The year was 1940. I was 5 years old. The Great Depression was just beginning to lose its grip on the world. The Second World War had not yet begun.
Independence “town fathers” decided it was time to have the belated centennial celebration that had been postponed in recent years. I believe they called it “Pioneer Days.”
The name “Santa-Cali-Gon” came much later, after a contest was held to find an appropriate name for the event.
Our family did not live in Independence, but many pioneer ancestors had lived here in earlier years and some of a younger generation remained. We lived in the Northeast Bottoms of Kansas City, but Mama wanted her children to have the experience of the excitement. She dressed three daughters in dresses sewn by her. We were 5, 4, and 3 years old. She took the 1-year-old daughter to a neighbor lady and exchanged her for the 5 year-old-son, Harold, who would accompany us.
We had no car, for Daddy had taken it to work, so we walked nearly a mile to the end of the carline and took the East Fifth Street bus to downtown Kansas City, where we transferred to a bus going to Independence.
The arrival at the Square was like being suddenly transported to another world and another time. Many women were dressed in long dresses and even sun bonnets. They reminded me of my country grandmother, born in 1865, so I was not frightened by them. They seemed kindly enough. But those men with beards and moustaches were scary to my sisters and me. Besides that, men without that shaggy hair on their faces were found and put into that wooden jail which had been set up on the northwest corner of the courthouse lawn.
As far as I was concerned, it was an overgrown outhouse, and intimidating to us girls. Those poor men could not get out of jail until they paid a fine, or some kind soul would bail them out.
We didn’t even want to go close to that “jail.” What if they put us in it? It was unsafe for any skin-chinned man to be found around the Square.
Mealtime came, and we were hungry. The festival food turned out to be more costly than Mama had estimated. She saw a man on the southwest corner of Main and Lexington who was selling bananas. It was fascinating to see the stalk with the hands still on it with the banana fingers pointing upward.
