Sybil Bruncheon's "STRANGE....but TRUE!!!"........

....It was extremely hard right after the Crash to raise children in the dust bowl areas of the prairie states stretching from Illinois straight through the wide plains of Kansas and Nebraska and off to the flat lands of the Colorado border... Texas and Oklahoma were particularly hard hit, and that's why on December 13th, 1935 it was considered both a blessing and a curse that twins were born to Cyrus and Vera Mil-Anne Krumphagen in a two room sod lean-to in Bland Precipice, Arkansas. Locals had traveled as far as 112 miles to see the twins who had been delivered amidst great whispering, rumors, and muffled shrieks by onlookers. Many witnesses who huddled nearby had fainted dead away, but their wives helped them to their feet and got them a lemonade and a smoke....or a chaw of tobacco. The scandal about the Krumphagen twins wasn't only that they were Siamese Twins (the state had seen its fair share of Siamese Twins in fairgrounds, carny shows, traveling circuses, and "burly-Q/educational shows" about Egyptian tombs, the harem of the Emperor of China, and agricultural matters in Akron, Ohio....no! Arkansas at one point was going to be nicknamed "The Twinner's State" by the legislature for all its Siamese Twin births in just under eleven years until it was discovered that it might have something to do with the water and the fact that many people were their own grandparents.) The chief point of the uproar, (which is what it became!) was that Enid, the older of the two twins was born way before her "younger" sister, Gladys.....significantly BEFORE!...... 9 YEARS BEFORE. Medical experts were rushed in (well, so to speak!) on the old Flaherty-Cumberbum Rail Lines that had nearly disappeared due to non-use. Professors, scientists, physicians, and phrenologists of high and low repute came to interview poor Vera Mil-Anne about her ongoing labor, which could not be rushed or terminated. The Krumphagens were Christian Scientists along with a cheerful mix of Seventh Day Adventists, Snake Handlers, Tongue Talkers, and Spencerite Wind Walkers. They practiced unusual traditions like wearing orange clothing during the Winter to keep them warm, eating vegetables shaped like other things or famous people, and observing only five days a week which meant that by May of every year, they were still living in February! (You can imagine the confusion after their junior high school wedding as the years went by!!) When little Gladys was finally born, Enid had already completed a typing and animal husbandry course through the local Farm-Arts Academy and had a varsity letter on both the Tractor Pull team and on the Pumpkin Toss brigade. She was quite the catch among the young swains (10 and 11 years old) at the Barnyard Sounds Cotillion & Ice Cream Sociable, and had to turn down five, count'em FIVE marriage proposals by an Explorer of Tomorrow, a Cub Scout, a 4H Club star, and a 63 year old man who was driving by. Nevertheless, Enid and little Gladys became very close right from the start....(well, they had no choice!) ...but that's how children of deprivation are. They don't have unnecessary pretensions and false airs like big-city girls from places like ...Laramoor...and Chutney Corners. And, as it turned out, their story and the sacrifices and torment that their charming and industrious mother had suffered gladly through her household chores and an extended stint as the head waitress at the Happy Spoon Diner became the subject of local papers...and finally radio broadcasts from Little Rock. Vera Mil-Anne became a spokeswoman for the Mohawk Muffin MIx company and was cast as Ma Gurney, a charming elderly lady who raised an orphan brood of children she found on the street, or in crates of cereal, as if they were all her own. The radio program got an astonishing "9" share forcing farm reports, grain futures, and prayer-for-rain broadcasts into non-prime time slots. And her twin daughters?? Enid and Gladys continued to grow and thrive (despite their age difference!) and refused seven different offers of surgery to separate themselves saying that they had worked too hard on their clog dancing technique, their pairs division ice-dancing, their tandem harmonic yodeling, and their Fred & Ginger imitation to ever be apart from each other. They eventually married; Enid to a veterinarian who specialized only in two-headed livestock or animals with multiple limbs and personalities, and Gladys to a man who was significantly younger than her who people kept mistaking for Enid's great, great, great, great, great, grandson.... No children came from either family. (with thanks to Bob Gutowski and George Sweet)

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