I know finally how it feels

I know finally how it feels. I remember leaving Des Moines for Cedar Rapids and bidding my father and mother goodbye, but it was only two hours away so it wasn't like leaving forever. We would see them often. Then I left them for Indiana. There were tears in my fathers eyes. I didn't see them much after that. They moved to Florida and I never saw my father again as he died in less than nine months. But still I didn't know the feeling that they must have felt when I left Des Moines.

Today my dearest daughter Kelly and her husband Don left her home of Fort Wayne to start a new adventure. She and Don drove away this morning to New Hampshire where Don starts his new assignment.

As I hugged and kissed her goodbye, I suddenly knew what my parents must have felt those many years ago. The tears came and the lump in the throat.

I can't even imagine how it must have been for my great grandparents when my grandfather left Denmark back in 1870 for the new world, knowing they would never see their son again.

It was my eight first birthday yesterday. And time is not on my side. In my mind, I thought will I ever see her again. But yes I will and often. I love her dearly.

Shoe Skiing

One of the dumber things my friends and I did when we were invincible (of which there were many) was to take our old car out to the country in the winter and shoe ski behind the car on the snow covered dirt roads. Now we didn’t use a toe rope or anything like that. Nope, we just hung on to the bumper of the car and slid along the snow with our shoes. You could get speeds up to 20-25 miles an hour which was really sailing. The only problem with this was if you should hit a dry spot in the road which usually resulted in your feet stopping and you going head first into the snowy road. Never really got hurt to bad. It was fun but dumb.

Bullying

You hear so much about bullying now days on the news media. Kids picking on others to the point where they contemplate suicide and worst. Some of them go through with it, some get beat up, on and on. When I was growing up there was always bullying. Kids picking on others who seem to be different. I had my share since I wore glasses. Four eyes they called me. Looking at this picture. can you imagine anyone wanting to pick on me? Me neither, right. 

Unfortunately I was not the run away type, maybe because of the Danish and German in me. So I got into fights occasionally, but didn't back away especially if there were some girls around. Had a few bloody noses and a broken pair of glasses or two.

But the worst bullying I ever received was in high school. I was definitely the geek type but then I went to a technical high school where there were lots of guys like me. Anyway in my freshmen year, I was taking geometry that was being taught by the wrestling coach. For some reason he didn't seem to like the nerdy kids and he was always picking on me and another kid. I sat in the back of the room. One day he kept getting on me and I up and lost my temper. I stood up, picked up my geometry book and hurdled at him as hard as I could. It missed him and hit the blackboard. The book didn't survive and I almost didn't either. He wanted to get me expelled, but another math teacher, Mr. Chrisman and my electronics teacher Mr. Andresen came to my aid. I was kind of on probation for the rest of the year and had to pay for the destroyed book which my father made sure I paid for. Anyway that pretty much ended the bullying.

A little more than firecrackers

I have told this story probably 50 times in the past 50 years. Well maybe more than 50. To borrow from my daughter Candy's late father in law, "If you have heard this before, just sit down and be quite, because I like telling it". Ok not word for word, I think I knew what he meant.

Ok, I'll get on with it.

Back in the early 40's a company called Gilbert sold a 'Chemistry Set'. This was the coolest Christmas gift I ever received. It came with chemicals, test tubes, beaker, etc along with a manual listing all kinds of experiments you could perform. And it actually gave the formula for making gun power. How cool was that to a 13 year old especially during the war.

I had this cousin you see who had the same kind of ideas I had, and that we could make a firecracker using this formula for gun power. And we did make something that exploded, but soon ran out of the chemicals that came in the Gilbert Chemistry set. Well as it turned out that there was a wholesale chemical company in town. And they actually sold the 'stuff' to us 14 year olds. Can you see that happening today?

Well we graduated from the small firecracker size to larger bomb size. All of this was done without our parents knowledge I think. My cousin lived almost in the country, in Urbandale Iowa. His parents were quite well off and my cousin had lots of toy trucks, cars, tractors and a large sand box where I sometimes got to go out and play with him.

We got this idea you see that it would be really neat to blow up the trucks and cars just like our solders were doing in the war with our oversized home made fire crackers. Somewhere, and I don't remember how, my cousin obtained some fuse material. I called it dynamite fuse.

We wrapped old brown packing tape around and around a waxed broom handle to make the containers, filled them with our secret mixture, set in the fuse and sealed them up tight.

We buried them under all his trucks and toys in the sand box and proceeded to light a match to the fuses. Well as I remember it was spectacular from a 14 year old boys point to view. Trucks and cars and tractors flying skyward, sand blown all over. But it did get noticed by my folks and Aunt and Uncle. I'm sure we were punished severely but I don't remember it. My cousin told me years later that he was sent away to school by his father to get him away from me. Of course as I remember, we were equally guilty, it wasn't all my idea.

Today we would probably be arrested and charged as terrorists. I guess those were simpler day.

And no I'm going to tell what chemicals we used.

My First Real Job

My first real job aside from helping my Dad trim windows and when my cousin Jim and I worked for my uncle Gus at the beer distributors was at the Fulton Market in Des Moines. Roy Huntoon, a good friend of my parents, owed the market and somehow, I surely do not remember, I was offered a job. The Fulton Market was essentially a butcher shop, but they were the best in town.

There was a deli in the front of the store, which by the way was located on sixth avenue, just north of Grand avenue. In the rear of the store was where they prepared the meats for the deli, but the major portion of the business was supplying meat for restaurants and hotels.

This was my first real employment. I was 15 and a freshmen in high school, a summer job. I was hired to make hamburger patties for restaurants. I spent all summer in a 40 degree cooler making thousands of patties. That summer was a coming of age, well sort of. The butchers working there were always kidding me about high school, girls, sex etc. They would tell me stories like I had never before heard.

It was a good thing that Roy the boss was a friend of my folks, or surely I would have been fired. I destroyed the old elevator twice and dropped a large frozen salmon down the stairs that shattered into hundreds of pieces. I did manage to get through the summer without serious injury. There are a lot of very sharp knifes, saws, hooks, cleavers, etc in the butchering business.

I worked at the store on Sixth Avenue for two summers. Then the market was sold to a large grocery firm and moved to a location down near Mulberry st. Roy was retained as manager and I still had a summer job. My third summer was when I managed to stick my finger into the hamburger Pattie machine and cut the end off to the first knuckle. I remember that it didn’t hurt at first and I walked out to the order desk and held my finger up to show the lady, who took one look at the bone sticking out the end and promptly fell faint to the floor.

When they went to clean up the machine, there was the end on my finger sitting squarely in the middle of a quarter pounder. Good thing it didn’t make it to the customer. That summer I saw one of the butchers cut off three fingers in a band saw, another cut off part of a finger and another stick a boning hook in his chest.

After losing the end of my finger, it was decided that I shouldn’t be around machines or sharp knives, so I became a delivery truck driver. They figured I couldn't get hurt delivering the meat to the restaurants. Well I didn’t hurt myself but managed to blow two truck engines. Like I said, it was good that the Huntoons were good friends or I would have been fired.

One of the trucks I manage to blow turned out to be kind of a good thing. It was in the dead of winter and I was delivering to restaurants in small towns near Des Moines. I was going down this farm road when all of a sudden steam came boiling out from the engine. It was right in front of a small house and went up to the door and asked if I could use their telephone. As it turned out, two very elderly people lived there and when I when in, I could almost immediately that the house was ice cold.

The old guy said that their oil stove quit working. They were all dressed in sweaters and coats freezing. So while I waited for the market to send a truck for me, I said I would look at the stove. With a little investigation, I discovered the problem, fixed it and had them heat again. You never know when things seem to have a purpose.

I met a lot of neat people on that job, and it was fun.