Home at Last

by Jim Potter

Robert Parks was honorably discharged from the US Navy in 1919 just in time to enjoy Christmas with his parents, Henry and Lydia Parks, living in McPherson County, Kansas.

Fighting in the World War was over for more than a year when Robert was discharged. His extended service time was due to the monumental operation of clearing tens of thousands of mines in the North Sea between Scotland and Norway, while assigned to the USS Heron (AM-10), a minesweeper working out of Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, Scotland.

Today, it’s difficult to imagine how catastrophic the war was to the world population, both civilians and those in military service. The estimate of forty million total casualties is mindboggling, but Sailor Parks survived his subchaser and minesweeping duties, and avoided becoming a statistic of the 1918 flu pandemic. Over 116,000 US military personnel died in the war. Robert was fortunate; he was able to return home in one piece.

Those who served in the United States military during the war came back to a different America. After the music from welcoming parades faded, veterans soon learned that they were on their own. For many of the able-bodied soldiers, marines, and sailors, the jobs they had when they enlisted or were drafted, had been filled by men who stayed home.

In a letter sent to his parents in June 1918, Robert shared that one day, as a civilian, he hoped to farm a small piece of land. After two and a half years in the military, he returned home with an opportunity to make that dream come true. However, if he had known wheat and corn prices would begin collapsing by the summer of 1920, he might have considered another line of work. When farmers had prospered during the World War due to high global demand, many had purchased more land and modern agricultural equipment. But, the end of the war created competition from other countries and resulted in over production in the United States causing crop prices across the country to drop by over fifty percent by the end of 1921. In Kansas, the average price of wheat was $2.14 per bushel in 1920; a year later only $1.03.¹  In many cases, farmers couldn’t get enough money from their crops to cover the interest due at the bank or to pay the taxes which were levied on the increased valuation of their farm land.

The 1920 US Census, which was taken in January, shows “Robbie,” twenty-two, working as a farm laborer, living in Jackson Township with his parents, Henry, forty-three, Lydia, forty-one, and their servant, Anna Soby, twenty-seven.

When I learned from census data that Robert and his parents had an unmarried woman living with them, I couldn’t help but recall a Parks family story explaining why Robert might have run off in 1915 when he was eighteen. Supposedly, Henry, his adoptive father, encouraged Robert to marry Gladys, Henry’s biological daughter. It’s a silly thought, and we’ll never know, but I wonder if Henry put any pressure on Robert to start a romance with Anna. Henry might have thought that if Robert married a local woman, he’d be more likely to live and farm nearby.

In 1920, Gladys May Parks, twenty-one, daughter of Henry and Lydia, was no longer living at home with her parents. On October 14, 1917, five months after Robert enlisted, she had married Joseph V. Kubin, thirty-four, also of McPherson County. Their first-born, Leland, was born July 28, 1918.

Less than five months after Robert’s return to McPherson County, he accepted an invitation from his older brother, Arthur, twenty-four, to move to Wyoming. Prior to, and after the World War, Arthur was farming near Torrington, Wyoming.

Arthur had fought in France as a member of the US Army’s 316th Trench Mortar Battery, part of the 166^th Field Artillery Brigade.

With employment hard to find for Robert, Arthur told his brother about job openings at Sunrise, Wyoming, a mining town thirty-seven miles northwest of Torrington. Arthur may have informed Robert that free grazing land was available in Wyoming through the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916.

Planning a reunion on the High Plains must have been exciting for the two bonded brothers. By the time they started their wartime military service, they had already experienced personal battles.

The young men had a lot to talk about, some of it potentially traumatic. They may have had only a few memories of their father before his premature death, but their life with mother, who was in and out of insane asylums until her final commitment in 1909 to Osawatomie State Hospital, must have been unforgettable.

I’ll bet that Arthur and Robert also remembered their good times at the orphanage, in the military, and with their two younger brothers, William, 20, and Bristol, 14.

When Arthur told Robert that Sunrise Mine was hiring, he may have explained that Sunrise was more than a mining camp; it was a model company town with modern conveniences. If Robert asked about housing, Arthur had the answer. Single employees of the mine could rent a room at one of the boarding houses; married couples—with or without children—could rent houses in the mining community.

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1 Kansas Wheat History, 40. United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, released October 17, 2024.

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