My parents dropped out of Shawnee Mission East when they had me. My dad was 17, my mom 18. They married, and my dad eventually took a job at Boeing in Wichita, then Seattle, before they moved back to Prairie Village when I was 6. When I was a kid, he managed the Prairie Village Standard gas station at 68th and Mission, working 60 hours a week and often more to provide for our family. A smart and driven man, he eventually returned to Boeing, where he had a successful career in field services.
After their divorce, my mom, a remarkable woman in her own right and one of my heroes, married a carpenter. He was a great guy when he wasn’t drinking. We moved out to Blue Valley. By my junior year of high school, they had divorced too, leaving my mom to raise three kids on her own. She did it heroically, by sheer will. At one point we lost everything to bankruptcy and moved into an abandoned farmhouse that members of our church helped make habitable. After we moved out my senior year, the fire department burned it down for practice. We moved seven times in six years.
My wife LaVon and I married the week after high school graduation and went off to college. For the first eight years of our marriage, we lived paycheck to paycheck…