Page 49 - Winter 2020

“Security is mostly a superstition and does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
-Helen Keller
inseparable companions and conspirators in mischief and occasional mayhem.
The family’s summer vacations in Cloudcroft provided ample time and opportunity for Paul and Mary Kay to test the waters of questionable behavior.
It was in that mountain community that Mary Kay, Paul and their friends rode horses all summer, built tree houses and scrambled onto railroad tracks to await the next passing freight train.
“We’d sit in the middle of the train trestles and then we’d run off them as fast as we could just before the train caught up to us,” says Senator Papen. “We led a kind of Huckleberry Finn life in Cloudcroft in the summer.”
And it was one of those summers in Cloudcroft--when Mary Kay was about 10 or 11 years old--that she and her buddies learned to roll their own cigarettes. Bull Durhams they were called.
“Oh, yeah,” she says to the question of whether she was a young smoker. “But only in the summer.”
There’s something magical about mischief when you’re getting away with it. Not so much when you get outed. So when the father of one of the kids found out what they were doing and bought them a cigarette rolling machine, their gig lost its glamour.
“He took all the fun out of it,” says the senator.
Mary Kay got her first social security card at age 12 after her brother got her a job setting pins at the bowling alley in Cloudcroft.
“It was before machines, so you had to hand set them. My brother was doing it and one day told me, ‘Sissy, I got you a job.’ My father was horrified but I begged and begged and he finally said yes. I was just a tag-along of my brother.”
It was more of the same back home in El Paso. Mary Kay, Paul and their friends spent the war years (1942-45) riding horses, swimming and being oblivious to any form of fear.
“We’d ride from our stable to the El Paso Country Club to go swimming,” she says. “We led happy, carefree lives and our parents
were able to let us do that. You don’t have the freedom to do that now.”
Alluding to the messages in the Helen Keller quote, Senator Papen says: “As we
go through life, we go through peaks and valleys. It’s not a given that we are secure in our lives. Just because we have great parents or anything else.”
Mary Kay was 15 when her father suffered a heart attack while playing golf and died. Instantly gone was the security that comes with the fallacy in believing your parents will always be there.
She recalls reflecting on the loss of the man she adored.
“I remember I sat under a bush watching all of the people coming over to the house.
I can remember it like it was yesterday,” she said. “I was really my father’s pet.”
But in the midst of their grieving, Mary Kay and her brother found solace in the strength and perseverance of their mother. This was the woman who had grown up on a farm in Leavenworth, Kansas, had gone back
Paul & Susan Vescovo, Senator Mary Kay Papen and Allison Smith
WINTER 2020 47