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GORDON BETHEL
THE MAN WHO STARTED IT ALL
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A freak accident changed the life of a little boy by the name of Gordon Samuel Bethel. He was 8 years old. He lived with his family on a farm on the Kansas side of the line south of Pawnee City. On May 7, 1910, his father was crossing a bridge and it collapsed. He was killed instantly.
The family was left destitute, a mother and five fatherless children: William Paul, Harry, Gordon, Willis Robert, and Genevieve. Gordon’s mother Florence was a Table Rock girl; she had been a Goodell. She moved back to Table Rock, taking a house in Lower Town. Florence tried to support her family by serving meals and doing laundry for the railroad crews. The railroad was a big employer then, with steam locomotives to be cared for at the railroad round house, a section crew covering the area, and trains coming and going. When Gordon was in the sixth grade, he left school to bring in money that the family needed to survive. He worked for Charlie Kalina for three or four years. Charlie’s farm was north of Table Rock. Gordon next got a job building the power plant in Peru. Every Friday, he walked home to Table Rock to bring his wages to his mother so she would have enough to live on. Every Sunday afternoon, he walked back to Peru. His son Bob said, “I asked him what path he took. He said there were not many fences, so he took off cross country.” Eventually Gordon met an Elk Creek girl, Gertrude Ray, and married her in 1928. They took up farming on the old Andy Lock place northeast of Table Rock. One wrenching memory that Gordon passed on to his son Bob was about a tragedy common to farmers in the depression. In 1934, there was a big drought. Gordon. It would cost more to feed them than to sell them, if he could even find a market for them at all, and he couldn’t get enough corn, anyway. He dug a trench, and shot 400 of them and buried them there. He and Gertrude three young children to raise by then, the oldest of whom was only 4. With farming no longer a realistic option, Gordon bounced all over Table Rock and Pawnee City. He had a Sinclair gas station in Pawnee City. Then he went to a sheet metal school in Beatrice about a year before the war. In about 1942, Gordon and Gertrude went to Colorado to build B-17s at the Martin Bomber Plant. Gertrude was a riveter. She was very tiny so she could sit inside the wing; her partner used the rivet gun and inside she “bucked” the rivets tight. After the war, they returned to his gas station in Pawnee City. In 1948, his son Bob enlisted in the Navy at that station when a recruiter stopped for gas. After the gas station, Gordon had an implement business, selling Case tractors and machinery in Pawnee City. He then moved to Table Rock where he had a grocery store in the Odd Fellows building. Within a year-and-a-half of their getting the grocery store, Gertrude became ill. It was her heart, a mitral valve prolapse. She had an infection that had to be treated before she could undergo surgery. She died from an acute reaction to penicillin. It was 1954. She was only 44. Gordon married Minnie Fairbanks Strohm in 1955. He was 53, she was 48. He had three adult children, Betty, Bob, and Dona, aged 26 to 22. She had two from her first marriage to Ray Strohm, Carole and Stanley, aged 27 and about 20. In 1961, he bought the drugstore from Ines Madden, then a widow. He was always kind to children, and many of them, now with children and even great children, have fond memories of him behind the counter. In late 1965, Gordon brought together a band of residents to form the Table Rock Historical Society. It was incorporated in December of that year with 30 charter members. (With the recent passing of Harold Gottula, only two charter members are left, Milan Tomek of Table Rock, and Elsie Tomek of Pawnee City.) The first three museums opened in 1966, in a ceremony attended by the governor. The late Floyd Vrtiska remembered that Gordon “was crazy about old things.” Floyd said, “He knew my granddad, had worked for him. When he got all revved up about having a historical society he got hold of me and some other people and wanted to start it. Gordon was real active in those days, really gung ho.” Floyd said, “He started gathering up things. He went out and got farmers to give up there stuff. Gordon was a good friend of mine, and when he got all hepped up about finding more stuff, he wanted more help, so he got it from me. I went with him to talk with people. I had a truck and we always were going to get something you couldn’t haul in a car. Bigger stuff, too. We hauled a threshing machine in here, a corn sheller.” Son Bob remembered visiting when on leave. Gordon would “regale me with stories about how he had acquired this item or that for the museum. It meant a lot to him.” Gordon kept busy to the end of his life. His Minnie died in 1972 but he carried on. A 1976 newspaper article by Martha Senft featured Gordon, and mentioned him finding pleasure in leaving something worthwhile to posterity. He traveled. He liked dining and dancing. He passed away in 1981, having lived a long and eventful life full of gladness, grief, and accomplishments. |
Gordon (front left) aged about 12, with his mom and his four siblings, about five years after his dad was killed in a bridge collapse. By this time, Gordon had left school to work full time to earn money for the family. Front row: Gordon, Genevieve Bethel Minchow, and Willis. Back row: Harry, Paul William, and mom Florence
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