Raymond Kelley Interview, Including History of POWs

I'm Raymond Kelly. My great-grandfather, Jesse Ashton, and his brother, Barnett, came from Indiana right after the Civil War. But they had heard that there was some good land out in this area, and so they started heading west. They got as far as Lincoln, and they needed to get some more money to keep moving, so they stopped and helped haul stone for the penitentiary when it was built. Then they came on west, and they got here. There was no other settlers here at that time, but they found some land here on the Beaver Creek, about two miles west of here, and that's where they settled then. And anyway, they were... some of the people that they had been in contact with back in Indiana started coming and joining them, so some of them were relatives. But anyway, the closest mail would be like in Indianola, or further away, so they decided they wanted to have a mail service here. And then, of course, they had to have a town name, and my great-grandfather had some land over south of the Beaver [Creek] that had cedar trees on it, and he thought that the [name] Cedarville would be appropriate. But Carol got some information that there was already a Saunders County, or there was a Cedarville, so the other fellow was from Danbury, Connecticut. So that's how it became Danbury. But anyway, the original town of Danbury was out about two miles west, and my wife and I lived on that farm after we came back from the Air Force. But anyway... what was I going to say?

Anyway, they started the town, and then when the railroad came through, why, then they needed to have, when they called it Danbury Station down here, and then they decided to move the mail service down here and make it the town Danbury. So that's how it got to its present location. So, but anyway, my grandmother was born on the original homestead, and my wife, Viola, and I lived there after we came back from the service. And we lived in the... just crossed the road for about seven years, and then the place where we now live came up for sale, and we were able to get the land then that my great-grandfather had, so. But anyway, so, and my wife and I lived there for 52 years, and raised a family there. And our oldest son is Carol's husband. He was born over in Okinawa when I was in the Air Force over there. Anyway, the way I got into the Air Force was going, when I went to the University of Nebraska, why, I wanted to, at that time, why the Korean War was on, and anybody, any of the guys that came there had to have a physical, and anyone that passed the physical was eligible for the draft. But if they was to join the ROTC, the Army, Navy, or Air Force, why, then you could have classes, and you wouldn't be, have to go until, until you completed that training, which I did. And then in 1955, I graduated from the University, which as a... and I was given a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Air Force at graduation, so that started my... Of course, I'd been in the ROTC for four years, too. Actually, the Korean War was over at the time that I was a junior, but I was qualified for pilot training, and I wanted to do that, so that's how I happened to get into the Air Force. And then I heard of the F-100, which is called the Super Sabre, the F-86 was the North American airplane that was famous in the Korean War, fighting the Russian MiGs. It was called the Sabre jet, made by North America. And then after the Korean War, why, they wanted to have a supersonic plane that was supersonic in level flights, and they, that's when they built the F-100, and they called it the Super Sabre.

Uh-huh, there was one, yeah.

I was probably seven or eight years old at that time, and my grandfather was a farmer, and he hired some of those German prisoners to come over to help chop feed. And so I remember that time, and I remember I had a little .22 rifle single shot. Anyway, I had that with me. I was out there in the field, and one of the German soldiers wanted to see that. And anyway, the guard checked to make sure that the shell was out, and then he let him look at it.

They used to come and get them from Indianola and Atlanta both and bring them to McCook to work. My mother-in-law's dad had a farm, and they did potatoes and things, and they would bring the German prisoners to dig potatoes and different things in McCook. And they'd stay for like two nights, and then they'd take them back after that, which was, I thought, kind of interesting. They kept in touch with several of them after they went back.

I'd also heard that a lot of them wanted to stay here, so even, you know, after the war was over, they ended up back staying in the States. They liked the time they spent here, which is unusual for prisoners of war. But that's how some of them felt, I guess.

I know my grandmother provided the dinner for the prisoners when they were over doing their work, and my grandmother had a reputation for being a good cook, and when the farmers would get together at harvest time, they'd harvest, and she had a reputation of being a good cook. But anyway, my mother passed away when I was five, and so her folks, my grandparents, took over my life, and I was lucky to have them bring me up all the way from five years old, until the time I graduated from college and got married. But anyway, I have a lot of stories that got in the book that Carol asked me to have written that story with, and I've got stories about them in that book. But anyway, by living with them, I heard a lot of stories that the rest of my family, of my age, didn't know until I wrote the stories in the book.