a nostalgic touch
The long good-bye: packing up the final family treasure by Matt Keenan
The solitary piece of furniture at the family home: the Kimball.
T
he final chapter of saying goodbye to a parent is not the funeral. Nor is it sorting through the clothes and divvying up the photos, the letters—or in my Dad’s case, the bottles of Pinot Noir in his wine cellar. The final act is selling your parents’ house. And if that house is where you spent all of your formative years and remained central to your life in the years post college, then it is a home. So it was with a four bedroom, three-bathroom house at 3616 17th street in Great Bend. The story goes that Dad purchased the two-acre vacant lot in 1967 from the previous owner, an insurance executive in town. A man, it seems, who was allergic to risks. The kind that come with a dwelling to be constructed on a body of water known as a sand pit. McKinney Sandpit to be precise, on the northwest edge of the city limits. The origin of the pit was never fully known, but dad said it was the product of large cranes digging halfway to China. The true depth of the pit? Not known. The creatures swimming at the bottom? Not knowable. There were claims the water would swirl and could pull down the most experienced swimmer. So naturally any parent wanting to build a house on that lot with a family of five toddlers prone to misadventure? 24
The Journal of the Kansas Bar Association
Dialing child services … The house was finished in September 1968. The ages of the young occupants: Kate 12, Tim 10, Matt 8, Marty 7 and Beth 6 months. That home and the adjoining attractive nuisance brought adventures beyond anything Larry and Ramona could have probably imagined. In the early morning of May 11, 1971, for instance, Tim tugged on the backyard trotline and when something tugged back, he climbed in the boat and hauled a state record fish – 34 pounds 8 ounces. Something called a buffalo head. A very rare species that, locals told us, flourished in very deep waters. After weighing that fish in the Dillon’s meat department (the health inspectors were AOL), the State Fish and Game officials placed it in a special tank and took it to their headquarters in Pratt. If you happened to attend the Kansas State Fair in September 1971, and your sister got scared when saw a huge creature -- yeah, that was Tim’s fish. But as time wore on, it turned out that the centerpiece of our home wasn’t the sand pit or even the beauty of the sloping backyard boasting fifty-year-old cottonwood trees. Instead, it was in the great room, with vaulted ceilings, expansive windows overlooking the lake to the north. In the northwest corner of that room was a grand piano. A Kimball.
