Northern Lights

I know finally how it feels

2011-10-18T15:18:00.000-04:00

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

2010-12-30T14:27:00.000-05:00

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

2010-11-26T15:16:00.001-05:00

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

2010-10-25T12:56:00.008-04:00

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

2009-04-02T14:27:00.006-04:00

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.

Newspapers

2008-12-29T09:09:00.010-05:00

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

2008-11-26T10:12:00.006-05:00

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.

Flash

2006-04-25T15:36:00.000-04:00

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.

The Champ

2006-04-12T15:24:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday our friends from Ohio, Lyle and Bev called and asked if we wanted to go flying. Gosh yes I said but I had already make plans to go to brunch with Kelly. After I hung up the phone, I thought I wonder if Kel would mind if we went another time. She didn’t and off we went to go flying. It had been a couple of years since I’d been up and this looked to be a great day to fly.

Not a cloud in the sky, light wind, and visibility was unlimited. We flew over to Rugh's and circled the farm, then up to Bohney’s to circle the lake cabin. Had a great time. In the flight center at Smith Field after we got back, I happened across some airplane post cards for sale and I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a picture of the plane I learned how to fly in way back in 1960. An Aeronca Champ. The memories came flooding back to me. It was a two seater front and back, stick, 65 hp, no starter and no radio. To get the engine started the prop had to be pulled thru by someone while you handled the choke and throttle. Almost no instruments except a compass, altimeter, airspeed indicator and a turn and bank indicator.

You had to tell them at the office where you were going and when you intended to be back so they could look for you in case you went down. I can remember my flight instructor was a World War II navy pilot and he was a tough and nasty guy. He told me if I wanted to learn to fly I was going to damn well learn his way. I figured that anyone who had survived the pacific war was the kind of pilot I wanted to learn to fly from.

He only yelled at me a couple of times as I remember. Once when I bounced the champ about 8 feet in the air upon a bad landing. I can remember that the stick disappeared from my hand and the throttle slammed forward to full power amid several obscenities. The plane leveled out and we were safely out of trouble. But I learned.

We went up one afternoon to do a couple of takeoffs and landings and after the first landing he said take it back the flight line. I thought oh boy I must have screwed up. He climbed out and said it was time I did it by myself and he would be watching. My time to solo had arrived and it was nervous time in spades. I made two great takeoffs and landings and I had passed my solo flight. When I had parked and tied the plane down, still shaking like a leaf, my instructor came to meet me and shook my hand and said I passed. I actually passed.

Suddenly he was a really nice guy, never a bad word after that. Kind of like the drill sergeant becomes after you finish boot camp. I had several interesting flights after that. Once I was doing a cross country flight by myself and I found myself lost. I spotted a small town and they had a water tower with the towns name on it. I flew down past the tower at about 150 off the ground to read the name so I could look it up on the map. I found it alright about 90 degrees in the wrong direction from where I was supposed to be. I had read the compass wrong. Boy did I feel dumb.

Then one time I was taking off and was about 50 feet off the ground when I look ahead of me only to see another plane taking off from the opposite end of runway. We were headed right at each other. We both remembered the maneuver, make a slight powered climb to the left and away from each other, but for a minute it was almost ‘wet my pants’ time. I never did get my pilots license. I moved to Fort Wayne and never finished. I have always regretted not having done so.

I had a friend here in Fort Wayne who had bought an old 1946 Commonwealth SkyRanger 85 HP Continental airplane that he had fixed up. One day he asked me if I wanted to go up with him. Sure why not. The SkyRanger was a tail dragger like most planes of that period. The tail wheel would not stay locked in place while taxing, so I had to run along side pushing on the fuselage to keep it going straight down the taxi strip. What was worse, when we wanted to takeoff I had to do the same again till the wheel locked and then run up and jump into the plane as we were moving. Yes we were crazy, but we were flying.

I tried out for naval flight school when I was in the service but they had some dumb rule about being able to see. No place for glasses. So went my flying days.

April Fools Day

2006-04-01T12:27:00.000-05:00

To most people the 1st of April means a day to pull a practical joke on somebody. How that ever got started is a mystery to me. I suppose I could pose the question to Google or Ask.com or consult the encyclopedia. But it really doesn’t matter because April 1st eventually became very special to me for a totally different reason. My only sister Karen was born on April Fools Day way back in 1938. She was my only sibling. It was a tough pregnancy for my mother because she had passed out from the smell of paint as the story goes, and fell face first to the concrete sidewalk and broke her jaw on both sides. My Mom spent the rest of that pregnancy with her jaw wired shut.

I was only seven when Karen was born and that date didn’t become special till years later. Well because she was just a little sister and what boy of seven cared that much about a little sister except to torment. They were always in the way right? She was still in grade school when I started high school. But that is when I began to appreciate how special she was to become to me. She looked up to me for some unknown reason. I guess I was the big brother, her protector around the neighborhood.

My father adored his little girl and she was named after his mother Anna Therkelsen and his grandmother Kaaron Knudsen. Karen was everything I wasn’t to my dad. Oh don’t get me wrong, my dad loved me and was behind me 100% in what was important to me. But I was not athletic or artistic or did I want to follow in his footsteps. Things like electricity or chemistry or math were not his bag.

But Karen was all those things. She could play sports, was a great golfer and she was an artist. When I went off to the navy, Karen went off to college. She graduated from Drake in Des Moines and shortly after married David Tyler. We both ended up in Cedar Rapids. Karen teaching school while David was going thru Law school and I working for Collins and having a family. Karen taught I believe 3 rd grade in the same school and same room that Mamie Eisenhower once taught. We spent a lot of time together those few years and my sister became my best friend besides being my sister. That is when April 1st became really special.

We left Iowa for Indiana and Karen and David went to Waterloo. We didn’t see one another that often, Christmas, Thanksgiving and maybe sometimes in the summer. There are many things I remember about Karen. Things that keep her alive in my heart. Yes my sister died in 1985 after fighting breast cancer for over 7 years. When I picture her in my mind I always see the vibrant and beautiful woman she was. I try not to remember her as she was the last time I saw her a few weeks before she died, totally ravaged, aged beyond belief, in terrible pain.

She asked me to help her get to her chair beside her bed. I lifted her frail little body which couldn’t have weighed more that 85 lbs into her chair and she whispered ‘I love you’ one of the last things she said to me.

WW II

2006-03-28T16:54:00.000-05:00

I was only 11 when the Japanese attached Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Although the war had been going on for some time in Europe, 11 year olds in America were pretty much oblivious to it. Our parents of course weren’t and most of them knew that the war would eventually involve the U.S.

But we did play war. And even though we fought the Germans because they were what we heard about on the radio, we still didn’t understand what war was really about. We had our Gene Autry pistols and some home made rifles and we would pretend to chase the German soldiers from our neighborhood.

I can remember that it was a sunny day that Sunday, December 7 and I can remember a bunch of us out riding our bikes and I remember Mr. Henderson coming out of his house and telling us that we must go home, that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and we were now at war. When I got home my parents were huddled around the radio listening to all the news. Programs were interrupted with constant news bulletins. As I remember it was very tense. I can remember President Roosevelt on the radio with his very famous speech to the nation.

Well from then on things changed a lot. Men and women rushed to join the services. Things like rationing came into being. Stuff soon got scarce. And our play took on a whole new meaning. We had both the Germans and the Japs to worry about now.

Two things I remember vividly were that my dad became an air raid warden and German prisoners were loose in Iowa. Toward the end of the war there really were German prisoners in this country but certainly not in Iowa. I think it was the summer of 1944 and I was away to Y Camp for 2 weeks. During the break from one session to the next the counselors had to figure out what to do with those of us that didn’t go home. Here is where the escaped German prisoners entered the scene. All of boys were armed with baseball bats and the like and we were taken by bus to a farm where said prisoners were hold up and we were to march across the fields and capture them. Pretty exciting. The Germans would certainly be terrified by twenty or thirty 12 – 14 years olds marching toward them Well of course there were no prisoners but they had us fooled into spending the entire day tromping through the weeds and corn and brush. Pretty funny Huh?

There was a lot of paranoia about Japanese air attacks on the mainland and invasion on both the east and west coasts spurred on by the government I’m sure to keep the public in the patriotic mode. So we had to be prepared for the worst, night air raids by Japanese bombers. My dad being too old for the service volunteered for air raid warden duty. He had arm bands that said Civilian Defense and a white steel helmet. We practiced against air raids practically ever couple of weeks. All lights were turned off in the homes and the streets. The city was totally blacked out. If you had to have a light on you needed a heavy cover over the window. My dads job was to walk the neighborhood and look for any light showing that might give away our location to the enemy.

Well how ridiculous that all was. Can you imagine the Japanese being able to fly bombers to the middle of America?

But we all bought it and my dad helped make middle America safe.

Powder Puff Paint Job

2006-03-21T16:51:00.000-05:00

The first car my family had that I really remember was a 1934 four door Lafayette sedan. It had a big old straight 6 cylinder engine. It had a cloth top and a floor gear shift. It had a spare tire mounted on the back. The fenders were made from heavy steel and you could literally hit them with a hammer and no damage. I remember going with my Mom to get my Dad at work, going to Lakeview sitting in the back seat counting the telephone poles as they past by the window. Did you ever do that when you were little; count something out the window as you traveled by car. I remember going to ‘Bank Night’ at the movies with my Mom. I have lots of memories of that old car.

In fact I learned to drive in that old car. That was the summer of 1945 and I was 15. The car weighted several tons and had no power steering, and no power brakes and no automatic transmission. You could not turn the wheels unless it was moving. And braking took all the pressure you could muster. Trying to parallel park required you to use the clutch, brake, gas petal and steering wheel. It was not fun but we loved it, learning to drive. I had two accidents with that car. One was tiny accident that involved me, the car and the garage door. The house on Witmer had an under the house garage and the driveway sloped downward with cement walls on both side. My Dad was sure that I could put the car away with no problem. Well I got very close to the door frame and he was yelling at me to get over and I thought I was to close to the other side so I turned the wrong way and tore the whole garage door frame loose from the house. That was before I ever got my license.

Then a few years later after having received my license I managed to turn into the path of an old ford and we collided fender to fender. I tore the whole fender, head light and all on the old ford up pretty badly. My dad never knew about that accident as far as I knew. Like I said earlier the old Lafayette was built like a battleship. When I got home I took a hammer and with one good wack to the underside the fender the dent popped out like a can and with a little polish you would never know it had been damaged.

My Dad was a very forgiving man. But I can’t believe to this day that he forgave me for this. Some time around 1946 I heard about this new thing out where you could repaint your old car and make it just like new with nothing more than a large powder puff and some special paint. So thought I would surprise my parents and make the old Lafayette look brand new just like the ad said.

I bought all the stuff and my friend and I proceeded straight away to paint. All you had to do was dip the oversized powder puff into the paint and carefully apply it in nice even strokes. Well it didn’t look to bad going on but oh after it dried. This was the sickest looking car in the world. Streaks all up and down the doors and fenders. Oh it was just awful. Needless to say I was beside myself. And now there was nothing I could do about it except await the punishment I would surely receive. All I can remember my dad saying was it looked a whole lot better. And that was that. My folks and all their friends and all my aunts and uncles must have died laughing over that and probably did for years to come.

It wasn’t long after that that my folks bought a 1959 Studebaker. I can't imagine why.

Scarlet Fever

2006-03-10T16:43:00.001-05:00

Back in the thirties modern medicine hadn’t arrived on the scene. The diseases were out there trying to get you. Mumps, diphtheria, measles, whopping cough, polio, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, small pox, chicken pox just to name a few. I managed to get a few of these along the way including scarlet fever. Scarlet fever was not to be messed with as it could lead to the more serious rheumatic fever which could damage the heart. I must have been 9 or maybe 10 when I contracted the fever. I can still remember that summer. My sister was moved out of her bedroom that was sort of isolated from the other bedrooms and I was moved in. My father set up a radio in my ‘sick room’ so that I could have something to keep me company in my isolation. Yes I was quarantined and nobody could come into my room except my mother. We actually had a quarantine sign on the house. Now it seems as though my father and sister were not there but I can’t remember for sure.

Well my scarlet fever did go into rheumatic fever and I was one sick kid for most of a month that summer. The things I remember most was how my mother took care of me. She waited on me and was beside me most of the time. The cure in those days was complete bed rest. There were no antibiotics. There was really nothing except aspirin. I can remember my mom wiping my arms and legs and forehead with a cool damp cloth hourly it seemed to keep my temperature down. I’m sure she stayed up half the night watching over me. She would make me Jell-O. She would feed me. She would carry me to the bathroom. She would sit beside me and read stories and we would listen to the radio, to all the old soap operas like Our Gal Sunday and Helen Trent. And in the afternoon we would listen to Jack Armstrong the all American Boy and Captain Midnight.

On warm sunny days she would set up an old army cot in the yard and she would carry me out there so I could lie in the sun. She knew what it took as she had contracted polio when she was little that left her with a damage left leg. Well I got through the fever with no damage to my heart. My mother saved my life that summer and I can’t ever remember thanking her for that. How sad.

The Label Incident

2006-03-09T16:46:00.000-05:00

One of my first paying jobs other than helping my dad at Davidson’s was working for my Uncle Gus at his distribution plant. Standard Distributing Co. supplier of Schlitz beer for most of Iowa. My cousin Jim who was a year younger than I and Uncle Gus’s son had the enviable job of repairing broken cases of beer that had accumulated for the better part of a year. This was a job for the lowly and paid at the rate of about $0.40 an hour as I remember.

We would remove all the good bottles from the damaged case, attach new labels to the bottles if need be and load them into a new case. Pretty tough job right? It didn’t take long till this task was completed, a couple of weeks tops. By the end of the day I stunk like a brewery. I was 14 at the time and I looked as if I was about 12 more or less. Anyway stinking like a brewery, I would ride the street car home after close. I would get some of the most awful looks and occasionally a comment or two and a couple of times people moved away from me. I can imagine what was being whispered. "Poor child, probably from a horrible home, father drinking, mother working to support the family". It was so cool.

The job didn’t last much more than a month. Well you see Jim and I managed to get into trouble several times before my Uncle finally fired us. First we played around to much. And he didn’t like when we would shake up a bottle of warm beer and roll it down the loading ramp till it exploded. But I guess the final straw was the beer bottle labels. Jim and I discovered that if you wetted down the label, stuck it on your wallet and tossed the wallet to the ceiling the label quite often would stick to the ceiling. It became a contest to see who could stick the most labels. We probably stuck a couple hundred labels. The ceiling was quite high and it was going to take some doing to get them down. We were suspended till further notice and to this day I haven’t received a call back.

Jimmy was sent off to military school that fall supposedly to get him away from the influence of his troublesome cousin. Not because of the label incident, but because of more trouble we managed to get into that summer. But that is another story.

My one and only moment of bravery.

2006-03-02T11:19:00.000-05:00

My one and only moment of bravery.

I had just started high school mid semester January 1946 at Des Moines Technical High when one day this kid came up to me and began a conversation. I knew of him since he was on the football team. This kind of surprised me as the jocks usually didn’t talk to the more geeky types. The term ‘geek’ is a term to come into being 50 years later, but it applied to most of us at a technical vocational school.

This kid was Mexican and he had a condition where he essentially had no hip socket and he walked rather oddly because of it. He said do you remember me and gave me his name. This did not ring any bells with me at all. He said when saw my name at school he remembered me from first grade at Greenwood school. He said that he got picked on a lot because of his walk and he was Mexican. He said one day I had stepped in and got into a fight with one of the bullies that were picking on him. He said that after that the kids did not pick on him near as much. We moved that year to Moyer so I never remembered Charlie. His name was Charlie Waters.

I told him that I did not remember that at all but glad I had helped. He and I stayed friends through out high school even though we ran in different circles.

And believe me that was my one moment of bravery and I didn’t even remember it.

Trimming Windows

2006-03-01T09:47:00.000-05:00

When I was about 15 or so, right toward the end of World War II., I along with my high school friend Ross, worked for my Dad at Davidson’s in Des Moines during that summer. I had helped my Dad over the years trim windows. Ross was a art student in high school. So my Dad decided we could do the minor window trimming duties. Davidson’s was a full blown department store. They had Women’s clothes, household and appliance department, furniture, sporting goods, jewelry, etc.

My friend Ross was kind of a jokester. He decided one day that we should get into one of the windows facing the main entrance and pretend to be mannequins. Well this happen to be a window displaying women’s dresses and suits. There were several mannequins as I remember and Ross and I took up positions facing these and pretended to be shaking hands.

We stood very still but turned ever so slightly so we could see the people going in and out of the store. Most of them walked on by without noticing us. Some would stop and look and then after a bit realize that a couple of the mannequins were men and then realize that they were ‘real’. The women especially would laugh and point at us and try to talk to us. Every so often we would turn our head and give a little wave which occasionally startled a passerby.

As I remember we kept that up for only a short time afraid of being caught by a store employee. We repeated this little game a couple of times that summer. The best though was standing in the sporting goods window with a fishing pole in hand. Very seldom did a man ever catch on. Or did my Dad that I knew of, or did the store ever catch on.

The trees in this window were real. After Christmas my Dad would go out and buy unsold Christmas trees and tie up all the branchs and stack them behind the hous and cover them with snow. Come spring he would use them in his sporting goods windows. Nobody else in Des Moines went to these lenghts.

Click on picture for larger version.

Christmas Story Darren McGavin

2006-02-27T11:26:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post I mentioned the passing of Darren McGavin. To me he was just great as the 1940’s father in the classic movie Christmas Story. Never does a Christmas season go by without sitting down and watching it again. So many scenes from that movie take me back to Des Moines in the 1940’s. Especially the downtown Christmas parade and the department store windows. The toy windows are special to me because my father trimmed those beautiful windows at a store called Davidson’s in Des Moines.

When I was old enough I would be allowed to go with him to Chicago to pick out next years window. You can’t imagine how exciting it was to ride the train to Chicago in those days. I mean Chicago, the big city. It was so great to see all the wonderful displays up front and in person. My buddies used to envy me I think because of this. My Dad would decide which display would go in the big corner window and make all the arrangements to have it shipped to Des Moines around November of that year.

The display would get set up completely on the eighth floor of Davidson’s to check it out prior to putting it into the window come Christmas time. Christmas decorations and displays didn’t appear in those days until after Thanksgiving was over unlike today where Christmas decorations are going up not long after Halloween.

I was allowed to help as much as I could at that age. I could crawl under the display with my Dad and connect the motors and chains that made all the animated characters work. Checking the push rods that went up to move arms and heads. Making sure everything was properly adjusted and oiled. I think my love of things mechanical and electrical came from those window displays.

The window in Christmas Story was so reminiscent of those my Dad trimmed. The toy trains running in and out. The characters moving back and forth. All the toys, yes and even the Red Rider BB gun. When I watch that movie quite often you’ll might find a tear in the corner of my eye. Oh and my Dad won 1st prize nationally for some of his windows. But nothing as wonderful as the fish net leg lamp.

Click on picture for larger verision.

Street Cars

2006-02-27T00:40:00.000-05:00

Just to show you how different things are today, than they were in the 1930’s and 40’s. When I was about 5 my mother would get me all dressed up and we would walk the few blocks to Grand Avenue in Des Moines and wait for the street car to come along.

When it arrived, my Mom would put me on board, pay the motorman the 10 cents and she would send me off on my own for an afternoon ride to the end of the line and back. I would sit behind the street car driver all dressed up riding the street car without the fear of anything. I remember it as nothing short of exciting and wonderful. The roar of the electric motors, the clack of the wheels on the steel rails and the clang of the warning bell as we came to each stop or crossed an intersection or warning pedestrians, is still vivid in my memory.

When we reached the end of the line, he would take me by the hand to the rear of the street car which was shortly to become the front. Then he would climb out and reverse the trolleys, climb back aboard and off we would go. Soon ‘our’ stop would come into sight and there would be my Mom waiting for my arrival. Today she would have been arrested for such behavior. Life was so much simpler in 1935.

My world is dying

2006-02-26T13:14:00.000-05:00

Yes it seems to be dying all around me. Today in the Sunday paper, it read Don Knotts dies at the age of 81. Next to that was the announcement of Darren McGavin’s passing away at 83. All the old movie stars and TV stars I grew up with and went through my 30’s, 40’s and 50’ with are gone. Barney Fife gone. The proud winner of the major award gone. Almost all of my generation are going, going gone. I have only one Aunt left from 42 Aunts and Uncles. There is virtually no music written today that I can relate to. Yep, my world is dying. Well what else can you expect when your 75. Just be happy you had it.

My children, well some of them, have been after me to write down some of the stories I have told them over the years so they might have them after I’m gone. So that is what I am going to attempt to do in this weblog. There will be no chronological order to these stories. That would require me to make out an outline or something akin to an outline and that was never easy for me. Electrons and tubes and wires and resistors and capacitors didn’t require an outline, just a schematic.

So starting soon, a collection of stories from my past. About myself. my parents, my sister and myself.

Minnesota

2006-01-18T16:23:00.001-05:00

Minnesota.

Minnesota is not merely a place for us. It is a place remembered as far back as I can remember. First it was a place my parents took me where I could catch crappies on a cane pole.

Then as a grown up it was a place to take my children where they could ‘experience the great outdoors’. Then it became a place where my grand children could come and share the same.

Oh I know Minnesota is nowhere near the grandeur of other parts of this country.
There are no spectacular mountain ranges, or beautiful ocean beaches or the majesty of the Grand Canyon.

But there is a quite beauty to Minnesota and the lands of the north country. The smell of pine forests, the gravel roads leading through the forests back to pristine lakes, clear running streams, the wind whistling through the towering northern pines.
The warm summer days and the crisp spring nights. The lack of sound except for the birds, squirrels and chipmunks. The sight of the occasional white tail and yes even a black bear or a wolf. The big Bass or Walleye.

Oh yes there are the mosquitoes and bugs, but with a little repellent, a can of beer and a crackling campfire, who notices.

My daughter named our little piece of northern Minnesota, Near Wild Heaven. And I guess that is what it is to us.

Bicycles

2005-10-29T15:51:00.000-05:00

Do you ever think about when you used to ride your bike practically every minute of the day? You know when you were 10 years old. The other night I was sitting out on the porch enjoying the cool breeze and there were these young kids riding their bikes. I began to think back when I got my first bike. Back then they really didn’t have small bikes like today. You had to be big enough to get your leg over the bars of a 26 incher. Anyway my first bike was a full 28 inches and it was pretty much put together by my dad from junk yard parts. It was red and white, complete with chain guard, kick stand, fenders and new tires. I was so proud of that bike. My friends would ride and ride, up one street and down the alleys, up to Drake and back, through the school yard at Kirkwood, down 27^th street to Moyer. We didn’t go any place without the bikes. It was freedom like we had never known before. And it was safe and parents didn’t worry as long as you checked in every so often. We loved to play ditch'em after dark. Oh man was that fun. If you happen to get hurt which happened occasionally, you wore it like a badge of honor. Got hurt riding your bike, you bet. When you got older and had the seat up as high as it would go and you could ride down the hill as fast as you could go, no handed, it was so great. Gone are those days but not forgotten.

Oak leaves

2005-10-20T12:40:00.000-05:00

Here it is October. I was born in October. But that is not the reason for this writing. October was always a special time when I was growing there on Moyer Street in Des Moines. There were some mighty big oak trees in the neighborhood and come October they began to shed their acorns and their rusty brown leaves. We loved to rake them into huge piles and run and jump and bury ourselves. And we would ride our bikes through the big piles to watch the leaves fly. When I close my eyes and think about those fun days, I can actually smell the smell of being covered under piles of oak leaves. Of course it always came time to burn the piles. One of the neighbors would rake all his leaves into a huge pile and we would have a big bonfire. With long sticks we would roast marshmallows over the fire. There is nothing like the taste of a marshmallow blacked by an oak leaf fire.

The kids of today can still play in the leaves while parents watch carefully, but not like the old days. Nothing is like the old days when you were a kid.