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. Whit 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.

Newspapers

Every time I go get our newspaper off the front stoop, well not every time, I think about how different it is now compared to when I delivered the newspaper back in the mid 1940’s. When I was about 14, I started delivering the Des Moines Register & Tribune daily and Sunday papers.

Now days you order on line, pay online, and never see your carrier. Papers are delivered to your carriers door step by truck. The paper is folded in half and put in a plastic bag. And chances are, your carrier is an adult trying to supplement his income just to survive.

In 1945 in Des Moines papers were delivered to a ‘branch’ where you had to go to pick up your papers. The branches were conveniently located as far away as possible from your route. In my case the branch was at Clark St and Harding road. This was approximately 12 city block from my home on Moyer st. The branch was nothing more than a corrugated sheet metal building with a pot belled stove for heat in the winter.

If you were 16 years old and had a driver’s license and access to a car, this was no problem. But those of us who didn’t, rode our bikes to the branch, loaded the papers into a couple of cloth bags, slung them over each shoulder and pedaled back the 12 blocks.

Usually somewhere near the beginning of my route I would sit down on the ground and fold all the papers in a neat square fold that allowed you to sail the paper from sidewalk to porch sort of like throwing a Frisbee. Sometimes especially if it was cold I would fold as I walked my route. More than once the paper would land on a roof and a couple of times resulted in a broken window.

In the winter it was a tough job. By the time I got to the branch, I would be so cold that I would fold the papers along side the pot bellied stove, then pack them in the bags and ride home, sometime thru heavy snow.

Paper carriers in those days had to go door to door to collect. We had sheets of tear off receipts stubs for each customer. This usually took several evenings to get all your money. As I remember a weekly paper was about 25 cents.

Sometimes my Dad would help me on Sundays especially if it was really cold out. How things have changed.

This picture could have been me. It was a cover picture from a August 2006 Reminisce magazine.

Lakeview Iowa

My Grandfather , Jens Peter, helped pioneer Lakeview, a little town in northwest Iowa in 1876. He opened a mercantile business and started selling out of a freight car because his first store wasn’t built yet. Grandfather Therkelsen first came to America in 1870, and had a small store in Des Moines until he was flooded out. Then he went to Chicago in 1871 to help clean up the city after the great fire. He saved his money and returned to Iowa to start over again in Lakeview. He built the third house in town, the first of three he built for the family. He married Anna Karan in 1882. Anna and J.P. had eleven children.

My father, Eugene, born in 1904, was the last of the eleven Therkelsen children. Eugene grew up in Lakeview near the lake and went to school in the school his father helped to build. Eugene worked in the family store, played football, basketball, and ran track; he also hunted and fished. After he graduated from high school, Eugene went to Chicago for schooling in art and interior design.

He returned to Iowa and lived in Des Moines where he went to work for Younkers as a designer of display windows, floor displays, etc. There he met my mother Irene, who worked as a personal shopper for Younkers. They were married July 1927, and in 1930 I came along. While my parents made our home in Des Moines, I was privileged to spend many great times in the small town of that my father grew up in and that my grandfather helped establish.

Lakeview is still there, but not quite like it was when I was growing up. Back then small town life meant everyone knew everyone else and everyone went downtown on Saturday nights. I spent so many wonderful days in Lakeview, I would have been proud to say it was my home town, even though it was not.

My earliest memories of Lakeview were of my grandmother (grandfather had died in 1921) in the big house on High Street, the last house my grandfather built. I was probably five or so, and I remember her putting her pure white hair up in these funny looking leather covered things. That white hair has come down to many of her descendants, even me. And I remember sleeping in the front room in a feather bed so deep that a little guy just disappeared. The upstairs rooms were full of old merchandise from grandpa’s store, and my cousins and I loved going through all that old stuff: old hats and high laced shoes, clothes all from the late 1800’s. Some of that would be worth a lot of money today.

Blackhawk Lake, not huge by most standards, is one reason Lakeview is so special. My dad and I caught many crappies in that lake. I loved to fish, so I would take my cane pole, walk by myself to the lake and fish for crappies. I almost always caught a few to take home for supper.

Lakeview came alive downtown each Saturday night. The movie house would show pretty new films and by the 1930’s there was Technicolor. The smell of popcorn from the big stand on the street beckoned us. There was the drug store with wire back chairs at the soda fountain. At the Frozen Frontier Café, you could get a big steak with all the trimmings for only a dollar. In those days, there were still horses and wagons parked on side streets. If you owned a car, it was a Model T or a Model A. My dad knew everyone at the Ford garage. But then he knew everyone in town. And they knew me. They’d say “you’re Eugene’s boy,” and that made me proud. The old hotel, my grandfather’s store and the popcorn elevator where we could get free popcorn whenever they were testing the latest crop are some of the things I remember about downtown Lakeview.

After my grandmother died in 1942, I would sometimes stay with my widowed aunt Tina, up on the hill behind grandma’s house. I remember that she still had a wood burning cook stove and an old gas engine powered washing machine. The house had a breakfast nook with long wooden benches on each side with a huge wooden table down the middle. All my cousins remember that table and how much fun it was to eat breakfast there. Aunt Tina loved to cook for all of us.

I suppose I was thirteen or fourteen then. Aunt Tina pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. She would send me after the mail every day. The post office was downtown where everyone in town had a post office box with combination lock. I loved to walk downtown to the post office, dial in the code and get the mail. No matter what the errand or where we had to go in Lakeview, we walked. Nothing was ever far away or unfamiliar.

There are no more Therkelsen’s left in Lakeview. Uncle Jasper was the last. I am in my seventies now, but Lakeview still holds its magic. In my mind I am still eight years old, walking to the lake to fish. I am still with my cousins and parents and my grandparents, and Lakeview brings us all together again in a space that is timeless and without change.

Well I'm back

I hadn't logged into my 'Blogger account in over a year. Since then Google aquired blogger and it took me for ever to get a 'google account. But finally.

Flash

In 1951 during the height of the Korean War, I went on active duty with the U.S. Naval Reserve. I was sent to Great Lakes Naval Training Center just north of Chicago. Even though I had been active in the reserve and been to sea twice on training cruises and been through reserve boot camp, I was not quite ready for the big time. I had a lot to learn about the military. Boot camp was an experience unlike anything I ever imagined. It was January, just after Christmas when I reported for active duty. There are few places on earth colder that Great Lakes during the winter. I was lucky that I did not get sick as did many of the recruits. Maybe because I was a northerner and I knew how to deal with winter unlike some of the guys from the south.

Even though it was tough we always found ways of staying happy and dedicated to the task of becoming sailors in the greatest navy in the world. As any soldier, marine, or sailor can relate to, the ritual of getting rousted out of the sack in the early morning before it was light. It was just plain terrible. There were 160 men to a barracks, 80 in each wing of a barracks shaped like a giant ‘H’.

The petty officer in charge of reveille in our wing would come in at 5:00 am, throw on all the lights, tip up one of the large steel trash cans that had corrugated sided and run a coke bottle round and round on the inside of the can. As you can imagine this made the most awful racket and was designed to bring you suddenly awake. Something like a 100, no make that 200 alarm clocks going off at the same time.

Well it seemed that we ought to retaliate in some way. In 1951 some cameras like the old Kodak brownies, had flash attachments using flash bulbs that had screw in bases just like your present day incandescent light bulbs. A couple of us wondered what would happen if you screwed one of these into a standard light socket. The flash was spectacular to the point that some of the bulbs actually burst into flame for a second or two.

Are you beginning to guess what the plan was? Well we bought enough flash bulbs at the gee dunk (the navy’s PX) to replace the 40 or so lights in the whole barracks. After lights out one evening, with the barrack lit only by some street lights, we replaced all the light bulbs. I can’t remember exactly how we all awoke the next morning before the petty officer would arrive for the morning ritual, but we were lying awake in anticipation.

In he came and when he threw on the lights, the entire barrack exploded in a blinding flash. As I remember the officer spewed out some very nasty words. I guess his first thought was that something bad had happened to the electrical system and he ran from the barrack to summoned help. Before his return with several other petty officers we removed all the flash bulbs, replaced the regular lights, turned off the switches, curtailed our laughter and waited.

When they came back, he tried to show the others what the problem was. Nothing happened but normal lights. And of course none of us had anything to offer in explanation. The poor petty officer probably wondered about that for months. And I’m sure all that were there never forgot.

Aw how sweet it is.