I was born on Christmas Eve in 1904. My parents, Richard Ambrose Ketner, Jr. and Ethel Caroline Payne Ketner, welcomed me with love and surrounded me with love all their lives.
The event took place at 611 South L Street in Tacoma, Washington. I wasn't much interested in the place of my birth at the time but it was later pointed out to me, a little "salt-box" of a cottage set atop a high bank in what was then the outskirts of a young town. Later the property was graded down level with the street and a bank was built there.
My earliest memory--or maybe it's part memory and part feeling--was at my Grandparents Payne's house. They had a narrow two-and-a-half story house on South 9th near K Street which had a wooden stoop or porch on one side that was about four feet off the ground. There was a way to get under the porch from the dirt-floored basement. I remember going in under the porch, sitting there and watching the dust-motes dancing in the sun rays that came through the cracks in the porch floor.
I must have been two-and-a-half years old at the time. Aunt Vera had a snap-shot of herself and me on that porch taken about that time. I don't remember anything more about it--whether I was hiding there for some reason or whether it was a favorite place.
(from the notes of Merle Gilman Ketner Shoemaker)
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