The origin of my "paying it forwardness" was my mother. My father was killed in a head on train collision in 1945. My mother was left alone to raise three children ages 2, 5 and 8. Actually I wasn't quite 5 only 4 years 8 months old. The railroad gave in my view a paltry $3000 dollars for the death of a family man. My mother eventually spent $1500 for a small house in Smith Center, Kansas, never remarried, worked two jobs and sometimes three jobs to care for her children. Time passed and I was a senior in high school and the talk was of college.
In retrospect I now know what an extraordinary person my mother was. I had a little money from working in the summers and my mother had virtually none. How was I to get and eduction? The answer was to uproot her family from a 13 year existence in Smith Center. She sold the house, got a job at the Fort Riley Army Base and bought a small house in Manhattan, Kansas home of Kansas State University. Thus I attended Kansas State University. It took me 6 years to graduate because I ran out of money and dropped out of school and worked for the Manhattan Tree Department for 2 years. Times were always tough and I will tell you a telling truth. It concerns the Sewing Machine. My mother had a reasonably good sewing machine. I remember going with her to the local pawn shop on more that one occasion with that machine in hand. Pawning it for a few dollars to be able to make it to the next pay day. In the end her sacrifice was well worth it. I had a 38 year teaching career, was elected city commissioner and even served as city mayor(my mother suffered a life ending stoke a that time and she was told of my election. I can only hope she understood and I do know she would have been very proud.}
I paid it forward the other day to my oldest grandson. Aged 19 and forced to be on his own with really no financial support, a car that had broken down and the rent coming due. He was distraught. I put a few thousand dollars in his bank account, drove my decent 2002 Honda down to his place in Hutchinson, Kansas and gave him the keys. I told him I was "paying it forward". I told him what my mother had done for me and that some day in the future there would come a day when someone he knew would need help and he would "pay it forward". He is doing OK.
