Saturday, May 9, 2009

8

HOM: Fambly Memories
Some of the Streits, like many farmers, were readers. Uncle Bill liked westerns and the old "Ranch Romance" & "True Detective" style magazines. Rudy liked Science Fiction & Westerns. Grandma Streit read Westerns, but in her later years she, like Mom, spent many hours playing solitaire when she couldn't read.

After television came along, it replaced some of the reading. "As The World Turns" was one show neither Grandma or Bill would miss - EVERYTHING had to come to a halt while it was on! Mom used to shake her head at them, saying that you could watch the show once a month and not miss anything important.

TV altered our lives for a while - George Wagner got the first TV in the area, and used to invite us over to watch it. When we got our own, we ate a lot of meals in the living room off of trays so we could see our favorite programs. I loved the old westerns, and "Have Gun, Will Travel" and "Gunsmoke" were family favorites. Lawrence Welk was one of Dad's favorites.

Before TV, there was radio, and I used to rush home from school to listen to "Sky King" and "Sergeant Preston Of The Yukon & His Dog King", while Mom & Dad listened to "Fibber Magee & Molly", "The Shadow", and "The Lone Ranger". Mom got me a little crystal set shaped like a spaceship. Attach an antenna & headphones & tune by pulling the nose cone in and out and Voila! - music! I used to sneak it into bed at night and listen under the covers. ( I used to use a flashlight to read under the covers, but Mom usually caught me & confiscated the flashlight. The radio wasn't as easily spotted.)

"Sky King", by the way, always ended each show with a cliffhanger and the last show our local station aired ended with the heroes wrecking their plane on an island. I haunted the radio for a long time but never found the program again, so I guess they died on that island.

Hmmm - the term "grain of salt" popped into my head while I was wondering how far to trust my memories and triggered a very vivid one. Dad came in from the field for lunch and we were at the table. Mom was getting something from the stove when Dad picked up the salt shaker and realized it was empty. He didn't say a word - he just threw it over his shoulder towards Mom. She never said anything either, just picked it up, filled it and put it back on the table. I guess I took all that sort of for granted but when I got older I realized he was lucky he didn't get a frying pan alongside his head.

Meal times, as I think I have mentioned, were pretty stressful most of the time. I always wanted to bring a book to the table to escape into but that was never allowed. Now, any household I am a part of allows books at the table - and dogs under the table.

OK, let's get this back on topic. Reading.

I learned over the years to write down the details when I loaned a book out. Rudy borrowed a book from me called "Avalanche" about the discovery of Sperry Glacier up in the park that was signed by the author. He did not bring it back, and when I asked for it denied ever having it. After he died and his widow, Eilene, went through his things she found the book on his shelf and returned it to me. I guess my relationship with Rudy deserves its own column one of these days. It was kind of rocky.

I was given a couple of books by James Oliver Curwood that had belonged to Ian, and we had a neighbor where Jellars live now named Harold Olson. Harold had some of Curwood's books and used to loan them to me and eventually gave them to me. I still have them.

As a side note, when I wrote an article on book collecting for Gun Digest the lead paragraphs dealt with these JOC books.

TBC


Tags: | Edit Tags
Wednesday February 13, 2008 - 11:39am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Entry for February 12, 2008
























Can't Comment!

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday February 12, 2008 - 11:16am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Paul
Paul Streit was my youngest uncle, and for a while after he came home he was my best friend.

He loved to fish and hunt and enjoyed companionship when he was outdoors, so he started inviting me along on his expeditions. That fall, 1962, I bought my first shotgun, a Winchester model 12 magnum, so I could hunt with him. I still own it! Paul also bought a Remington Nylon bolt-action .22 and I bought one just like it. (Actually, Paul bought one of the Remington Nylon lever-actions first, but it gave him so many problems he took it down to the creek and threw it off the bridge and then bought the bolt-action.)

Ducks, geese, pheasants and grouse were the quarry and we covered almost every inch of huntable ground on the surrounding farms - usually with permission, but not always. The banks of Ashley Creek and the slough & island behind Jim Weaver's were our favorite haunts and we covered them thoroughly by boat and on foot.

Memorable moments? Well, there was the time we separated in the woods on Weaver's island and headed down parallel gullies a hundred yards or so apart - and didn't know that they nearly converged a little ways on. A pheasant flushed ahead of me and to my right. I swung, fired, the rooster veered away and went down. I went after it and found Paul holding it. I thanked him for getting it for me and he asked me what I was talking about - he had shot it! A pretty heated discussion followed.

I showed Paul my empty shell where I had fired as proof it was my bird, and when he tried to find his empty as proof he had fired it turned out to still be in the gun. We finally sorted out that we had fired at the same time. Dressing the bird out showed that he had hit it from the rear & I had hit it from the side.

Paul shot a coyote when we were hunting in the brush, and the farm dog, Arlie, walked up and sniffed the dead animal and then turned away and got sick.

We hunted the island in Church slough (Named for an old trapper that lived on the island in the early days) a lot too. The ponds - potholes - it contained were loaded with ducks and the brush was home to pheasants and grouse.

One morning Paul saw a big flock of ducks close to a brushy shore there and made a long solo stalk on his belly till he crawled into range and had a number of them in line. He carefull fired, hoping for a maximum kill, but for several moments afterwards nothing happened till a voice came out of the brush nearby saying "DON"T SHOOT MY DECOYS!". Paul made a reverse crawl and left unseen, feeling a little lower than his belly had been.

Strange, writing this, to discover I still have mixed feelings about Paul that color the fun we had. Well, writing these episodes has pulled out a lot of memories about everyone I grew up around, most of them pretty good.

There will be more about Paul later, and more fun with him, but just to jump ahead a bit - our friendship took a real hit a couple of years later.

I walked into Grandma's to see him, and he would not speak to me. He was angry at me and I couldn't figure out why. He finally told me I had been eavesdropping on his phone calls on the old party line. When I told him I couldn't have because we were on different phone lines he didn't believe me.

I withdrew, literally, physically and emotionally, from him, and from everyone else for a while. One part of me understood that Paul's mental illness required him to take medications but that that same illness made him refuse the meds sometimes, and he had been off of them when this happened. The rest of me just felt rejected by someone I had liked and trusted.

Later on we did start hunting together again, but it was never quite the same.

Okay - that subject is now closed.

Heh - before I went in the service I bought a Jeep & Paul & I used it a lot to explore. I got on a dim trail in it and we followed it till it ended. When I was doing the back-and-fill turning in limited space required I backed into a little pine and pushed it over. That caught Paul's funny bone and for the rest of the day he kept pointing out huge trees and telling me to try pushing them over.

Before I knew him, after he came home from the service, he drove a bus and worked at the Flathead mine with Rudy, then drove a bus for the Hungry Horse Dam project. He told me of the time he was trying to open a chute with a crowbar. When the chute wouldn't open he tried wedging the bar in up fairly high and then jumping up, grabbing the bar in both hands, and letting his full weight hang from it. The only problem was that the bar slipped, and if he hadn't been wearing a helmet the dent the bar made would have been in his skull instead of the aluminum.

TBC


Tags: | Edit Tags
Monday February 11, 2008 - 01:01pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 1 Comment
HOM: Forgot These!
Ian had a motorcycle - for a very short while! He had a mishap in the long old driveway and ended up landing in a barbed wire fence. I have no idea how old he was at the time, but he loaded the bike in the truck, hauled it to towna and sold it. He was done with two wheeled transportation..

Also, Uncle Tom put one finger on his dog's nose and one on a sparkplug on an old gas engine (running) to see what would happen. He thought it was funnier than the dog did, but didn't repeat the trick.

Vic Bjornrud took Tom duck hunting once. He put him in a blind at the end of the slough with some decoys set out and then hiked around the perimeter of the slough, scaring up all the ducks he could. He knew that most would land in the decoys, but never heard a shot from Tom. When he completed the circuit, there was Tom, sound asleep in the blind with dozens of ducks swimming around right in front of him.

Uncle Bill, like most of the farmers in the depression, depended a lot on the fruit of the land for survival and ignored the fish and game laws . They did not harvest much wildlife and none of what they took was wasted, but the game wardens still tried to stop them.

Bill liked to fish out of the river when the season was closed, and kept his tackle hidden on the bank so he wouldn't attract attention carrying it back and forth. One day Vic, who trapped the river for beaver and such, found Bill's stash. Being a bit mischievous, he dug out the envelope with his trapper's license, tore off the F&G portion of the address label, and tied it to Bill's pole. When Bill found it, he treated it as a friendly warning from the local warden, Old Archie, and told everyone what a great guy the warden was for warning him. Vic never did break the truth to him.

The fields in the late winter and early spring were sometimes black with ducks and geese, and Uncle Rudy took Grampa's old Winchester 97 out to try for some. He crawled around and got a bunch of fowl lined together and touched off a shot, hoping for a big bag of game with little expenditure of ammo. The problem was that he had managed to plug the end of the gun barrel with mud and when he fired he blew the end of the barrel off and bagged no ducks at all.

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday February 10, 2008 - 08:46pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Mixed Memories
I was in fifth or sixth grade when I had a day when I REALLY didn't want to go to school so I told Mom I was sick. Mom knew instantly what was up, so she called the teacher to tell her I wouldn't be there and then she made me go to bed. Too sick for school, too sick to be out of bed!

Then she followed up with "Too sick for school, too sick for games in bed!" and topped it off with "Too sick for school, too sick to read, too sick to even have the lights on!" and "Too sick for school, too sick to have your dog in the room with you!"

Her "cure" worked pretty well - I felt fine by noon and was ready to go to school!

I remember Ella Siderius, my teacher for the first three years of grade school, as a totalitarian dictator and now I think she really might have been one. The teacher before her had quit, totally unable to handle the rowdiness and rudeness of the kids, so I suspect the school board was looking for a "drill sergeant" type when they hired her. They got one! (Alternatively, one school board member felt they ought to kick out every kid in the school and start from scratch with a fresh batch!)

Luckily, it was Edith Grant and not Ella that was teaching when I had my "sick day".
Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday February 10, 2008 - 10:46am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments

HOM: Recycling
I am a packrat. There, a confession! However, I blame my Mom for that...

Mom was frugal. She saved and reused anything she could, from the buttons off discarded shirts to plastic Oleo tubs with lids to the wire ties from bread sacks. If something wasn't completely destroyed, she saved it - just in case! (Being an only child, I was spared most of the hand-me-down clothes lots of us were afflicted with, however.)

I know Mom was a survivor of the depression years and am pretty sure that she was also the product of a frugal household. "Waste not, Want not" may not have been her motto, but she sure followed the guideline and I guess she passed it on to me.

When my metal flatbed toy truck broke in half, I flipped over the back part and used it as a pretend paddlewheel boat. When the wheels came off of my little wagon, I used it as a sled. Discarded wooden items like old spigots became toy guns. Improvise and re-use!

Growing up around farmers & loggers didn't help any either - the pride and joy of every shop was the scrap pile, supplied by the breaking up of old machinery and supplying material for fixing other machines. Very little was actually thrown away if it was made of metal or wood.

Dad is somewhat that way too. I still remember how excited he was (and how unthrilled Mom was) when he came home from an auction with a huge bin of nails and screws and miscellaneous small parts and mystery objects. He ended up putting them out by the old gas house and I am not sure he ever used any the gadgets but I had fun digging through them.

One of the drawbacks to the "save and re-use" scheme is that "saving" translates into "Taking Up Space". I have this bad habit of saving old wallwarts, small cloth/canvas/nylon/leather bags, all kinds of switches and wires, nuts and bolts and ...and... well, you get the idea. Another drawback is organization, or lack thereof. It frustrates me to KNOW I have something but have no clue where it is. I dream of a storeroom with walls that consist entirely of mixed size drawers, all neatly labeled with contents thereof, but reality is a jumble of bags and boxes and drawers of thoroughly scrambled contents.

(Flashback: Grandpa Streit gave me an old treadle sewing machine to take apart. Disassembly was great - but reassembly didn't work. Too many left over parts... Actually, 50+ years later, I STILL tend to have a few left-over small parts after every project. Once in a while, one of the left-overs turns out to have been important!)

Anyway, my packrat tendencies make my bland disregard of neatness into a nigh-terminal condition. One day I should do an Aslett and declutter, but I am pretty sure the possibly-useful will drift right back in again and in a year or two I will be in the same boat - except that I will have developed a critical need for some particular piece of stuff discarded in the decluttering and will spend a while regretting my burst of energy.

TBC


Tags: | Edit Tags
Saturday February 9, 2008 - 01:04pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
LAFF!
Or at least smile.



























Can't Comment!

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Saturday February 9, 2008 - 10:47am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: All Flashes, Some not so hot!
BEES and no birds.

One summer there was a huge yellow-jackets nest under the eaves of the garage, so being young and dumb I decided blasting it with a shot gun would be a good idea. Wrong.

I was smart enough to sneak up to the corner farthest from the nest and lean out just enough to aim and fire, but then I got distracted by all the commotion and just stared. Bees (Yes, I know Yellow Jackets are not bees. Tough!) formed a small cloud around the shattered nest, milling around the shreds. Buck, my little Cocker Spaniel, went running over to see what was going on and the "cloud" arrowed out after him. After a couple of yips that I assume marked stings, he outran them.

I got so interested in watching the main force of bees I didn't see the stragglers milling around until I got stung and then it was my turn to run. I guess I won - they abandoned the nest - but it was a Phyrric victory.

Another bee story, this time one i wasn't involved in, happened to a neighbor. There was a medium sized nest under his eaves and he decided a simple way to get rid of both nest and bees would be to slip a large coffee can over the nest, use it to tear the nest loose, and then slap a lid on the can before the bees could escape. He made one miscalculation - he set the lid down a bit too far away to reach while he held the can in place against the eaves. He was pretty fast, but the bees were faster and he got pretty well stung.

(This is the same neighbor who was working on his outboard motor while his family was swimming. He wondered if he was getting spark to the plug so he called his wife over and had her hold the wire in one hand and put a finger on the plug. When he cranked the motor over he got a lot more sparks than he planned on!)

(Flashback: George Wagner was putting up an electric fence with his wife's help. He hooked the wire to the fence charger and handed the metal spool to her. She headed for the corner of the pasture, letting the wire roll out behind her under tension, and was almost to the post when George plugged in the fencer. He had to finish the fencing without her help...)

(FlashForward: George was also the one who asked my wife why she didn't swim in her birthday suit and I piped up that it needed ironing. Ouch!)

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Friday February 8, 2008 - 03:42pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments

HOM: A Mishmash
When I was quite young there was an old root cellar just north of the driveway by the road. I used to love to play with my dog Penny on the little hill it formed. Dad was burning off the grass on it one spring and apparently the fire got into the wood beams that framed and supported the cellar. They burned through and the roof collapsed. The folks just had time to rescue a valuable scales they used for grain and potatoes. I missed my playground.

The pit that was the result of the collapse became the dump for the farm refuse - cans, limbs, whatever - until it filled. This took a while because annually Dad would pour gas over the contents and burn them off. Finally Dad finished topping it off with dirt and put the north extension of his driveway over the top of the site. Someday it might make an archaeologist very happy!

I liked to play and dig in the dirt in the pit, but my main memory of doing that is from the day I disturbed a yellow jacket nest and got a few stings. I don't think I played as much there afterward.

In my anti-social youth I was playing on the cellar mound with a slingshot when a neighbor went by. I let fly and shot the back window out of their car. I would have probably gotten into a lot of trouble for that, but within a day or so - before they told my folks about the window - their son totaled that car.

I know in my heart that I am the reason Mom's hair went gray...

Now - Flashforward: Before it slips my mind I want to mention that as far as I know I took Donal on his last hunt. It was in the '80s and he was living in Hot Springs then. I had a Stainless S&W .38 revolver I wanted to show him and he suggested a ride so he could shoot it. He took along his .22 rifle.

We saw a grouse along the road and Donal shot at it with the rifle but only wounded it - a sign of his failing health. In earlier years he would not have missed his aim like that. Anyway, the grouse ran and I took off after it on foot and chased it down. It cost me a torn shirt and some scratches but I retrieved it for Donal. I did not want his last hunt to be a failure.

Sentimental idiot that I am, I still have a .38 case that he had fired, and in it are the tail feathers of that grouse.


Tags: | Edit Tags
Friday February 8, 2008 - 10:58am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
More Donal
Donal took me on my first camping trips. He had a wall tent with a stove and all the gear and experience, so all I had to furnish was a sleeping bag and labor for setting up, gathering firewood and carrying water.

My first sleeping bag was a cheap one, and on the first cold-weather trip we went on I was cold all night. The stove was near the foot of my bed area, so when Donal got up and fired it up for breakfast I slid the bag closer to the fire to soak up some of the warmth. Actually, I soaked up so much warmth I melted a hole in the bag. Donal thought that episode was a lot funnier than I did. The next night I drove some stakes into the ground to hold the bag in place and keep myself from doing it again.

In later years, Donal retired both the wall tent and the old Ford pickup and got a used Chevrolet 4x4, which he then built a plywood camper on. In those later years, I got a down insulated sleeping bag!

Donal had access to a lot of ranches because he knew the owners, and we saw some neat country together. I saw my first wild mountain goat on a hunt with him up in the mountains near Thompson Falls.

On day trips, there was a third person along most of the time - Donal's dog, Spike. Donal said when he first got him, Spike was too little to follow him and so he would carry Spike in his coat pocket. Spike was old when I knew him and his bad breath made some of the trips memorable.

Another Donal memory - we were following a logging truck on a dusty road when we came to a spot where the road looped around an old clearcut, so Donal shifted down, hit the gas, and took off crosscountry. He beat the truck to the far side of the clearcut by a fair margin, but it was sure a bouncy ride.

I caught my first pike with him in Lone Pine Reservoir, back in the day when that was the only place around here that had pike. We fished all day and the one small fish is all we got. We fished most of the lakes within a few hours drive of home but made a special effort to get to Lone Pine because he had heard so much about the pike there and had never caught one.

Once when I was hunting with him I saw a nice doe. I wanted to make sure I made a good shot so I leaned up against a little dead snag - which promptly fell over and took me with it. All I saw of the doe as I went down was two bulging eyes and a dropped jaw, then a white tail as she took off. Once again, Donal thought it was funnier than I did. (Well, at the time, anyway. Looking back now I laugh at those episodes!)

He spent a lot of time helping me try for a big buck, but things never worked out for us - I was alone when I found the big buck I finally shot.

We sure had some great times, and the only regret I have is that I remember so few of the many stories he told me of his life.

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Wednesday February 6, 2008 - 03:29pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Good, Bad, Ugly . . .
But funny! (The brain vacation progresses.)




























Can't Comment!

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Wednesday February 6, 2008 - 10:40am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Donal's guns
In his quiet way, Donal was an NRA member and a gun nut, but only as it applied to hunting. He was not interested in owning guns he did not use but wanted the most efficient hunting tools he could afford.

When we first hunted, his rifle was an old Model 8 Remington semi-auto, originally in .300 Savage and later rebarreled to .308. He had modified it by adding a pistol grip with a dowel and wood putty. He said it was the safest gun he ever owned because of the design of the safety.

Later on, he retired the old Model 8 and bought a Winchester Model 100, also a semi-auto and also a .308. It had a horrendous trigger pull so he worked it down till he liked it but the side effect was that the gun would go full-auto unexpectedly. He returned it and got another Remington, a Model 740 ADL in .308. (ADL is the fancier version.)

He also owned a Colt Huntsman .22 and when his eyes began to give out he put a scope on it. Even with the scope he could do a very creditable fast draw and shoot accurately.

He bought a High Standard Sentinel .22, the nine-shot double action, which he used as a house gun for defense.

His .22 rifle was also a Remington semi-auto with a scope. It was a model 550.

His shotgun was a Remington 1100, but he was more of a rifleman and seldom used the shotgun.

I gave him a Ruana hand-made hunting knife for Christmas one year. He wore it once when he took me hunting and then put it up. Edith returned it to me when Donal died.

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday February 5, 2008 - 09:42pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Memories Of Donal
There are so many "Donal" stories they rate a book to themselves. I must have fished & hunted with Donal and listened to his stories for over ten years - from around 1960 into the early seventies.

Physically he was a little guy, maybe 5'6" and maybe 150 or so, but he was strong and fast. He was born in a cabin around 1900 up above Big Arm and spent most of his life in that country west of town.

At some point he worked with dynamite, wand was quite deaf as the result of an accident. He would not work with electricity because of another accident when someone switched on the circuit he was working on.

During the depression he had a ranch above Hot Springs on the hill west of town and supplemented his income with hunting and trapping for fur. He kept several families supplied with meat during the hard times.

He also worked at Hubbard dam when it was being built, pushing a wheelbarrow. This was in the days when men lined up for any job and the bosses took advantage of them. On this job, men would run a wheelbarrow till they dropped, then they would be fired and the next guy hired. Donal kept the job. He didn't drop and took all they dished out to him.

He worked on a fishing boat in Alaska, one that tended traps. He always wore a .44 revolver in those days and got razzed about it till the day a sea lion got in the trap and they needed to dispose of it. One shot from the .44 ended the depredations and the teasing.

(One story about the ranch above Hot Springs - Donal had two daughters, Dorothy & Donaldine. They rode horses from the ranch down to the school and one day the inevitable happened - one of the daughters was all dressed up for a special occasion and when she mounted up the horse bucked her into a big pile of fresh manure. Donal said that was the first time he realized just what a vocabulary she had!)

I think the first time he took me fishing, he had just gotten a second-hand boat and motor and wanted to try it out. He picked me up in his old early-fifties Ford pickup with all the gear loaded and I think we went to Ashley Lake. We got the 12ft boat in the water, gear loaded, motor gassed and mounted and shoved off, then Donal started cranking on the motor. And cranking. And cranking. He fiddled with the choke and the throttle and when the motor finally caught it was on full throttle and aimed straight for the bank. Donal had about five seconds to recover from a near-header over the stern and turn the boat before it hit the rocks - and made it with about a half-second to spare. He replaced the outboard with a new Evinrude 5hp right after that, but kept the boat.

Actually, he did lose the boat once. We had been fishing at Hubbard Dam, and the road was atrocious. When we got to the highway we didn't have a boat in the back, it had jiggled loose and bounced out. It was still laying in the middle of the road when we went back. After that he bolted it down.

Some other memories of Hubbard with Donal: Once I left my shirt off to get a tan and ended up getting blisters and another time I put the fish in a dark canvas bag as I caught them. I left the bag out in the sun and it got so hot the fish inside it cooked.

One lunch time there Donal was spreading homemade jam on a slice of bread when a yellowjacket landed on the bread. Donal contemplated it for a second, then said "Here you go!" and slapped a spoonful of jam over the bee. After a few seconds, this big red glob of jam vibrated and sprouted wings and went wobbling off into the trees. Sweet!

Donal was a deadly shot, fast and accurate, but that skill backfired on him once in a while. He jumped a deer at medium range, fired, and it fell, got up again, went down again at his next shot but was up again, then dropped with his last shot. The whole episode took perhaps 5 seconds. When he walked up, there lay three dead deer. He hadn't missed. The meat didn't go to waste, either.

He lived in a cabin above Lake Mary Ronan for a while and bagged the biggest buck of his life there. It was early one morning and he was still in the cabin and in his underwear when he glanced out and saw this enormous buck. He didn't hesitate - he grabbed the rifle and fired, bagging both the window and the buck. His wife was pretty upset, but he always said it was worth it.

When he first took me hunting he made me stay close by his side, and the first time he pointed up a ridge and said "I'll meet you up there" and left me alone, I felt like I had graduated into being a woodsman, albeit a neophyte one.

More Donal later!

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday February 5, 2008 - 04:15pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments

John Steinbeck
From "Bombs Away". Another point of the "Greatest Generation".

And we may be thankful that frightened civil authorities and specific Ladies Clubs have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. For one does not really learn to shoot a rifle or machine gun in a few weeks. Army gunnery instructors have thus described a perfect machine gunner: When he was six years old, his father gave him a .22 rifle and taught him to respect it as a dangerous weapon, and taught him to shoot it at a target. At nine, the boy ranged the hills and the woods, hunting squirrels, until his pointing of his rifle was as natural to him as the pointing of his finger. At twelve, the boy was given his first shotgun and taken duck hunting, quail hunting, and grouse hunting; and where, with the rifle, he had learned accuracy in pointing, he now learned the principle of leading a moving target, learned instinctively that you do not fire at the moving target, but ahead of it, and learned particularly that his gun is a deadly weapon, always to be respected and cared for. When such a boy enters the Air Force, he has the whole background of aerial gunnery in him before he starts, and he has only to learn the mechanisms of a new weapon, for the principles of shooting down enemy airplanes are exactly those of shooting a duck. Such a boy, with such a background, makes the ideal aerial gunner, and there are hundreds of thousands of them in America. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, and the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights¾ the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.
Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday February 5, 2008 - 01:07pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
JPSOFT: For Geeks
JP Software Is Proud To Announce Take Command 9

We have completely redone Take Command. It now includes all the features

of Take Command, 4NT and TCI. Even better, we have merged graphical file
management (a la Windows Explorer) with the command line. It's the power
of the command line with the ease of use of a GUI.

It's just a better way to work:

* Manage multiple command processors in tabbed windows
* Drag and drop files
* Advanced cut and paste features
* See the results of command line actions immediately
* Find text in any tab window
* Customizable menu, toolbars and status bar
* Multiple themes and skins
* And yes, you can still run 4NT (now called TCC) by itself

You will save loads of time getting things done.

We have also added many new capabilities to our command language:

* Monitor system events, like file/folder changes, process and service
changes,
usb hookups, event logs, etc. and trigger actions with seven new
event monitoring commands
* Start and stop system services
* Create task dialogs in Vista
* Execute a command line after a batch file exits
* Over 300 enhancements to commands, variable functions and internal
variables

Check it out at http://jpsoft.com. It's our biggest upgrade ever and you
can get our special introductory price of $79.95 ($44.95 upgrade) now
through 2/28/2008. Then the price goes up to $99.95.

Contact Information:

JP Software
P.O. Box 328
Chestertown, MD 21620 USA
800-595-8197
operations@jpsoft.com

Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday February 5, 2008 - 10:58am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Special Events
We got new neighbors in 1960 - Tom Wagner sold a piece of his land across the road along the river to one of his daughters and her husband, Lois & Gordon Nail. I didn't know at the time how important this was to me. (I first met Gordon a year or two before when I acted as his fishing guide - my pay was a lure that I still own - but I first heard of him when he noticed the bullet hole in Tom's mailbox and I lost the use of the .22 for a year despite my argument that I had done the deed a few years earlier when I was younger and stupider. Needless to say, I didn't like Gordon much until I got to know him.)

In 1962, Uncle Paul Streit moved back to Kalispell and moved in with Grandma & Bill. He had spent the last ten years in Warm Springs, suffering from schizophrenia. I don't know what triggered it in him but do know that his best friend was killed in a car wreck. The accident happened in the little dip in the highway just north of Columbia heights, his friend was driving, I guess Paul was in the back seat with his girlfriend and when the car went off the road he grabbed her and they dropped to the floor. His friend was killed and they were hurt, but not too badly.

(Related story - I believe it was Uncle Bus that was driving down Buck Weaver's lane after having a few too many drinks. The lane was lined with trees, and Bus said "Watch me hit that tree!" and proceeded to do just that. Mary Riedel was with him and got a broken collar bone out of the deal.)

I think Donal Grant retired about 1960 too, though he worked as a carpenter and did general stuff for some time afterward - Mom had him tear out the partition between the front porch and the living room and do some other work. He was also my instructor for hunter's safety class when I was still in grade school.

Over the next few years Paul, Donal & Gordon became my surrogate fathers. Dad was so involved with the Ridenour Brothers enterprises that he didn't really have time or inclination to do much with me so they stepped in. I am not sure how they put up with me, but they did, and I am grateful.

Donal started taking me fishing and huckleberrying and hunting whenever he went. I have a lot of great memories of time with him and I will share some of those stories in a bit.

Paul got into hunting and fishing in a big way after he came home, and I started tagging along with him whenever I could. (I envied his 1962 Olds F-85 and his Winchester Model 70 Featherweight .308 rifle!)

Dad did buy me my first rifle - a Winchester Model 94 .30-30 he found on sale in Spokane when he was delivering hogs there. (This was in the good old days before the Feds made buying guns in other states illegal.). I shot my first deer with it hunting with Paul, my second with Gordon, my third was probably with Donal. My daughter shot her first deer with that rifle too.

You WILL be hearing more about Donal & Gordon & Paul & Lois too.

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Monday February 4, 2008 - 04:27pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Patriotism
In grade school, we said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and I remember how we stumbled over the new wording when it was modified.

"Eisenhower was instrumental in the addition of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and the 1956 adoption of "In God We Trust" as the motto of the US, and its 1957 introduction on paper currency."

Two of us were assigned to raise the flag each morning and lower and fold it each night, and to do so with some degree of reverence.

Almost every one of us had a parent or relative who fought in WWII and all of them were members of Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" who had survived the Depression and the war years. They drilled into us a feeling that we owed our country and not the other way around. Pictures of great presidents and patriotic scenes decorated the school and playing war games was certainly not disocuraged.

Dad, Darel & Uncle Paul were all veterans. Dad was on the LCI-624, which was written up the book "Mosquito Fleet" after a close call with a torpedo that scrped the length of the hull and did not explode. Darel was on the Battleship USS Iowa, BB-61, Paul was an Air Force mechanic stationed in England.

This background made military duty pretty much a certainty in my future, but nowadays society treats patriotism like it was able mental illness. Sad...




Tags: | Edit Tags
Monday February 4, 2008 - 01:13pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 1 Comment
WHINE!
I hate the editors Yahoo supplies for this blog.

The better one lets you add image links and generally has more power but no one can comment unless they register with 360, the lesser one randomly inserts six carriage returns, the number six, a plus sign and another carriage return when you hit backspace.

Both, as you try to post an entry, will randomly ask you for a password, which then erases everything you just wrote.

NEITHER OF THEM ALLOWS YOU TO EDIT PREVIOUS POSTS PROPERLY!!!! They fail to save the corrected posts.

My point is, that if there is a typo or a misspelled word in the blog, it is gonna stay there. These HOM posts are going into a WP document as a permanent record and the doc is correctable.

(If I try to compose in the word processor and then paste the text into the blog, BOTH editors treat the text as an image and crash.)
Tags: | Edit Tags
Monday February 4, 2008 - 12:08pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comment

Thank you
. . . for your patience. I have been having a lot of fun on this jaunt down memory lane that is being posted under the HOM (History Of Me) titles. I am saving it as it proceeds in a word processor document and I see that it is up over 38 pages now. I hope some of the three of you that read this still enjoy my maunderings.



The interspersions of comics is as much for me as you - humor is one of the most important ingredients of life. Humor refreshes the spirit, and that might be why I try to keep the HOM pretty light.

Once the memory bag has been emptied into this blog, I may try editing the resulting document - then again, it may be like sorting out the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag - not worth doing.

Enjoy, if you will!
Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday February 3, 2008 - 12:49pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Brainless Again
And tired of typing & thinking.























Can't Comment!

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday February 3, 2008 - 08:46am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Wood Be Tough Sledding
My first sled was a hand-me-down, probably an antique, and was a casualty of dual-use. Firewood got from the stack to the basement via muscle power and the stereotypical Little Red Wagon or a wheelbarrow when the ground was bare and on sleds when it was snowy. The old sled's wood frame finally gave out under a load of wood & Darrel welded a new frame out of pipe. It was stout enough then for heavy hauling, but not so good for play because the rigid frame meant you couldn't steer it. (I think my original LRW gave up the ghost hauling wood too.)

My Christmas present that year was a new Flexible Flyer - the king of sleds! It is still, unless dad gave it away, stored in the rafters in the old garage. It was the five foot model, made for a growing boy and big loads, and was a joy to use.

Riding it on the end of a 50 foot rope behind a tractor was a blast. You could go up into the fields or in the ditches and dodge bushes quite handily as long as you were careful to stay on the same side of sturdy trunks as the tractor - failing to pay attention meant you would do a face plant in the snow while the sled kept right on going until dad looked back and saw I was gone.

(Dad tried skiing behind the pickup with Mom driving once, but an error in commincation brought that to an end - Mom thought he was motioning and yelling at her to go faster when actually he was screaming for her to take the emergency brake off.)

When I left home the folks converted to oil heat - I suspected it was the result of Adult Conspiracy and lack of free labor, but it may have just been Mom's age.

Hauling wood on anything was not one of my favorite chores, and I would always overload the sled or wagon so I would be making as few trips as possible - a self-defeating proposition in most cases. I would all-too-often have a lot of the wood spill off and have to reload it, and when that happened I used a lot of the vocabulary I picked up around the farm.

(Related story - one of the neighbors got a flat tire on the way home with his kids and had troubling changing it. When he finally got home, the kids went in the house and their mom asked them what their dad had been doing. They said that he had been kicking the car and yelling "You run in the ditch" at it.)

I had the adult vocabulary down pat from Dad & Darrel and Bill and the other grown-ups before I hit my teens but I was usually pretty cautious using it. I goofed once when I spilled a wheelbarrow load of wood and I was expressing myself loudly in adult terms. Dad walked up behind me and in a very gentle voice asked if I would like some help. I said "Sure!", and he cut loose at full volume, telling me the he would "Help you with a foot up your a** if I catch you doling any more of that G**-D***** swearing!!" I took that lesson to heart - ansd learned to swear under my breath...

Farming was really good for developing both vocabulary and lung power!

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Friday February 1, 2008 - 03:17pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Brain Lapse - Humor Time













And this is the biggest question!


Can't Comment!

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Friday February 1, 2008 - 11:25am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Mischief
HOM: Mischief magnify
Study hall was in a big corner room on the top floor.

The desks were the antique style pictured above, complete with ink wells and fastened together in complete rows with the flat desk portion attached to the seat back of the desk in front. The desks sat on wooden rails and entire rows would move as units

Most of the rows ran east & west with the kids facing east and the teacher sitting on a platform along the west wall behind them. There were two wide hallways intersecting in the room, one coming in from the east and one from the south, and the short rows of seats between them ran north and south with the occupants facing north.

I liked being in these odd rows - I was able to keep an eye on the teacher as easily as she could keep an eye on me.

Jim Smith, a big farm kid, sat in the row behind me one year, and for a joke I tied a wire between the rows of desks. When Jim came up and hit the wire all that happened was that the two rows of desks were pulled togther and the wire broke - he didn't even slow down.

I got a bright idea from a magazine ad - probably for a Johnson-Smith product - and got a short piece of garden hose and threaded a rubber band through it, then took a shotgun shell apart for the pellets. I was able to cup the hose in my left hand, put a pellet in the band, pull the band back with my right hand, and shoot the pellets the length of the room. It was pretty unobtrusive - I could hold the left hand cupped on my desk and even keep a pen in my right hand while I was firing so I never did get caught. The teacher used to hold up a newspaper and read or else lean back and watch the room, and I could usually hit the newspaper or the big calendar she had hanging behind her desk and make her jump with almost every shot. Stupid of me?? Very!!!!!!

One year I was near the front of one of the regular rows and had a good view down the hall. A girl I didn't like left and went down the hall wearing a very tight skirt. I yielded to temptation and fired off a small fence staple at her. The staple rotated and hit her in the butt points first and stuck. She went straight up and then came down cussing. I had about as puzzled an expression as everyone else did, but mine was fake...

That was the same year one of the school jocks walked down the row and someone (not me!) tried to trip him.He stopped, grabbed the kid by the hair and slammed his face down on the desk, then walked off. Typical for those days. Oh - the jock teaches at the high school now...

I tried shooting a bobby pin at the teacher once, but it flew in an arc, hit a light fixture, and landed on a kid's desk. He picked it up and was looking around, so the teacher busted him for doing it and sent him off to the office. I cooled the mischief for a while then.

(This is an addenda to the previous post - I forgot to put it back in after the editor crashed last time).

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Thursday January 31, 2008 - 04:17pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments

HOM: HS BS
Lloyd Wilson was my drafting teacher in the shop building across from the main school, and the most memorable event in his class was the day he left the room and went into the main shop for a moment. A snowball fight broke out that only lasted a minute or so, but the last ball thrown hit the shop door at nose level a second before Wilson walked back through it. If he saw the snow he ignored it, but if he had been hit I think it would have been a different story.

Another snowball memory - on the school bus - I slipped a handful of snow down Sherry Seney's collar when she wasn't looking. She thought the boy ahead of her had done it so when she dug it out she threw it at him, missed, and hit Mr. Pritchett, the driver, in the back of the head. He skidded the bus to a stop and nearly made all of us get out and walk before Sherry admitted she had thrown the snow. The original culprit kept his mouth shut - till now.

A possibly apocryphal story involved some kids in a previous class who waited until a very icy day and a sharp curve and then threw their weight to one side of the bus, making it slide into the ditch. My Cousins may have been involved in this...

Speaking of cousins, Dave Ballenger got a hotrodded Oldsmobile and gave my cousin Pat a ride in it that gave him more thrills than he appreciated, but Pat got his revenge after he got his pilot's license and gave Dave a close-up high-speed view of a chimney at the bottom point of a power dive. (Pat went on to a career as a pilot for Weyerhauser jockeying corporate jets around the globe.)

Back to school - one of my most embarrassing moments involved ice. I left the first period home room (Mr. Narum, in the music room) and when I went out the door I slipped and fell - and split my pants from knee to knee. I ended up repairing them in the bathroom with the wire from a spiral notebook, but the results were both obvious and painful.

(Probably the MOST embarrassing moment was the result of my crappy penmanship and a student teacher. She was calling out names and handing back corrected papers, but when she mistook the "n" for an "r" in my name on my paper I wouldn't claim it - but everyone in the class who WASN"T laughing too hard pointed me out to her. Her face was probably redder than mine.)

The problem with playing pranks on teachers was that they tended to punish the whole class, kind of like boot camp. Things still happened though, and the better teachers did not make a big deal of high spirited jinks like locking them out of the classroom for a few minutes.

I do remember one major prank from our senior year, but not the outcome. We had an assembly in the gym and at the end kids started hauling out eggs and tomatoes and such and throwing them. After a few teachers got smacked the fun ended.

Back in Mr. Johnson's chemistry class, there were a few kids who were afraid of the Bunsen burners so once in a while a classmate would give them an exploding match to use. It was kind of fun to watch the victim scream and dive when the match popped.

(Hodgson flashback: At Easter, we would exchange names and make Easter eggs for each other, and then hide them outside. Some kids made a point of adding one well-decorated but raw egg to the batch.)

Since this is the !THIRD! time I had to do this post, I am tired of typing.

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Thursday January 31, 2008 - 03:24pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
The TSA has a blog
This is stolen straight from BoingBoing, worth reading!!!

--------------

The TSA has a blog

Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, January 31, 2008 10:30 AM | permalink
Our favorite federal administration, the TSA, has just launched a blog, called Evolution of Security. It kicks off with a cheerful message from Kip Hawley.

I applaud his reason for launching the blog:


One of my major goals of 2008 is to get TSA and passengers back on the same side, working together. We need your help to get the checkpoint to be a better environment for us to do our security job and for you to get through quickly and onto your flight. Seems like the way to get that going is for us to open up and hear your feedback...

The 270 comments following Hawley's introductory post contain a mix of congratulatory messages (most of these are from proud TSA employees), accounts of bad experiences with the TSA, general and specific questions, and suggestions for improvement.


Here's a typical comment from a citizen:


DHS and TSA are fundamentally broken. Disband both immediately and return our civil liberties. Thank goodness Richard Reid did not conceal something in his underpants or these people would be strip-searching every poor grandma from here to Branson. Would someone please explain to these people that putting shoes through an x-ray does not mean they don't contain an explosive? And honestly-- Refusing a valid ID because it is "expired"? Confiscating deodorant and sun block? Does anyone believe that this kabuki security theater really makes us safer? If you guys are serious about your responsibility to protect the country I suggest you start by (1) not cutting off "TSA approved" locks anymore (2) learning and sticking to your own rules and regs especially those pertaining to passengers with medical problems (3) not trying to intimidate anyone who asks for a complaint form and (4) immediately crack down on the threatening screeners who shout "do you want to fly today?" anytime their crazy made-up-on-the-spot orders are questioned by passengers--who in my opinion often know the rules better than the screeners themselves. Oh and by the way your first amendment rights to free speech don't stop when you enter an airport screening area, even at MKE.

Another citizen:


Traveling through Chicago I set off the metal detactor. I'm an almost 60 year female. I stopped dead in my tracts, afraid of what I had done. The TSA lady (??) barked at me worse way than how I talk to my large dog. All she kept yelling at me was, "BACK!" I'm not that used to traveling and didn't know what she meant. Why cannot you not talk to us as if we are 'people'? You say that you yourselves are people...I doubt that!

And here's a typical comment from a TSA employee:


As a LTSO I have very proud to work for TSA. I understand that some of the passengers do not like taking off their shoes or surrendering their toothpaste, however, there are many passengers that thank us for what we do. We must all remember that 9/11 happened and we are just trying to make the air safe for everyone. Flying is not a right granted under the Bill of Rights and due to the state of the world today, we must all make smart decisions. I am proud of what we do and what we represent. Thank you Mr. Hawley!!
The comments make for entertaining reading, but I'm skeptical that any positive changes to TSA policies will be made as a result. Link

Tags: | Edit Tags
Thursday January 31, 2008 - 12:20pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Teachers: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
They were the best and worst of times & teachers. These are the ones that stood out.

Best liked - funny, articulate, fair, interesting and good at what they did.

Richard Chapman, Sophomore year, English.

Bruce Johnson, Senior year, Chemistry.

George Cussen, Junior year, English, ditto.

Jim Corbett, Senior year, Economics.

LLoyd Wilson, Junior year, Drafting.



Least liked - for varying reasons.

Neal hart; biology, T. R. Richardson; social studies, Richard Nelson; physics.



Most unforgettable? Russ Ritter, Advanced Biology. Big & ex-Marine, and the first day of class he walked in, told us - loudly - to sit down and shut up, then requested a show of hands from any people who thought he "couldn't grab them by the buns and heave them out the door". He was a good teacher and had absolutely NO discipline problems.

(Flashback: Christmas at Mom's a couple of years ago, and Dad was reading a magazine when all of a sudden he asked "Do you know what an Odocoilus Virginianus is?" I just smiled and said "Yes". After a double take, he said "Okay, name it then!" "Whitetail deer." His reaction was "well, I'll be damned - how did you know that?" When I said it stuck from HS Biology class, he was surprised. Let's just say that Ritter had a way of making you remember things...)

That Biology class was fun - we had to have class projects and Ritter allowed me to use one I had been working on before - a map of Ashley Creek from the mouth up through Streit's farm annotated with notes on birds I had seen there over the years. I liked bird identification, and specialized in the "Audabon Method", shoot them and then identify them. (Members of the Audabon Society don't usually publicize the fact that shotgun & paintbrush was the method old J.J. used.) IIRC, I got an "A" on that project.

Chapman was a WWII vet and had a great sense of humor & great anecdotes. One day when he was lecturing & I was bored I started fiddling with a model airplane engine I had traded for. When he noticed, all he said was "Handcock, if that starts buzzing around the room, you are in trouble." I put it up.

Once when someone was whispering, Chapman whirled away from the blackboard where he was writing, let fly with the piece of chalk he had in his hand, and scored a mid-forehead hit on the whisperer. Silence ensued.

In later years he was a favorite customer of mine here in the store.

Bruce Johnson. There were some memorable moments in his class. There was the day someone threw a live snake through the window. It wrapped around a girl's neck when it hit, she screamed, grabbed it, and threw it while going over backwards in her chair. The snake landed on another girls desk which caused her to freak and that desk to go over and the whole room sort of went into motion. Unflappable Doc Johnson just sighed, walked over, picked up the snake and dropped it back out the window and resumed his lecture.

He grew a beard that year for the Montana Territorial Centennial and was told he looked like a cross between an ion and a polar bear.

I remember we used putty for some kind of an experiment. Dan H. & I started tossing it up to the ceiling and catching it again while Johnson was out of the room - and one of us threw it too hard & it stuck to that old fashioned high ceiling. We got it back down before he was back, but it was a major project.

Once Dr. Johnson gave us each a sealed box and asked us to determine without opening it what it contained by weighing, measuring and manipulating the box. The box I got was about 2"x3"x10". I determined that whatever was in the box was cylindrical (it rolled), had a protrusion (it wobbled), was light, and roughly 1/2" smaller than the small dimensions of the box. Then I tried to determine the material the object was made of. It wasn't magnetic, so I tried tapping the box to hear how the object resonated. After I tapped it a few times, the object no longer rolled, but slid with a rustling sound and the last resonation I heard was a "Crash-tinkle-tinkle". I concluded that the box did hold a glass beaker when it was handed to me and broken glass when I turned it back in. I got an "A" along with a semi-humorous-sarcastic note about "destructive testing".

He was mixing chemicals once at his desk when there was a muffled "POP" and a cloud of white smoke. All he said was "Well, it wasn't supposed to do that!"

A couple of other teachers, nameless now, decided to add to their income by printing $100 bills. The bills were pretty good quality, but they got caught passing them in Las Vegas - same serial numbers...



TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Wednesday January 30, 2008 - 02:22pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
More Plagiarism.
But I LOVE this strip! (mostly)






























Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday January 29, 2008 - 04:58pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
FYI: Watches & Bells

Eight Bells

Aboard Navy ships, bells are struck to designate the hours of being on watch. Each watch is four hours in length. One bell is struck after the first half-hour has passed, two bells after one hour has passed, three bells after an hour and a half, four bells after two hours, and so forth up to eight bells are struck at the completion of the four hours. Completing a watch with no incidents to report was "Eight bells and all is well."

The practice of using bells stems from the days of the sailing ships. Sailors couldn't afford to have their own time pieces and relied on the ship's bells to tell time. The ship's boy kept time by using a half-hour glass. Each time the sand ran out, he would turn the glass over and ring the appropriate number of bells.


Watches

Traditionally, a 24-hour day is divided into seven watches.

These are: midnight to 4 a.m. [0000-0400], the mid-watch;

4 to 8 a.m. [0400-0800], morning watch;

8 a.m. to noon [0800-1200], forenoon watch;

noon to 4 p.m. [1200-1600], afternoon watch;

4 to 6 p.m. [1600-1800] first dog watch;

6 to 8 p.m. [1800-2000], second dog watch;

8 p.m. to midnight [2000-2400], evening watch.

(Dog watches run from 1600 to 1800 and from 1800 to 2000. This alternates the daily watch routine so Sailors on the mid-watch would not have it the second night, and, the split also gives each watchstander the opportunity to eat the evening meal.)
Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday January 29, 2008 - 11:46am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments

HOM: LOST! Fights Too!
This is going to be highly non-linear. These high school years were a hodgepodge to live through and are a hodgepodge to remember.

"LOST" pretty much describes me in my transition to high school in the fall of 1960. Going from one room with one teacher, and in a class of one to a hundred room, 1000+ student school with 300+ classmates was wrenching and I spent a lot of time locating classrooms and then trying to figure the fastest route between them.

I had more or less worked through my "total misfit" stage in grade school, but FCHS put me back in that mode again and making new friends was hard.

School work wasn't too bad, I worked hard, and I was pretty proud of the first report card, one C and the rest B's, but when I showed it to Dad he said he had expected me to do a lot better and was disappointed. I kind of quit caring after that - the rest of the high school years were mostly C's and a few B's and doing just enough work to get by. Bad attitude on my part!

The school had trouble classifying me, too. 1/2 my freshman year in honors English with low grades, 1/2 in standard English with high grades; sophomore year, honors English; junior year, standard English; senior year, honors again. The other classes didn't really differentiate between levels of ability.

---------------

Fights. Pretty common in those days. The teachers would cheer us on rather than call the police & counselors, and the fights did tend to settle things. With a few exceptions they cleared the air between the combatants and led to peace.

I was not and am not athletic and being a misfit I ended up getting bullied by a few jerks. (And yes, I can understand the kids that break under bullying and blow away the bullies - any kid who has been on the receiving end of bullying can.)

What really sealed my fate was getting into a fight after school that first Fall - one kid kept tormenting me in gym class until I accepted his challenge. There were a few things wrong with that scenario - I had never been in a boxing match in my life and he was a fighter, and that concussion still affected me. When he hit me, it felt like my head was exploding and it didn't stop hurting for days. He got a black eye, but I lost.

After that I would not fight, and it really made me fair game for the next couple of years until the concussive aftereffects went away & I figured out that the only way to stop getting hit was to hit back. One effect those episodes had on me was that I accepted the brand of coward. Not a great help for self image.

I guess I threw my next punch when I was a junior - a big fat kid kept shoving me in the hall and stepping on my heels till my shoes would pull off. One day I swung around and punched him in the belly and he stopped doing that. Then later on a kid knocked my books out of my hands and we ended up out in the alley. I won that one, but I still felt like a coward.

(Memorable fights of classmates - Harvey was being picked on & hit by a bigger kid and he picked up a board and laid the kid out. The next afternoon was like a chase scene from a "B" movie - Harvey hit the bus steps at a dead run with a dozen or so kids after him - friends of the kid he had clobbered. I guess it wasn't fair to use a club, but but it was okay to gang up on someone.

The second - Louie & Bob got in a fight and Louie went berserker. Bob ended up in the hospital and Louie in an institution for a bit.

Then there were Mike & Alden - they started fighting in grade school and kept it up periodically all through high school. I guess it was finally a draw. Alden ended up at M.I.T. and Mike stayed here)

We had a few teachers that were pretty free with their fists too. I got slapped once by Neal hart for asking a kid in a neighboring seat for a pencil, and the neighbor got slapped too. My fault, I guess. Hart bit off more than he could chew once and ended up getting knocked on his kiester by a student. The student had to switch schools, but Hart kept his hands to himself after that.

The school doors were locked during lunch hour so kids that went outside had to wait for them to be reopened before they could come back in. Once in a while a kid would manage to sneak in and open the doors for others - the doors had push bars so they could be opened from the inside.

One day Gary, a friend of mine, was inside and I was trying to get him to open the door for me, but he just leaned on it and grinned at me. He was still grinning when teacher Mr. Ylinen walked up behind him, planted a foot in his butt and sent him out the door headfirst. I thought it was funnier than Gary did

A different Gary and some friends got into trouble when we were seniors - the old cannon that sits at Woodland park was on an island in the middle of Main Street in those days, near the courthouse and the old WWI Doughboy statue. Late one night they stopped by the old cannon and tossed a jug with four pounds of black powder and a long fuse down the barrel and took off. When the powder went off it blew all the accumulated crud and junk out of the barrel, broke a couple of windows and damaged a sign.

Another kid who had been with them earlier ratted on them when he got busted for possession. The cops gathered them all up and scared them thoroughly, but since no one was hurt or much damage done they let them off, but afterwards the city filled the barrel of the old cannon with concrete so nobody could repeat the episode.

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday January 29, 2008 - 10:55am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Okay, I Admit It!
I'm addicted!






































































Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday January 27, 2008 - 08:35pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Best of Best
So far, anyway....












--------------------------------










Can't Comment! (I take email, though!)

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday January 27, 2008 - 08:19pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Picks!
LOVE THIS STRIP..... (that's an order!)



































Can't Comment!

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday January 27, 2008 - 10:38am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Solitary Games & Other Events!
Playtime!

Indoors, it was books or games or maybe television.

I would play war games with an old set of Chinese checkers. I used to take the little bowling-pin-shaped wooden "men" and stand them up in two opposing groups, then move back and forth bombarding them with a "cannon" that consisted of marbles rolled down through extension tubes from Mom's old Kirby vacuum cleaner till all of one one group was knocked down. When I had actual toy soldiers later on I did the same thing, Axis versus Allies.

I played cards against imaginary opponents using Mom's old Pinochle chips and making up rules as I went.

I'd arrange furniture & blankets to make hideouts or tents and play cowboys & Indians and adventure games. In the summers I built hideouts in the hay shed or in the bushes that lined the fields then. (The bushes are gone now, the price of progress. Dad didn't like having nonproductive land so he ripped them out. He also cut down an old elm tree that grew in the front yard and was a favorite play-spot of mine - even after I slipped and ended up hanging head down with my foot caught in a fork and had to be rescued.)

After Dad gave me an old Zenith console radio that had shortwave bands I got pretty hooked on listening for and to foreign stations, a hobby I still pursue though now I use a tiny "black box" radio hooked to my computer.

I played a lot with toy guns, a favorite being a cheap cap pistol called a "Trooper" by Hubley. (In a fit of nostalgia I bought one of them off Ebay a few years ago.)

Cap guns never lasted long - the caps were very corrosive and a summer's use wore them out internally. I never did own a cap rifle, I got by with BB guns or wooden guns or Ian's old single-shot shotgun, which functioned quite well as a single-shot cap gun; Cock it, stick a cap under the hammer and pull the trigger. BANG! Dig old cap out, repeat process.

I usually stayed out of trouble playing war games, but really did an oopsy once. I found this rock that worked fine size and shape wise as a grenade, and once when I was fighting "Japs" who periodically hid in the garage I would sneak up to the garage door and do a Sgt. Rock imitation, lofting the grenade blindly in. "Blindly" was the operative word that got me in trouble - I didn't know Dad had backed his car into the garage while I was playing elsewhere & I put the rock through the windshield.

----------

Related Flashbacks: Once Mom hopped in the car in a hurry when it was parked in front of the house and hit reverse - without seeing the tractor Dad had parked behind the car. He went somewhat ballistic over that episode & told Mom he was going to put sights on the hood so she aim the car since she obviously couldn't steer it - the same thing Jimmy Weaver told his wide Jean when she ran into the loaded haywagon parked in the middle of their driveway. (Jim had little room to talk - the road south of his house ran on a grade through the middle of a swampy slough nad he managed to put his car over the edge into the water once when he had spent a bit too much time visiting at Del's Bar. Henceforth that Slough was called "Jimmy's Car Wash".)

Years later, Dad hopped into his VW station wagon and backed it up in an arc - directly into the rear of Becky's station wagon. He felt so bad that no one gave him a bad time about it.

Mom had two other car accidents over the years - when I was in grade school we were coming home from town and were turning off at Four Corners just as Edith Grant was pulling on to the highway. Mom waved at Edith and when she did the car slid in the gravel and went into the ditch. No damage and no injuries but Mom was pretty shook up so some guy that stopped drove the car back onto the road for her. I thought it was kind of exciting! Her last accident occurred in front of the High School - she was driving the International and when she was pulling out of a parking space a car swiped the edge of the front bumper. It hurt the car worse than it did the truck - that truck built like a tank! When dad had it parked in the old barn, a beam about 8" through rotted off and fell on the hood - and dented the hood ornament! A modern truck would have been severely damaged.

----------

Anyway - back to playtime.

Wintertime was fun back in those days. Dad used to take the tractor and built me a packed sledding area in the draw north of the hog pens for solitary sliding and would sometimes hook my sled on a rope behind the pickup or tractor and pull me down the road or through the fields a criminal act these days, but common practice then.

When the frozen ponds formed in the fields as I mentioned earlier, I would gio out on the ice with my sled and a ski pole and push myself along or hold a small piece of plywood that worked as a sail if the wind was strong. When one of those ponds formed in the draw below my sled track I really had a lot of fun with long-distance sliding.

When the slough froze, I took the sled down there and then skated there when I got older. Once in a while I took a dog along. i would skate down a ways, then have someone (Mom!) call him, then he would give me a wild ride back.

Summertime, I liked to fish in the slough for bass with Mom or Aunt Minnie. We used to borrow Riedel's old wood rowboat until later on when Dad bought a used 13' aluminum boat and a 5-hp motor. I remember one hot summer day we got a mess of bass. We were using Minnie's car and when we got home we were missing a fish! Minnie found it a couple of days later under the seat - in hot weather!

Another Minnie memory - we were landing the boat at the corner where Jellars live now. I hopped out and just as I pulled the bow up onto the bank Minnie stood up. She went over backwards and landed on Mom's legs. Mom yelled at her to get up because it hurt her legs but Minnie was laughing too hard. When she got her breath all she could say was "I can't move - I peed my pants!" Mom was pissed....

I used to play bicycle polo using an old bat and whatever ball could find. The driveway had a loop in it then (Gone now because Dad built grain bins & blocked it) and I used to go round and round there hitting the ball. I tried it once when the seat of my bike had broken and been removed, leaving the empty post. I didn't think it would matter as I usually was standing & pedalling, but when I forgot and dropped down it was kinda, um, disgruntling.

----------------

Since this is very much stream-of-thought-triggered-by-unrelated-memories, let me jump over to the Weaver family for a bit.

Buck was Jimmy's father, Carol's grandfather, and a friend of Ian's. Jimmy was a friend of Uncle Paul's.

Jimmy rode a motorcycle and Paul said that no matter how late Jimmy left his house he was never late for school so Paul liked riding with him. He said that if you saw a cloud of dust in the distance and it was Jimmy on the bike, you would not have time to cross the road before he went past. Jimmy had a reputation as a tough kid, one who liked to fight and seldom lost, and this was in the day when fights didn't end till one person couldn't get back up after the last punch or kick.

I suspect that Buck was pretty tough too, but he was in his 70's when I knew him. I know he was an excellent mechanic who pushed his vehicles pretty hard - I saw him go nearly airborne crossing a ditch to get into our field.

Buck gave me my first pay. The neighbors all hayed together and we kids were unpaid family labor, but one teenage summer I asked Buck if he would pay me. He asked me what pay I expected and I told him to pay me whatever he felt I was worth. I ended up getting the same pay as the grown-up hired hands and more than the other teen-agers who worked for him and I am still proud of that.

It was in front of Buck that I had my last major disagreement with Dad, when I was 18. It was haying season and we were all over at Buck's, and it was one of those days that every time I opened my mouth to anyone about anything Dad interrupted & corrected me. I finally shot my mouth off when Buck asked me a question and I just pointed at Dad and said "Ask him, he knows everything!" Big mistake, and when we were alone Dad let me know exactly what he thought of me and it was pretty bad. When we got home, I got in the car and just drove for hours mad and hurt. When I finally returned everything was calm like nothing had happened but I think Mom had finally blown up at him because he never spoke to me like that again.

Dad, by the way, liked Buck but didn't care much for Jimmy Weaver and always said he'd "lie when the truth would sound better". I liked Jimmy and in later years loved hunting on his place and keeping his supply of pigeons whittled down.

----------

I am starting to lap into the high school years so I guess I better work on getting the Hodgson years wrapped up.

The April Fool's joke that backfired - I waited till bedtime, then went out into the kitchen, looked out the window and yelled "The chicken house is on fire!" The resiults weren't as funny as I expected them to be.

Puttiung an egg into Bill's cap so that when he plopped it on the egg broke - which was not as bad as the O'Connell kids who put the snake in Bill's hat! Poor Bill was such a wonderful guy and so much fun that he probably ended up getting more than his share of abuse.

Bill introduced us kids to Spoonerisms and we had a lot of fun with them. (Some of the more famous quotations attributed to Spooner include, "The Lord is a shoving leopard," (instead of "The Lord is a loving shepherd"), "It is kisstomary to cuss the bride," ("It is customary to kiss the bride") and, "Mardon me, padam, this pie is occupewed. Can I sew you to another sheet?" (Pardon me, madam, this pew is occupied. Can I show you to another seat?") Bill loved repeating what was said to him but with letters shifted around - "Start the car" became "Cart the Star", etc, but this backfired on him a time or two - like the time Benny Louden called him "Still Breit" or the time Rudy asked him if he wanted a "bit a sugar".

Okay - too much typing, too much history, time to go rerad a book.

TBC.
Tags: | Edit Tags
Saturday January 26, 2008 - 04:48pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments

HOM: LOST! Fights Too!
This is going to be highly non-linear. These high school years were a hodgepodge to live through and are a hodgepodge to remember.

"LOST" pretty much describes me in my transition to high school in the fall of 1960. Going from one room with one teacher, and in a class of one to a hundred room, 1000+ student school with 300+ classmates was wrenching and I spent a lot of time locating classrooms and then trying to figure the fastest route between them.

I had more or less worked through my "total misfit" stage in grade school, but FCHS put me back in that mode again and making new friends was hard.

School work wasn't too bad, I worked hard, and I was pretty proud of the first report card, one C and the rest B's, but when I showed it to Dad he said he had expected me to do a lot better and was disappointed. I kind of quit caring after that - the rest of the high school years were mostly C's and a few B's and doing just enough work to get by. Bad attitude on my part!

The school had trouble classifying me, too. 1/2 my freshman year in honors English with low grades, 1/2 in standard English with high grades; sophomore year, honors English; junior year, standard English; senior year, honors again. The other classes didn't really differentiate between levels of ability.

---------------

Fights. Pretty common in those days. The teachers would cheer us on rather than call the police & counselors, and the fights did tend to settle things. With a few exceptions they cleared the air between the combatants and led to peace.

I was not and am not athletic and being a misfit I ended up getting bullied by a few jerks. (And yes, I can understand the kids that break under bullying and blow away the bullies - any kid who has been on the receiving end of bullying can.)

What really sealed my fate was getting into a fight after school that first Fall - one kid kept tormenting me in gym class until I accepted his challenge. There were a few things wrong with that scenario - I had never been in a boxing match in my life and he was a fighter, and that concussion still affected me. When he hit me, it felt like my head was exploding and it didn't stop hurting for days. He got a black eye, but I lost.

After that I would not fight, and it really made me fair game for the next couple of years until the concussive aftereffects went away & I figured out that the only way to stop getting hit was to hit back. One effect those episodes had on me was that I accepted the brand of coward. Not a great help for self image.

I guess I threw my next punch when I was a junior - a big fat kid kept shoving me in the hall and stepping on my heels till my shoes would pull off. One day I swung around and punched him in the belly and he stopped doing that. Then later on a kid knocked my books out of my hands and we ended up out in the alley. I won that one, but I still felt like a coward.

(Memorable fights of classmates - Harvey was being picked on & hit by a bigger kid and he picked up a board and laid the kid out. The next afternoon was like a chase scene from a "B" movie - Harvey hit the bus steps at a dead run with a dozen or so kids after him - friends of the kid he had clobbered. I guess it wasn't fair to use a club, but but it was okay to gang up on someone.

The second - Louie & Bob got in a fight and Louie went berserker. Bob ended up in the hospital and Louie in an institution for a bit.

Then there were Mike & Alden - they started fighting in grade school and kept it up periodically all through high school. I guess it was finally a draw. Alden ended up at M.I.T. and Mike stayed here)

We had a few teachers that were pretty free with their fists too. I got slapped once by Neal hart for asking a kid in a neighboring seat for a pencil, and the neighbor got slapped too. My fault, I guess. Hart bit off more than he could chew once and ended up getting knocked on his kiester by a student. The student had to switch schools, but Hart kept his hands to himself after that.

The school doors were locked during lunch hour so kids that went outside had to wait for them to be reopened before they could come back in. Once in a while a kid would manage to sneak in and open the doors for others - the doors had push bars so they could be opened from the inside.

One day Gary, a friend of mine, was inside and I was trying to get him to open the door for me, but he just leaned on it and grinned at me. He was still grinning when teacher Mr. Ylinen walked up behind him, planted a foot in his butt and sent him out the door headfirst. I thought it was funnier than Gary did

A different Gary and some friends got into trouble when we were seniors - the old cannon that sits at Woodland park was on an island in the middle of Main Street in those days, near the courthouse and the old WWI Doughboy statue. Late one night they stopped by the old cannon and tossed a jug with four pounds of black powder and a long fuse down the barrel and took off. When the powder went off it blew all the accumulated crud and junk out of the barrel, broke a couple of windows and damaged a sign.

Another kid who had been with them earlier ratted on them when he got busted for possession. The cops gathered them all up and scared them thoroughly, but since no one was hurt or much damage done they let them off, but afterwards the city filled the barrel of the old cannon with concrete so nobody could repeat the episode.

TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags
Tuesday January 29, 2008 - 10:55am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Okay, I Admit It!
I'm addicted!






































































Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday January 27, 2008 - 08:35pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Best of Best
So far, anyway....












--------------------------------










Can't Comment! (I take email, though!)

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday January 27, 2008 - 08:19pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Picks!
LOVE THIS STRIP..... (that's an order!)



































Can't Comment!

(Me) (Home)

Tags: | Edit Tags
Sunday January 27, 2008 - 10:38am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
HOM: Solitary Games & Other Events!
Playtime!

Indoors, it was books or games or maybe television.

I would play war games with an old set of Chinese checkers. I used to take the little bowling-pin-shaped wooden "men" and stand them up in two opposing groups, then move back and forth bombarding them with a "cannon" that consisted of marbles rolled down through extension tubes from Mom's old Kirby vacuum cleaner till all of one one group was knocked down. When I had actual toy soldiers later on I did the same thing, Axis versus Allies.

I played cards against imaginary opponents using Mom's old Pinochle chips and making up rules as I went.

I'd arrange furniture & blankets to make hideouts or tents and play cowboys & Indians and adventure games. In the summers I built hideouts in the hay shed or in the bushes that lined the fields then. (The bushes are gone now, the price of progress. Dad didn't like having nonproductive land so he ripped them out. He also cut down an old elm tree that grew in the front yard and was a favorite play-spot of mine - even after I slipped and ended up hanging head down with my foot caught in a fork and had to be rescued.)

After Dad gave me an old Zenith console radio that had shortwave bands I got pretty hooked on listening for and to foreign stations, a hobby I still pursue though now I use a tiny "black box" radio hooked to my computer.

I played a lot with toy guns, a favorite being a cheap cap pistol called a "Trooper" by Hubley. (In a fit of nostalgia I bought one of them off Ebay a few years ago.)

Cap guns never lasted long - the caps were very corrosive and a summer's use wore them out internally. I never did own a cap rifle, I got by with BB guns or wooden guns or Ian's old single-shot shotgun, which functioned quite well as a single-shot cap gun; Cock it, stick a cap under the hammer and pull the trigger. BANG! Dig old cap out, repeat process.

I usually stayed out of trouble playing war games, but really did an oopsy once. I found this rock that worked fine size and shape wise as a grenade, and once when I was fighting "Japs" who periodically hid in the garage I would sneak up to the garage door and do a Sgt. Rock imitation, lofting the grenade blindly in. "Blindly" was the operative word that got me in trouble - I didn't know Dad had backed his car into the garage while I was playing elsewhere & I put the rock through the windshield.

----------

Related Flashbacks: Once Mom hopped in the car in a hurry when it was parked in front of the house and hit reverse - without seeing the tractor Dad had parked behind the car. He went somewhat ballistic over that episode & told Mom he was going to put sights on the hood so she aim the car since she obviously couldn't steer it - the same thing Jimmy Weaver told his wide Jean when she ran into the loaded haywagon parked in the middle of their driveway. (Jim had little room to talk - the road south of his house ran on a grade through the middle of a swampy slough nad he managed to put his car over the edge into the water once when he had spent a bit too much time visiting at Del's Bar. Henceforth that Slough was called "Jimmy's Car Wash".)

Years later, Dad hopped into his VW station wagon and backed it up in an arc - directly into the rear of Becky's station wagon. He felt so bad that no one gave him a bad time about it.

Mom had two other car accidents over the years - when I was in grade school we were coming home from town and were turning off at Four Corners just as Edith Grant was pulling on to the highway. Mom waved at Edith and when she did the car slid in the gravel and went into the ditch. No damage and no injuries but Mom was pretty shook up so some guy that stopped drove the car back onto the road for her. I thought it was kind of exciting! Her last accident occurred in front of the High School - she was driving the International and when she was pulling out of a parking space a car swiped the edge of the front bumper. It hurt the car worse than it did the truck - that truck built like a tank! When dad had it parked in the old barn, a beam about 8" through rotted off and fell on the hood - and dented the hood ornament! A modern truck would have been severely damaged.

----------

Anyway - back to playtime.

Wintertime was fun back in those days. Dad used to take the tractor and built me a packed sledding area in the draw north of the hog pens for solitary sliding and would sometimes hook my sled on a rope behind the pickup or tractor and pull me down the road or through the fields a criminal act these days, but common practice then.

When the frozen ponds formed in the fields as I mentioned earlier, I would gio out on the ice with my sled and a ski pole and push myself along or hold a small piece of plywood that worked as a sail if the wind was strong. When one of those ponds formed in the draw below my sled track I really had a lot of fun with long-distance sliding.

When the slough froze, I took the sled down there and then skated there when I got older. Once in a while I took a dog along. i would skate down a ways, then have someone (Mom!) call him, then he would give me a wild ride back.

Summertime, I liked to fish in the slough for bass with Mom or Aunt Minnie. We used to borrow Riedel's old wood rowboat until later on when Dad bought a used 13' aluminum boat and a 5-hp motor. I remember one hot summer day we got a mess of bass. We were using Minnie's car and when we got home we were missing a fish! Minnie found it a couple of days later under the seat - in hot weather!

Another Minnie memory - we were landing the boat at the corner where Jellars live now. I hopped out and just as I pulled the bow up onto the bank Minnie stood up. She went over backwards and landed on Mom's legs. Mom yelled at her to get up because it hurt her legs but Minnie was laughing too hard. When she got her breath all she could say was "I can't move - I peed my pants!" Mom was pissed....

I used to play bicycle polo using an old bat and whatever ball could find. The driveway had a loop in it then (Gone now because Dad built grain bins & blocked it) and I used to go round and round there hitting the ball. I tried it once when the seat of my bike had broken and been removed, leaving the empty post. I didn't think it would matter as I usually was standing & pedalling, but when I forgot and dropped down it was kinda, um, disgruntling.

----------------

Since this is very much stream-of-thought-triggered-by-unrelated-memories, let me jump over to the Weaver family for a bit.

Buck was Jimmy's father, Carol's grandfather, and a friend of Ian's. Jimmy was a friend of Uncle Paul's.

Jimmy rode a motorcycle and Paul said that no matter how late Jimmy left his house he was never late for school so Paul liked riding with him. He said that if you saw a cloud of dust in the distance and it was Jimmy on the bike, you would not have time to cross the road before he went past. Jimmy had a reputation as a tough kid, one who liked to fight and seldom lost, and this was in the day when fights didn't end till one person couldn't get back up after the last punch or kick.

I suspect that Buck was pretty tough too, but he was in his 70's when I knew him. I know he was an excellent mechanic who pushed his vehicles pretty hard - I saw him go nearly airborne crossing a ditch to get into our field.

Buck gave me my first pay. The neighbors all hayed together and we kids were unpaid family labor, but one teenage summer I asked Buck if he would pay me. He asked me what pay I expected and I told him to pay me whatever he felt I was worth. I ended up getting the same pay as the grown-up hired hands and more than the other teen-agers who worked for him and I am still proud of that.

It was in front of Buck that I had my last major disagreement with Dad, when I was 18. It was haying season and we were all over at Buck's, and it was one of those days that every time I opened my mouth to anyone about anything Dad interrupted & corrected me. I finally shot my mouth off when Buck asked me a question and I just pointed at Dad and said "Ask him, he knows everything!" Big mistake, and when we were alone Dad let me know exactly what he thought of me and it was pretty bad. When we got home, I got in the car and just drove for hours mad and hurt. When I finally returned everything was calm like nothing had happened but I think Mom had finally blown up at him because he never spoke to me like that again.

Dad, by the way, liked Buck but didn't care much for Jimmy Weaver and always said he'd "lie when the truth would sound better". I liked Jimmy and in later years loved hunting on his place and keeping his supply of pigeons whittled down.

----------

I am starting to lap into the high school years so I guess I better work on getting the Hodgson years wrapped up.

The April Fool's joke that backfired - I waited till bedtime, then went out into the kitchen, looked out the window and yelled "The chicken house is on fire!" The resiults weren't as funny as I expected them to be.

Puttiung an egg into Bill's cap so that when he plopped it on the egg broke - which was not as bad as the O'Connell kids who put the snake in Bill's hat! Poor Bill was such a wonderful guy and so much fun that he probably ended up getting more than his share of abuse.

Bill introduced us kids to Spoonerisms and we had a lot of fun with them. (Some of the more famous quotations attributed to Spooner include, "The Lord is a shoving leopard," (instead of "The Lord is a loving shepherd"), "It is kisstomary to cuss the bride," ("It is customary to kiss the bride") and, "Mardon me, padam, this pie is occupewed. Can I sew you to another sheet?" (Pardon me, madam, this pew is occupied. Can I show you to another seat?") Bill loved repeating what was said to him but with letters shifted around - "Start the car" became "Cart the Star", etc, but this backfired on him a time or two - like the time Benny Louden called him "Still Breit" or the time Rudy asked him if he wanted a "bit a sugar".

Okay - too much typing, too much history, time to go rerad a book.

TBC.
Tags: | Edit Tags
Saturday January 26, 2008 - 04:48pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments

No comments:

Post a Comment