When class let out on a crisp fall afternoon at a one-room school two miles south of Aliceville in 1942, Wayne Slinkard didn’t dally. He scooted through a fence into a pasture north of the school and set out for his rural home three-quarters of a mile away.
Along the way he gathered up 10 cows. Just before arriving home, he engaged gears on a windmill and watched briefly as water trickled into a tank.
The drone of an airplane’s rotary engine intervened. A trainer with an Army Air Force pilot-to-be at the stick swooped down: “I could see the guy’s face.” Such flights were common from newly opened bases in Coffeyville and Independence to help prep the nation’s response to the Axis powers.
Once home, Slinkard milked two cows. His dad, Fred, milked the others. He also checked the hen house for eggs and often was assigned to turn the handle on a cream separator, a chore that required an exacting touch.
Slinkard’s life began on a farm west of Le Roy, and by the time he moved to Great Bend to work at a motor company, without attending high school, the family had moved several times. As the war unfolded, his dad worked at the Sunflower Ordnance Plant in De Soto, leaving Wayne, mother Mary and his siblings to keep the home fires burning.
Among his tasks was to tote and sell crates of eggs at a store in Aliceville, a combination of general merchandise and post office with a gas pump out front, one that demanded fuel to be pumped by hand into a graduated glass cylinder at the top before being sold.
Slinkard always had a hankering for the Old West and was on the verge of taking up bronc riding when Margery Lois Dunn fell into his life.
She had suffered through some rough physical times before being divorced.
“I knew her three months,” Slinkard said. “I said, ‘Let’s get married.’ I told her I’d never hit her or beat her. Whenever we had a quarrel, which wasn’t often, I’d go outside, cool down, come back in, and tell Margery, ‘I’m sorry. Let’s start.’”
They were married in 1955. The union lasted 55 years, until Margery died seven years ago.
WITH MARRIAGE, Slinkard was intent on providing for his new bride.
“I joined the U.S. Air Force,” a decision that provided financial security and eventually proved a catalyst for a long and prosperous life. He learned electrical work and happily embraced cooking at NCO clubs. Both skills came to roost when he retired from the Air Force after 20 years.
Before leaving the service, he earned the high school diploma that he missed out on as a teenager, through the GED program. “I went back to Le Roy in 1976 and got a genuine Le Roy High School diploma,” Slinkard crowed — and for a while lived there. He put his electrician skills to profitable use helping to wire the reactor core at the Wolf Creek nuclear station north of Burlington.
While an airman he was assigned to many bases, including a tour in Vietnam. Eventually the Slinkard family moved to Roswell, N.M., where he was stationed earlier in his career.
For the next 25 years he worked for a local power company, and spent spare time honing his knowledge about the Old West. He also acquired a chuck wagon built in Iowa in 1893 and a 13-inch, high-back saddle manufactured in Kansas City in 1917, the choice of old-time ranch hands. A rawhide riata (lariat) hangs from the leather-wrapped saddle horn.
When he retired for good about 15 years ago, Slinkard didn’t sink into a rocking chair, although he did continue to educate himself about the Old West with every book he could lay his hands on and in conversations will local cowboys, as well as descendants of those of yesteryear.
A fact he likes to mention: For 10 years just before 1900, 10 million head of longhorn steers and other cattle were herded from Texas along four major trails, the Shawnee, Western, Chisholm and Goodnight.
Trail drives nowadays are features of dude ranches, but Slinkard replicates a portion of the experience with this chuck wagon, cooking at schools, churches, anywhere folks want to try authentically prepared Western delicacies, such as beans, steak, fried taters and cornbread.
Chuck wagons, he explains, were an invention of the cavalry. Freight wagons carried food and water during long marches into areas barren of civilization. They naturally became a part of trail drives, which crossed vast distances, including dangerous stretches of Indian Territory — now Oklahoma.
A typical drive, Slinkard reported, began with 1,000 to 1,500 head of cattle and “12 to 14 to 16 men” — cowboys, horse wranglers, a trail boss and a cook. Each cowboy had at his disposal eight to 10 horses — thus the need for two horse wranglers. Many horses were lost to illness, injury or theft along the trail.
“Dishonest cowboys and Indians would steal cattle along the way,” and take horses anytime the opportunity arose.
WHEN SLINKARD sets up his wagon for a cookout, he makes it an educational experience. Never at a loss for words, he regales those awaiting a meal with what he’s doing and how chuck wagons became such a storied part of western lore.
Used on ranches in Nebraska after its construction in Iowa, his kitchen on wheels is outfitted with many of the things carried on trail drives: cooking utensils, bed rolls, water barrels, food and spices, a gun or two and any number of bits and pieces that might come in handy.
Slinkard cooks with cast-iron Dutch ovens and round-bottom pots.
The Dutch oven has a hollow lid that begs Slinkard to direct heat of white-hot coals from top and bottom. A necessity, he said, is to “rotate the Dutch oven to keep from getting hot spots,” which would scorch, or at least overcook, parts of whatever is being prepared.
His round-bottom pots have much the same requirement. They have tight-fitting lids that keep liquid within the vessel. Slinkard “rolls them” to keep heat well distributed.
Even when the mechanics of outdoor cooking with iron utensils is mastered, there still is much to learn. “You have to know how to season steaks, hamburgers and everything else you cook.”
Occasionally, he takes a culinary leap forward and uses a wok for making stir fry of potatoes, onions and bell peppers.
FOR SEVERAL years Slinkard has told Roswell friends he intends to return to his native home, Le Roy, or at least somewhere in Kansas.
Wherever he lands, it will be with a bit of acreage.
Lakota is coming with him. Named after the northern Sioux who liked similar Appaloosas, Lakota is a handsome horse Slinkard keeps on a friend’s place a few miles west of Roswell.
“I saw him in a pen at the sale barn one day and asked about buying him. The owner thought that’d be OK, he was kind of afraid of the horse. He shot me a price,” Slinkard made a counter offer and soon Slinkard had Lakota in tow.
“I’ve never ridden him,” said Slinkard, 81. “I have an artificial knee, a bad back and five stents and had bypass surgery,” in August. But, he has tamed Lakota to where he will lay his head on Slinkard’s shoulder.
In arid eastern New Mexico Lakota’s diet is a few flakes of alfalfa hay a day and commercial feed. Slinkard ensured his horse would welcome a move to Kansas where he’d find lush green grass to munch at to his heart’s content.
Slinkard has three sons and three daughters, one of whom lives at Wichita. Another, a registered nurse, lives in Roswell.
But, he wants to get back — or at least much closer — to where he spent his childhood.
He can rattle off the names of many Le Roy residents of the 1940s and ’50s and vividly recalls occasional trips to Iola.
“What was that movie theater, west of the courthouse?” “The Pic?” “Yeah, the PIc, next to Fritz Auto, where my uncle worked. And there was Krogers, and other grocery stores on the east side.”
Slinkard is wont to spin into many remembrances, common for an octogenarian blessed with lucidity, who spends most days surrounded by a houseful of things from the past and memories of what was.
If all goes as he has planned, before long, new friends — he makes them easily — will benefit from his vast bank of lifetime experiences.
PHOTO: Wayne Slinkard, a Le Roy native, with his chuck wagon in eastern New Mexico. COURTESY PHOTO
