STEPHEN'S PARENTS
JOHN & BECKY
John grew up outside of St. Louis, Missouri in a country school house his parents converted into a rural home. Becky grew up in Ottawa, Kansas, a small farming community southwest of Kansas City. John and Becky met each other in the summer of 1969. He was fresh out of high school, she was a year out of high school, and they were both in Wichita working for the same company with summer jobs, selling encyclopedias door to door. Over the course of the summer they got well acquainted as their travelling band of book peddlers set up shop in motels throughout Kansas, Colorado and Wyoming, plying their wares. By summer's end it was love, but they went their separate ways, he to Lawrence, Kansas and she to Emporia, Kansas in pursuit of their respective higher educations. Love, however, proved stronger than knowledge and the next summer they got married. Becky went to work to put John through college, but then he tricked her by going to law school and she had to work three more years. By 1976, when John graduated from law school, Becky was pregnant and Stephen was born in Iola, Kansas where they moved so John could launch his legal career battling crime as a prosecuting attorney. Kimberly was born there in 1979 and then they moved back to Lawrence in 1982. They took the kids with them. John hung out his shingle and set up shop in downtown Lawrence, and Becky started working again. Well, they got the kids grown and they took off to California, while John and Becky remain in Lawrence, Kansas where they can catch all the KU Jayhawks basketball games on TV. John still has his shingle out, Becky still works for the Kansas Union Bookstore on the KU campus, and they're still in love, after all these years.