please update the book description Frankie Valen’s autobiography, “Chasing An Illusive Dream,” is a story that contains the drama and pathos that inspired the old cliché, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” This story of a pop-singer is about fame and the loss of it, separation from family and children, and a dramatic return to the Lord. “Frankie’s story is a story of rags to riches to rags that started back in 1967 but left him with an enduring celebrity status.” Linda Stinnett, Derby, KS Informer. This book will help give the reader his family history, and the story of the mistakes and accomplishments he made, and the incredible journey he took. His feelings of rejection at every turn, the constant fear of never being accepted or good enough to make a difference, and yet he experienced fame and fortune, later becoming a gospel recording artist, and traveling with his concert pianist wife Phyllis nationwide for over 18 years in a full-time music ministry. This book attempts to answer such questions such as: Is Frankie related to the famous Mallory/Duracell battery family? Is Frankie related to the singer Richie Valens? Was Daniel Boone Frankie’s cousin? Does Frankie share a grandmother with the famous Lucille Ball? What about Frankie being related to the Piper Cub airplane family? Because Frankie never became a major recording artist, it took years of hard work and dedication for him to try and become a household name. Frankie has decided to become very transparent in his desire to reveal his heart to his readers on every page.
Chasing An Illusive Dream
By Frankie ValensAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Frankie Valens
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4670-3637-5Contents
Introduction.................................................xiOne A Match Made In Heaven...................................1Two Rosedale.................................................9Three Washington Grade School................................19Four Ball Lane...............................................24Five Our Fontana Farm........................................51Six An Awful Gut Feeling.....................................61Seven Cap And Gown...........................................66Eight A Surprise Visit.......................................76Nine Who Else Is Leaving?....................................80Ten Giovani's Pizzaria.......................................88Eleven The Swanky Club.......................................95Twelve The Mallory Legacy....................................103Thirteen Dodging A Bullet....................................115Fourteen Disharmony..........................................127Fifteen Hollywood............................................134Sixteen The Horrific Journey.................................139Seventeen Mt. Freedom........................................143Eighteen Rockaway Sales......................................150Nineteen A White Bomb........................................158Twenty Fragile Glass.........................................161Twenty One An Arresting Experience...........................165Twenty Two Creating An Image.................................175Twenty Three Saskatchewan....................................179Twenty Four Showcased........................................185Twenty Five It Wasn't A Dream!...............................188Twenty Six A Chance Encounter................................193Twenty Seven I Was So Torn!..................................197Twenty Eight An Unexpected Knock.............................203Twenty Nine A Musical Heritage Destroyed.....................209Thirty A Show Band...........................................218Thirty One A Pretzel Tree....................................221Thirty Two Choosing To Quit..................................229Thirty Three A Premature Blessing............................234Thirty Four Mayday! Mayday!..................................239Thirty Five Adoption Rumors..................................244Thirty Six Showstopper.......................................248Thirty Seven Off To Jail.....................................258Thirty Eight A Gifted Lady...................................261Thirty Nine A Pastor Was Arrested............................267Forty The Tree Bark Carving..................................271Forty One A Temporary Auditor................................281Forty Two The Ultimate Testing...............................283Forty Three Expect The Unexpected............................286Forty Four A Ministry Was Born...............................294Forty Five The Red House.....................................302Forty Six In The Fullness Of Time............................309Forty Seven Rescued..........................................314Forty Eight Car Thief........................................319Forty Nine The Choo Choo That Could!.........................333Fifty Gone Are The Tears.....................................344Fifty One The Angel Was A Patrolman..........................349Fifty Two Lake Havasu........................................356Fifty Three Music Pastors....................................363Fifty Four On The Road Again.................................369Fifty Five Among The Stars...................................379Fifty Six A Carnival Cruise..................................384Fifty Seven Rick Skelton, Not Red!...........................388Fifty Eight Piano Joy........................................394Fifty Nine Our Duncan Days...................................399Sixty Our Stormy Entrance....................................414Sixy One We Stand In Awe.....................................418Sixty Two YMCA Of The Rockies................................424Sixty Three Those Chicken Days...............................426Sixty Four Magnanimous Year Of Events!.......................429Sixty Five Forced Retirement.................................442Sixty Six A Bumpy Year.......................................451Sixty Seven Collectanea Of Twenty Years......................461Sixty Eight Ministry Bouquets................................489Sixty Nine Hazel And The Butts Family........................496Seventy Julius's Family......................................507Seventy One The Giffler Family...............................543Seventy Two The Community Of Elk.............................559Seventy Three Flint Hills....................................566Seventy Four August And Mamie................................574Seventy Five Will And Goldie.................................589Seventy Six Giffler's Three Wives!...........................620Seventy Seven Where's The Butter?............................632Seventy Eight Jacob Berry's Life.............................640Seventy Nine Carl And Emma...................................643Eighty Buried Alive!.........................................647
Chapter One
A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN
My mother, Pauline Evelyn (Day) Piper, was born on November 29, 1921 in Junction City, Kansas and was raised there. She attended the same Washington Grade School I attended when my family lived there and I had gone to first grade. She is now 89 years old and lives with my brother Doug in Wellston, Oklahoma. My dad, Bernard (Bernie) Hobert Piper, was born on March 19, 1920 in Florence, Kansas. He lived in Florence most of his life except from about 1923 to 1930 when he and his family lived near Trenton, Nebraska. According to rumors in my family my dad was named after a horse that his mother saw while she was standing at her kitchen window in Florence, Kansas. His sister, Joan, only remembers them owning a donkey! Dad had been nicknamed Bernie. My dad, a retired pastor, died in his sleep at age 82. To think that I could have been nicknamed "Bernie!" I had enough trouble in school with kids calling me the Pied Piper or reciting Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, etc ...
Junction City and Florence, Kansas are about 59 miles apart and connected by highway 77. A town called Herington lies between these two towns, or 29 miles south of Junction City and 30 miles north of Florence. Herington is actually where my story begins.
My mother told me that she used to volunteer to do sewing for the NYA (National Youth Association) in Herington while she was in high school. Her mother and dad would drive her to Herington from Junction City and she would spend time sewing blankets and quilts for needy people and for the servicemen. Mom met a young lady there who was also a volunteer that lived in Florence. Her name was Bernadine Piper, and mom and Bernadine became the best of friends.
On many occasions when the two had free time after sewing most of the day, they would walk over to the local skating rink, snap on roller skates and have fun skating. I found out that this skating rink building had quite a history behind it. According to The Advertiser newspaper, in the Thursday, June 19, 1958 edition, there was an article about Arthur C. Kelch, the man who was responsible for the skating rink died of a heart ailment. According to this article Arthur and an Ernie Johnson started the J and K Grocery Store which was housed in the Wilson Building at the corner of Broadway and Day Streets in the 1930's. During 1946 he started a building program on South Fifth Street which housed his grocery store and skating rink where he ended up adding two more buildings as well. These were completed in 1947 when he opened Kelch's Drive-In Market. Arthur was born on September 19, 1890 at Erie, Kansas and came to Herington with his parents in 1906.
Arthur C. Kelch, age 67 and owner of Kelch's Drive-In Market, died Tuesday of a heart ailment at the Herington hospital where he had been a patient since May 30, 1958.
My dad, Bernard (Bernie), came to pick his sister Bernadine up at this skating rink to take her back home to Florence when Bernadine introduced my mother to her brother Bernard, or Bernie as most people called him. Mom was taken by dad's appearance with his jeans and white shirt, but was turned off because he had been drinking and was tipsy. Dad loved his beer. Many years later after dad died mom told us that dad had always had a drinking problem and at one time it almost cost him his life, and it was at that time that dad decided to turn his life over to the Lord. In May of 2011 I was told that the old skating rink building that had become a bar had burned to the ground! This is the very building that my mom and dad met in over 70 years ago.
Mom and dad dated long distance for about two years. When they decided to get married on January 3, 1942 mom met dad at his parents' home in Florence and the two of them left for Burns, a small town about eleven miles south of Florence. Dad's sister Bernadine and a friend Asa Yarhams followed behind to be mom and dad's witnesses for the wedding, and they met at the Methodist church parsonage in Burns to get married. This parsonage had been built in 1920, and is still there today. Bernadine and Asa drove back to Florence while mom and dad drove on down to El Dorado to spend their wedding night in a boarding house, which was about a 20 mile drive from Burns. Mom told me that the boarding house was rather dumpy looking.
After the wedding night the two of them drove back north to Florence to live with dad's parents. Mom told me that this home was in downtown Florence and had no electricity or running water, no inside restrooms, just an outdoor toilet. My second cousin Betty Criss, who now lives in El Dorado, Kansas, remembers visiting that home in downtown Florence when she was just a little girl. Her father, Fred Edward Piper, was my grandpa Will's brother.
The two of them lived with dad's parents for about three months when dad received a notice that he was being drafted into the army. Remember the Pearl Harbor attack? Some quick decisions had to be made because the army wanted dad to go into training at Camp Berkley in Abilene, Texas. World War II had broken out and many young men were being drafted.
Mom decided to move back to her parents' home in Junction City and dad was sent to Abilene, Texas for training. Mom was now pregnant with me at the time dad had to leave for Texas, and mom wanted to join dad in Abilene before he was shipped out. She told me she went to see him by bus before I was born and then one last time on a train after I was born. Dad was then shipped overseas to France. In France dad befriended an orphan girl and he tried to adopt her, but because of the war and the red tape involved, the adoption did not take place.
Mom was very reluctant about staying with her in-laws because she had already had firsthand experience with dad's sisters and brothers and how they would not accept her into their family easily. The only brother of dad that actually accepted mom as one of the Pipers was dad's brother Bobby, and of course Bernadine, mom's best friend. Bernadine had already married George Thomson and was not living at home, but Bobby still lived at home.
During the time my mom and dad were together in Abilene, Texas, it was later in 1942 when grandpa Will and grandma Goldie moved their family from Florence to a farm near Olathe for a short time and then to an upstairs apartment in Rosedale, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. I believe my grandparents wanted to move from Florence because in September 1941 water swept into Florence as the Cottonwood River went on a rampage, the worst in 35 years, and by October the river flooded for the third time in one year!
There was a lot of damage that was done to basements, buildings and the streets. The businesses had water standing from two to three feet deep, and very few homes escaped this horrible flooding. During the month of November, 1941 more rain fell, about 6.48 inches, bringing the year's total to 42.21 inches of rain. My grandparent's home in Florence sat right at the end of the block on Fifth Street at the river's edge. Their home must have suffered greatly with each flooding. Back then there was a bridge that spanned the river at Fifth. Today that bridge can only be accessed through another street. The street that bordered the river in front of my grandparent's home is gone and a large dike sits where the street used to be.
Then, on December 7, 1941—PEARL HARBOR! My parents were married that following January and within a few months my dad was drafted into the Army!
I wanted to know more about the town of Florence, Kansas because my dad was born there and spent most of his growing up years there, except for a few years when his parents had lived near Trenton, Nebraska from about 1923 to 1930. The town of Florence was formed in 1870 by Governor Samuel Crawford and was recorded as being a railroad community and the first town in Marion County to have a railroad in 1871. The town was named in honor of Governor Crawford's daughter, Florence, who later became the wife of Arthur Capper, the governor of Kansas from 1915-1919, and a Kansas Senator from 1919-1949. The town began to grow rapidly with groceries under tents, shops in the open air, a bank for loans from a shed, and families living in covered wagons.
Florence suffered its serious first attack in 1874 when grasshoppers plagued the plains. The insects covered the sky and land, destroying all vegetation. Then drought followed, destroying the remaining vegetation and causing a mass exodus of people from many Kansas communities. By 1875 prosperity and success came to Florence and the population numbered about 1,000. As the railroad grew, so did Florence. By 1883 an Opera House was built and opened with a gala and colorful affair in January, 1884. A water tower was built in 1887 by C. O. Johnson, a stone contractor, and water lines were laid in Florence. A large well was dug on the east side of the Cottonwood River at the end of Seventh Street. In the 1920s oil was discovered after two oil wells were drilled and the town grew from about 1,000 people to about 3,500 almost overnight.
Grandpa Will had been working on the railroad in Florence and was offered a position at the train depot terminal in Kansas City after his daughter Bernadine talked to one of the employees of a train she had been riding about her dad Will. My own dad told mom he wanted her to live with his family, so mom took a bus from Abilene, Texas to Kansas City to stay with dad's parents who had moved there in 1942.
I was born on November 7, 1942 as Bernard (Frankie) (Frank) Franklin Piper, in Kansas City, Kansas. Shortly after my birth, mom decided to join dad again in Abilene, Texas because he hadn't been shipped out yet. I had been sick with the flu, or as some called it back then, the summer complaints, with it's complications during our stay in Abilene and almost died. But mom does not regret going to Abilene because she knew that her husband would be gone for several years fighting in the war. Mom must have been a very strong and independent woman to travel the way she did on buses and trains, and not knowing whether her husband would even return alive from the war. Mom tells me that she wished she had stayed in Junction City with her own family during dad's stint in the army because she knew her own family loved her and would have taken care of her and her new baby son.
Chapter Two
ROSEDALE
Mom was now living with dad's parents, William (Will) Otto Julius Piper and Goldie Ellen (Mallory) Piper, in an upstairs apartment over a store-front business on the main street of Rosedale, KS. The name "Rosedale" was so named because of the hills and dales in that area that were covered with roses. Rosedale is a neighborhood in Kansas City and is located in the southeast corner of Wyandotte County and the Argentine neighborhood is to the west. Rosedale is the home of Rosedale World War 1 Memorial Arch, and the University of Kansas Medical Center, which was called the Bell Memorial Hospital when I was born there in 1942. My grandparent's apartment had a back entrance from the alley and outside wooden stairs to the second floor. Even though the apartment was located in town, grandpa was raising chickens in a fenced area in their back yard by the alley.
I can still remember playing in their back yard when a rooster got loose from the pen and started chasing me. My dad heard my frantic cries and came running to catch the rooster. The rooster had already attacked me and had me face down on the ground, pecking at my head. I was quite young and in diapers. Dad ended up killing that rooster and the family ate him for dinner.
There was another time at this upstairs apartment that my mom, Aunt Bernadine and Grandma Piper were in grandma's kitchen peeling potatoes. Aunt Bernadine's oldest daughter, Kathy and I were still in diapers and were playing under the kitchen table. At one point mom looked under the table to see how we were doing and mom asked grandma where Kathy and I had gotten a sweet potato to eat, and grandma told mom that she didn't have any sweet potatoes. They realized that I had found what rolled out of my diaper and was taking a bite and handing it to my cousin Kathy! Oh, the sweet innocence of babyhood.
Aunt Bernadine and Uncle George Thomson used to own a two-story house right in Rosedale. Mom stayed with them for a while and enrolled me in the Whitmore Grade School in a kindergarten class only a block away. I was only four years of age. The school wanted me to start early because my birthday would fall in November of that year and I would be five. I can still remember the lunches mom prepared for me in a paper bag for school. Aunt Bernadine would throw in a banana, which was quite a treat for me, since I don't remember my mother ever buying any bananas for us before. As a treat I do remember that we often had apples.
The living here and living there with family members of dad's must have been very hard on mom. But, almost three years later, dad came home from serving in World War II and they found an apartment to live in there in Rosedale. Dad found a job working for the Louis Shutte and Sons Lumber Company in Rosedale, and he kept that job till we moved away from the Kansas City area several years later. He had eventually become their lumber yard foreman.
Across from this lumber yard where dad worked was a row of houses. The first home as you entered onto the street from across the tracks was a two-story home owned by two women who laughed and giggled a lot, and who rented the upstairs apartment to my mom and dad. The entrance to the apartment was from the front door of the house that led into an entry way. The stairs were located to the left, against the wall, and they led straight up to a small landing and curved around to the right, and the stairs seemed to disappear into the ceiling.
It was in this upstairs apartment that I remember waking up during the night and headed towards mom and dad's bedroom where they always left their door open. As I approached the open doorway in the dark, my eyes started focusing on a bright shiny object over on the left in an open closet in their bedroom where coats and clothing usually hung. I could not take my eyes off that shiny object that had an ugly face imprinted on it that seemed to be angry looking. What gave that glow to the shiny object must have come from an open curtained window where the moon or a streetlight was shining in, but at the time the only thought I can remember was that the shiny object made me afraid and apprehensive to even take another step. I stopped dead in my tracks right there at the entry way and started to cry when mom heard me crying and came to rescue me. The shiny object was just a fancy broach attached to one of mom's coats! She was always so good about hearing me during the night if I cried out or called for her.
I can still recall playing outdoors in front of this home. There was a sidewalk in front of this row of homes but the streets were just dirt and gravel. It was a dead-end street that ended at the Turkey Creek on the south end of our street. The lumber company was situated on the east side of the street and took up most of that area. Then there was what we called the `swinging bridge' at the end of our street that led across the creek to homes on the other side on a hill which was not visible because of the trees. I was never allowed to cross that 'swinging' bridge for fear of falling off of it into the Turkey Creek.
Many times I remember watching neighborhood girls playing jump rope in the street. Now I know that they were the Hamon girls just down the block, and they lived in the only other two story house on this block. I must have been only four or five years of age at the time when I kissed Wilma, one of those Hamon girls. Later in life I found out that she married my cousin Eddie, from my mother's side of the family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chasing An Illusive Dreamby Frankie Valens Copyright © 2011 by Frankie Valens. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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