Susan Wagoner
“I was born 100 years too late,” he said. And thus begins your journey through the mind of Eddie McClendon.
Surrounded by nostalgic mementos that are the decor of the Conoco station, just over the bridge into Salina, he seems at home. A place he frequents. A place where he is comfortable. Then again, the world is comfortable to him it seems.
“Someone asked me one time if a man could know too much,” he said. “ I said sure. The more you know, the more there is to complicate.”
His eyes are knowing and kind. He spoke from a history he wasn’t old enough to know. Much.
One of 14 children, he began hunting old soda pop bottles at the age of 12.
“There was a lady that collected those bottles,” he said. “She paid me $1 a bottle.” His love for antiques took root and he bought his first antique at age 16. He surrounded himself with “old-timers” and listened to their stories, learning everything he could from them.
“Those old pieces of furniture,” he said. “There’s a story behind every piece.”
The man who built a new piece of furniture for his wife. The loving hands that formed and fixed the furnishing for his love, who was so happy to get it. These are the stories that taught McClendon a thing or two about life.
“That old primitive piece of furniture...the old guy built it for the wife because he loved her. Things were made to enjoy back then,” he said.
He easily reminisced about the times in the cotton fields with his father.
“I was in the cotton fields by the age of 6,” he remembered. “It was two cents a pound for cotton. Dad would drive folks to the fields so they could work.”
He remembered his father setting fishing lines in nearby streams at the beginning of each day.
“After we got done in the fields, he’d check those lines for dinner,” he recalled. “I try to teach my grandkids about those days.”
He recalled his great aunt who lived to be 95.
She remembered every little detail.
“She would say, you remember you were wearing yellow, the sky was darkened, it was this and that. She knew it all,” he said. “You’ve got so much crammed into your mind these days, it’s no wonder you can’t remember anything.”
McClendon taught himself to make Native American beadwork, handmade knives, then toy furniture.
He began to help a local Mennonite restore old wagon wheels and buggy wheels for no pay.
“I helped him so I could learn,” he said. The man told Eddie that he must have had a bunch of whippings because he “didn’t listen to nothing.”
“I listened, but did things the way I saw to do it,” he grinned.
Then the day came where he saw old man at the pumps with a doctor’s buggy in the back of his trailer.
“I asked him if it was for sale, he told me no,” he remembered. They ended up trading some merchandise, however.
“I traded a surrey for a 1919 Model T car. That got me messing with old vehicles. I turned it into a delivery wagon,” he said. Then an easy smile crept along his face and reached his eyes.
“The first day I drove it out on the road, I got stopped by the Highway Patrol,” he grinned. “I told him I worked on this car for three years. I just wanted to run it.”
He traded his way through to his current baby, a 1928 Model A Ford.
“Me and Mitch DeCamp over there at Locust Grove, we went through the rear end and the front end and tried to fix it,” he said. “If I told you how much trading I did just to get this truck where it is...”
The source of pride showed in his voice, finishing the sentence for him.
“When I die, they’ll put on my tombstone, ‘He was a trader, and he was a good one.’”
