The Big Family Circus

By Roger Eaton, grandson*

*relation to Andy and/or Flora Lehr

When she had a young family of her own, Rachael, one of my nieces, asked me to tell her about life in a large family.  She had her hands full with two lively boys.  I fielded her question at a family gathering that was organized by my nephew, Jeb. Like Rachael, he had a young family and wanted to experience being surrounded by a large family.  My brother, Joe, hosted the event at his rural El Dorado property.  It was reminiscent of family gatherings of the past.

My son, A.J., spent some time in El Dorado, when his grandpa, George T. Hurlburt, passed away.  A.J. was twenty-seven years old and eager to spend time in El Dorado.  He said that our stories of El Dorado made it seem like a magical place.  This was his chance to learn its secrets.

Being part of a large family had its moments both good and not-so-good.  Below are some stories that should help describe being part of a large family.  I hope that you will add your stories and perspectives to the comment/response section that follows this post.

We were outside playing and had to stop for this photo. None of us wanted to stop playing. We had no idea that the photo was going to be in the newspaper. Our mother wiped the sweat from our faces, selected our clothes and tucked our shirts in. Matt was the most upset, he wanted to hold Sissie and me. It was an amazing feat to get all of us to hold still long enough for the photo. Once the shoot was wrapped, we changed into our play clothes faster than Sunday after mass. 1961

I had six siblings.  My dad had seven and my mother had six. There were thirty cousins on my mother’s side of the family.  Most of them lived in El Dorado.  That created some large (Lehr family) Christmas parties! 

Christmas Eve, we would all converge at Grandma Lehr’s house.  In those times, grandparents were called by their last names.  It was a lot of people in a small house.  There was always great food and her amazing brownie sheet cake. She had one candy cane for each cousin on her Christmas tree.  They were small ones, but we all looked forward to the time were able to get them off the tree.  We lived two blocks from Grandma Lehr.  That was great.  When we walked home, usually around 10:00, our dad would allow us to open one gift. That was a great tradition.

During the summers, there were frequent family picnics.  Most of them were in East Park.  We filled the park! It had great swings sets, huge oak trees for shade, trails in the woods and a horse-drawn wagon to climb on – no horses, just the wagon.  I later learned that my day had acquired the wagon and donated it to the Parks and Recreation Department.  Picnics were such a significant part of our families, one of my aunts, Judy Badwey, gave the nephews and nieces picnic baskets as wedding presents.  We still use ours, but not as frequently, perhaps every three or four years.

We celebrated Independence Day as a family.  That is, my mother and her sisters would take the cousins out to Lake El Dorado, or rural Oil Hill to enjoy fireworks.  Anything could happen.  I recall my cousin, Andy Smith, lighting a firecracker and handing it to my sister, Maggie.  He calmly said, “hey, hold this.”  For a split second, she held it.  Then realized the fuse was sparking. She tossed it away, just in time for it to pop.  In the mid-1960s, the fireworks were potent.  One year, we accidently started a small fire in the oil-soaked soil of Oil Hill.  I don’t know how it started, but our moms we able to extinguish it quickly.  When the fire was out, they loaded everyone in the cars and we hurriedly went back to town.

As I mentioned, our house was two blocks from Grandma Lehr’s.  My cousins, the Badweys, lived three blocks to the east of Grandma Lehr.  Tim Badwey and I became buddies.  I spent my days riding my bike to Tim’s.  We would play with plastic army men on the side of their garage.  After digging trenches and staging battles, we would get the garden hose and flood the trenches.  I would regularly ride home covered in mud. My mother had two clothes dryers to keep up with the laundry.

At family gatherings we would naturally divide into groups.  The groups were mostly age groupings. For me, my cousins were my first friends. They were the first kids that I met, outside my siblings.

El Dorado, Kansas had a great swimming pool.  It was huge.  There was also a baby pool, but none of us wanted to be seen in the baby pool.  It was common knowledge why the water was several degrees warmer than the regular pool.  That fact combined with the social stigma of being in the baby pool kept us out.  The Smiths lived a few blocks from the pool.  A several families would converge on the Smith’s house and walk to the pool.  It was quite a procession. 

The moms would sit in a section of the apron while the loudspeakers blared radio station KLEO.  It was a Wichita radio station that played rock and roll.  Smoking was permitted.  My dominate memory includes the Rolling Stones song Satisfaction blasting while the air was filled with the fragrance of cigarette smoke and chlorine.

One day as we were returning from the pool, my brother, Matt, stepped on a piece of broken glass. Two of my aunts were nurses.  They immediately treated his injury.  My mother drove him to the hospital.  Instead of stitches, the doctor taped his wound.  That was a new treatment for the tome and a marvel to Aunt Ruth and Joanne.  He healed.

Whenever anyone of us was injured, Aunt Ruth or Aunt Joan would need to inspect the injury.  I recall getting stiches in the palm of my left hand from falling on a piece of broken glass.  At the next family get together, Aunt Joan Lewis, insisted on removing the bandage and inspecting the wound.  I was not eager to accommodate her request, but in those days, you did as you were told.

When my siblings started their own families, Maggie and I were still at home.  It was common for our parents to take us to one of the sibling’s house for dinner or just visit.  When we weren’t going to a sibling’s house they would come home for dinner or a visit.  We would frequently get together on Sundays at someone’s house.  That gave the nieces and nephews a chance to play together.  At one of these gatherings, we found the (young) nephews in my car looking at Playboy magazines.  Playboy magazines included tastefully presented nude women.  I got them from my brothers. 

Christmas 1987 was hosted by my oldest brother, Jimmy.  Everyone except my brother Matt and his family were there. That made a total of twenty-eight.  It was a great time.  An ice storm trapped twenty-two of us at Jimmy’s house.  Joe and his family left before the ice storm hit.  He is always the first to leave.  While Jimmy’s house was large, with four bedrooms, it was still crowded.  Marcia and I slept on the floor in the living room.  There were probably six others in the living room that night.  Most of them were (giggling) nieces and nephews.

Sibling rivalries are a fact of life in the large family.  Maggie and I were largely ignored as rivals to the other siblings.  When we moved to Louisiana, Maggie and I were ten.  Matt was four years older.  He decided that he didn’t like Maggie, so we teamed-up to torment her.  That continued as we moved to Iowa nine or ten months later.  I recall having bruises on my chest in junior high school.  When changing in physical education class or athletics, my buddies would ask me about it.  I just replied, brothers.  They understood.  This isn’t a sour grapes story.  It’s just an account of how things flowed in our large family.

I think it started when someone put an egg in Mark’s new halter boots.  It was probably Matt.  Regardless of who started it, Mark, Matt, Maggie and I engaged in an undeclared and unspoken guerrilla-style war.  When everyone was asleep, we would prank each other.  The pranks became creative.  One prank, that I remember, was putting crushed cheese curls in Maggie’s bed sheets.  I also collected my toenail clipping deposited them on someone’s bed sheets.  Those days, you checked your breakfast cereal boxes and other food items for pranks.  After a few weeks, we all agreed to a truce.

By the time Marcia and I began planning our wedding, the families had splintered across several states.  We planned our wedding around Grandma Lehr’s 80^th birthday, to make it easier for family to attend both events.  It worked well and all had a great time.  Our wedding was on July 12, 1980. The birthday party was the next day.  We were on our honeymoon and missed the party.

This was Marcia’s birthday party at the cottage on Grand Lake Cherokees, Oklahoma. That’s where my folks went to retire.  My brother, Jim, purchased the cottage for them.  We spent several holidays there.  My dad knew that Marcia’s favorite cake was German Chocolate.  He wanted to make sure that she got a German chocolate cake.  I drove him all over the town around his cottage until we found a restaurant that said they would bake the cake.

When it came time for the cake, we eagerly dove into it.  The cake was really bad.  It was “bury it in the back yard, bad”.  We all had a good laugh and a memorable party.

When my brother, Mark, and his family moved to Hutchinson, Kansas, we did a lot together.  Marcia and I lived in McPherson.  It was about twenty-six miles from our front to Marks’s.  At the time, I was the general partner of a couple limited partnerships.  The partners included: my dad and brothers Jim and Mark.  Even though Matt and Joe weren’t in the partnerships, they supported us in a variety of ways.  We owned and managed 55 units, in addition to our day jobs.  Some were rentals and some were contract land sales. 

One of the properties was a mobile home park in South Hutchinson.  Mark and I spent many evenings and weekends working on it.  We also had a couple of houses in Hutchinson. 

One weekend we scraped and painted the exterior of a house in a day.  For that feat, we enlisted the help of the wives, Pam, Marcia and Jacque.  Nephews Jeb and Jamie helped, too.

It wasn’t all work.  One of our family events was a luau.  My nieces Tiffany and Rachael performed a Hawaiian dance. My brother Mark hosted this gathering in Hutchinson, Kansas.

Mark wanted a toga barbecue theme for this one.  He was the only one in favor of that theme.  We decided on a cowboy theme.  Dallas was a popular television series at the time.  It was about an oil family in Dallas Texas and their adventures.  So, the theme had a Dallas (television show) influence.  This gathering was at our house in McPherson, Kansas.  As I recall, Joe brought a camper trailer and set it in the driveway.

Eaton’s Sports Spectacular

During the later 1970s, there were several television programs that were the forerunners of reality TV.  One of them was called the Battle of the Network Stars.  It was a competition of various television entertainers in athletic events.  The idea of have a family gathering with athletic events developed into the Eaton’s Sports Spectacular.  A better name would be Lehr’s Sports Spectacular, since it was all Lehr relatives.  We did this for three years.  When Marcia and I moved away from El Dorado, we didn’t continue the event.  It was fun while it lasted.

Family Business

This family was a business family.  No account would be complete without a summary of the family businesses.  My parents and many of my relatives operated business in El Dorado.  We supported each other.  It was good to trade with each other.  My cousins and I understood business from the other side of the counter.  When someone established a business, they had a built-in customer base.  We purchased our gasoline from Uncle Nick, had our haircut by Uncle Charlie, purchased paint from Uncle Wayne and Uncle Bill, purchase baby clothes from Aunt Beverly and groceries from my folks.  My brother Joe followed in Uncle Nick’s path and operated a couple gasoline stations.  One cold winter, my cousin Clay and I, both eleven years old, created an indoor miniature golf coure in his basement.  We collected golf balls from the roughs on the local golf course and built the course from used cardboard boxes.  It provided the neighborhood kids an indoor winter activity.  Many years later Clay operated a video rental business as a side hustle to his full-time job at the 3M factory.  Clay’s brothers each took a turn operating the Knoxville Lil’ Duffer.

Large Families

Large families can be a blast, especially for the young family members.  The holidays are full of excitement and fun times. It was always a great sensation to attend community events, weddings or other gatherings as a family.  That was amplified when the other Lehr relatives joined in. 

Being in a large family in a small town provided a lot of exposure.  That can be uplifting when you do something noteworthy, but the opposite when you stumble.  Even when you stumbled, they were supportive.  It was a rewarding experience for me, but I wasn’t willing to be the head of a large family.  Raising two active kids was exhausting.  I admire the parents who survived these large families.