High School Senior Picture of Bill Welton

It was a treat to get over to my parents’ home this afternoon to celebrate July 4th. Joined by my two nephews, Brett and Grant, we were given the gift of a traditional Independence Day feast by mom and dad: Church’s Chicken chicken fingers, potato salad, baked beans, corn on the cob- and let us not forget the radishes. And we reached the top of the mountain with the chocolate satin pie chaser.

Eating outside under blue skies contending with monsoon thunderheads mulling around Sandia peak, it was a wonderful meal and time together.

Following lunch, Dad and I talked a bit about his big task of late- going through belongings of his sister’s, one box at a time, and the things he was finding as he sorted stuff, some for keeping, or for sale, or for the trash bin.

He mentioned she had among her boxed possessions quite a few old books, many that had been handed down to her from aunts and uncles.

And he reminded me a little bit about his dad’s background.

Of the five siblings in his family, dad’s father was the only one who did not go to college.

Granddad graduated from high school in 1929, and was thrown into the Great Depression.

His career would have to be made some other way, and so a young man, Granddad just worked doing what he could in his home town of Fairview, Kansas.

Some time after high school, a local man wanted to show movies on an outside wall of a building in his lumber yard- and my granddad said he could run the projector.

In time, Granddad was no longer a part time drive-in projectionist, but a manager of small theaters in the Fox Midwest chain, first in Dodge City, and then overseeing the theater in Salina, and later, the Burford Theater in Arkansas City- the town in which my parents grew up.

Many of my parents’ friends in high school worked for Granddad at one time or another at the Burford, and the general consensus among them was that they were kind of afraid of him at first because he was very interested in knowing if they would work reliably for him, and do things right. And when they did, he became their ardent ally.

Bill Welton spent most all of his career bringing movies and entertainment to the communities that he lived in.