His funeral was well attended. Nice sprinkling of former students. On display were some of his paintings. He was very accomplished as a painter and I don't think many outside the family knew that.
A granddaughter read from his memoirs a story of embarassment he told on himself. To paraphrase; After he graduated Kiowa High he worked as a teller in the local bank and then left for K-State when the school year began. When he arrived he joined all the other male students in mandatory ROTC and became proficent at the manual of arms with the First World War rifle he was issued. The next summer he returned to work at the bank. One morning two young ladies who also worked there fell to bickering. He became so annoyed he stepped into the open vault where a rifle, like that he had trained with at K-State, was kept to deter robbers. He admonished the girls to cease their bickering and to distract them began to demonstrate the manual of arms in the doorway of the vault. Reaching the command,"Inspection Arms", he snappily opened the bolt, inclined his head to see that there was no cartridge in the chamber, slapped the bolt closed and, just as he had been trained, snapped the trigger. Well, what he'd missed was that, though the chamber was empty when he looked, the magazine was loaded and in closing the bolt he had seated a round home. The trigger snapped, the rifle fired and our young hero was both deafened and completely befuddled as to what ever could have happened. The brickwork in the vault, the concrete behind that and, finally, the sheet steel exterior all were the worse for wear though the girls did stop bickering. He was of course mortified beyond words. Someone eventually retrieved the spent bullet from its partial penetration of the steel exterior and gave it to him as a souvenir.
This episode sat with him all his life and on the occasion of his 45th high school reunion he returned to Kiowa, walked in to the local soda shop and found sitting there the two girls from the story. They saw him enter and one said to the shop in general, "Well, look. It's One-Shot Johnny."
L Russ Wilcox
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/cjonline/obituary.aspx?n=john-merryman&pid=158979828#fbLoggedOut
Mike Powell
His funeral was well attended. Nice sprinkling of former students. On display were some of his paintings. He was very accomplished as a painter and I don't think many outside the family knew that.
A granddaughter read from his memoirs a story of embarassment he told on himself. To paraphrase; After he graduated Kiowa High he worked as a teller in the local bank and then left for K-State when the school year began. When he arrived he joined all the other male students in mandatory ROTC and became proficent at the manual of arms with the First World War rifle he was issued. The next summer he returned to work at the bank. One morning two young ladies who also worked there fell to bickering. He became so annoyed he stepped into the open vault where a rifle, like that he had trained with at K-State, was kept to deter robbers. He admonished the girls to cease their bickering and to distract them began to demonstrate the manual of arms in the doorway of the vault. Reaching the command,"Inspection Arms", he snappily opened the bolt, inclined his head to see that there was no cartridge in the chamber, slapped the bolt closed and, just as he had been trained, snapped the trigger. Well, what he'd missed was that, though the chamber was empty when he looked, the magazine was loaded and in closing the bolt he had seated a round home. The trigger snapped, the rifle fired and our young hero was both deafened and completely befuddled as to what ever could have happened. The brickwork in the vault, the concrete behind that and, finally, the sheet steel exterior all were the worse for wear though the girls did stop bickering. He was of course mortified beyond words. Someone eventually retrieved the spent bullet from its partial penetration of the steel exterior and gave it to him as a souvenir.
This episode sat with him all his life and on the occasion of his 45th high school reunion he returned to Kiowa, walked in to the local soda shop and found sitting there the two girls from the story. They saw him enter and one said to the shop in general, "Well, look. It's One-Shot Johnny."
Not a bad story to tell on yourself