In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 4 38 In the spring of 1948 when my grandfather was killed in his prison , the Lyons family plot was full, so they buried him down a long slope in Mt. Calvary’s old section. Alone much of his life, he lies alone in eternity. Some years later as a young boy, my cousin Rick Neumann would join his family for visits to the cemetery on Decoration Day. “We’d leave flowers, and I’d ask my dad, ‘Who was James Lyons? Why is he over here all by himself?’ My dad always said he couldn’t remember or he didn’t really know. Or he didn’t want to tell. They were a very old-fashioned family. Some things were not spoken.” Even in his newspaper obituary the family tried to hide the truth. Just as they had for his brother Joseph Jr., they said my grandfather had died at home. But maybe that is true, I thought. He lived the last of his life drifting on the streets of Kansas City, pretty much homeless . In the city jail he would have had a bed and sheets, and a warm meal. Even in solitary confinement, if nothing else he had four walls around him and the spare mattress. Home was where he laid his head, crouched up against the winter wind or lying sweating in the morning sun. James Lyons followed his father into the rail yards and the packinghouses . He butchered meat, and he later moved to the Missouri side of Kansas City and pushed a broom at that Menorah Hospital . He hired himself out as a common laborer. Somewhere along the way he sold beer or peanuts at the baseball game. He went through girlfriends and wives about as frequently as hangovers. He and Helen had two children, Edythe Ruth and Joseph. When he left Helen, she put Edythe up for adoption, but Helen continued to care for the boy, long suffering from seizures and cerebral palsy. He never saw them again. 39 My Grandfather’s Prison Edythe Ruth was renamed Barbara, and in the mid-1990s she contacted our family for the first time. She showed me a copy of her original birth certificate. It noted that even at her birth James Lyons was already separated from his first wife. He was identified as “James Pat Lyons.” He was living back at home with his parents in Kansas City, Kansas. But he was working, the document said; in fact, it stated he had worked for six years as a meat cutter in one of the city’s packinghouses. She called us because like my mother, who was deceased by then, she wanted to know something of their father. Who was he? It turned out that what she had been told about James Lyons and passed on to me was far wide of the mark. “He was an alcoholic, I guess, and died in a jail falling out of his bunk,” she said she had been told. “Hit his head, I heard.” I tried to contact Barbara recently, to tell her the truth as I now know it, to tell her there was no prison bunk and no falling to the floor. But I was too late in reaching her; Barbara had died in 2002. After leaving Barbara’s mother, James Lyons met my grandmother . Their marriage in November 1930 produced two children. Mary Elizabeth Lyons, my mother, was born in September 1931. They lived on East Seventh Street in the city’s Northeast section, the apartment building long gone now. My mother had told me she was born at home. In fact, she said, she was born on the kitchen table. I thought that was odd. But on a trip to the Missouri state capital in Jefferson City I obtained a copy of her birth certificate, and sure enough she was right—about being born at home anyway. The document also noted that James R. Lyons (they had his middle initial wrong) had worked the last three months as a janitor at the National Bellas Hess building. He must have gotten that job through his mother-in-law, Rose Toelle Norman. She worked there for years as a telephone switchboard operator . The warehouse was built in 1913 in North Kansas City, situated just over the Missouri River amid that area’s grain elevators and railroad switching yards. It was a catalog and retail operation, nine stories of hardwood floors on Armour Road where merchandise was...

Share