With mom out of town tonight, Dad and I went to dinner at Dion’s, a local pizza joint, and I enjoyed gleaning a few more nuggets from him about his past.

He was the middle of three kids, which has been noted before, but I learned tonight that birth symmetry is a Welton attribute. Where I and my siblings were each born nearly three years apart, he and his siblings were each born nearly four years apart.

Since Dad was born in 1941, his older brother Billy was born in ’37, and Billy had been shot and paralyzed before Dad was born. As a result, Granddad (“Bill”) Welton was exempt from the military when the war broke out because he had a handicapped son that would be too much for his wife to take care of.

Granddad was also the only one of his siblings to not attend college because he graduated from high school right when the Great Depression started, and there were no resources to allow him to go. He probably would have done well as a college student.

Billy was born shortly after Granddad and Grandmother Welton were married, so they probably married in 1935 or 1936.

One of the places many folks in Ark City worked at at one time or another was the packing house, and it has its place in our family history. Mom’s father was killed there when she was a teen, in an accidental fall to the killing floor. Dad had his head nearly cracked open when a counterweight to a large saw fell from the cable it was suspended on above him and caused him to see more red- his own blood filled his eyes, and he had to go to the hospital for surveillance and attention. I would think he certainly had a concussion from a weight crashing on is skull. Dad mused tonight that he could have sued the packing house for that, but that nobody thought like that back then. You healed up and then you went back to work.

Dad’s other story about working at the packing plant, which he’s told us before, involved the fact that the father of a classmate of his from school managed the kill floor, and one night, the designated kill guy for a shift was late, and the manager needed someone else to take care of the duty. He asked my dad, a kid usually pushing around a gut cart on his shift to collect lesser organs and entrails for use in dog food, if he would take the chore that shift. My dad wasn’t certain he could do it, but he said yes, and headed downstairs to the kill floor, where a cow was led into a pen and then the kill guy would put a .22 slug into its brain, and then the dead beast would be raised by its back legs on a hook to be bled and hung on a track overhead and moved to be carved up at different stations.

Dad relayed that when he got to the floor and the pen and the first cow was put into the pen and the animal looked at him with its big brown eyes, he could not raise the gun and pull the trigger. He went back upstairs to the floor manager and told him that he could not do the deed, and he went back to his other duties. And he suspected the manager knew he would not be able to kill the animal as well.