The search for Richard L. Ford 42/10 weeks

The sun setting over the prairie of my dad's youth.

He has always been a bit of an enigma to me. He is my father and he tore everything asunder by falling passionately in love with my mom; the depth of betrayal could be felt decades later at her death. When she passed away in 2004 four of her surviving children were called home to wrestle with their own mortality.

As we sat around the dining room table sharing stories and photos it occurred to us that we would need to write up the obituary information. Mom had seven live children. We used to joke that she had her family in litters like a cat. Three children with her first husband and four of us with my father. That represents alot of birthdays so in order to get them straight we dug around until we came across the birth certificate box.

It was only at this phase that we clued in to the fact that something wasnt quite right; there were two certificates missing and the exact ones would tell the full tale of deception, betrayal and bitterness that always marked our family as somehow different.

 The only real reason to be missing a couple of birth certificates from a stack of well kept documents is to eventually hide the dates of those births. Really, it is so simple one wonders why she even bothered to get rid of them. Unless we had been trying to piece together her story of marriages, I cant say that we would have even figured it out but for that glaring omission.
 I told my sisters that I thought it would be a pretty riveting story except I couldnt figure out how to make the reader feel any empathy or affection toward the central character who blundered into repeated acts of selfishness and then attempted to push any blame as far away from herself as possible. As a result she never ended up making right any one of her mistakes.
Mom apparently caused the break up of her first husband's marriage by becoming pregnant with Susan; missing birth certificate one. Dad then caused the break up of Mom's marriage by getting her pregnant with Ricky; missing birth certificate number two.

As a result, my older brother and sisters were tossed from their comfortable middle class home into the abject poverty that always follows beginning at square one. Even so, they loved my dad. I think that says a lot about who he really was. See, I wouldn't know because there was an incredible amount of friction in my mom's family and my dad bore both the brunt of their collective anger as well as all of the blame for the marriage break up. So he was always cast out of the circle and ridiculed for being the poorest brother in law.
He left for the last time when I was 10 and died of cancer when I was 14. So this day was dedicated to finding his elusive trail.
We started in Goodland Kansas, his birthplace on the prairie. I couldn't find any trace of him here. I remember being told that he was raised not by his parents but his aging grandparents and their extended family. A melancholy picture of him as a young boy shows him in black and white seated at a large picnic. He is the youngest by almost 60 years. And the saddest.

While the plains do hold a beauty of their own, only a prairie child can understand the need to get someplace
less open and exposed.

Goodland Kansas's claim to fame; the world's largest Van Gogh.
(which just happens to be my favorite painting)

These enormous grain bins are called the 'cathedrals of the plains'.

There was really nothing remarkable about this little town except, like its prairie cousins, it just rises above the flat land for no particular reason.  I was happy to be in a town that my dad had spent time in. Like a lot of prairie-raised children he got out of there as quickly as possible. 

He served a stint in the US Coast Guard which indicates his mindset fleeing the plains; he headed straight for the coast.
It was because of this time in his life that we found him just outside of Denver Colorado.

Thank goodness they didn't close the gates of this cemetery at dusk since we arrived in Denver long after dark.

This eerie shot does nothing to show the number of tombstones given to soldiers in every campaign the US has been involved in since the Civil War.

Richard LeRoy Ford 1931-1977

Section S; number 3253

As frequently happens in a blended family, my brothers and sisters are closer to the first family of my mom. We only met my dad's two children from a previous marriage once. I am linking this blog entry to my dad's name in the hope that someone conducting a web search will find this and contact me. Even though I spent the entire day looking for him I still have more questions than answers.