Frank Spencer was not Frank Spencer

Frank Spencer was not Frank Spencer.....hehe.  My Dad was born in a farmhouse (that's where his mom was and he wanted to be close to her.), outside of DeKalb, Missouri which is just outside of Saint Joseph, Missouri.  Well, sort of anyway, I thought I knew that DeKalb was just to the northeast of St Jo....however according to Google Earth, there are 2 Dekalb, Missouri's, one is to the northeast of St Jo, and one just south of the city....sigh.

When Dad was born in 1912 it was spring planting time so Grampa Spencer was quite busy and it took a few days for him to get around to sending one of Dad's uncles to St Jo to record the birth....1 each, boy...named Frank Tyrell Spencer except the uncle got it wrong and the certificate said Tyrell Frank Spencer.  Actually, that is kind of par for the course for my family....Grampa Spencer was Benjamin Franklin Spencer.....who was know all of his life as Tom Spencer!   ???????

Dad had one older sister then two younger brothers and a baby sister.  The older sister (whose name I will look up) was killed in an accident at the age of 12.  The only time Dad ever talked about it to me, he said something about some boxes fell on her.  

Dad said his earliest memory was (and it stayed with him, his entire life) was when he was a toddler, running across a plowed field, holding onto his mothers hand and his sister runing with them, looking back he saw their house burning!

The outcome of that was the family selling the land, and loading their few remaining possessions into a boxcar and riding in the boxcar  all the way to Colorado.  Gramps set them up in a small town in the Colorado Rockies and worked for a short time in the mining industry, before moving back down to the flatlands of eastern Colorado. 

I'm not really sure about the chronological order but over the next 30 some odd years they lived in Ordway, Rocky Ford, Las Animas and La Junta Colorado.   I'm pretty sure that La Junta was the last one that they lived in as I believe that Vanita (the baby of the family) was born there.
Grampa Spencer was a farmer for a lot of those years, but also had some other jobs. Dad was able to go to school until he was  12.  Going to school, dad was still working on the farm, just as most kids of that time did.  He was able to play sports for a few years and played both baseball and  football for his school which helped give him his lifelong love of sports.
In 1924 when he was 12 times were very hard for the dirt farmers in the great plains.  So dropping out of school he went to work driving a mule team hauling gravel for a construction project for the government.  He did this while still working on the farm in all his free times.
After a few years of this, he got a job working for the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad.  His job was putting ice blocks in the old refrigerator cars that came thru the yard.  This involved standing on top of the freight car in all weather and lifting. 50 to 100 pound blocks of ice off of a conveyer belt and putting them into the car through a hole on the roof.
After a few years of this he got another job with the railroad, working on the telegraph and telephone wires that the company had.
I'm not really sure how long he worked for the railroad, but at sometime in the late 20s and early 30s he drove a car from the La Junta area to Trinidad carrying bootleg booze... I understand that this was at least a semi-regular job for him.
I'm very hazy on what happened throughout the 30s as Dad was quite reticent