Rimsie McConiga
Special to the Citizen
Wayne Adkins has been attending his family reunions for nine decades, though his first reunion memories are a little fuzzy since he was still in his mother’s womb.
The lifelong farmer, 92, and his wife Nigel have been participating in the Adkins family reunions for 64 years straight.
Wayne and Nigel Adkins
“Normally 25 or 30 people come to the reunions,” Wayne said. “There was a time when you didn’t have these paved roads and you just had dirt roads and you only met your families when they came to the reunions because it was hard to get around. In the past we’ve had 60 to 65 people at the reunions.”
Nothing ever stopped Adkins from spending time with his extended family on these special occasions. He even took leave when he was in the military to join his loved ones at their annual reunions.
Nigel’s first impression attending a reunion was that there were a whole lot of people that she hadn’t met.
“When I started going they had it in Hyde Park in St. Joseph,” Nigel said. “When it first started Wayne’s great-grandfather’s birthday was the last Tuesday in August, so they decided to have the reunions on the Sunday after his birthday. They always liked to tell me that the reunions were the Sunday after the last Tuesday — which is actually the last Sunday.”
The reunions have taken place in a couple of parks in St. Joseph and other locations in Missouri but being scheduled for the last Sunday in August became a deterrent for many because of the intense heat.
“They were in beautiful parks but as people got older they wouldn’t come and sit in the hot weather,” Nigel said. “When our children were older and had children of their own there were only a few people there because it was so hot. Finally one family member asked, ‘Is it written in stone somewhere that we have to have this in August outside?’ I finally told Wayne it was ridiculous and if we would have it in someone’s home more people would come probably. That’s when our son told us we could have it at his house in Camden Point, which we had lived in for 42 years before we moved to Dearborn. He’s a farmer and it was just too much work for him so we moved it to Gower Park. This year we had it in Frazier in a big home.”
Wayne has been the oldest person at the reunions for several years. Extended family members come from so many different locations that a lot of them Nigel and Wayne don’t know, so everyone at the reunions now is asked to introduce themselves.
Wayne’s family had moved to Edgerton from Kentucky where they raised tobacco. The reunions provide an opportunity to retell favorite family stories while giving young members of the family the chance to hear the colorful tales for the first time.
“One of Wayne’s uncles was struggling along with everybody else during the (Great) Depression and they were starving to death,” Nigel said. “So they went to the Ozarks to harvest and saw logs, so he wrote a note back to another brother, Wayne’s grandfather, and said, ‘Why don’t you come down and starve with the rest of us?’ In the Ozarks, Wayne’s grandmother had saved her money from selling eggs and bought a wagon and two horses and told his grandfather that she was moving back up to Dearborn and if he wanted to come along he was welcome to come too. So they came back up here.”
One of Wayne’s most vivid reunion memories when he was young was watching one of his second cousins, a little girl who had been born without hands. “I would worry about her because she’d run and try to get on the merry-go-round and I was afraid that she would fall,” Wayne said. “But she never did and she would so enjoy her picnic lunch. She used her feet as hands to eat.”
The Adkins family came from Kentucky and settled in the Edgerton area and raised tobacco.
One of the most harrowing family stories happened when Wayne’s uncle was on a wagon loaded with hay decades ago.
“He went to slide down off the wagon to get on the ground and slid down onto a pitchfork and ripped his stomach wide open,” Wayne said. “How the man ever lived nobody ever knew. He got gangrene. They didn’t go to the hospital back then. A doctor from Dearborn told him they couldn’t do anything for him and they just left him at his home. They thought he would die but he didn’t and lived to be an old man and kept raising tobacco.”
When Wayne was a child he says he went to the reunions because there was so much good food and lots of people made pies and homemade cakes.
“Wayne’s mother was a really good cook and made coconut cream and banana cream pies,” Nigel said. “I saw her making a pie and she wasn’t putting milk in it, she was using water. I asked why she wasn’t using milk and she said it was so hot at the reunions she was afraid somebody would get sick if she used milk. But the pies were delicious.”
Nigel said she’s only an adequate cook, not a fancy cook, but that Wayne once told her that she made better pies than his mother.
“He probably just said that so he could get more pies,” Nigel said.
Wayne’s favorite memories of the reunions include when he was young and he would make a trip to a creamery near the park in St. Joseph to stock up on ice cream in large metal containers to take to the reunion, where he served ice cream cones. His son carried on the tradition by inventing an ice cream maker with a Maytag motor.
Wayne and Nigel have three children, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
“When the kids were small they all had matching outfits for the reunions,” Nigel said. “Wayne and our son had matching shirts and the girls and I had matching dresses. That way everybody at the reunion knew our family.”
The reunions were very special to the families. Wayne said back then kids and their families mostly just went to church and Sunday school and didn’t do many other things. Reunion day was a chance to catch up with loved ones and share big picnic basket lunches.
Wayne still looks forward to spending time on reunion day with his extended family and talking about old times — and the pie is still one of his favorite parts.