May 3, 2018
This is “Our Past Is Present” from the Geary County Historical Society.
The information
being shared today comes from Carlo D’Este’s work titled Patton: A Genius
for War (Harper Perennial, 1996, pages 146-147 and is about the George
Patton’s first stay at Fort Riley in 1913 and 1914.) From an historical perspective, this is
about the same time the Pinaire house at 623 S. Adams was built and referred to
in yesterday’s script heard on this program.
“George and
Beatrice Patton had been married for only a few years when they moved to Fort
Riley. Even tough George was enjoying his experiences at the Mounted Service
School, Beatrice a Boston aristocrat, was having a difficult time adjusting to
being an Army wife out on the plains.
With so
little to stimulate her active imagination and equally little of common
interest to share with her husband, Beatrice began again to question seriously
if she was cut out to be an army wife.
She had virtually nothing in common with the other wives. Many of them were southerners and seemed snobbish
to the servant class.
Nevertheless,
Beatrice always referred to her experience at Fort Riley as her “waking up”
period. This was a time when she
reasserted her identity and accepted the reality that she was married to a
career officer and there would be many more Fort Rileys in their immediate
future. It was when she discovered she
was not standing on the lone prairie in the Middle West, but on the shores of a
dead sea in which millions of years had gone dry that she ordered and received
books about American marine fossils.
Beatrice became so interested in the geology of this area that she felt
an entire new world had opened up for her and it gave her a renewed spirit in
which she felt very much at home in the company of the Army wives.”
And that is
today’s story on “Our Past IS Present” from the Geary County Historical Society.
No comments:
Post a Comment