My father had an unusual life in that he was the orphan of an orphan. He often mentioned that he was proud that he had been the one to break that cycle of orphanages and was able to keep his family together.
I begin this story with a short history of my father’s father. Raymond Oliver Fredrick Henderson (King Henderson’s father and Robert Henderson’s Grandfather) was the oldest of four children, and was eleven when his mother died. Raymond and his brother John Victor were sent to the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran orphanage in Stanton Town, Montgomery, Iowa, at the ages of 12 and 6, respectively. The boys attended the Mamrelund Lutheran Church there, and Raymond was confirmed in 1897. Raymond moved to Omaha, NE when he was released from the orphanage and went to work at the Adams & Kelly sash & door factory as a Boiler Fireman earning $15 a week.
On May 15th, 1915 Raymond married Leila Irene Mason. Raymond was the pastor of the “Seventh Day Church of God,” and Leila Irene (Mason) Henderson, his wife, and sister to Nelson Mason, was a trained nurse who cared for the local Chief of Police, Chaunce Wilson. Nelson Mason, Leila's brother, was the secretary to the Governor of North Dakota.
When the Governor was elected to the United States Senate, Nelson went to Washington with him and stayed for the next ten years.
Raymond and Leila lived in Omaha Nebraska, and it appears that Leila gave birth to all of her children there, without the benefit of hospitals and nurses. Paul was born in 1916, Mark in 1920, Eleanor in 1921, Ralph in 1925, William in 1927, and King in 1918. King was born in the Seventh Day Church of God presided over by his father Raymond Henderson, on the corner of 17th and Cuming Street in Omaha Nebraska. The family lived in the back of the church until it was razed for a new Ford sales facility in 1924. At that time the family moved to an old house across from a Jewish synagogue, and Leila and the kids started attending a nearby Methodist church.
Since Raymond was a minister of the Seventh Day Church of God, it did not sit well with him for his children to be attending the Methodist church and it became a point of contention between Raymond and Leila.
The family did not stay in the old house very long. They soon moved to a flat across from the Bekins moving and storage warehouse a few blocks away. One day in 1924, Leila put King and Paul on a train and shipped them to a town in Iowa. King remembers that when they arrived, the station manager called a local grocery store owner who came to pick them up. The storeowner was surprised to see them, but let them stay in the back of the store for the day. In the evening he took them back to Omaha and dropped them off at their home without even stopping in to announce himself. The boys were 5 and 7 at the time and do not recall who the storeowner was, or why they were sent there.
Trouble continued between Raymond and Leila, so she packed up the kids, put all their belongings in a baby buggy, and the entire troupe walked across the river, from Omaha Nebraska to Council Bluffs Iowa. King remembers that they stayed there long enough to be enrolled in a large school, but before long the authorities (police) from Omaha picked them up and returned them to Omaha. On the way, they stopped at an institution and forcibly separated Leila from the kids and left her there. King remembers kicking the officers and trying to help his mom, but it was all to no avail. In 1926, Raymond had his wife committed to an asylum when her oldest child was only ten and my father was only eight. It was a husband’s prerogative in those days, on his word alone, to have a wife committed and all the efforts of her brother, Nelson, could not get her released. Leila spent the remainder of her life in an institution. The kids did not see their mother again for over 25 years.
Sadly, and for unknown reasons, Raymond followed in the footsteps of his father. The children were returned to him but he was unable or unwilling to care for them and after about a year Mr. Andrew Duggar, the leader of the Seventh Day Church of God, made arrangements for all the children to be “farmed out” to various church members. The 3 oldest children (Paul (10), King (8), and Mark (6) were sent to live with farmers in South Dakota (King lived with the Adam Straub family, whose cousins he amazingly and coincidentally met in Germany right after the end of World War II) and the other three Eleanor (5), Ralph (2), and William (1) were sent to Bassett Nebraska to live with a family named Carpenter, Seeley and Clara. I never met my grandfather and don't know much more about Raymond except that he passed away on the 31st of January 1965 due to a heart attack caused by cancer.
Next: Leaving The Farm
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