World War II ended on August 6, 1945. “The boys” began coming home, all of them that ever would, anyway within weeks. From the moment they arrived all they had on their minds was getting a new car, new clothes, a job, and making babies and not necessarily in that order.  As for those who had waited at home, when the celebrations ended a collective, almost audible, sigh of relief swept across the land.  Wives, mothers, fathers, and sweethearts let out the pent up breath they had been anxiously holding for so many years. The long days and longer nights of waiting were over.  We had won the war.  The nightmare is over.  The adrenalin ebbed and a peculiar sort of quiescence settled like a fog, deadening the senses and muting cares.  The children who had been left largely untended during the war were now adolescents.  We were coming of age at a time when adults were completely engrossed in recovering from the emotional and physical toll of the war and in putting their the lives they had left behind back together. They were sick and tired of worrying.  And at precisely that point in time, September 1946, the Mid-Century Kids, The Class of 1950, entered high school.    

We grew up in the belief that our home town was safe from that scourge of Kansas – tornados.  “A town in a valley will never be hit by a tornado" they said.  Although that prediction is has no basis in any kind of science, when dark storm clouds rolled in we were complacent. Nearby towns might disappear in a cloud, but not Caney.  Caney was in a valley.

Why Caney was considered to be in a valley always puzzled me.  There were a few hills outside town, but they were not situated in a way that created a valley.  A couple of miles east"Jacks' Hill" rose above the plain.   A one-lane, rutted, dirt road branching off the highway crossed a little creek went into a tight hairpin turn at the base of the hill and then struggled upward to the top.   Once on top of Jacks' Hill Caney lay spread out below.  The road at the top of Jacks Hill was rumored to be a lover’s lane but I never had a chance to see if the rumor was true or not.

“Smelder Hill,” no one ever used the correct term “Smelter” when talking about it, was just northeast of town.  A steep, rocky and rutted road ran north from the east side of town went past “Smelder Pond” and on to the top of that hill.  Smelder Hill was too steep and rough to for a kid to pedal his bicycle to the top.  We walked alongside and pushed our bike.  Occasionally, when feeling adventurous we would push our bike to the top, turned it around, take a deep breath and shove off down the hill.  The object of the adventure was to see if we could coast all the way to the bottom with putting on the brakes.   More often than not our bike would careen out of control creating a tangled mass of boy and bike.   Bragging rights were the reward of success.  Of course we never attempted that wild ride unless someone was with us to verify our claim.

Smelder Hill was not a solitary hill standing out on the plains.  It was actually the eastern end of a long ridge out north of Caney that ran for several miles east and west.   The part of the ridge that the road passed over was Smelder Hill.   A mile or so to the west that same ridge was called “The Shale Pit.” It got that name because in early times a brick factory had been located in Caney at the base of that hill.  Its workers had excavated most of the southern slope of the hill to get clay the factory needed to make bricks.  After a few years the excavation left a semi-circle of steep cliffs falling down to a large, flat floor.   It would have made a wonderful amphitheater for outdoor productions but in the mid-1940’s it was just another one of our playgrounds.

With the passage of many decades erosion had turned its excavated steep cliffs into a corrugated series of gullies. The face of the cliff resembled the bellows of an accordion.  Imagining ourselves mountaineers we enjoyed climbing to the top of the Shale Pit.   There was nothing to do once we were on top.  It was a kid’s playground and a cow pasture, nothing more.  Many years later a physician, seeing gold, not “In them `thar’ hills,” but rather in ministering to the medical needs of an aging small town population, came to Caney and opened his practice.  A few years and hundreds of gall bladders later he bought the Shale Pit had a road cut into the hillside and built a large home right on the crest of the hill.  With the steep cliffs of the Shale Pit falling dramatically from his front yard the doctor could sit in his picture-windowed living room and, much like a planter surveying his crops, serenely view the ripening fields of revenue lying below him.

Shale has a slick surface.  Two pieces of it can be rubbed together with little friction between them.   That characteristic made climbing to the top of The Shale Pit more difficult than might be imagined.  Like sinners headed for heaven we would take three steps upward and backslide two.  Climbing in the little ravines was in no way life threatening but we paid a small price in scrapes and bruises as we slipped on the slick surface.  A daredevil occasionally upped the ante by climbing the cliff not in one of the ravines; where there were walls to cling to should we start to fall, but out on the face of the cliff.   Unless fear overcame bravado part way up, prompting a rapid, crab-like sideways scuttling to the safety of the nearest ravine, the cliff-climber could brag for days.

The view from the top the Shale Pit was spectacular, so much so that it was the stimulus for a very emotional experience I had one day.   My country had been at war for almost as long as I could remember.  Rudy, who had been the most brotherly of all my brothers, had been killed in action in a B-24 bomber while returning back to England after bombing Germany.  All my other brothers were in uniform and I was living as an only child with parents who had been numbed and dispirited by the loss of their son.  Also, I was entering puberty, with all the inner turmoil that goes with that process.    It was a confusing and difficult time for me.  One summer day I went to the Shale Pit alone.  I climbed to the top and while standing there admiring the panorama off to the northwest where Cheyenne Creek flows crookedly towards its union with the Caney River and the Santa Fe railroad tracks ran northward towards Kansas City, I became overwhelmed with feeling.   As I looked out over that scene some emotion overwhelmed me.  I  began singing.  I stood there, fists clinched, sobbing, throat-choked and gasping, singing “America, the Beautiful” to no one save God and His creation.   Tears were streaming down my cheeks from a feeling I did not and still do not understand.   I was glad no one was there to see me.  I never told anyone about it.

The last hill around Caney was about a mile northwest of the Shale Pit.  It was also accessible by a rutted, rocky road that Caney Water Department workers used to get up to the water pumping plant on top of the hill.   The pumping plant was a small brick building.  Standing next to it was a steel cylinder about thirty feet in diameter and eighty to a hundred feet tall.  The top of that cylinder was the highest point for miles around.  It was old and covered with faded black paint with a skinny steel ladder attached to its side.   The word “CANEY,” in faded white paint, barely visible, ran down alongside that ladder. This hollow cylinder was called a “standpipe”, which led to the hill being known as “Standpipe Hill”.  This standpipe was Caney’s version of the water tower that almost always stands somewhere in every small town.  The water inside that standpipe had been sucked from the fetid soup that ran between the banks of the Caney River.  This terrible liquid was pumped under the nearby railroad tracks and into a water treatment plant where it was strained and made potable with chemicals.  There was nothing to be done about how this water tasted.