their hill was perfect for sledding,” Roach said.

As Roach began to realize what was happening to the house, she knew she wanted to save what she could before it all disappeared.

“I had wanted to get the claw footed bath tub that had been left in a smaller building. When I got there, the tub was gone like much of my grandparents’ antiques and property stolen by vandals,” Roach said.

With luck, Roach was able to save a small, wrought iron baby bed. “It was my Grandma Mary’s baby bed, which I knew I had to get since so much was disappearing,” Roach said.

Roach also managed to salvage the old water pump and would like a few of the bricks, Roach said, to place in a sidewalk she would like to build.

Since the fire consumed the home’s interior and caused a few walls to cave in, people who live nearby have also felt the loss.

“It’s sad to see this every morning. So sad,” said Steve Hinote of Stanton as he drives by on his way to the Muffler Mart in Paola.

And, Karen Spencer Hill, who has lived just south of the Caylor house for 22 years, has been cataloging the home in photographs both before and after the fire.

“I just hate to see things destroyed…,” Hill said.

Aaron Manes goes under the bar to win the student limbo competition during the skating assembly at Trojan Elementary.