JAMES AND PHYLLIS CONNELL

Written by Phyllis

As I was preparing to write about our family, I was reading some chapters in the 1996
Recipes for Living.  Jim came in from the golf course and said: We were born,
We went to school,
We got married,
We had two children
Then we retired!
He omitted just a few details, which I will fill in - - - -

Jim was born October 28, 1924, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (population 35,000), son of Smith A. Connell, Sr., and Ruby Schlott Connell.  His dad was an accountant and they also owned a small dairy. Jim was the youngest of six children. His mother and his two older brothers, Smith, Jr. and Ralph were born in Las Vegas in the New Mexico Territory. His brother Charles and sister Merle were born in Las Vegas after New Mexico became a state in 1912.  His brother Randolph was born in Albuquerque.  The family also lived in Soccoro, where his mother had a Candy Kitchen, and in Las Vegas, Santa Fe and Tesuque.  The latter was a little Indian village just outside Santa Fe.  It had a population 60, with a school, service station and Mom and Pop grocery. It isn't in the present atlas and must have gone the way of lots of other small towns.

Jim's dad was a self-taught, intelligent man who helped raise his siblings. He had an extensive library of New Mexico history and religions and was an avid reader in both English and Spanish.  However, he read only technical books, no novels.  The first nine years after he and Jim's mom were married, he was a machinist, trouble shooting for the railroad. His dad's job-history, however, resulted in the family moving numerous times, which gave Jim an interesting school experience.  He started to a Catholic school in Soccoro.  Jim tells that in those days the public schools did not have kindergarten and they took him on kind of a baby-sitting deal. The last thing his mother needed was to have her child in the Candy Kitchen.  It meant that Jim had three recesses a day. Protestants were in short supply in that area, and because he was the only one, while the rest of the children had catechism, he had an extra recess.

Jim went to three different elementary schools in Albuquerque and two different schools in Santa Fe. He started high school in Las Vegas and finished that year in Albuquerque.  "It seemed as though Dad always worked for companies that liked to transfer their employees. For a time he was an auditor for the State-a conservative Republican in a Democratic administration. When the Republicans were elected, they made a clean sweep so he was replaced.  That's politics!  That was when he began working for General Motors Company, setting up the bookkeeping departments.  In 1940, when I was 15, Dad was transferred to Council Bluffs, Iowa. Then the company sent us to Perry."

In 1941, in the summer before Jim's senior year in high school, his dad took advantage of art opportunity to go back to work as a machinist and was employed at the Rock Island Arsenal. Rather than move to Illinois, Jim stayed in a room in Perry and graduated from Perry High School in the class of 1942.  After a short stay in Rock Island, he went to Fort Worth, Texas, where his brother Smitty and family lived and Jim worked in an aircraft plant until entering the Army Air Corps in 1943.

Basic training was at the Amarillo, Texas, Air Base.  About half the men were from Texas, the other half from Chicago and Jim says that every night they refought the Civil War. He was the only one that stayed neutral.  Throughout his military service, he was based many places, including Barksdale Field in Shreveport, Louisiana.  In 1945 he was sent to the Marianas Island Group in the South Pacific, where he served as instrument specialist on the ground crew.

He was on Tinian Island from which the Enola Gay flew to drop the first atomic bomb.  He learned to drive by pulling one of the one half million dollar airplanes behind an aircraft tug.  No one seemed concerned that he didn't have a drivers' license.  An interesting aspect of that term on the island was that, whichever branch of the military had preceded them, hadn't been able to rout the Japanese, who hid in caves and came out at night to go through garbage cans and watch the western movies.  They didn't understand what was happening so they would join in the shooting. Even though they apparently weren't shooting at them, the airmen couldn't be certain of that and ducked for cover.

Jim was discharged in February, 1946.  His parents had moved back to Las Vegas and were living in an apartment, which was across the hall from mine. We would discover this was but one in a long line of coincidences, when our paths often came close to crossing. However, that is to get ahead of the story.

I was born Phyllis Jeane Welty in September 4, 1927, in the Seventh-Day Adventist Hospital in Nevada, Iowa, the only child of Rex and Mildred Welty. Both Jim's and my families can trace our history to early days in America. Jim's paternal grandfather fought in the Civil War. My great-great grandfather's name was Poffenberger and the battle of Antietam, which was a great Civic War battle, was fought on his farm in Sharpsburg, Maryland. I have a book about it.

My family, also, moved around the country a lot. Dad was a linotype operator and printer. Soon after I was born, we moved to Ankeny, where he worked in a print shop.  Next, Dad received a letter from a friend, who had bought a weekly newspaper in Reseda, which is in the Los Angeles area of California. He offered Dad a job as foreman.            ·

That was the reason, in 1930, that we loaded all our possessions in our Model A Ford and headed west.  Grandma Mullihan shed many tears, thinking she would never see us again, but we returned often for vacations.  Our trip took two weeks, which included three days going 20 miles in Arizona because of bad roads and weather. We went through Las Vegas, New Mexico, and Albuquerque, where Jim was living at the time. We didn't meet then.

The first recollections I have are of California. We raised pedigreed English Bulldogs and showed them in dog shows, which were attended by many famous movie and sports people.   One day I looked out and here was Barbara Stanwyck in our backyard. Others who came to see the dogs were Stu Irwin and June Collyer; and at a dog show we saw Betty Grable and Jackie Coogan, whom were then married to one another.  He had on a bright green suit and she had the blondest hair I had ever seen.

When I was in third grade, the family had a frightening experience. My mother was bitten by a Black Widow spider! She had disturbed some vines and the spider crawled inside the house and into their bed. During the night Mother rolled over on it. Dad and Mother had the presence of mind to put it in an envelope. Even though we were within the city limits, we were 30 miles from downtown L.A and there was no emergency room or hospital in our area. There seemed nothing to do but go to the Van Nuys Police Department.  By then it was 3:00a.m. but they directed us to make the trip downtown as the quickest way to medical help. No helicopter in those days! The professionals wouldn't believe the type of spider that had bitten her until we showed them. They did have medication for that kind of bite but she was a very sick woman!

In 1938 Dad went back and graduated from San Fernando High School intending to teach printing.  He did teach and was a patient teacher, but he became discouraged by those who weren't interested in learning printing. When I was in 8th grade, three months before graduation, we moved to Red Bluff in northern California, where he bought a print shop.  That turned out to be a poor idea.  There simply wasn't enough business to support it so Dad went to San Francisco that summer to work for a printer, setting type for a telephone directory.

While we were in San Francisco, Mother decided to take classes to become a florist.  In August, 1941, we moved to Yuba City where Dad was foreman of the newspaper, Mom opened a flower shop and I started to high school.  It was a great time for our family. We were getting acquainted in the area, the flower shop was doing well, and high school was fun.

That was our situation on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941.  The horror and fear that was felt by the entire country was exaggerated in our area, where we were just ten minutes by air from the Coast.  The expectation was that the Japanese would simply cross over to and attack the Mainland. It was panic time! Then, in April, 1942, it seemed necessary for us to return to Iowa. My grandparents Welty had several farms and were unable to hire help.

Dad built a horse trailer and packed it for the trip to Iowa. I stayed with my mother's parents on the farm and, for six weeks, attended Collins High School.  I had come from a school of about 600 students so it was a challenge to adjust to one where there were only 70 in the entire school; but, more than that, they didn't know what to do with me. I had two sophomore classes, two freshman classes, and the principal gave me some math problems to do.

Mom wanted me to attend school in Des Moines so she took a job at the Tea Room in Younkers that summer. I started 10th grade at North High School the following fall.  We had an apartment on 6th Avenue and Mom went to work at Armand Cosmetics. For two years we spent summers in Crary, North Dakota, 20 miles from Canada, and winters in Des Moines.

Dad farmed 1100 acres alone and brought the first combine to that area, which was quite an attraction for the neighbors.  The crops were mostly wheat and rye. We lived in a three-room farm house with no electricity. It was a mile to the mailbox and we bought supplies in a store in Lawton, 20 miles away. After the harvest each year, Dad came south and worked on the night shift as a typesetter for the Register and Tribune.

During my senior year in high school, I had a job clerking at Penney's on Monday evenings and Saturdays. I was paid 50¢ an hour. In those days clerks were required to wear black or navy blue dresses.

Throughout high school, I had taken courses preparing for college. During my last year, I took typing and found that I liked business courses. I graduated in June, 1945, passed up a scholarship to Drake and attended an Electronics Business School in Minneapolis. That meant that the day after graduation our family scattered. My folks went to North Dakota and I to Minnesota.

I was so anxious to be out on my own that I took the first job that was offered to me, as a teletype apprentice for the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.  There were two openings­ San Bernardino, California, and Las Vegas, New Mexico.  It was necessary to be 18 to work in California, which dictated the choice of Las Vegas. I remembered hearing of it but, not having been there since I was three-years-old, I had no recollection of it.

I spent a week with my folks in North Dakota and then left by train for Chicago.  From there another girl and I were to leave for Las Vegas. She was from Michigan and had never been west.  This was still wartime and the trains were full of servicemen. We had to decide which two was nice enough looking for us to sit with for over two days. We were exhausted when we arrived but were expected to work that day from 12:00 midnight to 8:00a.m. We begged off until the next day. Later I worked the 4:00-12:00 trick and that was the shift we worked every day! For $135.00 a month!  After five months, having had only one day off when I had the flu, I was offered a job as Invoice Record Clerk at Montgomery Ward's.  I took it! At that time I had an apartment in the same house as Jim's parents.

Jim was discharged in February, 1946, and in March we started dating. We were married June 14, 1946, in the oldest protestant church west of the Mississippi.  It was a Presbyterian church, even though we were all Methodists. That is a familiar date now, Flag Day; but it wasn't until 1949 that it became official. My mother traveled by bus from North Dakota to come, make my dress and do the "Mother" things for our wedding.  My dress was made from a parachute.  I still have the dress and probably could still wear it. The cake came by bus from Wagon Mound.  I mentioned that there have been coincidences in our lives. In a conversation that took place after we were married, it was discovered that there was a remote family connection. Jim's sister-in-law was a niece of the wife of my great uncle.  They had been divorced in the early 1900's-long before it became a thing to do.  All that Dad could remember of her was that she had red hair.

Jim had started college at New Mexico A&M the month before we were married. We left by bus for our new home.  The number of veterans needing housing caused a large problem.  Like other couples, we were assigned one room in the girls' dormitory.  There was no air conditioning, of course, and the dining hall was a mile walk each way. In the fall we moved to a very small trailer for the winter.  The second and third years we spent in old Army barracks. They had apartments identified as 0, 1 and 2, the number indicating how many bedrooms there were.   We were in 0 but, because I preferred having a living room, we put the bed in the comer of the kitchen and the big, old, square kitchen table in the living room.  It was quite an experience - the first time I knew of dust blowing through closed windows, and we could see under the front door.

That first winter I applied for work in the business office of the college, working on my P.H.T. (Putting Hubby Through) degree. Jim worked as a doorman at a movie theater that showed Mexican movies.  By the time he graduated with a degree in Engineering, in 1949, I was head bookkeeper in the business office.

Most of the veterans graduated at the same time and there were few opportunities for employment.  We headed for my folks' home in Greenridge, Missouri.  From there Jim was hired by what was then the Iowa Highway Commission, before it was the Iowa DOT (Department of Transportation), to work out of Red Oak. We moved to the Atlantic District office in 1952.

Janice Lynn was born on July 20, 1950.  In August of1953 Jim was hired as assistant Jasper County Engineer in Newton and our second daughter, Karen Joyce, was born on August23. In the 195O's they started testing for the Rh factor. Through an error, I was recorded as being positive rather than negative and after three days Karen was rushed to Blank Memorial Hospital where she was given new blood.  They kept her for three weeks and by then she was doing well, but that was a frightening experience! We decided that we were fortunate to have two healthy girls and that would be our family.

My folks had moved to the Nevada area on what we called the "home farm." Dad had not been well.  He had been a heavy smoker and his lungs were also affected by the years of being exposed to lead melted in the print shop without proper ventilation.  He developed asthma and emphysema.

In January, 1958, Jim was appointed to the position of Adair County Engineer but we waited until after school was out in June to move to Greenfield. Jim and I knew from having attended 16 different schools that it was important to us to disrupt our daughters' school years as little as possible.  That fall Janice was in third grade and Karen started school.  My father died in August, 1967, and Mother moved to Nevada.

Jim took up golf in Greenfield. He had bowled since he was 16 and set pins by hand, so now he bowled on several leagues. He has given up the bowling but still golfs every suitable weekday in warm weather.

Music has always played a large role in our family. Jim sang in the Episcopalian choir when he was seven and has almost always sung in church choirs and for special occasions of funerals, musicals, etc. wherever we have lived.  An early experience for me was singing a solo when I was in kindergarten.  I had told my mother to come because I would be singing.  She expected me to be part of a group and was quite surprised when my number was announced.  I also performed in a girls' choral group later on and was always in all vocal music offered in school. Janice was in the All-State Chorus in 1968 and Karen toured with 200 students who performed in five cities in Europe the summer she graduated from Greenfield High School in 1971.  For two years all four of us sang together in the Greenfield United Methodist Church Choir.  

Janice was married after graduation and our first granddaughter, Jodi Leigh Zimmerline, was born December 30, 1968.  Our second granddaughter, Julie Anne Zimmerline, was born June 28, 1972.

1971 was a busy year for us. Jim was appointed Clarke County Engineer and we moved to Osceola; Karen graduated from high school, we celebrated our 25th anniversary and we took Karen to New Mexico State University in Las Cruces where she attended two years.

Karen met and married Lee McCauley in Las Cruces in 1974.  The wedding plans were by mail and phone.  Janice was matron of honor and Jodi and Julie were the flower girls.  They would be living in Grants, New Mexico, and then moved to Osceola in 1978.

Our third granddaughter, Jennifer Sue Zimmerline, was born on Christmas Eve in 1977; and Karen and Lee presented us with Melinda Lee McCauley on October 24, 1979.

No life goes along without ups and downs and we have had our share of each.  In the spring of 1981 both daughters were divorced, Janice after thirteen years and Karen after seven.  We expect parents to predecease us, but never expect it to be a child. Karen and Melinda lived just two blocks from us and Melinda was with us a great deal.  She was a normal healthy, happy little girl until she developed asthma about the summer of her third grade.  On April29, 1989, following many attacks, she passed away in the emergency room in the hospital.  Dennis Kale called Rev. Cliff Haider immediately and he was at the hospital to be with us. He was more help to us than he will ever know.  Somehow we got through it, but she has left a void that can never be filled.

After my father died, Mother lived in Nevada. She traveled with friends, Bill and Winnifred Elo, to 19 countries and 48 states. I went with them to the Orient and Jim and I to the British Isles. Additionally, we have been in Mexico many times and in Canada.

In 1984 Mother moved to the North Fair Apartments in Osceola and then lived with us. This is the way I believe it should be. Our parents care for us in our early years; then, when they need us, we take care of them.  However, Mother began having strokes and needed more care than I could give her. We moved her to the Afton care facility, which is outstanding; then to the extended care unit of Clarke County Hospital in January, 1996.  She passed away December 19 of that year, just before her favorite holiday. My mother was a very special, caring woman who always put her family first.  If my daughters have half the feelings for me that I did for my mother, I will feel well blessed.

In 1986 Jim retired after 37 years in state and county government-16 years as Clarke County Engineer.  On June 7, 1987, Janice married Roger Shepard in Creston. Kati Nicole was   born August 3 1988, making our fifth granddaughter.  Roger adopted Julie and Jennifer, and Jennifer took the name Shepard.  On March 14, 1990, James Henry Shepard was born in Creston. He is the first boy in over 100 years on the maternal side of the family and a welcome addition to the girls.

We are now enjoying the forming of new families with the wedding of our grand­ daughters.  Jodi married Brad Goodale June 6, 1992. Jodi and Brad have made us great­ grandparents with the birth of Veronica (Roni) June 25, 1993, and Victoria (Tori) January 15, 1997.  Julie married David Chumbley May 28, 1994, and, at the time of this writing, we anticipate the wedding of Jennifer to Bentley Kinyon in September, 1997.

Karen gave us a scare in November, 1995.  While visiting my mother in the Afton Care Center, she developed problems and we took her to the emergency room in Creston where she had cardiac arrest.  This time there was a helicopter for the trip to Methodist Hospital.  With a new life style, she is doing well. She has been employed in the Central Office of the Clarke Community Schools since November, 1981.

Our lives in retirement are full and happy. I am still related to what I've always enjoyed­ gardening, flower arranging and entering flower shows.  Flower Show Schools were offered in Afton in the 1970's.  After much persuasion, I took courses to become a judge of shows and fairs, earning a Master Certificate with the National Council of State Garden Clubs. I still enjoy the challenge of exhibiting and judging.

When Jim retired, we purchased a vacation home in Bella Vista, Arkansas. We have been going for many years and we do enjoy our time there.

When we first moved to Red Oak, we joined the United Methodist Church. Mrs. Fancher, the minister's wife, invited me to go to a Circle meeting. I didn't know what that was but I went and have been going ever since. I am currently the secretary of Esther Circle and enjoy the fellowship each month.  So, in each of our moves, we join the church first thing and feel it is a part of a new experience.  To become part of the church is to become a part of a community.

As we look back over our lives, the many places we have lived, the associations we have had with different races and cultures, we realize that neither of us have a shred of prejudice.  Our additional travels to many countries and most states have made us grateful for where we live and what we have. We are convinced that there is no place like Iowa!!

Return to main page for Recipes for Living 1997 by Fern Underwood

Last Revised May 7, 2012