Ronald Gene Burford

Happy Birthday, Uncle Ron

We sure do miss you.

Ron was the youngest of my mother's three brothers. Here is what my she wrote about him:

Ron was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan (we only stayed in Wichita a year), and he was mine because he was my birthday present that year. He was born just a couple of hours before midnight on the night that it was going to be my eighth birthday when I woke up. Mama said he was my birthday present and if she didn’t mean it she shouldn’t have said it because I held her to it, and Ron was my baby from then on. If she ever tried to scold him, I would get right in the middle of it and tell her to leave him alone – he was mine. And I would get him on my lap and love on him. She explained to me that he couldn’t really be my baby and she hadn’t meant that I could raise him when she told me he was my birthday present – she had just meant that I got a new brother for my birthday, not a baby to raise myself. I didn’t care and I would tell her I didn’t care, she gave him to me, he was my birthday present, and he was mine! 

She finally told me that she had to teach him right from wrong and how to behave, and I’d better not love on him right after she scolded him any more. So from then on, when Ron got in trouble I would just look at him and catch his attention and then I would go outside. He would follow me just in a minute and then I would love on him outside in the yard somewhere out of Mama’s sight. Ron belonged to both of us forever. He just had two mothers all his life – Mama and me.

PHOTOS: Uncle Ron with his first wife, Maxine (center photo), and his second wife Beth. Ron adopted Beth's two sons Jamie and Sean. The baby -- Ronald Gene Burford, Jr. ("little Ronnie") -- was Ron's only child. 

Ron died in 1981 as a result of a hit-and-run automobile accident in Texas. He was 37 years old.