Dad’s gift of a Mickey Mouse sled a cherished memory

Leaning against the brick front of our fireplace is an old sled, festooned with Mickey Mouse’s name and his well-preserved image.

How the sled came to be mine is a Christmas tale that has likely grown in proportion over the years.

When I was born July 29, 1943 at old St. John’s Hospital east of Iola, Dad was at an Army post in Louisiana, preparing to ship out for North Africa to fight Germany’s Afrika Korps, led by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

Halfway across the Atlantic, Rommel’s threat had evaporated, and the convoy was rerouted to England to await the D-Day invasion.

Before he left the U.S., Dad was given a week’s leave in early September to get his first glimpse of me in a visit to Humboldt, where Mom and I were staying with her parents, Sherman and Ada Oliphant.

While in Europe he included notes to me in letters to Mom. I still have them: “Be a big boy and take care of mom,” was a typical message, though I was barely 2.

In the fall of 1945, with the war in Europe over and the curtain down in the Pacific Theater, Dad boarded the SS Bardstown, a victory ship, at the French port of Marseille. His discharge came at Fort Leavenworth. Later that day Mom and I, ferried by her dear friends Zeda and Marvin Wellcome, met Dad at Durand, a whistle-stop depot east of Yates Center.

To this day I remember sitting on his lap on the way home.

We all continued to live in one house on Mulberry Street — sister Jenelle, who arrived in 1950, still does — and depended on an old Model A, with the rumble seat removed in favor of a large wooden box to carry things, until my parents bought a shiny new Ford in 1949.

My other grandparents, Roy and Margaret Johnson, lived in Iola. Visits were by passenger train, an easy task since two trains traveled each way daily, stopping in Humboldt and Iola to take passengers, mail, and, in Iola, to drop off five-gallon cans of cream for processing at the Pet Milk plant. Once in Iola we’d walk half a mile from the Santa Fe depot to their home on North Chestnut, often through downtown for a little window-shopping.

That Christmas of 1945, a few gifts bearing my name began to materialize under our tree, a cedar cut from a field a couple of miles east of town. One present was a large colorful tin truck, which I still have today, now on a shelf in “my” room.

On Christmas morning the Mickey Mouse sled — probably purchased at The Grange, a Humboldt hardware store — was sitting next to the tree.

With a few inches of snow on the ground, Mom wrapped me in a heavy coat with a little wool hood that covered most my face and off we went, Dad pulling me on the sled.

OTHER GIFTS of later years — a Lionel train set, a new bicycle — are also embedded in my memory, but that sled and the toy truck are ones that I remember most dearly probably because they were the first gifts from Dad after missing well over the first two years of my life.

So, folks, when on the search for Christmas gifts over the next few weeks, think of ones that will be lasting expressions of love, and not just opportunities to mark off another person’s name on your shopping list.

Those are the ones that will resonate for years to come.