Category Archives: Autobiography

Jane begins reading to herself
Once Jane began to read, her ability expanded rapidly. Between Donna and myself, reading to Jane at least fifteen minutes each daily, plus Jane having learned the alphabet months earlier, gave her the ability and confidence to become ‘reading ready.’ Combining Jane’s interest in books, vocabulary and desire to do things right, Jane discovered that she could read some of her books and enjoy the story alone, or as she would proudly and matter of factly state, ‘I can read all-by-myself.’

In early October, of her own volition, Jane began spending about an hour a day, sitting on the couch and reading to herself. Occasionally, she would hop down and bring her book to me and ask for the pronunciation and meaning of certain words, when satisfied, she’d return to the couch and continue reading. For about the last year, at nap time, Jane took one to three books with her to bed, to look at and attempt to read, while falling asleep.

Books that Jane and I read together during the first two weeks of October:

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As Fall progressed and Jane’s vocabulary expanded, she began reading more library books and relying less on her ‘beginner’s books’. Seeing a three year old read as well as she did, began to cause Donna and me concern for her future educational needs. I began to mull the question, ‘What will Jane do in another three years, when she’s in First Grade, and the other kids are just learning to read and write?’

A ‘Black Monday’ for world markets
Through out the year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), an indicator of stock market performance, continued to rise, climbing from under 2000 to 2722 with only modest reversals. By Fall, trouble was brewing in the Persian Gulf between Western nations, particularly the United States, and Iran who was beginning to lay mines in the Gulf, attack Western naval vessels, and giant, international petroleum super tankers navigating that waterway.

14 October, Wednesday: The DJIA experienced a mild 3.8% decline, a few analysts said the drop was the beginning of a long expected market correction.

15 October, Thursday: Before America awoke, an oil tanker was attacked in the Persian Gulf., during US business hours the DJIA quietly, but steadily declined 2.3%.

16 October, Friday: Overnight, a second oil tanker, the Sea Isle City, was attacked  by an Iranian Silkworm missile and damaged as it sat  in a Kuwaiti port. Since the Sea Isle City was flying an American flag, the attack was considered an attack on the United States. The DJIA declined another 4.6% and  analysts began calling the recent drop, ‘the October Massacre.’ Stock shares in the other world market had been declining for the last few sessions, showing continued and escalating weakness and perhaps fear.

19 October, ‘Black Monday’: US Naval warships began firing on a pair of Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf. By noon the DJIA had declined 8.4% with heavy volume. Market activity grew so hectic on Wall Street that the ticker tape was running two hours behind. Later in the day, the San Francisco market closed several hours early, swamped by a backlog of paperwork.
By Monday’s market closing, the DJIA had craterd, losing a record 508 points in a horrendous 22.6% one day decline, and having a record 604 million shares traded. Stock shares lost about $500,000,000,000.00 ($500 billion) value in one day. News commentators and market analysts gasped at the unprecenteted decline pointing out that, ‘Black Tuesday’, which heralded ‘The Crash of ’29’ and preceded the Great Depression of the 1930s, had only been a 12% decline.

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Overnight, the other major world stock markets followed the American stocks, losing between 9% and 25% of their share values. After cratering the day before, the DJIA skyrockets 107 points, the largest one day advance in history. President Ronald Reagan came on National TV this evening to calm the public saying that he’d been in touch with US economic consultants. The US and world economic leaders would be working together to stabilize markets and keep their economies in line. Meanwhile, the Congress would look at ways to reduce the US budget deficit and would reduce the interest rates to help stimulate the economy. Mr. Reagan ended his speech saying, ‘There’s no need for concern.’ Although our family was not threatened directly and we lost no money in the stock market, the realization that history was being made in the market and the uncertainty of the conflict in the Persian Gulf  kept our eyes open and ears tuned to the daily news media.

26 October, Monday: World markets continued a week of wild gyrations: Tokyo’s Nikkei dropped 5%, Hong Kong which had been closed for a week, cratered a whopping 33% overnight, Sidney was down 7%.

From the noon TV News, we learned that a disgruntled stock investor had walked into his Merrill Lynch broker’s office in Miami, Florida, pulled a gun from his briefcase, killed his broker, wounded the office manager then killed himself. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down another 8% that day.

Doomsday observations
As the years passed, I became rather cynical regarding the importance of the ‘daily news’. For all the interest politicians and Big Business gave the stock market, for all the periodic price instabilities, warnings of doom, saber rattling and threats of war, and the ever present promises of prosperity, Donna and I came to see much of the news as a string of bias half truths and sensationalism that continually grew worse as the years passed.

Every year there were several particularly large, gut wrenching stories reported with grave solemness and nervous earnsty by the media; some stories continued over a several year period becoming irritating, oppressive or boring, ie.:
•  The stock market suffered a major decline in 1974. We had ‘The Arab Oil Embargo’. President Richard Nixon resigned his office.
•  In 1979-80 we had high inflation, commodity prices skyrocketed. Iran was roiled by revolution and took our Embassy personnel hostage, the situation bordered on war. It seemed that unions everywhere were striking for higher wages.
•  By 1983 or so, the Social Security fund was going broke and needed more funds. We’d just had a 22.6%, one day stock market decline.

The cries of doom came from a different direction each time, each having a  theorized disastrous endpoint, if the given scenario actually played out to its ‘logical’, extrapolated conclusion. However, in the end, each scenario along with the cries of doom just faded away. No great leaders emerged, we voters didn’t make a difference at the polls, no brilliant and-or decisive plans were executed to bring about a wonderous ‘fix’, the final solution to all our problems seemed couched in money. Every horrific national problem the news media reported was always solved in one or more of the following manners:
•  We workers lost about $10 a week in wages, through wage freezes, wage reductions or reduced benefits.
•  Some combination of Federal, Social Security, State and Local taxes, medical insurance, medical co-pay were increased.
•  Commodity prices became outrageous, i.e. groceries, gasoline, anti freeze, retail product price increases, auto insurance, movie tickets with popcorn & soda pop…

The cries of doom were all alarmist and sensationalism.
The important point to remember is that, ‘A successful parasite never kills its host’.
What this means is, that generally, you have little to fear from reports of impending doom unless;
1) we actually have an international war with missiles in the air, (nuclear or solar EMP or a nuclear tipped MIRV attack)
2) there is deadly pandemic with millions dying, schools closed nationally…,
3) major volcanic eruption(s) accompanied by obviously dimmed sunlight and cold summer temperatures,
4) or a for real oil embargo-energy flow stoppage, or
5) hyperinflation (under a P.C. name, but won’t be called ‘hyperinflation’),
All the political and business elite want is a little more money, which you’ll gladly part with if the news media have scared you enough.

Halloween
As Halloween approached, Donna bought several yards of black material and sewed a very nice witches costume for Jane. She also made a tall, pointy black hat with a wide flat brim. Donna did an exceptional job, she was quite skilled with her sewing machine. When the project was finished, Jane had a Halloween costume that lasted until she outgrew it, eight years later.

On Halloween eve, we ate an early supper, then Jane hurriedly put on her Halloween clown costume. Using actors cosmetics, Donna made up Jane’s face with a big red nose and a huge, ear to ear smile. We left home at 6:00PM, just after it became dark, and drove to a subdivision in Foley to Trick or Treat. We were glad for Jane’s sake, as well as our own, that the outdoor temperature was quite mild and that several inches of snow we received a week earlier had melted.

As we worked, our way through the subdivision, Donna and I took turns walking with Jane while she made her way from house to house. After awhile Jane wanted to Trick or Treat by herself so we simply followed along in the car.

We had a great time.
Imagine if you will, a (almost) four year old pint sized, little witch. She’d run up to a door, ring the door bell and look up, waiting. When someone answered the door, Jane would step back and exclaim, ‘Trick or Treat!’. After being given a small candy treat, Jane would look up and say, ‘Thank you! Happy Halloween!’  Often these words of appreciation and the unexpected salutation caught the adult off guard. When this occurred, they always turned back to look at the diminutive witch and warmly replied words to the effect, ‘You’re quite welcomed.’

A lot of children were roaming the streets: There were ghosts and goblins, baseball players, hobo’s, various monsters, children dressed like adults, children with no costume, various monsters, etc. all streamed  up and down through the neighborhoods, running between homes, walking, scurrying diagonally across the road. That year, more so than in an year in the past, I saw a lot of children carrying flashlights or other battery operated glowing objects for safety from auto traffic.

The older kids seemed to run in packs of about four to six. The smaller children darted between houses either by themselves, with another small child,  or more likely with a parent lagging a little behind. Here and there, groups were seen stopping briefly to chat, then they were off, going in their different directions. It made me feel good and warm to see all the little and not so little folk hurrying about busy, all under the exciting spell of Halloween.

We drove quietly down the street following Jane, with only our car’s parking lights on, all the while alert not to hit any of the other children who were racing about hither, thither and yon.

At several houses there were adult costume parties in progress. Some homes had as many as a half dozen pumpkins on their front porch, all had hideous, carved faces. One home owner had placed a loudspeaker in a screened living room window and was playing eerie sounds that could be heard down the block. At about a quarter of the homes, either no one was home or the front porch light was left off, indicating the family didn’t want to be disturbed.

Around 7:30PM, activity along the streets began to wane. When Jane returned to the warmth of the car, we started for home hoping to hear all of her Trick or Treat stories. Alas, Jane had a busy day and a thorough work out  from running house to house, while the cold evening temperatures made her tired. No sooner was she comfortable in the car when she promptly fell asleep.

Our meals, November 1987

TJ- tomato juice. OJ- orange juice. PB- peanut butter. WW bread- whole wheat bread, no butter or margarine.
Coffee- instant, decaffeinated taken without sugar. Milk- skimmed. Canned soups are Campbell’s variety. Donna previously homemade the other soups, ie., split pea, vegetable, lima bean & navy bean which were frozen and later defrosted for lunch.

Jane’s social and cognitive skills develop
Watching Jane grow and develop has been a real treat. She was a fast learner and always eager to move to the next step in our studies. From the earliest times, just after she learned to walk, she explored and experimented using everything. She first learned to socialize with adults, then how to interact with other children in Campfire Sparks and at Dance School. At three and a half years of age, she followed directions and played her English Recorder with a proficiency comparable to a five or six year old. She was also beginning to learn to ‘read’ and understand our mannerisms, attitudes, voice inflections, and decipher those secret words and phrases (double meanings) which didn’t necessarily match the words we were saying.

One day in early November, just before lunch, Jane and I had just returned from the mailbox, when, out of the clear blue sky,  I asked her, ‘What do you think we should do about lunch?’ Jane replied, ‘I want hamburgers, French fries, soda pop and ketchup.’ I already had a pan of soup warming on the stove, but after a dismal morning, I was caught up by Jane’s enthusiasm.
Carrying the conversation further, I asked, ‘How do we do that?’  Jane quickly answered, ‘Get your keys an put them in the car (she pretended to put them in the ignition) and go to town.’
Playing dumb and evasive, I asked, ‘How would we get ready to do something like that?’  Jane, apparently sensing my vacillation, ran to me, reached up and unbuttoned the bottom button on my work shirt while exclaiming, ‘Like this! You just change your shirt and clothes and go!’
Then, pretending to have turned sour on the idea, I asked in a deep, negative voice, ‘Do you really think we should?’ Jane apparently understanding my trickiness, began to happily chant, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Still feigning sourness, I replied, ‘Wellll…..OK!’ Upon hearing this, Jane began hopping around the front room like a two legged rabbit, while shouting, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’
Before long, we were on our way to a fast food restaurant in St. Cloud.  :-)

Music [album: Battlestar Galactica, Season 3: A Distant Sadness]

Victorian Stereograph, from dream to reality
Sunday, November 9, I had a dream and in the dream I looked across time. By some unfathomable process of transport, I was in the past as an observer, but not as a ‘time traveler’. I was not an external observer viewing scenes from the outside, instead I was an external observer viewing scenes from within the past environment. I wondered at the paradox. Immediately the deep time environment dissolved into a blur, then images reformed and I understood that a different reality now existed. As I looked, I saw an old stereo picture viewer being lifted away from my face. I was at first surprised, then comfortable with the thought that I’d just been viewing ‘turn of the century’ stereopictures. The thought remained with me and I was quite amazed at the reality of the experience gained from looking at those old cards.

Shortly thereafter, I became conscious of being awake, of being in a drowsy state and of being warm, comfortable and cozily snuggled in my bed. It was a pleasure to lie there and recall my dream. Then I remembered an event from my youth, when I’d discovered an odd looking contraption made of wire and wood, in a glass enclosed bookcase at my grandparent’s Coloma farm. Grandma Elsie (Grubb) Pierce showed me how to work the device, where after, I sat in wonder looking at pictures of 19th century vanished scenes.

Later, on the same morning as my dream, I was just about to walk out the door of an antique shop where I’d purchased a tarnished, ca. 1898, silver plated butter dish, when I recalled my dream. The memory made me stop in my tracks; releasing the door handle, I turned and walked back to the sales counter and asked the owner, ‘Do you have any of those old stereo viewers or the pictures that go with them?’ The old woman took me across her shop to a roll up desk which she opened. Inside, the desk was a hand held stereoscope made of Birdseye maple. I examined the viewer and found it in excellent condition. The old woman also pulled out about a hundred stereoviews from pigeon holes in the desk. I was like a child in a toy store; I wanted that neat old stereoscope and some of her better quality stereoviews.

That night on her way home from work, Donna stopped at the St. Cloud Public Library and brought home several books about antiques which had at least one article about Nineteenth Century stereoscopy. Later, at home, we looked through the books and talked about buying the stereoscope that I’d seen.

The next afternoon, Jane and I met Donna in town to look at the instrument together. We bought the stereoviewer and so began my hobby of collecting stereographs.

During the next eight years, I bought second stereoscope, an aluminum one as seen below, and one thousand fifty stereoviews. I probably built up one of the largest, if not the largest stereoview collection in central Minnesota. Many of the images from the Nineteenth Century are amazing and far from the social mores of our time.

I have pictures of ‘Blacks’ picking cotton and hunting for lice on each other’s head; images of American Indians with weapons and dressed in the costume of their time; of western cowboys, of large game hunting in Africa, practically naked, black African natives carrying elephant tusk ivory, village huts and natives in the jungles of Africa; of cannibals with human prey in New Guinea; US Presidents; Yellowstone and Yosemite National Park’s when they really were wild; scenes from the construction of the Panama Canal; of the Rough Riders in Cuba; very early urban electrification; volcanic eruptions and earthquake fissures; peasant women grinding wheat and corn in stone mortars; Bedouin tent interiors; tours of the Holy Land; Australian aborigines; wood mast sailing ships and vanished scenes from all around the world, ‘1st generation’ airplanes.

Stereoviews are truly amazing, showing realistic, depth of field views, of many traditional cultures, whom only a decade or two later were becoming extinct. And now, only one hundred years after the photographs were taken, the world has evolved a ‘look’ that is very, very different. In this short period of one century, Mankind, our machines, and a machine made affluent culture have become virtually omnipresent across the face of the Earth.

Preschool testing begins the Dial R test
On Tuesday, November 10, we took Jane to Jefferson Grade School in St. Cloud, where she had an appointment to have her mental abilities evaluated. She was given a Dial R test which covered such topics as identifying body parts, naming letters, naming verbs and nouns, articulating, counting, sentence length, building figures with blocks, skipping, etc. The nurse whom administered the test told us that with her forty seven months of chronological age, Jane tested equivalent to a person with a mental age sixty four months, so she had an IQ of about 136. She continued, saying that with her mental age, Jane would be in the top five percent of her class.

 Jane and I have a car-deer collision
During late morning on Friday, November 13, Jane and I again visited the antique shop where I bought several of my first stereographs. We met Donna in St. Cloudfor lunch. After our meal, Donna returned to work while Jane and I left town for the trip home.

As we drove out County Road #3 into the countryside, Jane began climbing around in the car and becoming a pre-nap time pest. When we stopped at the Popple Creek crossroads ‘Stop sign’, I told her to put on her safety belt- in hopes of restraining and quieting her down.  A couple minutes later, we were about one and a half miles north of Popple Creek, when suddenly I saw large buck ahead, an instant estimation of our trajectories spelled danger. Suddenly, I began to see events pass in slow motion. The deer was running up the ditch on the right side of the road, coming in our direction. The distance between us was melting away fast. As a reflex action, I began to swerve the car to the left in order to allow a larger corridor for us to pass, just in case he bolted onto the road. In those two or three seconds, as I watched, the deer bounded up the roadside, out of the ditch, then onto the road. My right foot went down on the brake pedal. Although I’d been only driving about forty five mph, the car tires began to loudly screech on the blacktop. The car seemed to hop and grind, while slowly drifting sideways in its deceleration.

Something beside me in the car slumped and flew forward hitting the dashboard. I hoped Jane was going to be all right, but there was no time to look or think, all I could do was maintain control of the car. The approximately one hundred feet separating the deer from the car was vanishing. In the blink of an eye we collided, his brown body rose slightly in the air and came down with a ‘WHUMP!’ on the car hood about five feet in front of my face. I wondered if he’d come through the windshield. He slid up the hood toward me, then only eighteen inches in front of my face, began to defy gravity by sliding up the windshield toward the roof. Meanwhile, the car continued to shudder and the brakes scream. I held myself upright and away from the steering wheel, unable to see out the window. In another moment the car came screeching to a halt, and sat cantilevered at an angle in the center of the road. The deer slid back down the windshield and off the front of the car, all the while twisting and kicking. He landed on his feet and without a moment’s hesitation, bounded off, looking none the worse for the accident!

With teeth clenched, I looked to my right at Jane. She was scrunched down in her seat looking at me in wide eyed surprise, her books were scattered on the floor under the dashboard. I asked if she was hurt and was glad to hear that she was not. I realized immediately how fortunate it was that she’d just fastened her safety belt. Quickly looking back to the west (left), it was good to see the deer running and bounding away, along a weedy fence line, apparently unhurt.

I drove the car out of the center of the road and parked along the shoulder to assess damages. I told Jane what had happened and how lucky she was to have been in the safety belt. She was sitting up now, looking out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the deer. She said, ‘I saw some brown on the window.’ We talked for a couple of minutes, while I regained my senses and made sure Jane was both physically and emotionally all right.

The car had taken a little damage. There was a one inch deep by eight inch in diameter dent in the front right fender panel; a couple smaller dents in the hood; a hook shaped scratch  where the deer stomped his foot trying to gain his footing while he slid up on the hood; also a star shaped crack in the windshield from his antler.

When we arrived home, I telephoned Donna to tell her of our accident, then phoned our insurance company. The claims officer informed me that they receive an average of one car-deer damage report per day in Minnesota–and our insurance company is one of many operating in the state!

Tragedy at Fort Seybert, initial research
About three months earlier, in August, I initially stumbled onto the tragic story of an immigrant ancestor family that gripped my imagination.

The odyssey of discovery began when we requested some genealogical records from the Xenia, Ohio, Historical Society. Our contact, Mrs. Kathleen Taylor, dutifully searched her records for the information we requested and went a step beyond by photocopying and send eighteen pages of information from the family genealogical book, Betebenner-Horney and Related Families by Mrs. Evelyn H. Vohland.

Mrs. Taylor’s package arrived on Wednesday, August 6. I began to read over the information as soon as I returned from the mail box. I was particularly interested in developing a better understanding of the Jeffery Horney and wife Catherine Janes-Horney genealogy as these were shadowy names at the periphery of my research. This new material from Xenia, Ohio brought some vital dates and extended the Jane’s and Seybert family pedigrees back a couple more generations.

What particularly caught my attention was the mention of,
“William Janes(IV)…..m. Margaret Seybert, dau. of Jacob and Mrs. Seybert b. ca. 1745. The story of the massacre of the Seyberts by Indians is written on pages 43 through 51 of the History of Pendleton Co.W. Vaby Morton…”

I asked Donna stop at the St. Cloud Public Library the next day, and pick up several books on the history of West   Virginia and on the French and Indian Wars.
That evening, I scoured through the library books that Donna brought home, and learned that during the French and Indian Wars, several small forts were built on the South Branch of the Potomac River, in a region that is now Pendleton County, West Virginia. In the mid 1700s that area was known as Highland County, Virginia.

What I found was, ‘In the Spring of 1758 a large Indian war party took Fort Upper Tract and killed all its inhabitants and defenders, they next attacked Fort Seybert and either killed or captured its inhabitants.’

Friday, Donna telephoned the Pendleton County Public Library in West Virginia, and spoke to the librarian, Mr. Richard Harding, whom it turned out was also Vice President of the Pendleton County Historical Society. Mr. Harding shared some information about the old Fort, but recommended we read History of Pendleton County and History of Highland County. That afternoon Donna telephoned the St. Cloud Public Library and ordered these books from West Virginia, through the interstate library book loan system.

The books we requested arrived on August 27.
Several books that I  referenced in researching the massacre at Fort Seybert:
•  Betebenner — Horney And Allied Families © 1981  by Evelyn Halkyard Vohland publ. by Clipper Publishers, Shelton, NE. – A family genealogy with photographs and occasional stories. 297 pages.
•  A   History of Pendleton County, West Virginia  © 1910 by   Oren F. Morton, republished  in 1980 by   Regional Publishing Co., Baltimore, MD.
•  Pennsylvania  German Immigrants 1709 — 1786 © 1980, edited by Don Yoder, publ. by Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore   MD, 394 pages.
•  The Seiberts of Saarland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, 1982 ed. by Raymond Martin Ball, WA – A family   genealogy

Over the next few days, I spent approximately twenty one hours, extracting information from A History of Pendleton County, West Virginia.  My interest was two-fold, to learn about the massacre at Fort Seybert and get a understanding of how it was to live on the west Virginia frontier during the mid 1700s.

As the research progressed the story became chillingly: On 28 April 1758, my 6G- grandfather Jacob, his wife and others were tomahawked and scalped after surrendering the ill defended Fort to a large Shawnee war party.

We then telephoned the University of West Virginia and requested a photocopy of the Fort Seybert Geological Survey Map #77-1. The topographical map, which included the site of old Fort Seybert, would show us the spatial relationship between the nearby mountains, river, present roads and houses across that area. We also telephoned Evelyn Vohland[1] in Nebraska and ordered her last copy of the family genealogy, Betebenner — Horney And Allied Families for $26.00.

On December 4, I began entering my research of the massacre into my Journal #14, starting on page 2699  titled, Emigrating To The English — American Colonies and Making A Home In The New World: The Jacob Seybert Family Story. It took in excess of thirty two hours to write up the twenty six page story, including maps and drawings.

When the journal entry was finished, I sat back and looked through the pages.

These ancestors, who’d once been an obscure branch of the family tree, came alive in my mind. From descriptions of the environment and living conditions, the  danger of Indian attack, the hardship of life on the frontier, I could imagine their lifestyle. The dates and spacing of births in the family, the children’s names, knowing that the grandparents and extended family lived nearby; knowing the events that occurred at Fort Seybert on that fateful morning, all gave me an unparalleled insight into not only my own ancestors, but into life in Colonial America during the time of the french and Indian Wars. I was amply rewarded with a growth in empathy, for the several dozen hours spent unraveling the mystery.

The results of my research were written up and copies were sent to my genealogical research associates: my father, Uncle Bill, and cousin Doris Grubb-Hughes. The story is also found as a two-part post in the 4dtraveler WordPress bog:
•  My family in history/_2. Settlers & Migrants/The Jacob Seybert family: Coming to America
•  My family in history/_2. Settlers & Migrants/The Jacob Seybert family: Fort Seybert

Christmas Day 1987, Friday: The family gift exchange list

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Dog troubles in paradise
When Pepin was a gangly puppy, Griz occasionally would occasionally beat him up, repeatedly knocked him down and always put the youngster in his place– as  ‘#2 male dog. Griz always insisted on being first to choose  which of our three dog dishes he wanted to eat from. He also pushed his way past the others to be the first to greet and be greeted when we his human family members came outside.
Every year, when Jessie dog went into heat, I dutifully chained her, Griz and eventually Pepin, to their respective houses to kept them apart for about three weeks.
By early December, Pepin had grown and matured to a point where he was in competition with his aging father, Griz, for both Jessie’s attention and particularly, to become ‘yard boss’.

These few year were a sad time for me, because I hated to see the dogs fight with increasing frequency, when I came outside and called them together, for either a walk or to do some chore.

Griz was already about 10 years old and weighed 1/2 as much as his pup-son Pepin, who was just reaching  young adulthood. However, not one to give up, Griz would keep pushing Pepin; Pepin would turn on Griz and a ferocious dog fight would ensue.

One evening, I let Griz in the house for a few minutes and noticed some blood on his neck. When I raised his head to look I found a two inch long by one inch wide rip in the loose skin at the back of his lower jaw. I called the veterinarian, who said if he wasn’t bleeding to treat him with disinfectant and bring him to the office in the morning.

I chained Pepin to a dog house to keep the dogs apart. Griz went about his business stopping ever once in a while just out of Pepin’s reach to give him a spiteful stare. About a week and a half after chaining Pepin, Griz tried to dominate his son. A fight resulted and Griz’s neck wound was reopened. Griz continued to pester Pepin who remained chained. The state of affairs was ridiculous, the two male dogs would fight one another at the slightest provocation. In a fit of desperation, I decided to unchain Pepin and let them fight until a new, pecking order, was established.

The two dogs had a ‘knock down drag out fight’ at 11:30AM and another at 2:30PM.
During the second fight, Pepin immediately knocked Griz down and jumped on him. Griz laid curled up on his back yelping and whining while Pepin held him down, and chewed on him. After the fight, Griz spent much of the afternoon limping around the yard, his fur looked dirty, unkempt and matted.

Despite losing both fights, Griz wouldn’t give up, he kept picking at Pepin.

At 5:05 PM that same afternoon there was a third fight. Pepin knocked Griz down and while growling and snarling in a terrifying manner, bit into his fur and shook him silly. Griz wiggled, kicked and cried piteously as he was bitten, stepped on and beaten. When the fight was over, my heart sank at seeing my old buddy Griz so defeated. He looked so forlorn. His beautiful fur coat was disheveled and covered with wet and frozen saliva, there was dried blood smeared all around his neck, he was wide eyed, nervous and visibly shaken. I wished he would surrender and allow peace to return to the yard.

During the night, Pepin drove Griz out of the yard, causing him to miss his breakfast. When I walked down to the mailbox at just before noon the next day, I found Griz had made a nest in the snow amongst some saplings, down a slope, just inside our font gate, next to the County Road.
Griz walked back up the driveway with me, but as soon as we entered the yard, Pepin jumped on him. I grabbed a stick and beat Pepin good while he in turn beat up on Griz. When the fight broke up, I chained Pepin up for a couple days to let tempers cool.

We began giving Griz antibiotics as his neck injury had become infected. Griz stayed in his dog house all the next day. He was terrified of any injury, even yelping and running from his mate, Jessie, whom he previously had never given a second thought to.

That was the turning point in Griz and Pepin’s relationship, Pepin had established himself as ‘yard boss’. From that point on, we simply had two boss dogs in the yard. The smaller brown, gentlemanly one, Griz, remained my favorite. He learned to stay away from or at least not pick at Pepin. They still had an occasional fight, but as time passed and Griz grew older, he simply offered less resistance, thus avoiding serious damage.

Griz learned to spend a more time by himself, as he went about his customary daily errands in the yard and woods. Although he was defeated by Pepin, who was physically a much larger and younger dog, Griz was a cleaver and ferocious hunter, who frequently brought home small game (rabbits, woodchucks, muskrat, rats) and the neighbors pets, to eat or give to Jessie. Although Pepin was a big, powerful and fearless, he was neither fast, stealthy or smart enough to catch small game.

What’s on TV tonight?
My favorite programs in 1987
•  Local Evening   News
•  National   Evening News
•  Occasional ABC, CBS or NBC evening movies
•  Star Trek: The Next Generation

Movies
Movies that Donna, Jane and I attended during the year:
Batteries Not Included with Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy
Beverly Hills Cop II  with Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, Ronny Cox
Dragnet  with Dan Aykroyd, Tom Hanks, Christopher Plummer, Harry Morgan
Harry and the Hendersons with John Lithgow, Melinda Dillon, Margaret Langrick
Ishtar with Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Charles Grodin
Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Gary Busey
Predator withArnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Elpidia Carrillo
Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise with Robert Carradine, Curtis Armstrong
The Running Man withArnold Schwarzenegger, Richard Dawson, Yaphet Kotto
The Witches of Eastwick with Jack Nicholson,Cher, Susan Saradon, Michael Pfeiffer
Wall Street with Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Chuck Pfeiffer

Glen Kenyon Pierce, remembered on 4 June 1987
At left, a circa 1940 photograph of my grandfather, Glen Kenyon Pierce, about 50 years old, born one hundred years ago, on 4 June 1887, in rural Jacksonville, Chickasaw County, Iowa.

Jane learns to play the English Recorder
During early to mid February, Donna and I had on several occasions discussed buying Jane an English recorder and teaching her to play the musical scale. On Donna’s way home from work on February 20, she stopped at Four Winds Music Store and bought Jane an English recorder for $7.50 and a beginner’s music book.
Jane showed considerable enthusiasm at learning to play her recorder so we coached her a little every day. A month later, Jane had progressed far enough with her music and was still showing an interest in playing, so we set her up with music lessons. Her first private lesson was on Saturday, March 14, with Sharon. Sharon, a Elementary School music teacher in her 40s, gave Jane lessons in her home. Sharon explained early training procedures, so we could continue practicing effectively at home. Then for twenty minutes, Sharon and Jane practiced rhythmically tapping their hands, the proper method to hold the recorder, how to hold her fingers to form a ‘b’ note then rhythmically ‘tooting’ the ‘b’ note. When Jane learned a series of prescribed lessons, she was to be brought back for her next instruction.

Jane returned to Sharon for lessons in April, May and June, each time having shown great improvement over her previous visit. Meanwhile, Donna spent about 15 minutes a day with Jane assisting as she practiced fingering notes and playing her beginner’s scales. By mid June, Jane was playing songs like Hot Cross Buns, and Mary Had A  Little Lamb, which was exceptional for a three year seven month old preschooler!  8-)

Donna’s job at True Value Hardware
About one and a half years passed since Donna was hired as a bookkeeper at True Value Hardware store. Although she attended college and became a teacher with a California Secondary School Teaching License, she had never found a teaching position in Education. For the last fifteen years she worked in the bookkeeping and accounting departments of several different companies.

True Value Hardware is rather large for a hardware store, with 8500 square feet retail floor space, six full time and four part time employees. The store has a full line of hardware, plumbing, electrical, paint, pant sundries, hand tools, as well as an adequate line of house wares, small appliances and seasonal lawn and garden merchandise.

When Donna was hired, True Value was doing its bookkeeping in handwritten ledger books. Soon, Wayne, the owner, realized how much computer experience Donna had, so he bought a 286 IBM desk top computer, printer, etc., to convert the bookkeeping from handwritten to computerized records. Donna ‘brought the office into the Twentieth Century,’ buying, installing, and configuring the Peachtree Accounting software program to operate with their bookkeeping system and entering the data files to bring the records up to date.

The company needed to hire a part time girl for several months to help keypunch the account data in at night. Donna told our neighbor, Arlene, that the job was opened. After her  interview, Arlene was given the job and Donna trained her in what she was to do.

[At right, a 1987 photograph of Donna standing beside the driveway in our homesite.]

Since Donna spends most of her time working alone in the office, she has the benefit of pretty much setting her own hours. She was given a store key and can start work before the store opens, as is required when doing the monthly book closings. She takes the daily receipts to the bank and during slow periods helps work on merchandise displays. At times, she is called to the sales floor to either wait on customers or handle the cash register

Donna began her employment at True Value at a wage of $5.50 per hour, after thirty days training, her pay was increased 50¢ to $6.00 per hour. Now, after two ‘cost of living’ increases she is earning $6.55 per hour. For comparison, the sales floor personnel earn wages ranging from $4.00 to $5.95 per hour, however, Donna is still earning about $2.00 per hour less than she did working at Landy Packing Company. Although she earns less on a hourly basis, she does get a lot of overtime which goes a long way to making up for the pay differential. Besides working a half day every other Sunday, Donna  usually put in about two hours overtime (at one and half times regular pay) each week.

Installing a split rail yard fence
Beginning in early June, and finishing around the end of the month, we spend our weekends and some evenings installing a commercially made, two rail split-rail fence. The fence was set along the two hundred feet of driveway bordering the upper yard from the yard gate, around a semi circle to the garage.  It had been a few years since we’d installed the perimeter fence posts around the yard, so our renewed post hole digging sessions brought back old memories and sore muscles. Compounding the problem, we had a swarm of pesky Summer  gnats that flew into our eyes, ears and mouths with regularity.

When installed, the fence looked very nice and we realized we should have put it in earlier.  The rustic split rail style fits right in with our wooded surroundings, making the yard  look all that much more peaceful, serene and at one with nature, like the home of a National Park Forest Ranger.

[Photograph above, a 1987 summer morning at Nightstar*. Our upper front yard bordered by the newly installed split rail fence. We installed the fence by digging in a post or two each morning before work and maybe 3-4 per weekend day for about two weeks.
As of 1987, its been about 14 years since we decided to move out of California, 10 years since we bought the 39 acre property and 8 years since we became residents.]

At 3 years old, Jane begins reading
All the work Donna, Jane and I have been doing to teach Jane her alphabet and simple words has begun to pay off. On the morning of June 18, when Jane and I sat down to read from her book, Tom The TV Cat, Jane announced,
‘I can read the book to you, an’ mommy didn’t tell me how.’
Somewhat taken back, and surprised by Jane’s statement, I replied,
‘Ohh? You can? Well, what are you going to read to me?’

Jane placed her finger beneath a line in the open book and read, ‘He did mouse work.’ My head jerked sideways toward Jane, with full realization that this was the first time she had ever initiated reading aloud. Jane began reading sentences at three years seven months of age, approximately six months after learning the alphabet!  :-)

As the months passed, Jane and I read more children’s books together than it would be practical to list here. Some of the titles, however, included: Other People-Other Homes, Safety First-Home, Safety First-Fire, Continents, Oceans, Volcanoes, Deserts, Pioneers, West Indies, Japan, Ireland, I Like Kindergarten, Beavers…

Music [midi: Labyrinth Melody]

A dream about gathering family signatures
During late June, I began collecting autographs of family members[1].
In order to extract ancestral signatures, our original documents were photocopied. Liquid paper was then used to blot out all other words near the ancestors name, in this way we ended up with a ‘clean’ signature. The signature was then cut out and pasted to a sheet of white paper and photocopied onto a piece of fine quality linen paper. This copy was cut out and placed inside a Show Guard postage stamp mount for storage.

Several days after this process was begun, I awoke during the middle of the night with an upset stomach and had a difficult time returning to sleep. I laid quietly in bed, neither awake or asleep, but in some drowsy middle ground where the mind drifts between dreams and imagination.

All of a sudden, my mind’s eye was, as it were, looking into a pool of unstill water; as the water became quiet, an image formed. The image was of my maternal grandparents, Pearl Elmer Shafer and wife, Alma Delight Kellogg, as they stood in a room signing my mother and father’s marriage license. I watched them through the pool- like, watery image, from a position above and behind them, near the ceiling.

In those brief moments that I was there observing, I overheard several quiet words spoken by the preacher, saying, ‘Here’s the pen. Sign here.’ (while pointing). My grandparents appeared solemn, their minds trying to focus on the official act of signing the license. They were totally absorbed in the emotions of the marriage of their daughter, Hazel. There was tenseness in the room, also a sense of duty, happiness and sadness.

Having signed the license, they turned their attention elsewhere. In an instant the document swirled into the watery pool toward me. In another instant, I had separated their names from the other extraneous print on the marriage license. I turned my gaze and looked  back into the pool. No more than a few seconds had elapsed for my grandparents, they were just beginning to turn away from the desk where the license laid. On the surface of the document, the ink signatures were just beginning to dry.

I looked at my grandparents through the pool, they were only a few feet distance, but walking away from the center of the room toward the door. They were totally oblivious of the potential that their act created, of my presence and concern with their signature on that piece of paper. Yet, how could they know? I was a person, whom in their time didn’t exist. I was reaching from the future, reaching back for their signatures.

The marriage license was simply a document, a contract joining two persons, complete with names, intentions, date, and the signatures of the officials and witnesses. It was a piece of paper that documented an event in space-time, but there was more, much more. In the act of signing their names they had left a personal, physical record of their individuality and the operation of their minds and, they had created a linking event in a different space- time.

I mused over the fact that photocopiers hadn’t yet been invented in 1941 when my parents were married. Then comically, I recalled that parts of rural America weren’t even electrified at that time. I grinned to myself, smug and knowing. I marveled that a ‘future person’ could seemingly reach back in time and separate the mark, movement and psychological trace of a person from an event in the distant past where the background was becoming increasingly noisy. I wondered what future technology might allow us to do and how easy it would be for people in my future to look back and extract our spoor and trace.

Startled by that realization, I opened my eyes and starred into the darkness of the bedroom, and knew you were near.
[Above, a photocopy of some of my family signatures, dating from the 1620 Mayflower Pilgrims to roughly the mid 1800s.]

They lie about us, quiet and potential
It is practically a universal human trait to remain unaware and oblivious of those human forms on which light does not yet shine, the unborn, or upon those whom lived before.
Yet, the creatures that will track us, lie amongst the soil of the garden and field, they lie quietly amongst the leaves in the trees of the forest and in the air above the sea. They are about us, without the code of our form, having not yet been called forth to rise again from the chemical environment.  They lie inert and potential as we walk, talk, write, laugh and live. Given our chromosomal code, the soil, water and air combine into life, that will, in the fullness of time, seek out the chain of life which brought forth its body from the dust.

They will know that their ancestors have created locally increased order in the energy flow. The order they left has become covered with layers of events, like the layers of an onion, enfolded, shell-like, evolving and expanding away from the core events of a specific time, moving toward increasing general disorder.
Our ancestors, the people before, are currently going about their lives in their own space-time, naive and innocent of how you and I are becoming more and more capable of stirring the technological cauldron, peeling away the layers of that metaphorical onion and calling forth their trace from our own space-time addresses.
The ocean-like currents of space-time carry flotsam and jetsam from the distant shores of history to our present. Some of the material goods, capacity for love and ideas that we throw into this ocean, from our own life experience, wash up on the shores of the future.
Family genealogists, County Historical Societies, Museum curators and archeologists are not unlike astronomers, the former looking across the spance of 4-dimensional space time to make sence of human life in the time flow, the latter looking into the depths of 3-dimensional space to make sense of aggregates with in the volume.

‘Grandma and Grandpa Pierce are dead, huh?’
On Friday, July 17, while Jane and I were chatting during lunch, when the subject of my parents came up. Quizzically, Jane asked, ‘Grandma and Grandpa Pierce are dead, huh?’ Stunned by her statement, I promptly advised her that they were alive and well, reminding her that she wrote them a letter. She remembered writing the letter, but then averted her eyes, looking away as if searching for more memories or a positive outcome from them. I changed the subject of our conversation, not wanting to tell her that she wrote them six months earlier and they still hadn’t answered her letter. I supposed they were angry with me over some infraction of etiquette or minor instance of moral impurity.

Drought
During early April, extremely dry weather caused me to occasionally set the lawn sprinkler up and water into the woods along our yard’s west side. The same unusually dry conditions brought official recognition that Minnesota and the upper central Midwest were experiencing the worst fire threat in ten years.
By late June 24, the St. Cloud Times was reporting:

“Drought, Heat Threaten Corn Crop.
Many Central Minnesota farmers are watching their crops wither and wilt under unusually hot, rainless skies. Conditions are so bad in many rural areas in Central Minnesota that some Extension Directors and Crop Specialists are comparing this year to the dust bowl days of the 1930s… Many farmers will not be able to salvage another cutting of alfalfa…others have already began to cut and bale their oats because the crop would not produce enough grain to harvest later this summer…the next two weeks will be crucial as corn crops reach the tassling stage that gives way to pollination…”

Meanwhile, even our lawn, which I had begun to water was not growing at its normal proliferate rate. Although I enjoyed the easier and quicker mowing sessions, I didn’t like to see the lawn drying and yellowing so early in the season.
By the end of June, residents of Waite Park, a suburb of St. Cloud, were under a ‘watering ban’ and being threatened with City government ‘warnings’ that could lead to a charge of ‘petty misdemeanor’ if they were caught operating lawn or garden sprinklers!

Donna and I had noted that our dry Spring and early Summer had been almost mosquito-bite free. The super dry weather had eliminated the mosquitoes breeding and hatching habitat in our lowland and fen bog and so provided us with a pleasant, mosquito free season. We certainly enjoyed going outside to work about the yard and garden and not having to continuously swat at mosquitoes.

Gathering genealogical documents
June and July were busy months, as I continued work on family, genealogical research projects.  Among the items I sent for and received were:
1) Photocopies of the Revolutionary War records of 4G-grandfather (Lieutenant, then Captain) John Anderson, from the National Archives.
2) An inventory of personal property of 3G-grandfather, James Anderson, at the time of his death and a 1855 map of the farm and surrounding area[2] where, James, and his father, John,  lived; received from the Greene County Library Historical Reading Room, Ohio.
3) The thirteen page photocopy of 2G-grandfather, Civil War veteran, (Pvt.) Harmon Anderson’s Last Will, also copies of the official death certificates for Harmon and wife, Margaret (Horney) Anderson from the Greene County Courthouse, Jefferson, Iowa.
4) Last Will of 4G grandfather’s John Anderson and Revolutionary War soldier (Pvt.) William Horney, from the Greene County Library Historical Reading Room, Ohio. John Anderson and William Horney were amongst my paternal 4G-grandparents.

General activities in genealogical research
During the previous year, Donna and I read had each several books on genealogical research.
For a couple years prior to Eulah’s death, Donna, her mother and half sister Katherine, exchanged genealogical information related to the Dorr-Roberts side of their family. Later, Don sent Donna a photocopied genealogical tree and booklet that members of his side of the family had worked on years earlier
After Eulah’s death, Donna began correspondence with several other relatives and continued accumulating genealogical data and stories on both her father’s and mother’s (the Dorr-Roberts) sides of her family. Every couple weeks, she received a page or two of information from one source or another.
Meanwhile, I was trying to organize the rapiodly growing volume of genealogical data in a way that would allow:
•  a global storage method of the information,
• simplify information transfer to the reader,
• show images of the original documents,
• show relationships between obscure family members and family lines.

My 45th birthday: a personal inventory [3]
Birthdays are good ‘life referencing days’, times to reflect and take a personal inventory.
To wit: I was born on July 25th, 1942 and am glad, if not a little surprised to have lived as long as I have.
Other than for my eyesight, which is beginning to deteriorate, and an occasional ache or stiffness first thing in the morning, I feel fine. I have been fortunate all these years to have had good health, most of my illnesses have been either colds or the flu.

Looking in the mirror, I appear to be in my late thirties, with clear blue eyes and a face without wrinkles. My brown hair has neither begun to thin or recede. About five years ago, I found two gray hairs sprouting just to the front of my right ear, they are still the only gray hairs I have.

My body is in good tone from the work I do about the yard, splitting wood in the spring and fall, mowing grass all summer and raking leaves in the fall. I currently weigh one hundred seventy nine pounds and am a few pounds overweight, the excess has settled around my waist giving me a small paunch.

I have a loving wife and daughter, both of whom I love very much We live together in a place of quiet, natural beauty, accompanied by a family of dogs, several ducks and geese, a large variety of birds and other chattering, skulking and silent creatures of the forest and swamp. Here we enjoy the seasons and the days of our lives, removed from the noise, eyesores and other disturbances of a hurried, hungry world.

I enjoy doing outdoor projects, reading, and the type of work that goes into my journals. My interests are many and varied, they grow and change with my social, economic, genealogical, science, and space-time interests.

A family birthday party
After lunch, I washed up, shaved and changed clothes. At 1:30 PM we three gathered around the kitchen table.
Donna placed a store bought, Angel Food cake, with chocolate frosting in the center of the table, then brought out a gift wrapped box and set it on the table in front of me.
Then, with Donna sitting across the table and Jane to my left, the girls happily sang the ‘Happy Birthday’ song to me. Looking about and smiling myself, I saw the family’s sparkling eyes and their beaming happy smiles. After reading my birthday card, signed by both Donna and Jane, I opened the mysterious and rather heavy gift.

Lo! Upon peeling away its gaily colored wrapping, I found several items packaged together:
1) A letter box file for the long term storage of the personal mail I receive;
2) A calligraphy set; and
3) The out of print book, Bid Time Return,[4] a romantic time travel adventure. The  movie, Somewhere In Time, which was partially responsible for my starting to keep journals, was based on the characters and plot of the book, Bid Time Return.

That evening we had a delicious supper of shish-ka-bob (meat and vegetables on a skewer, grilled), followed by a thin slice of cake and scoop of vanilla ice-cream.
I put in a birthday request for a full body massage at bed time…
And, yes, the cherry went to the birthday boy!  ;-)

 The Archive project begins
Ever since 1980, when my father and Uncle Bill got me interested in family genealogy, documents and research papers have been accumulating[5]. We always worked on different ancestral family members, not because of a desire for efficiency, but because there were so many available lines of interest we simply never duplicated each other’s work.
Every month or two, when a little more information had been tracked down, the documents or worksheet would be photocopied and sent to our other two researchers. In this way, there was a fairly steady stream of genealogical information coming and going, all of which needed processing.

I kept the data from our research on standard and recognized genealogical research forms: Family Group Records sheets, Pedigree Charts and Life Outlines. I had even sent several page, Personal Characteristics Profiles, out for aging relatives to answer regarding our shared ancestor, their parents or grandparents. All my papers were separated by individual or family groupings. At first, some of the information was entered in my Journals[6].

As the years passed, the sheer volume of paperwork and data grew to such a point that it became necessary to put considerable time effort into organizing it.

Organizing the work was more than just separating the information by individual, family or location. Each piece of information, each document had to have a source and be given the best possible presentation of its information. The problem was that the photocopied documents I had, were received in many different sizes, while the network of the family relationships and their movements were spread across space-time in apparent profuse confusion.

Since Donna had access to a quality photocopy machine at True Value Hardware, we bought a ream of archival grade linen paper for photocopy document storage. On Tuesday, July 28, I began a long process of cutting out the pertinent areas of information, from old US Census records, and taping them to white typing paper for photocopy transfer onto the archival grade, linen paper. All of the marriage, birth and death records, wills, property’s, newspaper articles were also photocopied onto linen paper.

When a research paper was written about some facet of an ancestor’s life, or an old map was copied to show a family’s route of travel, when current photographs and perigee charts were drawn, all were organized and photocopied in the best format possible for maximizing the information content and long term storage.

Beginning three days after my birthday and continuing for several years, I worked my way through nearly a full drawer of ‘raw’ paperwork  in the file cabinet, cleaning out the accumulation of my many genealogical file folders and condensing the paperwork into informational bundles. The finished pages were organized in rough chronological sequence by family and stored in about a half dozen black, spring back notebooks. These notebooks became known as ‘The Archives’.

After several months work, preparing nearly the first one hundred pages for long term storage in the Archives, we came to recognize several facts about the effort:
1) The labor involved in setting up the layout for each page: taping photographs, making boarders where necessary, and experimenting took no less than five minutes, while some took twenty minutes.
2) For every document put into the Archive, there were four to six pieces of waste paper generated, besides the ‘original’ copies we received in the mail or copied from other sources. The waste came from testing the brightness, blowing up or shrinking documents on the photocopy machine.
3) There was an unknown and uncalculated amount of work and expense involved, developing the data, i.e., researching sources, long distance telephone calls, mail, genealogy research fees, official record coping fees, etc. that went into the Archives.

Music [midi: Star Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, 04 Violin L’Estate, Op8-2]

Early morning’s sights and sounds
On the morning of August 14, at 6:45 AM, about five minutes after Donna left for work, I stepped outside the front door to sit on the front steps, look about and listen to the peaceful sounds of the morning.

A shroud of fog laid across the land, limiting visibility to about four hundred feet. Even at the relatively near distance of two hundred feet, colors dissolved into gray, while forms back in the woods faded in the early morning’s filtered light. Down by the pond, in our lower yard, the ducks and geese were standing in the grass, surrounded by fog. Several appeared to be asleep, others were preening their feathers.

A gentle breeze began to rustle amongst the upper most tree branches at the edge of the nearby woods and I noticed for the first time, that the Maple trees leaves were beginning to turn lime green. One slight gust shook a half dozen Maple leaves off a tree. I watched as they silently sliced back and forth through the air, dropping to join others on the ground, announcing the approach of Fall.

I sat very still, listening.

From somewhere back in the woods came the occasional chirp of an unseen bird, then the ‘cohoo…cohoo’ of a Mourning dove. Only once was the natural silence broken by a car passing by on the county road. The sibilant hum of its tires on the tar surface came out of the distance, drew nearer, then rapidly disappear into the background. Behind me, I could hear Jane scuffing about in the coat closet, which was located right inside the mobile home’s front door.

Although I didn’t feel it when I first sat down, there was a slight chill in the air.
My arms began to chill and I seemed to remember the temperature had been 60ºF, when I took my morning temperature readings only an hour earlier.

After reminiscing for a moment or two, I took several deep, invigorating breaths and noted a somewhat familiar faint, earthy-sweet scent. At first, the odor seemed to carry the fragrance of the woods after a summer’s rain, but there was also the pleasant smell of fresh mown grass, perhaps it came from my having mowed the front lawn the previous day.

An itch on the back of my right hand and the tell tale, high pitched whine of a mosquito in my right ear, made me involuntarily swat at the offending insect.

A moment later, Jane came out the front door to join me. Playfully, she crawled head first down the four front steps, brushing past my left knee and foot as she clambered by. Reaching the ground, she jumped to her feet and ran over to her little red wagon, turned and exclaimed, ‘I fed ducks, Daddy!’ We chatted for a few moments, whereupon, I stood, stretched and walked back into the warmth of the house. Jane skipped down our stepping stone walkway singing to herself… and another beautiful summer’s morning had began.

Donna and Jane visit her father’s family in Indiana
In early August, Donna’s father, Don drove from his home in California, to visit with relatives in Freelandville, Indiana. He had intentions of bringing his elderly father, Paul, up to visit with us, but Paul was feeling poorly and wasn’t up to traveling. Since Paul couldn’t come up here, Don asked if we could fly down to visit with them in Freelandville, he offered to pay the air fare. I wasn’t interested in going, but thought it would be a good opportunity for Donna and Jane to visit with her side side of the family.

Donna made plans at True Value Hardware, to take a few days off. Don sent the girls their airplane tickets and $200 dollars for any extra expenses they might incur.

At 4:40 AM on Saturday, August 22, we said our ‘Good byes’ in front of the garage, then Donna and Jane drove off down the driveway thus beginning their trip.

About three hours after leaving home, their flight, aboard a TWA passenger jet left Minneapolis International Airport enroute to St. Louis.  This was Jane’s first time off the ground in an airplane. Donna later reported that Jane was wide eyed with wonder at the sight of all the familiar types of things she knew, as seen from above.
Don picked the girls up in St. Louis at 9:00 AM and drove them back to his father’s farm near Freelandville. Don had his recreational vehicle set up on his father’s farm and was living in it while visiting.

[1987 photograph: Twin Cities International Airport, Jane looks out the terminal window as a 747 passenger jet is loading for flight.]

Meanwhile at home, I continued with my chores and pursuing my interests as normal, but felt an emptiness, like a great vacancy and disturbing quietness had descended through the house and across the yard.

One day while visiting in Indiana,  Donna and Jane attended a dinner party of about fifty relatives. Don had rented a hall and brought ham for all, the other families brought pot luck dishes, vegetables, etc. The day was spent with every one looking at photograph albums, talking, telling family stories, etc.  Jane played with her many cousins.

A poem I wrote on August 25th:
‘In the Summertime, the faces of their children grew up from the soil,
Their smiles echoed the faces of the ripened crops come before.
Creating small pockets of heightened order from captured energy and entrophied matter,
these they  handed out with broken limbs, past Winterfall.
And, in the Spring…
Their faces were of children grown from the soil whence they came,
Their smiles mirroring faces of children gone before.
Their many are one, their one are many.’
It goes on until the end.

Don visits in his Recreational Vehicle
About two weeks after Donna and Jane returned from their visit with family in Freelandville, Indiana, Don drove up to Minnesota to spend the period of September 10 – September 28  visiting with us.

Six days after arriving, Don suggested we all go camping or on a few day mini-vacation. I telephoned Donna at True Value Hardware and told her vacation plans were in the offing and that she should start making plans at work to get a few days off. Don and I spent about four hours that afternoon planning a nine hundred twenty nine mile trip.
[Photo at right: This image from the Internet shows the same Dodge Sportsman model Don had, but different exterior paint colors.]

Description of the RV
Earlier in the year, Don bought a used 1972 Dodge Sportsman motor home for $6,000. He put another $1500. into the RV, buying and installing a small color television, a microwave oven,  air-conditioner and having some work done on the vehicle’s drive shaft and steering. When the outfitting was done, Don quite literally had a home on wheels.

The RV measured twenty four feet long, with an eighteen foot long by eight foot wide living quarters. The exterior of the cab and the body of the aluminum RV were painted white, while a ten inch or so, green stripe ran the length of the vehicle, just below its windows.
The RV had a 2500 watt generator for emergency or ‘off road’ electrical power, but was also wired to run from AC power.

Inside the cab were two, posh swivel chairs, one for the driver the other for a  passenger.

Passanger’s side of the RV interior:
Immediately behind the cab partition, on the vehicle’s right side was a dinette table with a long ‘L’ shaped seat extending along two sides. Continuing along same side wall while going back, there was the refrigerator with over head cabinets. Next came the microwave oven sitting on a shelf top with cabinets overhead and drawers below. Just beyond the microwave oven was the rear, side entry door.  At the back of the RV next to the door was a large closet for hanging clothes. Sharing the back wall, but enclosed in a small room, was the Spartan bathroom with its toilet, sink and shower.
[The Internet images at left are from the same Dodge Sportsman model RV as Don had, except in a slightly different floor plan. The idea here is to show how we traveled and the amenities at our disposal while ‘on the road’.

Continuing around the wall from the back of the living quarters on the driver’s side: Next to the wall partition that enclosed the bathroom, one first encountered the four burner cooking stove, then a counter top working space, followed by a double sink. Located above the stove, counter and sink were cabinets for foods and utensils, while below were drawers.

Between the sink and the driver’s seat was a long bench. This bench was situated right across the central aisle from the dinette table. Above the bench was a shelf on which Don had bolted the television. The RV living quarters extended  out over the cab roof about four feet, providing a ‘bed, over-cab’ sleeping area.

There was a screened window on either side of the living quarters, which allowed passengers at the dinette, or the opposite bench, a good view of the passing terrain. The interior walls were covered with wood grain paneling, while the living quarter floors had sculptured, wall to wall carpeting of cinnamon and white fabric. The bench seats had five inch thick upholstered foam rubber cushions and bolsters. At night the seats and dinette folded down to form sleeping arrangements for six persons.

Some of the RV’s other appliances and amenities included: Aa new 12 inch color TV, 12 linear feet of overhead cabinets, privacy drapes, microwave oven, 13 lower drawers and cabinets, hot and cold running water, air conditioning and heating, a large closet   for hanging clothes, a small but complete bathroom, a 7 cubic foot gas or electric (selectable) refrigerator with freezer compartment, four burner cooking stove with oven (propane),  both a fresh water and black water holding tank.

Iowa Revisited [7]
The circular trip would take us through Iowa to visit the Nineteenth and Twentieth century homes and graves of several of my great grandparents and 2-Great grandparents. During the next forty eight hours there was a flurry of activity around the house as we not only prepared for the logistics of the trip, but put together various documents so we’d know exactly where we were going and to look for when we got there. Several long distance telephone calls were made to genealogists in Iowa, who would be looking for ancestral home locations and Nineteenth century maps, all of which we’d pick up in a couple days, as we drove through Iowa.

During mid afternoon on Friday, 18 September, at the end of her work shift, we picked Donna up at True Value Hardware. As soon as she was in the RV, we pulled out of the parking lot, drove through St.   Cloud and turned south toward Iowa.  We spent the night in a KOA Campground near the Minnesota-Iowa boarder.

Visiting the Francis A. Pierce grave
During the morning of Saturday, September 19, as we drove into Iowa, the recreational vehicle was filled with the sound of talking, the squeaks and creaks of the vehicles body, the muted roar of the tires on the road. Within me was a private, hushed silence, for we were soon to arrive at the previous home and graves of my Pierce Great grandparents, near Lawler, Chickasaw County, Iowa.

Coming over the crest of a hill, we saw the small town of Lawler, spread out in a shallow valley. My Great grandparents, Francis Albert Pierce and Lydia Amanda Sabin were buried only a mile and a half northwest of Lawler.

We drove up Benz Street to the North Lawler Cemetery and located Francis and Amanda’s grave site more or less in the center of the cemetery. The cemetery was bordered on two side by corn fields and had a patch of wood on the back side. Later in the day, we found that until 1985, the North Lawler Cemetery and two other old cemeteries had been allowed to grow wild, without any lawn care or other maintenance. That explained why the grass in the cemetery looked like a mix of herbaceous broadleaf’s and grass–until recently, weeds and saplings had grown wild obscuring the markers.

[Site of Jacksonville, Chickasaw Co., IA. Located about 1-1/4 mi north of the 19th Century, Francis A. Pierce farm. The school Glen K. Pierce attended as a child, is seen as the white structure at far left.]

Francis A. Pierce, had one of the most prominent markers of the approximately one hundred grave stones in the cemetery. The six foot high, gray granite family monument had a top that was carved to resembled four gabled roof. Lydia’s obituary said she was buried in the family plot with her first husband, Francis and indeed we found their two smaller head stones. I was sad to see that Lydia’s name was never inscribed on the larger, family monument, never-the-less, many years before her own death she’d had inscribed on her husband’s marker,

‘GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN’.

I would like to have had the time to spread a blanket on the grass in front of the Pierce family grave marker and sat for awhile. I would like to have had some quiet time alone to reach within myself and segregate my principle parts, to commune with that 12% of me that was still Francis and Amanda.

Driving back to Lawler, we asked a gas station attendant for directions to ‘old Jacksonville’ and found that another three miles north, past North Cemetery on Benz Street, then about a half mile to the west, was a place now called, ‘Five Corners.’ As the attendant explained, ‘There used to be a small town there, but now it’s just a junction where there are five gravel roads going off this way and that through the corn fields. There is some kind of a small museum and park at the crossroads. People go there for picnics, but I think it’s closed now.’

My grandfather, Glen Pierce, attended elementary school in a small school house atJacksonville.

Old Jacksonville
We drove out into the country side following the instructions given by the gas station attendant and our Iowa state map. Turning west off Benz Street, at the roads ‘T’, we followed a narrow gravel road a little less than a half mile to the top of a low hill where we came to ‘Five Corners’.

While Don parked the RV, the rest of us climbed out to stretch our legs and survey the surroundings. Between the road segments that ran NW and SW from the junction, there was a several acre triangle of land dedicated as the ‘Adolph MunsonPark’. A large sign with yellow lettering on a brown background stood facing the five cornered intersection stating, ‘Jacksonville, Iowa 1854 – 1888’

The park was bordered by a weathered, old (modern vintage) gray split rail fence. In the park stood several original buildings fromJacksonvilleand vicinity. We walked around the old buildings looking in through their windows: There was a small, turn-of-the-century general store which had become a museum filled with antiques. The log cabin was brought in from elsewhere in the county and professionally reassembled in its new home. Lastly, was the nicely whitewashed, one room school house. The school building had originally set a few hundred yards away, along the gravel road we’d just come down, but was moved into the park and set on the still intact foundation that once housed The Jacksonville Republican newspaper.
.

Photos above. (L)  Interior of Jacksonville school, facing front. Photograph by Robert F. Pierce taken in 1989. (R) Interior of Jacksonville school, facing rear. My mother, Hazel M. Pierce looks about. Grandfather Glen received his lower education in this room.]

I walked out into the center of the gravel intersection and oriented my 1894 Chickasaw County map. Facing due south, I looked down a gentle, long hill which rose slightly about a mile away.  Fields of tall Iowa corn grew on either side of the road for as far as the eye could see. The southern horizon was a long low ridge about two and a half miles away. Between the hill, upon which I now stood, and that ridge, lay the land on which the Pierce family lived for some thirty years during the late 19th century. Their lives, toil and emotions all played out on the land located between these two low hills.

I gulped nervously and shifted my weight while peering down the road, lost in thought, searching for the images of another time. In my mind’s eye welled up the image of a buck board with the Pierce family coming to town; then of my young, grandfather, walking and skipping homeward from elementary school, turning his head briefly to watch a grasshopper fly up. I wondered how many countless times the family members had been in town, then starting for home, passed through that very spot where I stood and saw the same land configurations and I saw.

Returning to the RV, we drove about one and a half miles south on the gravel road where we came to the northeast boarder of the 19^th Century, Francis A. Pierce farm. The farm sat on the backbone of a long low hill; the land was beautiful and rich in agricultural resources. The current owners had the fields primarily planted to corn, while some acreage was in hay and some lay fallow. The farmstead buildings were near the lowest point of the property, at the northeast corner.
Extending along the road for a couple hundred feet and acting as shade and a wind break were a line of tall evergreens. Perpendicular to the road, and extending about six hundred feet was a line of old hardwood trees that protected the farmstead buildings from north and easterly winds.

[Francis A. &  Lydia (Sabin) Pierce farm. West (left) to Northwest panorama of the property owned by Francis Albert Pierce and     family from  the late 1800s. Jacksonville (Five Corners) is up the road to the right, about 1-1/2 miles.]

Stories from the Francis A. Pierce farm
I recalled reading in Francis’s obituary, that he and wife, Lydia Amanda Sabin, had carved their farm out of native prairie. Great-grandfather, Francis, and his family were the first civilized people, the first Europeans, perhaps the first humans ever to cultivate the one hundred sixty acres we were about to see.  The Francis A. Pierce family consisted of Francis and Amanda, their eldest son Francis Jr. (Frank), twin girls, Myrtle and Gertrude (Gertie) and the youngest son, my grandfather, Glen Kenyon. When Francis Sr. died in his fifties, Amanda remained on the farm raising the children. When the youngsters were grown, she sold the farm, moved locally and subsequently remarried.

Don stopped the RV at the old Pierce farmstead driveway. Donna and I climbed down and walked about seventy five feet up the driveway toward a figure who was bent over, working in the engine of a recent model car.

An older, middle aged man in his late fifties straightened up and watched us approach while frowning suspiciously. I introduced Donna and myself and told the weather beaten gentleman that I was descended from an earlier owner of the property and that if he had a few minutes to share we would like to ask some questions about the old homestead. After chatting for a few minutes, the farmer began to relax where upon he introduced himself as Harold, grandson of the man who had, in the time of Francis A. Pierce, owned an adjoining property immediately the north  of the Pierce farm[8].

The white haired, ruddy-red faced Irishman said that, the Pierce house was torn down and the current house constructed on the same site in 1924.

Harold invited us into his house where he motioned for us to sit at the kitchen table. His wife joined us and we all began chatting. During the conversation, Harold left the room for a few moments and returned with two books, a brittle scrap book and an old photograph album. When he sat the old books on the table, a silverfish darted out from the binding of the scrapbook, turned and scurried back inside for safety.

While opening the scrap book, Harold told us that ‘It was left to me by my old maid aunt who died at the age of 95, a few year ago.’

For a moment I lost track of the conversation, thinking,

‘If Harold’s aunt was 95 years old a few years ago, that means she was born perhaps 98 years ago. My grandfather, Glen K. Pierce, was born 100 years ago last June 4 (1887). So, Glen and Harold’s ‘old maid aunt’ had been only a year or two apart in age, they lived on adjoining farms, they certainly  knew one another, undoubtedly walked to school together and played together as children!’

Harold’s aunt had collected newspaper articles relating to the birth, marriage and death of many persons whom she knew from the early day in old Jacksonville. While browsing through the scrapbook, I found the Death Notice for my grandfather, Glen, dated 1958, and one for his sister Gertrude Pierce-Uglum.

Meanwhile, Harold was thumbing through the old photograph album. When he found what he was looking for, he handed me the album stating, ‘Here’s a picture of the Pierce house.’ I gulped in guarded excitement as I drew the picture’s image into memory. The photograph had been taken from atop the farm yard’s old wooden windmill, which previously stood two hundred feet southwest of the house, in the exact same location as Harold’s current windmill (built in the 1930s).

The Pierce two story, white, wood frame farmhouse had no basement, but was built on a field stone foundation. When the house was torn down in 1924, a small addition on the end of the house was salvaged and moved one hundred fifty feet west into the barnyard where it was used as a chicken coop for over half a century, before being burned in circa 1984.

During our conversations, Harold suddenly threw back his head in laughter as he recalled a story, a story told him many years ago by his now deceased aunt. Harold said (paraphrased), ‘When she was a little girl, she was over at the Pierce’s when one of the boys, (pause) Glen, climbed the wooden windmill. Then, holding onto the wooden blades, he began to rotate with the propeller. Round and round he went, upside down one minute and right side up the next.’

[Heirloom  photograph: Francis A. and Lydia (Sabin) Pierce home, ca 1923. Photo taken from the windmill tower shortly before the old house was demolished by the farms new  owners.]

Glen’s childhood deed was daring, funny and memorable. I was amazed that the story remained in memory for these last ninety years. At the same time, realizing that when I subsequently retold the story to my daughter, Jane, it would be an image evoking memory sake of her great-grandfather, Glen Pierce, for still a longer period of time.

Seeing our excitement, Harold left the kitchen again and returned with the farms old Title of Abstract. I was becoming overwhelmed by the amount and the rate at which information was being presented. I asked Harold if he’d so kind as to make photocopies of some of the papers he had shown us and if I could borrow the photo of the Pierce house.

[ca 1899 Heirloom photograph: Francis Jr. and my paternal grandfather, Glen K Pierce (standing) by ‘the Silver Maple’. (?)]

I gasped in shocked surprise when Harold  reached forward and simply removed the photograph from the album and handed it to me while agreeing to make photocopies of the other items I’d asked for.

When we about to leave, we’d all stepped outside when Harold told a touching story which gave an insight into the character of Great grandmother Lydia Amanda Sabin. Harold said, (paraphrased), ‘For years after my family bought the farm, Mrs. Pierce  would  stop by on occasion and ask to look at a Silver Maple that she and her husband planted when they first bought the land. The tree was on the north side of the house (gesturing over his shoulder).

I lapsed into thought for a moment, wondering if the Silver Maple was the same tree we have a in a heirloom family photograph. In the picture, son Francis Jr. (Frank) is seen seated in a chair and young Glen is standing, both are leaning against an approximately fifteen to twenty year old tree whose bark appears to be Maple. Harold continued, ‘The large, sprawling tree was damaged by severe winds during the 1970s and had to be cut down.’ As we walked back out along the driveway, I glanced back into the yard and could see all that remained of the tree was a slight, grass filled depression in the yard where the stump was removed.

That evening around 6:30 PM, we stopped at a Pizza Hut in Waverly, Iowa for a pizza and beer. As we hurried across the parking lot, a squall line passed over us and a downpour followed.

Whereas, downtown Waverly appeared deserted, Pizza Hut  was packed with college age students and young families. It had been overcast, humid and warm all day so we were all feeling a little uncomfortable and dehydrated. The smell of baking pizza crust, cheese, baking vegetables and tomato sauce set our appetites on fire. We ordered a large Super Supreme pizza with a thin crust and glasses of cold beer.

Around 9:30 PM, we pulled into a KOA Campground at Story City, a few miles north of Ames,Iowa to spend the night. Don paid the $12.50 fee for a parking space, with water, sewage and electric utilities hook ups. We were so exhausted after a full day of driving and sightseeing, that everyone was in bed by 10:00 PM and asleep shortly thereafter.

Early morning thoughts: genes, Lydia
I awoke at4:00 AM, got up for a bathroom run, then returned to my bed above the RV cab. Dim illumination from a park security lamp entered through the curtains, allowing me to make out shapes in the darkness.

Don, ‘Grandpa,’ was asleep in his sleeping bag on the cushions of the pulled out kitchenette table’s seat bench. Donna was asleep in her goose down bag on a fold down berth several feet above the table. Jane was snuggled in her goose down bag on the pull out bench seat between the sink and the driver’s seat. Other than for an occasional snore, the motor home was immersed in silence.

Instead of returning to sleep, I laid drowsily in my sleeping bag, thinking about Great-grandfather Francis, grandfather Glen, my father, Robert, and myself.
I was attempting to recognize the genetic predisposition’s, abilities and sense of order we shared. I wondered about the natural abilities that Francis used in building his house and farm. I sought the quiet strength and sense of order that led Glen into the profession of engineering and finally to his retirement fruit farm near Coloma, Michigan.

In my mind’s eye there formed small iconic images of Francis, Glen, Robert and myself. We were aligned vertically  in chronological order. I could see that there were related predisposition’s up and down the generations. To this group, were then added images of the descendants of Glen Pierce, all of whom I personally knew. The family was seen floating in pyramidal shaped family tree with Francis and Amanda at the top and our most recent generation along the base of the pyramid.

Suddenly, in my semi awake state, several of the images became animated, each displaying a similar predisposition or inherited trait. Then, one after another, shared characteristics were seen cascading down the generations like illuminated pin balls that spreading out through the widening family structure. However, as each characteristic coursed through the family, not every person was animated (or illuminated) by that particular trait. While several generations shared a trait, that trait became masked or muted for a generation, only to arise as a full blown characteristic in a later generation. The spotty way in which the characteristics were passed from one to another person, brought to mind the idea of probability cloud. Traits showed up at seemingly random locations within the related group but with greater density than they would be found in a not immediately related group.

I knew there was a large ‘genetic current’ feeding into the images from the husbands and wives who had married into this family line across the generations.

The animated images faded from my mind, only to be replaced by the realization that when we think of our ancestors as separate, non connected, individuals, we are inexplicably, but falsely, isolating one another in space-time. In reality we are not only connected, we are literally and paradoxically, one another by degree, we are very close reproduction-manifestations of an essentially immortal gene code.

A family is the leading edge of the gene mix. A family exists in a space-time location where clusters of shared genetic predisposition’s exist in their highest probability. Our genes sprout a new ‘carrier-breeder’ from materials they find in the natural  environment. We as individuals call the mobile carrier, ‘my body’. So, this body and it’s physical and socio-intellectual cerebral function becomes the individual manifestation of our genetic humanity. Those individual manifestations called, Francis, Glen, Robert, Larry and Jane all carry very, very similar recombinant characteristics– it was these blocks of similarity that I sought.

As time passed, and in the quiet, darkness of the RV, I continued thinking about the previous day’s events:
Before this trip, all that I knew about my Great grandmother Lydia Amanda Sabin-Pierce, was taken from a single photograph I had of her; the photograph showed a friendly and pleasant  looking, older, matronly woman.
When Harold _ told us that over the years, Mrs. Pierce had periodically returned to the farm to see and stand by the Silver Maple tree that she and her deceased husband, Francis planted, I knew her. I immediately understood Lydia as a loving, devoted mother, helpmate and wife. I saw a person who carried the memory of personal commitment and her first marriage to the end of her own life.

Lydia never knew, how could she, that her innocuous, private and personal pilgrimages back to the farm would be recalled a century later. The memory of her unyielding devotion and the words, ‘GONE  BUT  NOT  FORGOTTEN’ engraved on her husband’s monument, have continued to exist in that area and now with special meaning in the memories of her family. In a moment of introspection, I wondered if my idea for this sentimental trip to Iowa, derived from the same predisposition that led Lydia back to the farm and ‘their Silver Maple’, a multi generational sense of romanticism.

The Grubb home in Grand Junction
Sunday, September 20, was another busy day that started for our traveling group at6:00 AM and lasted until late that night.
During mid morning we drove into Grand Junction, Iowa.
Grand Junction was the town where my Great grandparents, George and Anna (Annie) Flora (Anderson) Grubb  lived for many years into the early decades of the 20th Century. It was here that they raised their family including my youthful grandmother, Elsie Grubb.

Elsie Grubb grew up, met Glen Kenyon Pierce while they both were attending the University of Iowa and were later married. Glen was the lad who rode the windmill propellers on his parent’s farm, the farm we visited the previous day.

The neighborhood surrounding central Grand Junction, was made up of old two story, white wood frame houses, all set back from the road on large lots. The wide streets were lined with tall, stately hardwood trees, whose branches extended out above the road to create an arching canopy.

Grand Junction had once been a bustling Midwestern town. It blossomed with the growth of agricultural production in Iowa and expansion of railroad service into the American west.

The town’s two to three block long business district consisted of a wide street with turn of the century brick buildings. Each building had its own character, all of which denoted past affluence. There were carved stone scrolls and brick designs at the top of the buildings and below the roofs. There were brick arches above windows and doorways, there were patterns created from differently shaded inlaid brick, but this was all from Grand Junctions heyday, in the latter half of the 19th Century.

The two story, brick City Hall, once the pride of Grand Junction, stood in the edge of the business district, it’s windows boarded up, it’s belfry dismantled, the bell removed.

The sidewalks through town had become grossly unleveled. Long fissures in the concrete were seen running this way and that, while weeds and grass grew wild from the cracks. Along the sidewalk, tall weeds had taken hold and grew from the tiny space between the sidewalk and the building fronts.

Several of the downtown business’s windows were boarded up, while other buildings were simply deserted and vacant. Walking along the main street through town, I saw checkered paint, fading colors, bare wood, faded and unused window shades still drawn in upper story windows, unclean gutters, weeds, and mostly empty buildings. The town was not dirty, run down or dilapidated like a city ghetto, but was honorably deteriorating with age, like an old pair of comfortable slippers that have been in service past their usefulness.

Returning to the RV, we checked an early Twentieth Century, Grand Junction street map to locate the house lot where George and  Anna lived.

A few moments later, when we turned onto Railroad Avenue, I stepped down from the motor home and walked alone. It was a mere half block walk along the sidewalk on the north side of the street before I came to a vacant lot that was filled with low weeds. Although the lot on which the Grubb house stood measured about one hundred fifty feet wide by two hundred feet deep, the family owned several consecutive lots along the street and thereby owned nearly one side of the entire block. At the back of the property and extending out perhaps a quarter mile was a cornfield.

Approaching the home site, I could feel my heart beating with anticipation. For so many decades George and Anna’s two story house had stood in the lot, but by the time I had come to visit, where the house had stood, there now existed only a large irregular square of dark soil. It was unsettling to see how all the attention, love and labor that went into making this location a prosperous home was now erased from the environment.

[Journal drawing looking along Railroad Ave. The sidewalk to the old Grubb house cane be seen where there is a long whish of brown leading to the right, from the sidewalk. The location where the front of the house stood can been seen in the rectangular geometry of brown discoloration of the soil-cut weeds.]

Standing on the public sidewalk in front of where the house had been, I looked about. Before me was the dark soil and a slight depression where a concrete sidewalk once led to the George and Annie’s front porch. Great grandmother had spent many hours of her life tending flowers along the sidewalk, immediately in front of the spot where I now stood.

I recalled something my elderly cousin, Doris Grubb-Hughes, wrote about her memories of Anna:

[Carrying forward from the previous drawing. We’ve walked down the overgrown sidewalk and stopped, turned to the right and are looking up the sidewalk, and back in time 70 years to see the family posing for their picture on the homes front steps.
Photograph above, the George E. and Anna Flora Grubb family, ca 1917. Part of extended Grubb family sitting on front steps the Grand Junction home discussed in this text.
L>R top rear: Edward Grubb (son), Elsie Grubb-Pierce (daughter), George E. Grubb Sr. (father)
L>R  middle row: Marie Heggi-Grubb (their daughter-in-law) with daughter Margaret, Anna Flora Anderson-Grubb (mother) with baby grandson (my Uncle Bill) William Pierce on lap, Glen K.  Pierce (their son-in-law, my grandfather).
Front:  Dorothy Grubb (granddaughter, who later in life was my 5^th grade math teacher)]

’…Annie rose very early on summer mornings, donned stockings on arms to protect skin, and worked outside in her flowers. Along the sidewalk leading to the main walk were California poppies…always beside the steps leading to the porch were pansies…they were surely hard on neighborhood kids that might skate by on their roller skates (and damage the flowers)’

Beside me and continuing down the block in either direction was the public sidewalk overgrown with weeds and buckled after generations without repair.

I began browsing around on the property and found a narrow concrete sidewalk that was covered by three fourths inch of soil, weed detritus and grass. This length of sidewalk once led to the Grubb’s ‘back (side) porch’. Cousin Doris wrote of that porch, as she recalled 50 year old images from her younger years, ‘…I mostly remember Grandpa at home, working outside, mixing up stuff on the enclosed back porch and carrying pails of it, slightly stooped…’

My Great grandfather, George Grubb died in 1938, four years before my birth, yet between cousin Doris’ memories and my standing on that practically buried walkway, the previous half century practically collapsed in my mind’s eye.

In a flash of imagination, I saw my great grandfather, a tall, thin, balding man, who had years earlier retired from the rail road and grown old. He was backing out the porch door carrying a bucket in each hand. The porch door swung shut with a thin sounding ‘slam’ and George came down the steps, turned and walked up the  sidewalk toward and right through me…over fifty years earlier.

Grandmother, Elsie Grubb-Pierce, once told me of an event that occurred here: When referring to her father, George Grubb, Elsie said, (paraphrased), ‘He had a terrible temper. Once when he was going to spank me, I climbed out the bedroom window onto the porch roof, scooted down a trellis next to the porch support and ran over to a neighbor’s until he cooled down.’

The Grubb’s house had burned, its basement was back filled with soil. The fruit trees and flower beds the family grew and tended, the house where Grandmother Elsie Grubb-Pierce was raised were all gone now.

Donna and I walked to a nearby house to speak with several adults who’d stepped out on their side lawn. We introduced ourselves and told of my relationship with the George and Anna Grubb who had lived in the currently vacant lot next door. An elderly  gentleman in the group appraised Donna and myself before speaking. Then we learned, the people we were talking to, were members of the Hillman family who had been one of the town founders a hundred fifty years ago. Over the generations, the Hillman’s were involved in a variety of local business’.

Doing most of the talking, was the animated, ninety two year old, Mr. Hillman, who alternately leaned on his cane and waved it in the air as he spoke of the Grubb family and their house, saying,

‘I recall an instance in 1918 when one of the children died during the Flu epidemic, that the Misses, Mrs. Grubb, came over to the house to help out during the families bereathment.’

He continued,
‘In its day the Grubb’s had one of the show place houses in Grand Junction. They had lots of trees and shrubs on the property…After she died, the house was rented out. Then it went downhill. Neither the landlord or the renters did anything to keep the place up. Finally the roof got bad and water started to get in, so no one lived in the house…’

We were told that the house burned down in 1984 or ’85 and the basement was back filled a year later. Indeed, all that remained of this place were the notations on an old map, some family photographs, the memories and stories passed down by the older members of our family.

After thanking the Hillman’s for the time and information they gave us, we walked back to the RV and left Grand Junction looking for the town cemetery.

Grand Junction Cemetery
Two miles west of town, on Highway E53, we found the Grand Junction Cemetery. The people who made Grand Junction a modern and up to date town during the late 19th and early 20th century were all there, their resting place as fine and modestly grand as the town they built had its self once been.

The graves of George and Anna Flora Anderson- Grubb were located on the east side of the cemetery, next to a large cornfield. Their family marker was a reddish-purple granite stone standing about two and a half feet high with an overall width of about four feet.

When Jane began climbing on George and Anna’s headstone stone, I called her down and began to explain what the marker stood for and our need to respect  their resting place. While talking, I suddenly realized that if George and Anna knew their 2G-grand daughter, Jane, was climbing on their marker, they would probably have told me to let her play. The twenty five percent of me that is George and Anna, told their twelve and a half percent composite, which has become Jane, ‘Go ahead and play, but don’t get hurt.’.

Sunday, September 20th was turning out to be one of those Fall days where if you wore a sweater it was too warm and if you didn’t, it was too cold.  By noon, the sun was just beginning to show itself  and small patches of sky could be seen amongst the fast moving cumulus clouds.

Margaret Grubb-Frantz
After lunch, we visited briefly with my elderly, seventy seven year old cousin Margaret Grubb-Frantz and her husband Leon Frantz. Margaret was the granddaughter of George and Anna Grubb, her sister Dorothy Grubb-Mount was my Fifth Grade mathematics teacher at Amphitheater School in Tucson, Arizona. (see youthful Margaret, leaning next to her mother, in the Grubb family photograph above).

The Frantz’s were obviously literate people. Decades earlier, Leon had been a successful hog auctioneer and gentleman farmer, as well as Mayor of Grand Junction for ten years. The Frantz’s sold their rural properties a couple decades earlier and were living in a modern, split level house in Grand Junction. There were books in evidence about the living room, including several thick religious books on an end table.

I noted that Margaret and Leon, as well as the Hillman family were all dressed in their Sunday clothes. The women were in nice, understated dresses; while the men wore white shirts, neck ties and quality vintage suits. They were all dressed from having attended church, an activity that is often second nature in small town America. Each was carrying on a custom they had learned as children, in the early decades of this 20th Century. These people had been, as children, the friends and relatives of George Grubb and Anna Flora Anderson-Grubb.

As we talked, Margaret said of Anna Grubb (her grandma),
‘She liked to have her way a lot. She was particular and tended to detail. Once they (George and Anna) had an argument and she went to bed for two weeks to teach him a lesson…’ 

A while later, referring to George Grubb, Margaret said fondly,
‘He was kind of gruff and liked to tease the grandkids.’

Margaret went into a back room and returned to loan me a 1914-15 photograph of George and Anna, as well as her childhood family sitting on the front steps of the Grubb house in Grand Junction (seen above).

Shortly thereafter, as we prepared to leave the Frantz home, Margaret and I hugged, looked into each other’s eyes and said our good-byes. That was the first and only time Margaret and I ever met, yet, it filled the two of us with a moment of sentiment. When we wished each other well, I had a lump in my throat and saw small tears in the corner of her eyes.
A few years later I received a letter from my Dad, informing me that Margaret had  passed away; Leon followed Margaret a few months later…and another generation was gone

Jefferson Cemetery
The next leg of our journey took us to nearby Jefferson, Iowa where we spoke for a half an hour with genealogy researcher, Shirley Ross.
Just before leaving Minnesota, we telephoned Mrs. Ross, whom was a long time member of the Greene County Historical Society, and asked her to find some information that we’d pick up a few days later as we toured Iowa. We were looking for the location of a farm owned by Harmon and Margaret Anderson, (my 2 great grandparents) the parents of Anna Flora Anderson-Grubb, whose now vacant homesite we’d just visited in Grand Junction.

Mrs. Ross exceeded our expectations by locating not only the Harmon Anderson farm, but other properties that he owned later, in Scranton; she found Harmon’s Estate Probate papers as well as other information relating to the Harmon Anderson family.

Our next stop in Jefferson was at the Jefferson Cemetery. About seventy five feet inside from the main gate, the cemetery drive came to a ‘T’ at the base of a statue. The approximately life size statue of a Civil War soldier stood atop an eight foot high concrete pedestal. I thought the statue fitting, particularly in the graveyard; for Harmon Anderson was a Civil War veteran and had been a Prisoner of War at Georgia’s infamous Andersonville stockade.
[Photo at right. Me, standing near Harmon Anderson’s family monument in Jefferson cemetery.]

On the northwest side of the cemetery, we found the monument and family burial plot of my paternal 2G-grandparents Harmon  and Margaret (Horney) Anderson, parents of Anna Flora (Anderson) Grubb. The Anderson’s eight foot tall gray granite marker was one of the tallest and most ornate monuments in its vicinity.

We cleaned, then chalked the monument in order to make the engraved inscriptions stand out more clearly, then as we had done with the other family grave markers encountered on the trip, photographed the monument for our family archives.

Harmon Anderson’s Iowa farm
Late that afternoon, we found the farm property Harmon, Margaret and family had bought for $480 on 10 July 1868. The one hundred sixty acre tract was located about five miles south southwest of Jefferson, on the south side of Iowa Highway E53.

When the Harmon Anderson family moved to Iowa from Spring Valley, Ohio and bought the property, my great grandmother Anna Flora was only seven years old!

At the old farm site, we stopped the RV to look across the fields of ripened corn. And in doing so, saw the same geographical and sky conformations my ancestors saw ever day for the eleven years they lived on the property. In the late 1860s, that area had been prairie, dotted by small agricultural fields. As the decades passed and technology improved the fields became larger and larger, to a point where as far as you could see there were now crops. The land was prosperous and had proven fruitful for those who settled here permanently.

We stopped at the modern farmhouse that sat on the property.
Next to the driveway was a sign stating that the farm was listed in the Iowa State Registry as a ‘Century Farm’, meaning it had been in the same family for at least one hundred years. An old, gray haired gentleman, in his sixties, working about the yard stopped to watch us, so we climbed down from the RV, walked up the driveway and introduced our selves.

I was pleasantly surprised that this man was Mr. Graven, grandson of Clark Graven who brought the farm from Harmon and Margaret in 1879! Mr. Graven told us that his father had told him that (paraphrased),
‘The previous owners, the Anderson’s, had a T shaped log cabin on the same site as their house[9]. My grandfather, Clark, lived in the Anderson cabin after purchasing the land.’  The Graven’s present house, built in 1951 was the second house their family had built on the same exact location.

The farmhouse and out buildings, sat on a slight rise along the slope of a long gentle hill, situated about one hundred fifty feet from the passing highway. From their cabin’s location, the Anderson family could look out over their prairie land and see from the southeast around to the southwest.

Mr. Graven said he was harvesting one hundred eighty bushels of corn and forty bushels of soybeans per acre from the land and that it was recently appraised at $800 and $1000 per acre at a time when agricultural land prices were depressed.

[Heirloom family photograph: Inside Harmon and Margaret (Horney) Anderson cabin home, rural Jefferson, IA, ca. 15 January 1875: Son, Willie, lies in state, his sisters and brother look on (L>R): Elizabeth, ♥ Anna Flora, James.]

We chatted with Mr. Graven for about twenty minutes then returned to the RV and turned back out onto the highway.

A quarter of a mile west of the farmhouse, we came to an intersection between Highway E57 and County Road 18. In the southwest corner, now a cornfield, there once stood a frontier school house. Anna, her brothers, sisters and neighboring children walked there for their schooling between 1868 and 1879.

Mr. Graven had just told us, ‘The school house is long gone, but the water well is reputed to still exist.’ Indeed, all traces of the school, save the remnants of a hand water pump, had been plowed into the field.
The images of children of hurrying to and from school along the rutted wagon trails, of great grandmother Anna Flora Anderson walking to and from school with her siblings, the sounds of children calling to one another, all lay hidden amongst the tall, golden, silent stalks of corn.

Visiting Scranton, Iowa
Very late in the afternoon, we arrived in Scranton, a nearby town, where Harmon and the family moved several years prior Harmon’s death. Scranton was only about two thirds the size of Grand Junction, having a business district only two blocks long and composted of about 8 to 10 brick buildings on either side of a wide street. It’s buildings, unlike Grand Junction, were mostly only one story tall and lacked the stylized flourishes evident of a town that has seen solid growth and a period of affluence.
Scranton was a sleepy town. Other than for a single, old man sitting on a sidewalk bench two blocks away, the village seemed deserted.
A block from the center of town, and in the same block as once stood Scranton’s City Hall, Harmon owned six of the eight city lots. All but one of the lots contained old and well kept, white, two story wood frame houses each surrounded by large, stately deciduous trees.

Harmon, like so many others of that area and of the late 1870s was heavily involved in land speculation. Our genealogical assistant, Mrs. Ross had told us, ‘ Generally, the people who arrived in a developing settlement bought up the land, speculating the area would continue to draw people and grow, hoping to make a relatively fast and handsome profit.’ I caught the term ‘speculating’ and realized immediately that Harmon and I shared at least this one common trait, he with land, myself with precious metals bullion and stocks.

Following the 1896 Plat Map eight blocks west of town, we found a six acre tract that Harmon owned and which Mrs. Ross thought was where the Anderson family lived after they sold the farm to Clark Graven and moved into town. There was no longer a house on the property, the land had become home to the not very large or prosperous looking, Scranton Manufacturing Company.

We drove back into Scranton and turned onto the main street on our way out of town. A few blocks north from the center of town, we found ourselves suddenly in the country, surrounded by Iowa’s ever present cornfields. We drove on, quietly talking amongst ourselves, everyone was tired and beginning to hunger after a full day of sightseeing.

Near the western horizon, the sky was filled with dark clouds whose upper most surfaces were illuminated with a soft white glow by the setting sun. Looking out across the fields toward the south, I noted that every few miles there were tall grain elevators located along the rail road tracks. We were  in the midst of the U.S. corn belt, a place of truly mighty food production.

It was dark when we reached Carroll, Iowa. We considered ourselves fortunate to find a Bonanza Steak restaurant, now quite hungry we stopped to eat. We all ordered the same meal, consisting of: soup, a plate pf goods from the salad bar, a baked potato with sour cream, grilled French bread, a sirloin tip steak, ice tea and a bowl of vanilla ice-cream for dessert.

Don’s hilarious story
After supper we resumed our drive, this time proceeding north, while looking for a campground in which to spend the night. Everyone was full, contented and beginning to relax, when suddenly, Don announced that he had a story to tell. It was about an event that had just occurred in the bathroom at the Bonanza restaurant.
Don continued, as we all sat listening to the story unfold:
‘I was sitting on the commode having a major poop when I passed a fart of such horrid smell that it ranked as one of the worst I ever let. Just then, two fellas came into the bathroom to use the urinal. One guy said to the other, ‘Boy the ventilation is poor in here!’ The second man, sounding about seventy years old, steps up to the urinal and said, ‘That’s the trouble with these places, the ventilation fans don’t work too good.’ The first man wouldn’t wait for his friend, saying, ‘I’ll wait for you outside!’ Meanwhile, the old man at the urinal began squeezing off farts while he tried to pee.
I sat on the toilet, one of those tall uncomfortable, paraplegic toilets, contemplating my own poop and listening to the old man fart, but laughing to myself, knowing there wasn’t a fart in the world thick enough to cover my odor. I laughed so hard after they left I could hardly wipe my butt.’

On we drove through the darkness, with Don recounting portions of his story. Donna, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, was doubled over, clutching her stomach while screaming with laughter. My sides ached and tears rolling down my cheeks as I gasped for breath between fits of laughing. Don’s revenge on people who fart in public bathrooms was one of the funniest stories we’d heard in a long time!
At 8:50 PM, we found a place to set up the RV in Black Hawk State Park, by 9:30 PM we were all in bed.

The trip home
Monday, September 21 found us on the final return leg of our mini vacation.
Over the next two days we stopped and toured several parks in Minnesota including, Blue Mounds SP, Split Rock SP, Upper Sioux Agency SP and Pipestone National Park.

Blue Mounds State Park was created around a prairie hill that gently rose from the surrounding plains, only to terminate on its southern slope in the sheer drop on ninety foot  cliff. In by-gone times, the Indians chased buffalo up the incline, over the innocent looking hill crest to the ‘buffalo jump’. We took the one and a half mile nature trail from the Interpretive Center to the ‘buffalo jump’, walking through some of the only remaining native prairie in Minnesota.

We stopped early that afternoon, to set up the motor home at a KOA campground near Pipestone National Park. We’d been driving hard and doing a lot of sightseeing during the last few days so it was nice to take a break, stretch our legs and lounge around for a while. By late afternoon, the sky became over cast and a chill set ins. While Donna prepared supper, I sat at the kitchenette chatting with her, writing a post card to friends and watching the Evening TV News. Meanwhile, Don and Jane, wearing their jackets, took a walk about the campgrounds. The Grandpa-Granddaughter pair visited an elaborate children’s playground which included, swings, see-saw, merry-go-round, a slide, tether ball and a hobby horses mounted on heavy duty springs.
Until nightfall, when another motor home pulled in, we’ were the only ones in the campground.
After supper everyonel remained seated about the kitchenette table watching television and chatting, before retiring at 8:30 PM.

A leisurely morning
I awoke at 4:10 AM Tuesday, September 22, but remained in bed until 5:20 AM before quietly getting up.
While my traveling companions slept, I dressed and stepped outside into the predawn chill and walked to the KOA park’s modern bathroom to wash and shave. Returning to the RV a short while later and finding everyone still asleep, I put on a heavy jacket and took a walk about the campgrounds. It was pleasant to be alone, to look up at the twinkling stars and walk in that strange place. The chilly temperatures felt invigorating; I pressed my hands deeper into my jacket pockets to keep them warm.

Around 6:20 AM the rest of our group crawled out of their sleeping bags and came out, one and hurried off to the bathroom. After that, it wasn’t long before we were all sitting around the table enjoying our morning cups of coffee and a milk and cereal breakfast.

Most of the morning was spent seeing the Pipestone National Monument museum and hiking the park’s long, winding nature trail. During the previous centuries, Indians came from as far as 1000 miles, to mine the pipestone mineral from the rock quarry for their ceremonial pipes. Over time, the crude mining operations resulted in several dozen small mines each six to ten feet deep and ten to fifteen feet wide. At the bottom of each of these miniature ‘open pit mines’, there was about a two foot wide irregular working space. Rock refuse piles built up around each pit created an unstable and hazardous talus pile.
I felt  a chunk of pipestone an thought it was fairly soft, having a hardness perhaps only about two or three times that of chalk and a feel described as slick or wet. The mineral ranged in color from rose pink to brick red.

Thoughts while returning home
We followed Highway #23 diagonally northeast, up across the state, from the southwestern corner of Minnesota, all the way to Foley. This was a quiet time. Donna was beginning to complain of a sore throat and felt like she was becoming ill. Don, Jane and I were all tired. During the previous four and a half days we drove nearly 1048 miles and stopped numerous times to visit my family’s ancestral prairie homesteads, the towns they lived in, we talked history with people, browsed through graveyards, saw the local sights, hiked, and visit museums.
I found that in our time in this world, we do leave traces that persist into deep time. The recognition of these traces are only realized when the proper key is inserted, when the proper questions are asked. When eyes that care look, old sights will be seen, lives sensed

When we reached Spicer, Minnesota, everyone was feeling the need for an energy lift, so we stopped at a Dairy Queen for an ice cream. Upon biting into our cones, Don, Donna and I all commented at once that the ice cream didn’t taste the way it use to. It was our guess that Dairy Queen had altered its ice cream formula, and not for the better. Thinking about declining ‘quality standards’ reminded me of a joke:
“A man walks up to the ticket counter at the Airport and inquires about prices. The ticket agent answers, ‘Yes, we have cheap rates and fast, efficient service. Which would you like?”

During the previous four days, while on the prairie in Iowa, we had seen very little wooded terrain, but as we approached St. Cloud, in central Minnesota, the area of forest coverage  increased rapidly. Also, Iowa’s agricultural fields  seemed to range in size between eighty and one hundred sixty acres, the largest field planted to one crop around St. Cloud is about forty acres.

Thinking about this, I realized that Iowa was settled by European culture a half century earlier than Minnesota. Iowa experienced a major influx of population between about 1840 and 1865. Minnesota followed with peaks in population growth occurring in the 1880s and 1890s. This is evident in the neighborhood of our rural home. The oldest farmhouses in Benton County date from the late 1880s to the early 1900s, these are ‘first generation’ houses. The oldest houses we saw in Iowa were second and third generation buildings.

Don, alone and not feeling well
We had a great time traveling with Don, but he’d changed since Eulah’s death. Don  seemed to have become more contrary and reclusive, noticeably so since his visit with us nine months earlier for Christmas.  Since his arrival, Don would get up after Donna went to work, come in from the RV for a shower, then spend the rest of the morning back in his RV having breakfast and watching TV. Of course, Jane kept him company. Grandfather and Granddaughter were frequently seen walking slowly along the driveway and about the yard.

Every day, Don spent maybe an hour or two working on this or that mechanical part of his old motor home. Some of the work probably needed doing, but I think he was also just trying to keep busy working on mechanical things, something he loved to do.  Don was not a happy man living alone. On top of his loneliness he was developing health problems: he’d begun complaining of an upper stomach pain or burning sensation, which he attributed to a haitial hernia or an ulcer.

Bright and early on the morning of September 28, after a nice eighteen day visit, we said our ‘Good Byes’ to Don, and he left, enroute back to his home in Anderson, California.

After our company left and life returned to normal around the house, I began writing up my notes from our trip to Iowa. It took seven hours per day for fifteen consecutive non weekend days, or one hundred plus hours work, to enter the story and associated colored pencil drawings into my journal.

[Above, photocopy of 1987 drawing from the front page of Journal 14: Trace of the Temporal Visitor]

This post is continued in Chapter 1987, age 44-45, Part 3 of 3.

Themes and Events:
*  Early in the year the DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average) topped 2000 points, 14 years after reaching 1000 points. On August 13, the 5th anniversary of the bull market, the DJIA closed at 2691. By August 25, it reached 2,722, up 800 points during the year. Two months later, October 19 came to be known and remembered as, ‘Black Monday!’
*  Ceramic superconductivity is discovered. Only 2% of the U.S. population now lives on farms.
* There is a widespread feeling that the ‘cold war’ between the U.S.A. and Soviet Union is coming to an end as relations continue to improve. During mid year, Soviet leader Gorbachev agreed to an U.S. proposal to ban short- and medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe.
*  Tax freedom day falls on 4 May this year, up from 1 May in 1980.
*  There are currently 83 million houses and 5 million mobile homes in the United States.
*  A U.S. insurance company calculated the value of a human life at $650,000… On the other hand, a ‘hit man’ can be hired in New York’s Bronx to commit murder for $400.

Buttons & bumper stickers:
*  The one who dies with the most toys wins.
*  No radio — already stolen.
* A woman’s place is in the mall.
* My lawyer can beat up your lawyer.

January 1, a moment in life
A one day excerpt from my Journal  13: A Daily Diary of 1987, Vol I & II, pages 2145-2572:
“It is just past midmorning on a cold and gray winter’s day. Outdoors, we have light snow flurries, with a temperature of 17°F and a northwest wind of nine miles per hour. I am sitting at the kitchen table, feeling both warm and comfortable while writing in my journal and looking out the kitchen windows. A slight chill moves across the floor and around my ankles, occasionally disturbing my concentration.

My good wife, Donna, has just brought me a warm cup of Darjeeling tea and two generous slices of fruit cake topped with margarine. Stepping back across the kitchen, Donna resumes working at the sink. She has begun to clean and process a thawed thirteen pound turkey, the prime ingredient of our New Year’s supper. Wafting through the air is the delicious scent of turkey giblets, boiling in a sauce pan on the kitchen stove.

Just beyond the kitchen, in the living room is our twenty five inch color television set which is currently showing the ‘Ninety-eighth Tournament of Roses Parade’ in Pasadena, California. Beyond the television, but out of my view, is our cast iron Fischer wood burning fireplace. A log that I added to the fire awhile ago, can be heard sizzling and crackling, giving off its stored energy, helping to warm our home.

Don (Donna’s father), who is visiting for the holidays, is sitting on our floral print couch near the fireplace, sipping tea while watching the parade on television. Our delightful daughter, Jane, is in her bedroom taking a nap. Occasionally, one of us adults will comment on something or other and for a few moments there is quiet conversation.

 There is in the house,  a certain warmth, a sense of togetherness and the cheer associated with the holiday season.

Turning my head to the right and looking out the kitchen’s large bow window, I see our three large dogs: Griz, Jessie and Pepin. Because Jessie is in heat, all the dogs are chained to their respective houses. Grizzy is chained inside the garage, but is standing outside looking around. Each stands silently by his quarters, occasionally shifting their gaze to look at one another or into the woods, listening. It is very quiet outdoors.

Beyond the dog house’s and our eastern yard fence is the Maple and Oak forest. The large leafless trees stand like dark sentinels, patiently waiting Spring. Below these monarchs, are their young saplings, grown in such profusion along our yard fence, that I can see no more than fifty feet into the thicket.

Turning back around to my left rear, I look south out a smaller kitchen window behind me. Two hundred feet away, across the lower yard begins the low land with its six acres of fen bog. Rising from the fen bog, I see, one…two…three…perhaps six muskrat lodges. The lodges are about three foot tall, rounded mounds of vegetation that have been plastered together my their rodent inhabitants. The dark mounds contrast with the yellowish-brown wire grass that surrounds them. There is no movement. All is still across the fen bog, the low land and on our yard, amidst the cold, dim grayness of the day and the lightly falling snow.’

Jane begins dance school
When Don was last visiting with us, he pointed out something about Jane that Donna and I had seen and talked about amongst ourselves, namely: Jane appears to be more advanced mentally than most children her age. This might make it difficult for her at school, learning and playing with less developed kids, always waiting for them to catch up. Yet, if we were to try and start her in school a year early, she would be competing with larger children who were more equally developed mentally for most of her school years. Since the option of starting Jane in school a year early was a real possibility, we decided to put her in a dance school, in order to help develop her motor skills, at the fastest rate possible.

Jane had her first dance lesson on Saturday, January 10, at the St. Cloud School of Dance. The class consisted of twenty two youngsters, ages three to five years, and four instructors. The instructors were women in their twenties, who provided personal help and attention primarily to the youngest and newest students.

We were happy to see the lessons were oriented more toward gymnastics and ballet than other forms of dance. Among the things that Jane learned from her first lessons were: how to do headstands, cart wheels, roll forward, roll backward, bunny hop, wheel barrow with a partner, a simple ballet and tap dance movement.

The rates were $8.00 per month, for four each forty five minute instruction sessions. Donna and I were exuberant about the classes. Jane was simply overwhelmed by the novelty, all the children, instructions and activity and was feeling ill by the time we arrived home. When asked if she’d like to go back to Dance School the next Saturday, she replied with an exuberant and resounding, ‘Yes!’

Jane joins the Campfire Girls, Sparks
In order to expose Jane to social and educational growth experiences and partially to make up for the fact that she didn’t have children to play with at our rural property, we enrolled her in the Campfire Girls. The Campfire Girls were a national organization similar to Girl Scouts, that met in St. Cloud twice monthly. Because Jane was only three years two months old and the normal minimum age was five years, we had to get special permission from the Pack Leader for her to join.
We took Jane to her first Sparks meeting on the evening of Thursday, January 22.
I wasn’t particularly thrilled with how the girls group was run by the Pack Leader, Marie, or her assistant, but acquiesced to Donna and we continued taking Jane to the periodic evening meetings.

After several months in Sparks, I noted that Jane was accepted by the other children, though she was a year and a half younger than any of the others. She was also the shortest which occasionally lead to some teasing. On the other hand, Jane joined in activities and played just as enthusiastically and as hard as any of her elders and so earned their respect. Several of the older kids even watched out for her welfare.

As the year passed, we came to recognize that Donna was the only mother who consistently attended the Sparks Meeting, and so in time became ‘helper’ to Marie Benson. Jane was the only child in her group with a complete Sparks uniform.

Some of the projects Jane was introduced to and completed in Sparks were:
a) Make a homemade Valentine card and give it to a patient in the Veteran’s Administration Hospital, (a Sparks troop event);
b) Make a creative Christmas card;
c) Make a paper sack puppet;
d) Draw happy, sad and surprise faces on paper plates;
e) Make up and tell a story to the other Sparks, using the paper sack puppet;
f) Explore the properties of water (object displacement, floating, sinking);
g) Explore the wind (make a pinwheel);
h) Explore vegetables (what parts of the plant grow above and below ground);
i) Animal Safari in the woods (Discover different kinds of ‘animal houses’)…

Books read
During the year, I read books on various topics, mostly whatever was either important in our lives at the time or of general topical interest to myself, including:
•  Tai Pan © James Clavell – Novel
•  The Caveman and the Bomb: Human Nature, Evolution and Nuclear War  © 1985 by David P. Barach – Nuclear weapons are all the more dangerous because they have no psychological reality: Their potential destructive capability cannot be touched, smelled, heard or felt.
•  Inside New England © 1982 by Judson D. Hale – The character, customs and people of New England. 257 pages.
•  The Mountain of Names © Alex Shounatoff – Genealogical resources of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons).
•  The Present of Things Future: Exploration of Time and Human Experience © by Thomas J. Cottle and Stephen L. Klineberg – Temporal orientation and the   socio-cultural perspective. 290 pages.
•  The Dynamics of Change © 1967 by Don Fabum – Observing and experiencing social and cultural patterns of change in the environment.
•  A History of Historical Writing © 1937 by Harry E. Barnes, © 1963 by Dover Publications.
•  Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension © 1977 by Rudolf Rucker – Create an intuitive picture of curved space-time. 133 pages.
•  Quest For The Best © 1979 by Stanley Marcus – The decline of quality service and elegance and the attendant growth of mass culture.
•  Other Worlds: Space, Superspace and the Quantum Universe © 1980 by Paul Davies – Time is just another dimension in superspace, while the asymmetry of nature makes time appear to flow. 207 pages.
•  Unpuzzeling Your Past: A Basic Guide to Genealogy © 1985 by Emily A. Croom – Tools, procedures and resources for genealogical   research. 136 pages.
•  A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Causative Formation © 1981 by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake – The inheritance of behavior and form depend on genetics and morphogenetic fields, while learned behavior is to a degree transmitted across time by selective morphic resonance. 229 pages.
•  No Surrender © 1974 by Hiroo Onoda -The autobiographical account of a Japanese lieutenant who remained hiding and combat ready, on a Pacific island for some 30 years after the end of WWII, and would only surrender to a former commanding officer. No one had previously told him the war was over!
•  The Nature of Time ©1967 by Cornell University – The direction of time is not found in the path of signals, but in the scattering of radiation. Read only last 150 pages.
•  Timescale © 1983 by Nigel Calder – The ‘meme’ is an informational parasite (Such as a popular tune, clothing style, idea of   God, etc.) that replicates between human minds in a manner similar to genes replicating in the presence of proper nourishment.
•  The Victorian Album © 1973 by Evelyn Berchman – Fiction. A story of the chilling investigation into the lives of a family that lived a hundred years earlier.
•  Physics As Metaphor © 1982 by Roger S. Jones – Modern science is like a religion, there are great prophets,   local priests, it’s worshipped by the public, and all important things are described with its metaphysics. 254 pages.
•  Taking The Quantum Leap © 1981 by Fred A. Wolf – The more we determine one side of reality, the less the other side is shown to us.  ‘Qwiffs’ aka. quantum wave functions, spread out through the universe faster than light, traveling both forward and backward in time. 262 pages.
•  Joseph Nichols And The Nicholites  © 1962 by Kenneth L. Carroll – History of the Quaker-like, Nicholites religious sect in North Carolina, of which several of my ancestors were members. 115 pages.
•  Beyond the Mists  © 1975 by Nathanial Benchley – About the life of explorer Lief Erickson. 152 pages.
•  The World As It Was: A Photographic Portrait 1865 – 1921  © 1980 and edited by Margarette Loke – A world wide stereophotographic documentary of life in the latter half of the 19th Century. 220 pages.
•  The Tao Of Physics © 1975 by Fritjof Capra – Our sensory perceptions function in a zone of middle dimensions. We exist metaphorically on an illuminated hilltop. Moving off the hill and down into the shadows, our senses do not work and we encounter paradox. 332 pages.

Frozen waterlines
When I walked into the kitchen on the morning of January 23, to read my morning temperatures, I found it a terrible -23ºF outdoors. Then, attempting to run water into the kitchen sink to wash dishes, I found both the hot and cold water lines had frozen during the night.  We still had hot and cold water in the bathroom, so I carried pails of hot water into the kitchen sink for the dishes. Needless to say this temporary and infrequent inconvenience was an irritation. I kept the thermostat turned up most of the day, finally thawing the water lines by mid afternoon; having frozen water lines in the home is a scary experience.

Trade: 10 year old PAMELA I for the Encyclopedia Britannica
For years after purchasing the Processor Technology SOL computer, I wrote programs for it and used the machine almost daily. Processor Technology went out of business within a year or two after we bought our SOL model.

During the early 1980s, there was no real market for ‘home computers’, the few models that were available, mostly relied on the owner to write their own programs, or type out the program code from a magazine or book.

Companies such as Tandy and Commodore offered a line of computers ranging from $300 to $700 which displayed only a few lines of text. These machines had to be attached to the household television or had small, dim monitors. The few software programs that were available on diskette for those early home computers, didn’t do much other than very basic word processing and were little more than you could copy from a computer magazine.

I’d run out of programming ideas and was up against the level of my expertise to program anything ‘powerful’. Donna and I were increasingly busy, me with my journals and looking after Jane. Donna was working full time and spending her free time with Jane. Our interest in the computer declined and PAMELA I had eventually ended up sitting unused on a table in the Activity Room.

During late January, we advertising the computer for sale and managed to trade it for an ‘as new’, thirty volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, and associated fifteen volume Britannica Junior Encyclopedias. Jane grew up with the encyclopedias handy for homework, while Donna and I used them periodically over the years for our own reference.

My last cigarette
Smoking was a habit I picked up about the time I went in the Army and continued with until early 1987,  only stopping for a month or so during previous years, when I was ill. During that twenty five years period, I predominantly smoked Marlboro and Viceroy cigarettes.

Ever since Jane was born, I’d wanted to quit smoking and had a good reason: I didn’t want to injure her lungs and perhaps hurt her later in life. Yet, I knew from past experience just how difficult it was to quit the habit. Many times I had the thought of ‘having just that one last pack, that one last cigarette’. Finally, I prayed from the deepest place I could find in my spirit for the strength to quit and beat the habit.

It so happened that a couple months earlier, my Uncle Bill developed pneumonia and was hospitalized. His doctors told him that if he wanted to fully recover he was going to have to quit his lifelong habit of smoking. The doctors apparently put a scare into him, because he did quit, immediately. Bill’s tobacco related near death experience and the fact that he quit added further impetus to helping me stop.
On January 28, I quit my ‘pack a day’ (twenty cigarettes) habit of smoking and never touched tobacco products again.

Attending local churches
Over the period of a year or two, Donna, Jane and I attended several Christian churches. Not particularly looking for a church to call home, we began by attending Mass at the large, grand, old Catholic church in Gilman, just four miles from Nightstar*. Although it was our families lot to have been born Protestant, I thoroughly enjoyed the Catholic use of symbols, the  mysterious prayers spoken in Latin, congregational chants, the entertaining organizational procedures, archaic robes and garb of the priests.

Donna’s religious convictions, being about the same as my own, made it fairly unimportant in determining the particular Christian church services we would attend next.
We decided to temper our choice of a church using the criteria of exclusion. We would not attend any church that was primarily evangelistic or which was noted for sending lay ‘missionaries’ out into the community to make ‘on the spot conversions’. Further, the church would have a congregation composed of primarily Western Europeans, preferably, Northern -Western Europeans.

During the early Winter of 1986-1987, while gathering information for my autobiography, I rediscovered that my parents use to worship at an Episcopal Church. That previous affiliation had long since been forgotten, since my father went on to become an Ordained Baptist minister and missionary. After reading portions of the books: The Power of Their Glory and Christian Churches in America, I was surprised to find that our criteria was met by the Episcopal style of faith and worship. I was particularly impressed with the fact that the Episcopalians ranked twenty ninth out of thirty nine organized religions, as being tight with their money when the collection plate was passed. To me, this indicated that the church was not using its clergy to fatten the organizations coffers.

We attended the weekly Sunday morning church service at St. John’s Episcopal Church in St. Cloud weekly during December and January. We were impressed with the casual dress of the congregation. Whereas, people in other churches tend to ‘dress up’ into their ‘Sunday best’ clothes, taking on an air of formality, the Episcopalians wore their everyday ‘town clothes’. Very few people wore suits.  The  number of people wearing ‘layered’ clothing or clothing made from natural fibers was much more common than seen amongst the local population on average. The style of clothes made it apparent that for the most part, these people were quite aware of their common heritage.

We entered the church just before services began and were happy to find afterwards that the Priest nor any other persons hurried to make our acquaintance or shake our hands. Some church congregations have a custom of being overly friendly, a practice we found disagreeable.

Our attitude was that we came to the church for the worship experience and the social ceremony, not to find friends. If friendship should eventually develop, it should do so at a natural pace. After all, we were the strangers and it should be our place to show an interest in the church and its people.

Some thoughts about organized religion
I have often wondered how all our billions of human beings, across the steep of time have reached that same logical conclusion in that the faith they happened to have been born into was the one explaining the supreme truth and therefore the faith worthy of their time, effort, adoration and obedience. Some 20,000 to 10,000 years ago men practiced religious faiths that have all faded into obscurity. Religions that are now so important to the world’s masses will themselves have passed into oblivion or mutated beyond recognition in another few thousand years. Science its self is a religion with scientist filling the role of priests, explaining how the natural world and universe operate. Given a few thousand years when we know better, our descendants will chuckle over our niavety.

There is no right religion. There is no wrong religion. There is only Man’s need for religious belief, as a guide to living in our social-physical world, and something to give meaning when needed, to the unexplained mysteries of life and the after life.

I think each religion is like a powerful, long lived creature, whose individual human members are the component cells of its corporate body. A co-existing group of these creatures are like members of any species, each sharing a similar form which can be seen in their effect on their membership community.
Each religion is also similar to an individual person, bearing the evolutionary traits of its specific tradition, the regional human culture, its economic base,  the membership’s education, time location and geographical location.
Each religion operates in a world with varying degrees of overlapping territories. Although all are somewhat different as individuals, they are also similar, valuing at least one concept that is to them, the Supreme Being or the Way. As local, regional and world cultural values slowly change, these long lived creatures evolve or are replaced by vigorous new forms that can adapt to the new paradigm of life.

Thoughts on death
When each of us in our own time takes our last breath at life’s end, I think what follows will be pleasantly different than religious experts from across time have taught us to believe. The good Hindu may not be reincarnated as an exalted creature, the brave and honorable Shoshone Indian may not ‘walk on the wind’ and the Godly Christian may not go to Heaven.

Personally, I suspect that in the moments following death, as the corporate mind dies and startves for oxygen, or if you will, as our spirit leaves, we will realize that we are dying, but it won’t matter. Only the living seek to avoid death. Persons crossing from life to death find that life does not and did not matter. There is no pain only the pleasant realization that one’s awareness is becoming selfless and seems to be going someplace even more peaceful. Life’s mental imagery plays across our minds eye, in sparks of recognition as nodes close, while a bright white light grows in our diminishing consciousness. When the comforting light has completely filled that final tiny flicker of awareness there are no further sensations and we sleep.

Music [midi: Can You Feel the Love?]

Our Happy Furry Friends: Griz, Jessie & Pepin

[Above, a photocopy of a drawing from my March 1987 Journal entry: Our Happy, Furry Friends, drawn to   proportionate size. Jane 3-1/2 years old, is standing with Griz (9 years old),   Pepin (1 years old) and Jessie (5 years old).]

Griz is always first to greet whom ever has come out of the house. He is always first to greet us when we come home from work or town. When the car door is opened, Griz is standing there tail wagging, ready to touch his nose to our hands and be petted on his head.

He is by far the smartest of our three dogs, not only does he routinely catch small wildlife, including rabbits, mice, woodchucks and muskrats, but knows sixteen verbal commands. He is the only one whom knows how to find the proper size of stick or stone to play ‘fetch’ with.

Ever since he was a pup and beaten up by neighbor, Bobby’s dog, Nemo, Griz has avoided confrontations with other dogs. Often at night, when I’m up going to the bathroom, I’ll look out the bathroom window and see Griz sniffing about the yard or walking on the driveway, making his rounds. Jessie and Pepin are seldom seen up moving about at night.

Jessie is a verbally communicative and affectionate dog. Unlike Griz and Pepin, Jessie allows Jane to sit on her back, pull her ears and poke her without complaint. When Jane is playing outside, Jessie will follow her around and can always be found sitting or laying beside her. When Donna or I go outside, Jessie will rub against us and often touch her nose against our hands. She is occasionally somewhat bitchy and bossy with Griz, where she may nip at him as if to say, ‘Don’t crowd me!’ Although she is very brave and will lead Pepin to chase a neighbor’s dog, she is not very intelligent. Occasionally, Donna remarks, ‘Jessie is so dumb the wind blows between her ears’.

Pepin, being a little over a year old at this time, weighs seventy-two pounds. The size of his legs and enormous feet indicate he may still be growing.  His body form is neither German Shepherd or Black Lab. He looks somewhat like a St. Bernard with a large St. Bernard shaped head, rather sad looking eyes, slightly droopy jowls, floppy ears, long white fur and large size. Pepin is at times an irritant and bully to his parents, particularly toward Griz.
Being taller and heavier than both his parents, he nips, throws his weight against, crowds in, shoves aside and periodically pesters them until they go to their respective houses. He is a large, fearless dog whom takes his fighting cues from Jessie. If a fight with neighboring farm dogs in threatened, he immediately will come to her side. His large size coupled with Jessie’s  threatening bark have routed neighbor dogs on several occasions. Pepin has not really found his place yet, being eclipsed by his parents and thereby third dog on the totem pole.

It is always a pleasure to go outdoors and find three happy smiling faces eager to go and do whatever you have in mind. It is always a pleasure to stop working on whatever outdoor project and turn to find one, two or all three of my dog friends sitting or lying nearby. They give much more in friendship, enthusiasm, love, companionship and low level communications than their food, water, feeding and periodic medical bills could ever amount to.

Our dog’s personalities
When I sit down to give each dog some personal attention, it’s plain to see through our eye contact and from watching their behavior, that the dogs have their own unique and individual personalities.

Griz will sit quietly and stare back into my eyes for a few moments, before averting his gaze. In those few moments, you can tell that Griz has a serious, no nonsense attitude. He doesn’t like rough house play, he is a gentleman dog, he is somewhat aloof, but also concerned. Griz maintains an air of equality, he doesn’t do irritating things and doesn’t expect to be irritated. Griz is a smart loner.

Jessie will not sit quiet and look into your eyes, she is too frazzled for such seriousness. Although she cannot sit still, personal attention is very important to her. She is concerned that our private times are not disturbed by the rest of her dog family. When we are alone, Jessie will talk to me in a squealy – growly voice saying, ‘RRRrrrow ERrrr ERrr RRRrrriii,’ as I scratch her head and pet her. When she talks to me, I talk  to her in that same squealy growly voice. Although she is generally a quiet, placid and an almost motherly dog around Jane, she tends to be nervous, excited, scatterbrain around me. When trying to pet her, she wiggles, twists, rolls over, talks, and jumps around.

Pepin will sit still for personal attention and will briefly glance into my eyes. He is alert, thinking, skittish, worried and has a slight sneaky streak. If Jessie comes around while I’m petting him, he will try to climb on my lap to keep her from getting his special petting. If Griz comes around, a fight very well might ensue. At a year old, Pepin seems to be rather cunning and has a ‘do it my own way’ attitude, somewhat similar to Griz. On the other hand, like Jessie, his behavior and ability to understand is often ‘dumb’, which might be attributable to his youth and inexperience.

Griz, Jessie and Pepin are our happy, furry friends.

Our dog family, hard at work.
On Sunday, May 17, Donna invited Jane’s Campfire Girl’s Sparks troop and the children’s parents to our place in the country for a Safari and hot dog roast.

The plan was to take the small children on a ‘Safari’ through our lower yard, around the pond, then along the driveway so they could observe bird and squirrel nests, see the ducks and geese, ant mounds, woodpecker holes in dead trees, etc. After their safari everyone would gather in our back yard for a picnic of hot dogs with buns, soda pop and various chips (Frito, potato chips) and roasted marshmallows.

That afternoon, at meal time, while the parents were lounging around and either talking or helping kids with their hot dogs, most of the children were running and playing, or taking turns at our picnic table getting their food. At times, while everyone was wrapped up in socialization and the picnic, I watched our dogs an saw their individual personalities at work.

Griz, the gentleman he was, took all the petting he received from the children as a matter of duty, rigidly and with a stiff upper lip. He didn’t stand in any one place very long, but spread his attention around equally to everyone who had food or was near the table. His calm, patient and observantly staring manner found him overly rewarded with potato chips and chunks of hot dog buns. Griz didn’t play, run or romp, all he wanted was food. He’d stand by watching each person until he was served then he’d moved to the next person.

[Photograph at left: My dog family, L>R: Griz, Jessie and eldest son Pepin. All loved and still missed in 2012. This was a warm summers morning at Nightstar*, the dogs were tied together for their picture,  some curious ducks and geese watching our activities.]

Jessie, on the other hand, was more of a favorite with the kids. She didn’t hang around the table, nor did she need to be fed in order to gain her attention. Jessie romped and ran, tumbled and played just as happy and as wild eyed with excitement as any of the children.

The puppy, Pepin, who weighed more than any one of the little Campfire Girls, was in a titter. He’d never seen so many people at one time. He could see everyone was having fun, running about and falling down, but he didn’t know how to play. He watched his mother, Jessie, bark, play ‘fetch-a-stick’ and tag, but he was just too worried about all those strange people to receive much petting or join in the faraces. Eventually, the activities became too much for him and he decided to try and catch a kid by the ankle! He was scolded and summarily chained up, at his dog house, about seventy feet away, where he watched everything with considerable nervous enthusiasm and continuous barking.

JP reading and writing
By the end of January, at three years and two months of age, Jane could print all the letters of the alphabet in uppercase text.

By March 19, Jane and I were going through about one hundred twenty each, three by five inch homemade flash cards daily. Each card contained simple words (can, do), numbers (5, 6) or simple addition (2+1=3) and subtraction (3-2=1) problems. For a few minutes, every few days, while I worked in my journal, Jane sit across from meat the kitchen table. During these times she printed out the letters of the alphabet several times and wrote several words that she’d learned to spell.

On Sunday, May 10, three and a half months after Jane learned to print the letters of the alphabet, Donna and Jane called me into the Activity Room where I proudly observed Jane read her longest string of card-words to date, stating:

By the end of October, Jane’s mastery of printing had improved considerably, besides printing the uppercase alphabet, she was printing the lower case letters at approximate Second Grade quality.

Where now garbage scow?
On March 22, a garbage barge carrying 3,200 tons of refuse left Islip, New York on a six month journey in search of a place to unload. The evening TV news media periodically featured the story, showing the huge barge being turned away from port after port in the United States and three foreign countries. The barge eventually returned to Islip, where space was found in the city’s garbage dump. Donna and I just shook our heads being both humored and irritated, that this episode had turned into a major U.S. news story. It had became an environmental statement  about garbage, sewage, overpopulation, our ‘throw away’, disposable, affluent society.

Jane makes Easter & Valentine cards
During February, and again in early April, I assisted Jane in drawing and pasting together Valentine and Easter cards to be sent to several of her relatives. Jane put a lot of work into the projects, which was for her age, a complicated procedure involving cutting out various colored paper, glue, writing, stuffing and putting stamps on the envelopes.
The card recipients included my parents, Donna’s father and Uncle Bill and Aunt Elizabeth. For her efforts she did not receive return correspondence from my parents on either occasion. I was left feeling sad and hurt. Donna merely shook her head at such social offenses and muttered something unintelligible, and undoubtedly appropriate, while continuing with her chores.

A typical spring day in the late 1980s
A chronology of personal and family events  for  Tuesday, April 7:

Morning
5:30-6:30  The   family awoke and got up, dressed and took a walk up County Road #14 to our   south property line. Back at home, Donna changed  into her  True Value Hardware office ‘work clothes.’
6:30-6:50  The  girls sat in the Activity Room practicing with their English recorders. I began washing a load of laundry and set the table for breakfast.
6:50-7:00 Donna sat at the kitchen table reading a portion of my Journal’s Daily Diary. Jane nibbled on her breakfast cereal, while I sat across the table sipping a cup of coffee, watching the news on TV.
7:00-7:10  The   family ate our bowls of cold breakfast cereal and had a glass of orange   juice.
7:10-7:20  Donna and I looked over a Phenological worksheet, entering dates for our ‘first notice’ of events this Spring.
7:25  Donna left for her day’s work at True Value Hardware. Jane put on her coat and boots then followed Donna outside to wave ‘Goodbye’.  I ran water in the kitchen sink in preparation to wash dishes.
7:50  I finished washing the previous night’s supper dishes and our mornings breakfast dishes. ‘During   dishes’, when the laundry finished its final spin cycle, I transferred the damp clothes to the automatic dryer, then began washing a second batch of   laundry.
Jane   came in the house for a minute to inform me that Pepin had knocked over one  of our bicycles.
7:50-8:05  While standing at the kitchen bay window, I finished drinking a cup of coffee, then went to the bathroom.
8:05-8:50  Dumped and burned a load of waste paper.
Brought   a wheel barrow load of sawn firewood out of the woods and split several pieces.
Set one of our sprinklers up along the west yard fence and began watering, in order to wet last season’s leaves and reduce the fire hazard. There have been two fires on this property since we bought the land, we started neither. Our  area now has a burning ban (grass and leaves) in effect due to the extreme dry nature of the Spring vegetation[2].
Jane and I took on a short bicycle ride on the highway. She rode in her plastic child’s seat, behind the bicycle seat.
I checked the oil in the Ford and added some water to the radiator.
8:50-10:25  I began rewriting my Daily Diary notes for April 4-5.
About 9:30 Jane laid down for her nap.
10:25-10-28  Donna telephoned me from True Value, we chatted for a few minutes.
10:28-10:42  I went outdoors and changed the sprinkler’s location. Back inside, I folded the   first batch of clothes and laundry and put them away.
10:42-11:24  Continued rewriting and entering my Daily Diary notes into Journal #13.
11:24-12:00  I changed the sprinkler’s location again.
Rode my bicycle down the driveway and picked up our mail:  1) Benton Coop Telephone bill, 2)   Shopper’s News-a newspaper size advertisement,  3) notice from the Benton County Planning Commission that a neighbor wanted to split his property into smaller   parcels, 4) a letter from Don –  enclosed with $10.00, ‘…so the Easter bunny will bring a little something extra for Jane.’
Microwaved a bowl of homemade split pea soup for my lunch and a peanut butter and honey sandwich for Jane.
Woke  Jane from her nap for lunch.

Afternoon
Noon-12:15  Jane and I ate our lunch at   the kitchen table while chatting and watching the noon TV News.
12:15-1:05  After lunch we went into the living room and began listening to a radio program about gifted and talented children. While listening to the radio, Jane and I  dusted and polished the furniture.
1:05-1:20  Donna telephoned, we had a good long chat. After our conversation, I went back outside and changed the sprinkler’s  location.
1:20-1:30  Folded and put away the second batch of dry laundry.
1:30-2:25 Finished entering Daily Dairy notes for April 4-5 in my Journal (pages 2256-2257) and  drew examples of the planters that were discussed.
2:25-3:10  Jane went outside to play. I fed the dogs and washed the few dishes that had   accumulated during the day
I took a wash cloth bath, washing my hands, face, armpits and crotch, then changed my underwear and put on my evening clothes.
3:10-3:35 Rewrote the Phenology list.
3:35-4:57  I sat on the small beige couch and continued reading The Dynamics of Change.   Jane came in the house, watched TV cartoons for about 20 minutes. After the cartoons and with several crackers in her hand, Jane went back outside to  explore, in her words, ‘Where no child have been before.’
4:57  Donna arrived home from work bringing Jane’s new, official Campfire Girls cap. Jane came in from playing outside.
4:59-5:20  Donna and I chatted about the days affairs.
5:20-5:45  While Donna began preparing supper, I read aloud to her a series of interesting concepts I’d just learned from The Dynamics of Change. During this time Jane was in the bathroom taking a wash cloth bath and changing her   clothes.
5:45-6:00  While supper preparations continued, all three of us were in the kitchen all trying  to get a word in edgewise talking to one another. There was a lot of   spontaneous, gay and cheerful chatter.

Evening
6:00-6:28 The   family sat around the kitchen table eating our supper, occasionally talking   to one another and watching a TV program.
6:28-6:34 While   Jane finished her supper, Donna and I cleared the table.
6:34-7:30 The   family sat in the living room watching a previously copied television movie, while each licked away at either a vanilla ice-cream cone or orange popsicle.  Jane put on her pajamas.
7:30 The movie we were watching wasn’t very entertaining so we turned it off. Every one brushed their teeth and we all climbed into the big brass bed.
7:30-8:30 The   family laid in bed talking amongst ourselves for about an hour. As we began drifting off to sleep, Donna put Jane in her own bed.
8:30PM and for the night….Zzz   Zzz

Precious metals investment discussion (edited).

Jane’s tonsils seem swollen a lot
During late April, Jane developed a fever and we noted she had swollen tonsils. At the time we didn’t think much of her swollen tonsils, but over the next couple years it seemed all her colds were accompanied by swollen tonsils. Eventually the condition brought about the memory of my own childhood, and how the family doctor had told my parents that a tonsillectomy would reduce the number and severity of the colds I was catching.

With all the antibiotics available, inoculations, drug store nostrums and talk of prevention, it seemed to me that children were catching more colds and a wider variety of illness than were common during  my childhood in the 1940s. The old scourges of infantile paralysis, whooping cough, rheumatic fever, various types of the ‘pox’ and spinal meningitis have been brought under control in the United States. These old malady’s seem to have been replaced by newer life threatening diseases and dangers, such as strep throat, ear infections that are practically incurable, teenage drug and gang related homicide.

The small utility trailer
Once the Spring weather warmed, our thoughts returned to camping. One weekend, we went price shopping for a small, four foot wide by six foot long utility trailer. After work on May 4, Donna stopped back at one of the stores and purchased the utility trailer hardware kit that we liked best.
The bolt together frame, two wheel axle, electric wiring harness, lights, tongue and wheels were provided as a self assembly kit, produced by the Long Company for $160.00.

The very next day, I assembled the hardware; then designed and built a wooden bed (plywood sheet), side walls and removable tailgate for the trailer (one by four inch tongue and groove planks nailed to two by four inch uprights) and painted the wood (white primer and dark blue latex finish paint) at a cost of an additional $100. By the time the work was done, we had an attractive small utility trailer that became a handy vehicle to have available.

Over the years we’ve used the trailer to carry the families camping gear during vacations, to transport Pierce Antiques and Collectables wares (not discussed yet) to shows about central Minnesota, haul firewood and for a variety of other small projects that required more transport space than was afforded by the auto’s trunk.

Our Ford Grenada gets a rebuilt engine
In early May, after owning the 1977 Ford Grenada for only a little over a year, it began to develop serious mechanical problems. One evening, on Donna’s way home from work, the main engine bearing froze up with a ‘clankety clank’ and the car coasted to a stop on the road shoulder. Donna telephoned home from a nearby pay phone, where upon, Jane and I drove the Toyota into St. Cloud to bring her home. We had a tow truck pull the Ford to a repair shop, where the mechanics found its engine needed replacing and  transmission needed a overhaul. Since everything else on the car seemed to be in good condition except these parts, we had the work done. Although the repairs cost $1313, that was cheap considering the cost of replacing the car with either a new, or another used vehicle.

While the Ford was in the shop for repair we had a light duty pull bar and electrical wiring connected so we could pull the small utility trailer.

Over the nine years that followed these repairs, we put an additional 100,000 miles on the car. The only other problems we had with the eighteen year old Ford were worn brakes, busted radiator hose, tire replacements, muffler worn out, seat disintegrating, leak in the gas tank and a leak in the radiator (which was been temporarily sealed with a chemical additive).

Camping at Sibley State Park [3]
Recalling all the fun we had camping the previous year, and after a long winter, at the earliest opportunity in the Spring, the family was ready for another vacation camping.  We found from the official state park camping brochure that Sibley State Park, located just seventy miles southwest of our home, had an interesting mix of activities and things to see. We’d never camped at that park and were eager to explore it and the nearby historical locations.

[Photograph at left: Taken at home in the driveway, our  Ford Grenada and newly assembled & constructed 4 ft by 6 ft utility trailer;  loaded and about to leave for our camping trip at Sibley State Park.]

Plans were subsequently made to stay at Sibley S.P. from May 21 to 26, 6 days. We phoned the park and made reservations, Donna put in for several days vacation, I cleaned and  packed our equipment.

As it turned out, it rained and drizzled during much of our holiday. This is not said as a complaint, just as a matter of fact. We came to Sibley to enjoy nature, in whatever guise she might reveal herself, we came to see the park, the natural history presentations at the visitors center and to visit the historical locations in the communities outside the park.

I was a lifelong, experienced camper, having encountered inclement conditions many times, so we were prepared for the rain. As part of our gear we carried a large, twelve foot square green plastic canopy that more than covered our picnic table. A second large green plastic tarp covered our tent, giving us that much more protection from any leaks the tent might develop.

The Broberg homesite at Monson Lake [4]
On our second day of vacation, we drove twenty five miles from Sibley S.P to neighboring, Monson S.P. While speaking to the Park Ranger, we found that the park was dedicated to several settler families that were massacred on the site by a Sioux war party. The Ranger showed us around to the side of his office to a nicely mown area and pointed out the now gentle, sod covered indentations that had once been the basement and root cellar at the Broberg family cabin. As we continued talking, the Ranger volunteered that he had an eyewitness account of the massacre, made by Anna Broberg, one of the survivors, who was at the time ten years old.

After the Ranger gave us a photocopy of Anna Broberg’s account of the slaughter, we returned to the car to sit and read the story.
The mornings light sprinkle was turning into a solid rain.

As we read the account, Anna’s tragic tale unfolded with swift and violent suddenness.

A short while later, during a lull in the rain, we climbed out of the car and walked the couple hundred feet to the Broberg cabin site. We stood on location and reread the story while aligning ourselves to Anna’s perspective of the scene. We could almost point to the location where various events occurred: The Indians had caught this and that family member over there (pointing). One person was killed about here, another over there (pointing). Anna fled roughly in that direction (pointing) to hide in shore line weeds at around Monson Lake.

Standing in the large clearing surrounded by woods, on this gray and darkly overcast morning, it again began to gently sprinkle.
I felt a wave of empathy wash through me.
My eyes darted back and forth reconstructing the home, crops in the field, the split rail fence, a wagon trail that led past here to the neighbor’s cabin.
Within my mind’s eye, a scene evolved and I began to imaginatively relive the sight and sensations of the carnage that occurred in our immediate vicinity. I heard the surprise, men shouting, women and children yell in surprise, occasional gunfire, screams of terror. In that fleeting vision I saw settlers running in several directions, the Indians emerging from the woods and splitting into groups to chase them. There were momentary flashing images and sensations associated with running, pleading, crashing sounds, fear, pain, and savage, victorious elation.

In their own space-time location, everyone in the Broberg family, had many times, walked through the location where I  stood. In most every instant, their lives were full of the space-time events that unfolded around them. Now, all we see is a grassy hole in the middle of a yard where once stood their cabin. Because of entropy, most of the information relating to their lives and death, has been muted into the background. The information that made events real in 1862 have mostly gone beyond the range of our senses, covered by layer and layers of intervening space-time events that continued to unfold hereupon. That environment and those events that occurred here, are all still here, but locked in space-time. Indeed, they are occurring right here and  now — at the Broberg cabin, 20 August 1862.

For the first time, I was able to sense time more as a location than as the customarily perceived clock flow. The date, 20 August 1862, was the date-label for an event that occurred in the spot we stood and as I’ve recently read, ‘one cannot refer to space-time events in tenses – tenses confuse.’

Camping anomalies
In the days that followed, Donna and I were amazed and entertained at some of the sights provided by some of our fellow campers, among the wonderous examples that brought us to chuckle or gasp with stiffled laughter, were:
1)  In one nearby campsite, a grossly overweight woman is seen waddling around alternately cooking breakfast, calling her children and setting the table. Looking closer we realize she has an electric toaster and electric coffee pot on the picnic table. Most campsites at Sibley are electrified, but still, camping is not what it use to be even ten years ago.
2)  Early one morning, with a 50ºF outdoor temperature, a male camper stepped out of his luxury recreational vehicle, a place of pampered luxury while ‘camping’. Bare from the waist up, he walked, with head held high, across the campground towards the bathroom, probably to shower. Meanwhile, we were bundled up with T-shirts, long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts, plus wearing stocking caps pulled down over our ears. Observing this display of, ‘half naked man against native elements’, Donna and I wondered aloud, ‘How high do you think he had the thermostat set is in his RV?’
3) Late one afternoon while we were eating lunch, Donna leaned across the picnic table and quietly said, ‘You aren’t going to believe this.’, while looking over my shoulder.
I slowly turned around and saw of all things, a man carving a roast turkey with an electric knife! Never, never, in my years of camping, have I ever seen anyone cook a turkey while camping, but more surprising yet, I’d never seen an electric knife in a campground!
Camping has become an honest to goodness ‘adventure’ for the proletariat. They arrive in motor homes when they probably don’t even own their home. They sit glued to their picnic tables surrounded with electric coffee pots, electric toaster and electric carving knife. While some go fishin’, other’s walk up and down the campground lanes inspecting and comparing neighboring ‘set ups’. They stay up until 11:00 PM nightly and sleep until late morning. Few attend the park Interpretive Center activities, few are seen on the park trails, at historical sites or museums or monuments.
It appears they spend much of their time sitting around, chatting with extended family, sipping beer, discussing their camping ‘set up’ or ‘rig’ and considering how thoughtful they were to bring their households electric kitchen appliances.
4) One evening just before we retired for the night, we saw the most amazing thing we’ve ever seen while camping. Tenants at a nearby campsite (different group than those mentioned above) were sitting around their campfire talking. As it grew dark, their campfire didn’t provide enough luminosity for the people to see one another. Someone went in the Recreational Vehicle and brought out an electric table lamp. When it was plugged in, the extra 100 to 200 watts of light apparently allowed them to enjoy their camp chat and the experience of nature.

While driving in and out of the campground on our various adventures, we’ve seen a portable television and two large, portable ‘ghetto box’ radios sitting on various picnic tables. This is not a good sign for the future enjoyment of nature in our nation’s campgrounds; the nature of the camping experience is changing.

The Great Sioux Camp, revisited
One ironic discovery was made at Green Lake. There, amongst the small rolling hills on the northeast shore of the lake was the site of ‘The Great Sioux Camp’, a Sioux village had sat on the spot for about a hundred years at just the time when Whites were moving into the area. This same location had more recently become Kandiyohi County Park #5, a camping, swimming, fishing and water skiing park. We drove through the park musing over the fact that the land use by whites was about the same as it had been by the Indians.

People were seen sitting and talking to one another, others were laying in the shade napping, half clad people were returning to their campsites from fishing or swimming in the lake, others hurrying to the beach, canoes and power boats were out on the lake. There were shouts, laughter and gaiety everywhere. Human life was teeming with individual purpose all across the previous location of the old Sioux Indian village.
Meanwhile, densely packed along each lane were tents and recreation vehicles. Centrally located, near the lake shore was a large, solidly built concession stand which sold fast foods and packaged foods, fishing bait, ice, etc. It all looked very commercialized, reminding me of a crowded urban park on a hot day.

Around and about Sibley S.P.
During the rain-free periods of our mini vacation, we explored points of interest around the park. We rode our bicycle, took car tours and explored hiking trails. We pointed out a variety of wild life to Jane, including: eight turtles, three pair of Mallard ducks, a beaver swimming and diving in a pond, a Great Blue Heron, American Egret, squirrels, a skunk, rabbit, deer, beaver, turtle, woodchuck and eight wild turkeys.

During our evenings at Sibley State Park, we attended three talk and slide show presentations: ‘Welcome to Sibley State Park’, the ‘Natural History of Mt. Tom’ and ‘Fur Trade’[5].

On one side trip, we stopped at a roadside historical marker overlooking Lake Minnewaska and the town of Glenwood, MN. A bronze plaque at the site pointed out that the hill we were parked and standing on was deposited by a retreating glacier about 11,000 years ago. It said that the glacier at this location had been between one and two miles deep! Suddenly, I realized why Minnesota was so low and boggy. It wasn’t because a glacier had melted here, it was due to the weight of the glacier which had depressed the land over those tens of thousands of years; the ground simply hadn’t sprung back from that weight. Thirty thousand years ago, our home at Nightstar* lay about a mile beneath the Wadena glacial lobe. No wonder we found so many rocks in our garden and see so many rock piles along neighboring farmer’s fields.

Settling the west: Then, now and again
We were surprised to find that the first white child was born in Kandiyohi County, during the year 1857. What a shocker!
That first white child was born in a fourteen foot by fifteen foot wide log cabin, only eighty six years before my birth, and one hundred years before I was in high school.
Reading that information made me more fully realize that central Minnesota, including Benton County where we live, is really no more than a frontier. I have pretty much taken for granted that central Minnesota was the same as everywhere else in the United   States, except for climate. Of course, we knew the area was settled in the latter part of the 19th Century, but dryly stating a date is not quite the same as comparing dates to events in your own life.

The cities and towns, the farms with their new and old buildings, television antenna’s on nearly every house, retail stores, power lines, paved roads, automobiles, bridges and schools are all essentially the same here and elsewhere across America. As such, we are lulled into accepting that since these structures look the same everywhere, that they existed on land that was settled all about the same time.
In a moment of reflection, I can see the rate of local settlement by the fact that, during the first seven years, from 1980 to 1987, after we bought our rural property, Nightstar*, five new homes were built along a two mile stretch of County Road 14, which passes the property. The change occurs slowly, like aging, where no single event creates a break between past and future climax states. We simply keep changing our evaluation of what is the norm and disregard what has previously occurred, anything prior to the ‘current norm’, is history.

As Donna and I discussed how people tend to take, ‘how things are,’ for granted, she told me of a discussion she had in 1972 with her mother, Eulah. At the time, Donna and Eulah were driving in the Los  Angeles urban region, when Donna complained about the traffic and crowds. Eulah replied,
‘It hasn’t always been this crowded in Los  Angeles. When I came to Los Angeles in the early 1920s, it was a small town with horse drawn buggies on narrow dirt streets. Extending for miles around town was orange orchards and to the east the desert.’

As we continued talking, I recalled that when my family moved to Pasadena, California in 1959, Los Angeles was already a large sprawling city. In the early 1960s, LA’s growing population was pushing community development south to form Mission Viego in Orange County. During our visit with Mike and Kay in Redlands, California, during 1985, we found suburban communities extending east into what was only a few years earlier a most inhospitable and desolate desert.

They left Sibley S.P., in the rain
On the last morning of the long Memorial Day weekend, we awoke to a good downpour. We dressed and came out of the tent to sit around the picnic table and heat water for our coffee and hot chocolate. Things were not going well around us.
Two campsite from ours, we saw a couple packing their gear to leave, their children waited in the family car. Several items had been unceremoniously tossed into their pop-up camper. They cranked down the top, set the small row boat on top and loaded their bicycles on a rack. They were soaking wet and looked quite solemn. I think I understood their rationale for leaving so early, in Anglo native parlance, ‘No inconvenience, even gettin’ soakin’ wet, can be worse than not bein’ able ta go fishin’. If you can’t fish, ya might as well pack ‘er up an’ go home!’

[Photograph: A chilly, wet morning at Sibley State Park. Donna and Jane, under our rain canopy, making breakfast on the Coleman stove.]

We remained dry  about the picnic table. Jane helped Donna cook breakfast.
While we ate our meal in leisure and sipped several cups of coffee, the campground came alive.

All around us were people rushing about in the rain. They hurriedly cranked down their tent camper RVs, raised the leveling legs, pushed in the beds, and loaded unused bicycles. Items that had been left out on the picnic table over night were wadded up in table cloths and dumped into the car trunk. Dripping wet bathing towel were removed from sagging, makeshift clothes lines and dropped into plastic bags. RV door awnings were seen bagged down with water, threatening to collapse their thin aluminum support poles.

On previous mornings, most of these folks were still in bed at that early hour. In fact, seeing so many adults up and outside working in the rain, I imagined many leaving before breakfast. The campground was undergoing explosive decompression. People were hurrying in the downpour, shouting instructions, trying to coordinate their actions.

One woman had a jacket over her head, she would of course end up soaked, but there was a slight chance that her hair wouldn’t get wet and that her mascara wouldn’t ‘run’.

The scene that went on around us would have been worth paying to see, it was a comedy of folly. One woman, backing the car up to their RV, got excited and backed right into the trailer tongue. Her husband shouted at her in a spiteful voice, then they traded places. For over an hour we sat at the picnic table in disbelief, watching the activities about us. Occasionally, we were led to snicker, but several times the antics of our fellow campers made us gasp, choke and squeal with laughter.

I rather thought that the rain had defeated a lot of spirits that morning, you see, during previous mornings, when a vehicle left the campground, it went out slowly, its occupants looking at each campsite along the lane as they discussed the merits of what they saw. Not so that day! When they left in the rain, their vehicle whisked right by, their heads did not turn to gawk. With rain water dripping from their eyebrows and noses, with clothing wet, they left cold, uncomfortable and probably hungry. The procession of disheveled campers that left, reminded me of a defeated army hurrying off the battlefield and returning home, ignoble, wet and weary…

We made best of the weather
Later that morning, we attended a ‘Frog and Toad’ presentation at the Park Interpretive Center. Jane watched in awe, then in glee as Tom, a captive toad, gobbled up live Blood worms given him by the Park Naturalist.

During the afternoon, we attended the grand opening of the Monongalia Historical Society museum in the old Lebanon Lutheran Church in New London.
Within in the last decade or so, there had been a growing interest in local and individual family history, at the community level. This interest manifested itself in the growing number of local cultural museums. The sort of things one usually finds on display are early photographs of the town, perhaps an early automobile, the first TV in town, an old icebox and kerosene stove, mannequins outfitted in ‘turn of the century’ clothing, local paintings, old books and Bibles, a quilt or two, old dished and bowls, and old local newspapers.

Just inside the door, in the vestibule of the Monongalia Historical Society museum, a table had been set up with racks of cookies. Teenage girls stood by, serving ‘Krumkukens’ to all who entered. The atmosphere was gay and light as there was a four piece band seated where the church alter once stood. The band was playing 1960s popular tunes mixed with ethnic Swedish songs.

We wandered through the building, looking at the museums exhibits which were loosely displayed in various rooms. People were standing and sitting everywhere, in the aisle, in the old pews, all listening to the music, talking and sipping coffee.
About half a dozen old men (about 70s) were gathered together intently looking at a map of northern Europe. Since they were mostly speaking in a somewhat Germanic language, I could only pick up an occasional stray word of English. Bending close to the map and running their fingers about the page, two old men were babbling away in their native tongue, when one suddenly lapsed back into English and said with some surprise, ‘Oh! Dat’s ware you frum.’

In the basement we found a hall and kitchen. The hall had chairs set side by side all along the walls. Once again, we encountered numerous people standing and sitting, sipping coffee and munching on Swedish rolls and lefse bread, whilst carrying on happy animated conversations.

By the time we returned to our campsite, the park was essentially deserted. Several wild turkeys were already encroaching on the perimeter camping areas, scavenging for tid bits of food dropped by exuberant campers during the holiday.

Early the next morning, after breakfast and washing the dishes, there lull in the rain, allowing us the opportunity to pack our gear for the return home. Before leaving the state park, we  left the car at the Interpretive Center and took the mile long, ‘Pond Walk’. The trail passed through a patch of woods, crossed a large meadow and swung around a large pond then uphill, finally circling back to the Interpretive Center.
As we walked, we kept an eye on the sky for any particularly dark rain clouds that might be approaching. During our leisurely hour and a half walk, we identified twenty six plants and nine animals from Jane’s Junior Park Naturalist Guide booklet.
The mid morning silence was only broken by our quiet voices and the squawk of a startled Mallard duck. We were the only humans on the trail. There were no other families or groups of kids hurrying along shouting at one another. Everything about the hike was pleasurable, and a fitting end to our mini-vacation.

Returning home: Battle of the Broom
On our way home from Sibley State Park, we stopped at a roadside historical marker that was located just northeast of the tiny crossroads town of Harwich. We hurried across busy Highway #23 to read the brass marker and find out what event occurred in the area to qualify it as a point of interest.
In our immediate vicinity had occurred, ‘The Battle of the Broom’, which was thought to be the last pitched battle between the Chippewa and the Sioux Indians for territorial rights in that part of the state.

A hundred and some years earlier, when the Indians fought, the nearly flat land aound us had been a woodland savanna. As we stood there looking about, I realized how much the area had changed in the intervening years. To our west was an large commercial strawberry field, which was bordered by an equal size, large corn field. To the northeast, ran a power transmission corridor of tall steel towers, not the small local carriers, but the big U.S. electric grid network towers. Behind us was a paved highway that bisected the state, running generally from southwest to northeast; the road was busy with cars and big sixteen wheel trucks all whizzing by one after another, at 65-70 mph, .

Thinking about the past, living in my own present, but standing in this ‘historic location’, I was consciously teetering between two time periods. Reflecting on the situation, I realized that the people passing by us in their cars were just as oblivious of the Chippewa and Sioux fighting there, as the Indians were of us, from their own time.

People in one time location pay little attention to people in another time location.
This is the same state of mind as people in one geographical location being oblivious of people and their activities in another part of town or in a different city. You may know there must be someone across town mowing their lawn, but it doesn’t matter, until in some way it becomes important to you.
If we spent as much time moving our mind’s eye, empathy and imagination across time as we do moving our bodies in space, time would tend to collapse between events, relative to the way technology has brought about an essential collapse in separation between geographical locations.
Geographical locations remain separate, time locations remain separate, but movement between locations and events can be facilitated.
Huge global transportation infrastructures, flying machines, ships, roads and motor vehicles, and trains move our bodies; what could a similar expenditure of human creativity and technology do for collapsing time?

Continued in Chapter 1987, Part 2 of 3.

[1]  See Journal 11, High Plains Drifter, page 1836, “A Return to the Camping Experience.”
[2]  Camp stew: Cook together: about 1 quart of water containing a package of commercial dehydrated onion soup mix, 1/4 cup rice, 1 diced potato, 1 diced onion, small can stewed tomatoes. Add a pound of fried hamburger to the stew mix. Serve with sour dough bread topped with peanut butter. A hearty, easy to make stew good for cool and cold evenings in camp.
[3]  See Journal 11, High Plains Drifter, page 1844, excerpts from “A Return to the Camping Experience.”
[4]  Jane had her duck doll, “Ducky,” a gift from her paternal Great uncle Bill and Elizabeth Pierce.
[5] Over the next 14 years, while the threat of terrorism was drilled into the public consciousness as a huge threat, more people in the USA died from bee stings than from terrorist attacks. Fear generates business.
[6]  See Journal 12, Point of View, page 2007, part of the article “Jane Elizabeth Pierce: The days between ages two and three”
[7]  See Journal 4, The Passage, page 536, “An Account of the Death of Eulah Clara Roberts-___”
[8]  See Journal 4, The Passage, page 539, “The Passing of Eulah Clara___– Mother’s Farewell Gift”
[9]  See Journal 12, Point of View page 1984, “Jane Elizabeth Pierce: The days between ages two and three.”
[10]  See also Journal 11, High Plains Drifter, page 1822+, ” Drawings by Jane Elizabeth Pierce.”

 Themes and Events
*  The U.S. Department of Agriculture approves the release of the first genetically altered virus into the environment, it is used to attack a form of herpes affecting pigs.
*  As oil drops below $15 a barrel for the first time in years, there is an increased fascination with larger cars, the price decline helps fuel a stock market rally.
*  The national debt exceeds $2 trillion, having doubled in the last 5 years. The Trade Deficit jumps to an unprecedented $18 billion.
*  The world’s human population reached 5 billion persons in July, a 20% increase in 12 years. The Human Race is increasing in population by 150 babies per minute or 216,000 per day, a number that is clearly not sustainable.
*  A report in the New England Journal of Medicine that the risk of death from all causes, can be significantly reduced with moderate exercise.

Buttons & bumper stickers:
*  This car stops at all garage sales.
*  You’ve obviously mistaken me for somebody that cares.
*  Crime wouldn’t pay if the government ran it.
*  Go ahead hit me — I need the money.

A mid winter’s power outage
Living in Minnesota would be just fine, if it weren’t for the occasional life threatening scares we receive from the weather.
During the summer months we are concerned when there are severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings issued for our locale. Because we live in a mobile home, we are subject to greater risk from wind damage.
During winter, we become concerned over: 1) the possibility of being ‘snowed in’ for an extended period of time, 2) the snow depth accumulated on the mobile homes roof and 3) extended electric power outages. Unfortunately, major winter storms, snow depth, being snowed in and an electric power outage all can happen at the same time.

On the morning of January 27, I awoke at 3:45 AM and got up to go to the bathroom> While walking about in the house, I discovered we were in the midst of an electric power outage. Initially, I felt it was chilly in the house so went to the livingroom to check the indoor-outdoor thermometer. The outdoor temperature was a horrid -25ºF,. Meanwhile, the indoor temperature had  slipped from its normal 60ºF thermostat setting to 48ºF. The microwave and VCR display lights were out, of course, so were the house lights.

[Photograph. Winter 1985-86. My little pal, Jane, in her snow suit, on the driveway in front of our garage.]

I hurried back through the trailer to awaken Donna, so we could concert our efforts to warm the house and look into the situation. Donna immediately telephoned the electric company to find that the power had failed only an hour earlier. That told me the mobile home’s indoor temperature was dropping at the rate of 12ºF per hour.
We had to act fast, before the interior froze up.
We quickly dressed by flashlight, putting on multiple layers of clothes, then lit candles about the front room and kitchen. While Donna  brought Jane into the front room and dressed her, I started a fire in our wood burning stove and began warming a pot of water for coffee. At times like these we are extremely thankful that we had the foresight and took the expense of buy the stove and maintaining a supply of cut and split fire wood!
Once the living room was warming up, we started the Toyota Corolla and let it run for a few minutes to warm the engine oil and block. We wanted to make sure that we had any means of escape, if it became too cold in the house and we were forced to abandon the premises until power was restored.

At 5:17 AM the electricity suddenly blinked back on. Needless to say, with the outdoor temperature still in the -27ºF range, we were happy to hear the furnace’s air circulation fan come on and blowing warm air through out the home, to see the electric lights and digital clocks all functioning again. As warm air began pouring out of the floor registers our world rapidly returned to normal.
We remained a little tired from our short night’s sleep, but knowing we’d come through a potentially dangerous situation gave us cheer.

Music [album: Battlestar Galactica – Season 3, Mandala in the Clouds]

The Hero’s of Challenger
Around 11:20 AM on January 28, Donna telephoned home from work with terrible news. Her voice was cracking with stress as she solemnly told me, “The shuttle exploded just after takeoff.”.
A few moments later I turned on the television and found CBS anchorman, Dan Rather, explaining what had happened… For the rest of that day and the next several day,s we were filled with a sense of loss and sadness. Not only had we lost one of our space shuttles and her crew, but we lost someone who we’d all come to view, as a friend.

[Internet  image: January 28, 1986. The space shuttle   Challenger exploding  at ten miles   altitude, shortly after lifting off from Kennedy Space Center.]

During the summer of 1985, NASA searched the nation’s school system for a talented teacher who would exemplify the character of a professional astronaut, a pleasant and charismatic person with a friendly continence. From some 10,000 applicants, NASA chose one such person.
Last Fall we were first introduced to the teacher via television: Her name was Christa McAuliffe, a beautiful, thirty-seven year old high school Social Studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire. Through the winter the media kept we Americans up to date on Christa’s progress while providing taped footage of her astronaut training.
We watched with anxious approval as ‘one of us’ was fitted with her space suit and as she went through the various aspects of astronaut training.
Christa was always cheerful and happy, like one of us, she felt blessed by having been chosen to travel into Earth’s orbit aboard the space shuttle. As the months passed, through the national TV news media, we met Christa’s husband, Steve, her two children, even her Mom and Dad. The TV networks took us on a guided tour of Concord, Christa’s home town,we saw where she lived, worked and shopped, and even talked with her friends.

Christa prepared lesson plans and was to give  series of ‘Classes From Space’. TV networks were scheduled to air these, ‘the first school classes given by a teacher in space for children on Earth.’ It was a plan that was guaranteed to have large audience participation from schools and homes across the country.

At one minute twelve seconds after launch: Challenger had accelerated to 2,000 mph and was ten miles in altitude. In her main fuel tank was a half million gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
Mission pilot Michael Smith had just said the words, ‘Roger. Go at throttle up…’ when we saw in seeming slow motion and at high telescopic magnification, a yellow glow on the right side of the right solid fuel tank…which quickly exploded. A second later, as our jaws dropped open in horror, a much more devastating explosion occurred engulfing the entire ship in a rolling ball of fire. The maelstrom of fire continued to expand upward and outward, while particles of indeterminate size were seen blown out of the fireball. One solid fuel booster then  the other flew up out of the fire and smoke, continuing their death flight in separate wide arcs. Then  as the shuttle debris began falling, we saw smoke trails from a cloud particulate black rain,  as everything dropped from the sky toward the ocean.

At the White House, Mrs. Nancy Reagan was watching live television coverage of the lift off; when she saw the fireball, she exclaimed, ‘Oh my God. No!!’

Moments earlier, we’d seen what had been a happy, cheering party atmosphere in Christa McAuliffe Social Studies class at Concord. The scene quickly turned into a time of confusion, denial and horror. Immediately after the explosion, we saw students with their brows wrinkled and near tears; here and there, hand’s covered stunned face’s and mouth’s; some children looked at the camera, their face drained, wishing to escape from the formality of the television crew taping their class.

Everyone had the same exuberant happiness and excitement for Christa.
It was crushing to see our astronaut hero’s all die before our eyes.  This was a sad day, for me personally, for our family, and the United States.[1]

Our ‘Traditional’ English dinners
I always thought it was nice to have ‘traditional’ family dinners on  occasion when visiting friends and neighbors.
Donna’s and my family had no traditional meals to draw upon. The problem was that my much of the paternal side of my family had been on this continent so long, since the 1620 Mayflower and settling of Nantucket Island that we’d simply lost the idea of a traditional meal – all of our meals were simply – American. Donna’s family adopted American foods when they came to this country in the 1800s, so no traditional German or French foods came down through her line either.

During the winter we borrowed several English and New England cookbooks from the public library; I read one while Donna read several. After reading, Donna selected a variety of dishes traditional English dishes and began cooking special dinners for our Sunday afternoon meal.
English dinners are an excellent fare in cold weather, but were too heavy for our hot, humid summers.
The New England dinners we selected were quite heavy as well, but ohh, sooo, very tasty!
On occasion we’ve drooled over and eaten heartily of Donna’s sumptuous meals of:
1) Roast beef with horseradish sauce,  Yorkshire Pudding, and roast potatoes;
2) Pot pie, glazed turnips and Treacle Sponge Pudding;
3) North Shore Smothered Ham, Aunt Mary’s Brown Bread, Boston Baked Beans and white wine (recipes from New England). Note: England lies on a latitudes similar to mid Canada, but experiences milder winters.
We purchased three English cookbooks and one New England cookbook for our home reference library.

Books read during the year
During the year, I read books on various topics, mostly whatever was either important in our lives at the time or of general topical interest to myself, including:
British   Cookery © 1985 by Jane Grigson – A British cookbook with a historical look   at most of the food items discussed.
The New   Diary  © 1978 by Tristine Rainer – How to use a   journal for self guidance and expanded creativity. 323 pages.
A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries © 1984 Thomas Mallon – A history and study of diary forms, in their authors own words. 318 pages.
Shogun ©  1975 by James Clavell, publ. by Dell Publishing

Three types of supermarket
Of the three types of supermarket we encountered in St. Cloud, all shared several similar characteristics: the floors were apparently washed and polished on a daily basis, everything was clean, and there was good bright incandescent (neon tube) illumination. The buildings were all large  measuring a couple hundred feet or more on a side, with concrete floors that were covered with heavy duty linoleum or tile. Shelves were always kept well stocked with whatever products were carried. Store employees, whether they were stocking shelves, taking inventory or the cashiers, were all courteous, helpful, friendly and busy. Each store carried a large variety of food products and a plethora of other small household items, ie; toilet paper, Kleenex, paper towels, cat and dog food, soaps and laundry detergents, pot and pan abrasive powders, scratcher pads, polishes, paper plates, stain removers, shoe polish, some had greeting cards, a small selection of stationary, a few inexpensive paperback books, various non prescription pharmaceutical supplies. In the standard and upscale type super market, the sundries might occupy five percent of the floor space, in the ware house market they occupy perhaps one to two percent of the floor space.

The standard supermarket
The standard supermarket, which I think came into existence during my childhood (ca early 1940s), is a large one floor grocery store carrying a huge variety of brand name and ‘house’ label foods all in various size containers.
Coburn’s Grocery, was St. Cloud’s standard type of supermarket. It carried a large supply of quality fresh fruits and vegetables, but not always a wide variety of either. The standard supermarket maintained a large well stocked meat department. The cans, boxes and packages of food or sundry household products had all been taken from their shipping boxes and stacked neatly on display shelves that generally were not higher than an adult could reach. Occasionally after shopping at Coburn’s, we had to visit another market to pick up a few specialty food items.

The warehouse market
A supermarket type that developed since the 1970s is what we referred to as a “warehouse” market.
St. Cloud had two such grocers, one was aptly named, Warehouse Market, the other was, Red Owl.
In a warehouse type market, cans and packages are found still in their shipping containers.
Often, the store’s interior decor reminded me of an industrial setting. Employees might be seen using hand-operated forklifts to raise or lower pallets of unopened shipping boxes from overhead pallet racks.
Shopping carts were sometimes larger and more heavy-duty than the ones used in more conventional grocery stores, even low boy pull carts with flat beds were in use.

Warehouse markets seemed to specialize in bulk items, offering a smaller variety of products, in fewer size containers.  They carried fewer and lower quality fresh vegetables and meats. Many foods were ‘off brands’ or ‘house labels’ that supposedly tasted the same as the national “brand name” which they emulated.
We found that there was often a difference in either the taste or shape of the product inside the package, that made the house brand inferior to the national brand name. We found that the slightly more expensive brand name food item was always a better tasting product, that observation was never violated.

One practice the warehouse markets encouraged, and which I didn’t care for, was in offering bulk soda pop, bulk cookies and bulk candy. Customers buying these items received a small price break on the soda pop – when they brought their own empty and presumably washed, plastic quart soda pop containers back to the store and refilled them with any one or more of a variety of perhaps twenty premixed flavors.
Small candies and various cookies were sold by the pound and were scooped out of their individual bulk bins into thin plastic bags, by the customer.

About the only thing of value that I could see in this type of marketing was that individual items were priced a little cheaper. Of course you have to remember the adage, ‘You get what you pay for’.
We shopped at the warehouse markets a few times during their first couple years in town, but only while they were still a novelty to us. After shopping at a warehouse market, we always had to go to a standard grocer to pick up the items or packaging sizes that had been unavailable.
The little money we saved didn’t justify the taste difference, the inconvenience, or time wasted having to finish our weekly shopping elsewhere. Before long we quit shopping at this type of store, but noticed over the years, that their parking lots seemed busy, so they must have continued to thrive.

The upscale supermarket
Byerly’s, was St. Cloud’s only ‘upscale’ supermarket. The grocer seemed to have a slight international and cosmopolitan air to it, while carrying foods that the other grocers didn’t. Although most of the product brands and container sizes found in Byerly’s were exactly the same as found in the standard supermarket, there were differences. Unlike her competitors, Byerly’s carried live lobster and other fresh sea foods; vegetables not readily found locally, i.e. artichoke and egg-plant; many fresh herbs and exotic fresh foreign vegetables; fruits not in season i.e. strawberries, various melons, mango’s; fresh bakery goods from the stores own in house bakery.

Prices at Byerly’s were comparable with those at the standard (Coburn’s) supermarket. Generally speaking, the people seen shopping at the upscale grocer were better dressed, generally thinner, more handsome, have pleasanter faces, look more alert and cough less (generally healthier) during the winter.

‘Remember the Alamo!’
One hundred fifty years ago, on March 6, 1836, the American defenders of the Alamo died at San Antonio, Texas.
After a twelve day siege, one hundred eighty-eight freedom fighters who held the Alamo were overrun and killed to the man by four thousand troops under the Mexican General, Antonio de Santa Anna. Among our fallen heroes were colonel’s William Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett.

We should remember, American cultural difference with the Mexican’s in Texas could not be bridged in the 1830s these differences remain in the late Twentieth century. We Anglos, are giving up southern California and other property all along the US – Mexican border. Mexican Americans are taking the land back in a way that is completely legal, they know it, we know it: “One house at a time, one business at a time and one neighborhood at a time.”
In the decades to come, I think we will legislate ourselves right out of the southwestern USA. The direction this is taking, reminds me of Chief Seattle’s famous speech of 1854, “… I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my pale-face brothers for hastening it, for we, too, may have been somewhat to blame….”
You can read Chief Seattle’s entire somber and heart rendering speech at the following website (and elsewhere):
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=1427

Pepin is born
On March 8, Griz and Jessie (dogs) had their first of two litters of pups. We decided to keep the first-born of their first litter for ourselves, and sell the rest.
After we found a home for all his siblings, we gave our new pup the name, Pepin. [2]  From the beginning, it was apparent that  Pepin was going to grow into a big dog and just as we thought, he did; becoming much larger than larger than either of his parents. His sheer size and head shape pointed to the St. Bernard in Griz’s genealogy. Pepin’s adult fur coat was primarily of long white fur. He had the most interesting little round black spots all over his coat and a black mask across his face and ears, otherwise he was just a Big, long-haired, shaggy white dog.

The 1986 return of Halley’s Comet [3]
During late 1985, as Halley’s Comet approached from the outer reaches of the  solar system approaching the sun, it became visible just after sunset; however, because of the extreme cold winter weather, we didn’t go outside to stand around and look for it.

From the television news, we learned Halley’s Comet measured approximately eleven miles long and three miles in diameter, its long axis was along and pointed in the direction of travel. It was composed of a mixture of ice, frozen gasses, rocks and dust; the whole mass was moving along its orbit at speeds between 20,000 and 118,000 miles per hour.

As the comet drew closer to the Sun, the news media and specialty advertisers brought the importance of it’s “once in a life time” passage to the public mind. Over a several month period, the comet’s publicity increased interest in astronomy. The many beneficiaries of Halley’s Comets’ passing were the retail outlets who hawked binoculars, small telescopes, comet photographs, astronomy magazine subscriptions, Comet T-shirts, jacket patches, medallions, books, etc.
Unlike its previous passages near the Earth, this time no one was frightened, instead, ‘Halley’s Comet-1986’ was an interesting curiosity – and a commercial success at best.

[Photocopy: Journal 11: High Plains Drifter, drawing of Donna and me observing Halley’s Comet from the County road.]

By March 1986,  the comet reached  perihelion and was moving away from the Sun approaching Earth’s orbital radius. On March 15th and 16th, between 5:00 AM and 5:20 AM, Donna and I walked down our driveway, then a short way south along County Road #14, to a point where we had a clear view across the low land toward the southeast. We wished Jane would have been older than her two years three months, so she could have enjoyed the vague sight with us, never-the-less knowing she wouldn’t understand what we were looking for through the binoculars, we left her at home asleep.

Donna and I scanned above the southeastern horizon, but were unable to find the comet with our naked eyes. Then, using our 8mm x 40mm power binoculars we located its faint diaphanous glow above the distant, darkly silhouetted trees. The weather cooperated with our short viewing sessions by remaining clear and starry, but with chilly 22ºF to 27ºF temperatures.

It seemed to us, that with all the news coverage given the event, there wasn’t much to see, the performance did not match the advertising. Even with the binoculars, Halley’s Comet was not easy to locate, nor did it reveal much detail to us amateurs.
The comet was seen having a tail that appeared to be about three times as long as its greatest width. The tail extended in a direction opposite to the sun and had a slightly conical appearance. The entire apparition appeared as a very thin, light bluish-white glow and did not have truly definable boundaries. Because of its distance, there was no noticeable movement to the comet in the few minutes that we were observing, it just seemed to hang still in the predawn sky.

Clothes washing, 1980s style
Every two or three days, after Donna and Jane had awakened, I began washing a load of clothes. I might point out that for the most part, our clothes are washed to remove the smell of body odor, only my work clothes, some of Jane’s school clothes and our socks ever really get ‘dirty’.
Compared to the onerous duty ‘laundry day’ was prior to the advent of the automatic washer and dryer, in the recent decades washday chores have become an easy and almost non existent task.

Soon after buying our mobile home in April 1977, we purchased a Montgomery Ward Heavy Duty 18 wash machine and clothes dryer set.
The wash machine handles clothing loads up to eighteen pounds; it has a water volume selector, a water temperature selector and a washing timer that either can turn the internal agitator at regular speed or at  reduced speed for the more delicate fabrics (curtains, anything with lace, rubber backed throw rugs). We never weigh the clothes, figuring that eighteen pounds on the ‘fill’ setting means ‘full’, nine pounds means ‘half full’, etc.

The clothes washing technique I used: 1) Pour into the empty machine a measured quantity of either powdered or liquid laundry detergent, whatever we’re using at the time, i.e. Tide, Purex; 2)  turn the load volume selector dial to provide the quantity of water needed for the size of a load to be washed; 3) while the water is filling the machine, I rummage through the hamper separating the white and colored clothes, or occasionally toss all colors into the machine together; 4) when the clothes are loaded and the machine has about filled with the proper amount of water, I close the hinged lid; 5) twist the Timer selector to wash the load, usually for twelve minutes; 6) Press the Start button and walk away.

The wash machine’s agitator quietly twists clockwise and counter-clockwise stirring the clothes around and about for the chosen twelve minutes cycle, then the machine empties the water and spins the clothes semi dry. It then automatically refills the machine to the previously selected volume and goes through a several minute’ rinse cycle’. At the end of the rinse cycle, the water it again automatically pumped out and the clean clothes are spun semi dry. It takes about a half hour from start to finish for the machine to wash a load of clothes.

After about forty-five minutes to an hour, I lift the damp clothes out of the wash machine and toss them unceremoniously into the front loading clothes dryer. Once the dryer’s door is shut, I set its timer at thirty minutes and press the Start button.
A full load of wash usually requires two or three thirty minute dry cycles to dry and fluff the load. Although the timer can be set for periods up to two hours, we prefer to check conditions after thirty minutes, feeling that the dryer’s electric heating/drying elements represent a fire hazard. On occasion, clothes that have been over “dried” become so hot they almost burn your hands when they are initially touched.

It takes between ten and twenty minutes labor to sort, wash, dry, fold and put away one batch of laundry. Bulky items like towels, pants and shirts are folded and put away faster than smaller items, like socks, underwear, etc. It does not take over an hour per week to wash and put away the entire households laundry.
When I was a child, in the late 1940s, it took perhaps two hours on a Saturday morning to wash and hang the clothes on the clothes line to dry, and another hour or more of ironing before the garment and other items were put away.
Maintaining clean and fresh clothing has become a minimal inconvenience since the mid 1960s.

The curio cabinet
Using our Federal and State income tax refund [4] this spring, we bought a traditionally designed curio cabinet made of dark Fruitwood. The cabinet, measuring a little over six-foot high, two and a half feet wide and a foot deep, has two sets of glass doors covering an upper compartment with three shelves and a lower compartment with two shelves.

Over the years we filled the top shelf with small family heirlooms: Donna father, Don’s baby dish, a Knowles serving bowl that my parents used when I was a child, a ruler from the Hagameier store, several photographs, Bibles, my Grandmother Alma Shafer’s mechanical pencil, my old journal writing pen, etc.

[Photo at right: Our curio cabinet, shelves filled with the items mentioned in the associated text.]

The top middle shelf displayed our set of antique silver plated tableware including: an ornately carved teapot, creamer, sugar bowl with lid, syrup pitcher with separate plate, butter dish with elevated final for hanging the lid, butter knife. We bought the set piecemeal from several antique shops ca. 1977 and had the individual items professionally resilvered, the butter dish was restored prior to resilvering. The set dated from about 1901.

The third shelf contained a portion of our Anasazi Indian artifacts: An eight hundred year old bowl that Donna found; several stone ax heads, including one from my Grandfather Pearl Shafer’s farm; several stone arrow points, stone spear points, stone knives and scrapers; and a variety of pot chards; a handmade antique trading post doll and an old cast iron figural Indian bank.

The top shelf in the bottom cabinet became home to a variety of personal and heirloom glassware, including, a Carnival glass candy bowl from Donna’s mother, Eulah, a cut glass candy bowl, etc.

The bottom shelf  housed several antique wooden boxes and antique tins which contain: various small family heirlooms, mid to late Twentieth century political pin backs, and other small collectables.

Beside it being a handsome piece of furniture, the curio cabinet displayed, for our daily enjoyment, many of the small items which have special meaning and personal interest to us. Every few weeks I enjoyed looking through the boxes and tins on the bottom shelf, exploring and rekindling pleasant memories over the providence of many of the items stored therein.

Meltdown at Chernobyl , USSR
On April 26, an explosion and fire occur at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, which eventually spreads over a large area contamination thousands and thousands of people. The accident was kept secret  by the Soviets, from the international community, until April 30th, when radioactivity spreads across Soviet boarders. The environmental damage done by Chernobyl could be thought of picking up, where Three Mile Island, left off in the degree of environment contamination [5].

We sold the electric generator
On August 8, we sold our emergency electric generator for $950 and used the money to pay off the balance of the Ford Granada’s installment loan. No sooner was the loan paid, when the car promptly developed mechanical problems.
I converted the small generator shed into a second dog house for our female Black Labrador/German Shepherd cross, Jessie.

A weekend in St. Paul, May 15-16
The family planned to take a holiday and go to the Twin Cities for Saturday and Sunday, May 17 &18. Our schedule of events was to leave early Saturday morning, drive to ST Paul and see the Science Museum, spend the night in a motel, then Sunday morning visit the Minnesota Zoological Gardens and return home in the late afternoon.

Being unemployed, I prepared for the trip by bringing in our Styrofoam cooler, filling the extra ice cube trays and a five quart container with water for freezing; brought the suitcases out of the closet,;  filled the Ford with gas, washed the car and cleaned the windows.
Friday evening, Donna brought home a pizza for our supper allowing extra time for our suitcase packing.

Saturday, May 15th
Saturday morning, the family awoke at our regular time of 4:30AM, did the last-minute packing and make sandwiches for our lunch. I fed the dogs two consecutive meals and set a feed tray in the garage for them to nibble on until Sunday evening. Lastly, the ducks and geese were given a double ration of corn. We knew the ducks and geese would be alright, since they routinely worked the upper and lower yard for bugs and frogs.

We left home at 6:30AM Saturday morning, everyone excited about our two days of discovery. It wasn’t often that we went on a ‘road trip,’ so we were looking forward to the novelty. We brought a large well packed suitcase and a cooler, which was filled with ice, soda pop, sandwiches, apples and a liter of white wine.

By 7:35AM we’d driven 52 miles and arrived at Rodgers, Minnesota; about half way between home and St Paul. We hadn’t eaten breakfast yet so stopped at the Country Kitchen restaurant. It had been fourteen months since we last ate here; we were about to find that the food quality and service had seriously deteriorated.

The window shades at our table hadn’t been opened yet thus leaving the table dark. I asked the waitress to open the shades whereupon she went into a dither and finally said, “I can’t, they’re broken!”, but when prompted to, she went ahead and gave the ‘broken shades’ a try, and to ‘all of our surprise’, found they opened normally.  8-)

When the waitress filled Donna’s cup with coffee, I asked her to only fill mine half way (I drink coffee slow and a full cup always gets cold while sitting), the girl nodded then filled the cup 90% of the way.

As I tried to pour some back into the pot, a little trickled onto the table. I used my napkin to sop up the spilled coffee. When the waitress returned, Donna asked for two more napkins, we had to ask her two more times before they were delivered.

Restaurants like Country Kitchen, Sambos, Perkins, etc, don’t cook excellent meals, the food is usually tolerable, a little bland, with a tendency to be greasy and with little consistency (the vegetables aren’t ever really fresh and crisp, the meat seems to have been processed with some kind of a filler, i.e., oatmeal). These shortcomings are not mentioned to be negative, because it is nice to go out to breakfast, or supper, and these restaurants are frequently found near common public destinations. Face it, when you go out to breakfast its for a change of habit and to socialize, not for the food quality.

Our breakfast meal consisted of:
•  Donna had 2 pancakes, 2 eggs-over light, 2 pieces bacon, 2 sausage links. $2.99
•  Jane: 1 pancake. 55¢ (plus tidbits off Donna’s my plate)
•  Larry: 2 pieces toast with jelly, 2 eggs-over light, 2 sausage patties, hash brown potatoes. $3.45

I’m far from being a connoisseur of fine foods, but there is a low-level of taste quality that when encountered, makes one sit back and look questionably their plate with a worriedly frown.
The ‘worried frown’ condition is reached when you find that the texture and taste of a particular food item doesn’t fall within what your memory says are the taste limits for that food.
When you’re hungry, but need to stop eating and dwell on whether or not to finish chewing and swallow a mouthfull of food that tastes odd, you’ve reached that point.
This is what happened to me when I began chewing a bite of my sausage patty. Then, not wishing to be overtly fussy with the waitress, after the hassle over the shade, coffee and napkins, I asked Donna to taste the sausage. She agreed. The texture was poor, as if the meat had been ground too fine and the spice mixture used in preparation was lousy.

Then, I found my hash brown were very poorly prepared. It was as though the premade serving had been only partially defrosted in a microwave, then put on a hot griddle, but just long enough to brown the exterior and finish melting the interior ice crystals, but not long enough to cook the interior.

Donna and I looked around the restaurant and noticed that the restaurant had stopped using the customary disposable paper placemats, dishes were now being set directly on the table.
It seemed par for the course that the salt shaker on our table was greasy with a pea size glob of food dried on one side…

Before leaving the restaurant, we’d already decided never to eat at this particular Country Kitchen again.
A couple of years later, while driving through Rodgers, we noticed that the restaurant had gone out of business. Another restaurant opened in the same building, but it too failed. In the fullness of time, as the city of Rodgers grew, the structure was bulldozed. Amen.

We arrive in St. Paul at 9:30. We located the Science Museum on 10^th Street, just several blocks off the 35E Freeway and parked in their underground parking facility.

When the museum opened, at 10:00, we browsed through the Gift Shop, then saw the Technology applications demonstration.
At 10:30, when the Omnimax theater office opened, we bought tickets for the movie presentation, then stood in queue until the theater opened. It was a good thing we bought our tickets when we did, because it didn’t take long for a large queue of movie patrons to develop that extended  a city block in length.
At 11AM the theater doors opened and we filed in. Wanting the best viewing experience possible, Donna, Jane and I took seats in the center of the theater.
[Internet image at right is of Imax theater seating, which is the same as the Science Museums; however, the screen seen here does not curve around to the sides as it did in the Omni theater.]

This was our first visit to a theater using the large Imax film format on an impressively large screen. Unlike the customary movie theaters, where the seating rows are on a slight incline, which gradually rise from front to rear, the Omnimax format required each row of seats to rise about a foot, from the one in front. This resulted in two very steep stairways, which divided the theater into thirds. The seats were tilted back slightly to provide a comfortable view of the enormous 7300 square foot screen, which extended spherically to the sides, far beyond ones peripheral vision.

Here I quote from the museums brochure describing the Omnimax experience: “The world’s largest film projector, the Omnimax with ‘take up reels’ four feet in diameter, uses a single fish eye lens to project 70mm film onto the tilted dome. To ensure sound as brilliant as the picture, the theater uses a sophisticated six track audio system capable of producing 5,000 watts of power…”

The film we saw was entitled, The Dream is Alive. The combined effects of a huge, wrap around screen, the resolution of the 70mm film and tremendous acoustics, all combined to provide an incredible experience.

During the film, we spectators were taken into Earth’s orbit aboard three 1984 Space Shuttle missions.
When the Space Shuttle took off, the theater seats and our very bodies shook from the near deafening sound and low-frequency vibrations. Meanwhile, our entire field of vision was filled with the enormous space craft, rocket ignition, the gantry falling away,   searing flame, billowing smoke, and then the Shuttle rising, the Earth falling away behind us…
A few minutes later, while beautiful, ethereal music filled out ears, we visually drifted through space looking down on the Earth from a 200 miles high orbit…we floated down the Italian peninsula in a matter of minutes.

Then back at Cape Canaveral: In another sequence, while observing astronaut training, we were taken on an escape pod, which slid down an inclined cable from the Space Shuttle to a distant emergency capture net. Talk about the visual reality! As we spectators sailed down the cable in an escape pod, I found myself pushing deeper into the theater seat, twisting my head from side to side, tightly clenching the armrest and trying to escape. It was impressive, it was thrilling! There are, without a doubt, fingerprints pressed into the steel armrests throughout the theater. Whew!

By the time the film was over it was lunch time.
We took the elevator down to the parking level, found our car, popped open the cooler and set up a picnic lunch in the front seat. Our tasty meal consisted of both bologna and cheese sandwiches, each with various spreads and salad vegetables, also Frito chips and canned Diet Pepsi.

After lunch we returned to the Museum exhibits to see the, ‘Walk Through Time’ exibit and Dinosaur laboratory. Lastly, we  returned to the Gift shop and bought Jane a dozen hard rubber dinosaurs.

We left the museum at 1:30PM, realizing we’d have to come back to see the rest of the exhibits. Parking for a half day cost $3.00.
We drove out-of-town several miles on the I-94 freeway to the Holiday Inn-St Paul East.
We took occupancy of room #825 on the top floor, the room had two double beds and rented for $56 per night, including tax.

Our room had crème colored walls, a white stucco textured ceiling and mauve wall to wall carpeting. There was a contemporary floral painting print hanging above the head-board on each bed, and a small desk with chair. At the other side of the room a 19 inch color television sat on a chest of drawers facing the beds.
[Photograph at right: Holiday Inn East, St Paul, Room 825. During our visit to the Twin  Cities. Jane with toys laid out on the bed looks on.]

The rooms pecan colored furniture had what is called, ‘radiused edges’ (rounded). The dresser pulls were brass plated to make the furniture look more expensive and older in style. The desk lamp and wall lamps were brass plated.

The bathroom had a long sink, large wall mirror, toilet and bathtub-shower combination. Next to the toilet were two wall mounted dispensers each carrying a roll of toilet paper.
My first impression was that the hotel wanted to make sure ‘users’ didn’t run out of paper in the middle of a ‘job’, however, when I had need to use the paper I found that one roll was of coarse and other, soft tissue. That left me wondering if the hotel was offering ‘two texture choices’ to pamper guests, or if it was just a coincidence. Why would anyone use coarse toilet paper on a soft bummy? The hotel provided wash cloths and towels, however, they were made from thin, inexpensive cloth and didn’t have the name of the hotel imprinted; probably in an attempt to reduce patron theft.

After carrying our suitcases and snack food up to the room, we washed up and decided to drive around to look for a restaurant for supper. We’d already checked the hotel’s dining room and found the price of convenience was exorbitant.

Saturday mid afternoon, we drove through downtown St. Paul and saw an odd sight: Great buildings, that during week days held thousands of well dressed professional employees, were deserted. The sidewalks so busy during business hours were now essentially vacant, except for a few wandering derelicts.
The people loitering and shuffling about downtown were grossly overweight, of mixed race and poorly dressed.
And, what an interesting mix of architecture we saw, tall multi story modern buildings mixed with the shorter, older style buildings which had patina coated copper roofs and gutters.
[Metropolitan St Paul, photograph at left was taken from a ridge near Harriet Island (?) during a weekend family outing to the Twin Cities .]

Continuing our explorations, we drove up a hill six to eight blocks northeast of the State Capitol building and came upon a neighborhood that had long ago seen better days. Up behind the capitol lived a mix of poor mixed race peoples from all over the world. The community had few poor white children, but those we did see were fat. Motorcycles were parked here and there on small unkempt lawns, or what use to be lawns, automobiles were seen to be badly rusted, the older houses were not kept neat, many needed paint. Although we were on a hill, high enough to take a panoramic photograph out over the city, we thought it unwise to stop and get out of the car in that area.
Being rather well dressed, carrying an expensive camera and driving a used but nicer car (for that area) discouraged us from exposing ourselves to any unnecessary confrontations with people who might have thought we were taking photographs of their homes and unenviable living conditions.

A short while later, while driving down a main highway some four miles east of the St Paul downtown area, we found the ‘Ol Mexico’ restaurant. A Mexican meal sounded good to everyone so we stopped.

Seated at our table we chatted about our day while sipping Margaritas and eating tortilla chips dipped in salsa. Our meals consisted of:
•  Donna had 2 flautas, rice & beans with sour cream and guacamole topping.
•  I had a taco, enchilada, rice & beans with shredded salad topping (lettuce and tomato).
•  Jane had a plate with bits from Donnas and my plate.

We finished our tasty and thoroughly filling meal around 5PM and drove back to our hotel.

By the time we reached our room, we were all tired from a long busy day. The family washed up, put on our pajamas and sat back on our beds to watch television. The hotel provided HBO (Home Box Office), which was a cable subscription service that showed recent movie releases. The service was part of our rental fee so we started our evening watching the movie, Sweet Sixteen.
At 7:00 PM we watched a second movie, The Ambassador, starring Robert Mitchum and Rock Hudson. This was Rock Hudson’s last movie prior to his dying from AIDS. The movie was about mid-east terrorism, a decent movie up to the end which turned unnecessarily gruesome and bloody.

At 9:00PM we watched the National news. Jane fell asleep. Donna and I went to sleep around 9:30, after quietly practicing ‘the ancient arts’.   :-)
It was a good day!

Sunday, May 16th
The family awoke at 5:30AM. Jane promptly scooted off her bed and crawled into bed with Donna and me for some good morning kisses. We discussed the highlights of what we’d done the previous day and what we might find at the Minnesota Zoological Gardens that morning.

At 6:30 we got up and busy about our room. I disappeared into the bathroom to shave, while the girls put on their swimming suits. While I dressed, Donna and Jane went down to the hotel’s indoor swimming pool; I followed a few minutes later, bringing our 35mm Minolta camera.
Upon entering the enclosed pool room, I was  immediately hit by the strong odor of the pool’s chlorine disinfectant. The chemical dosage was so high that the girls were attempting to keep from getting their faces wet because the chlorine stung their eyes. The girls were making the best of their time in the pool; Donna was backing around in the shallow end, holding Janes hands. Jane held on, laughing and kicking, learning her first swimming movements.
Meanwhile, I browsed around in an adjoining combination, gym-exercise room and rode on an exercise bicycle for a few minutes. The ‘Dynamic Duo’ spent about twenty-five minutes in the pool before we all returned to our room.
The girls showered while I sat looking out our eighth floor window; watching the morning’s business activity in the street below.

To our immediate north, just beyond the hotel parking lot, is the I-94 freeway. Across the freeway to the northeast, are the 3M Corporate Offices, their Research and Production facilities, all being spread over an area of about acres. Beyond  3M is part of St. Paul’s residential suburbs, mostly hidden from view by stands of trees.

It didn’t take long for the girls to dress and pack our suitcases; by 7:30AM, we were feeling hunger pangs and discussing breakfast. Donna phoned the hotel restaurant and found they were charging a dollar per cup of coffee! (gasp) Donna drove a couple blocks to a local MacDonald’s fast food restaurant and bought two cups of coffee for a total of 64¢.

We left our room at 8:30AM and checked out of the hotel.

Since the Minnesota Zoological Gardens didn’t open until 10AM, we had a lot of time for breakfast and the commute. We stopped at a Mr. Donut shop for donuts and coffee. Donna wanted something more, so we drove across the street to McDonalds where she bought a Sausage McMuffin with Egg.

In Burnsville, as we neared the zoo, we took a brief sidetrip detoured to sight see a new housing development called Cinnamon Ridge. We hadn’t been in a new residential development for a long time and were curious to see current housing styles and trends.

As we drove up and down the streets in Cinnamon Ridge, we saw that some of the detached houses looked nice, but the yards were small and the houses looked rather cramped and close together.
Part of this new, densely populated community was composed of apartment complexes. The apartments consisted of dozens and dozens of 8-plex apartments which were clustered together, frankly it looked dehumanizing.

We arrived at the Minnesota Zoological Gardens at 10:30.
Our explorations began in the Gift Shop, conveniently located near the entrance ticket booth. Next we watched some thirty monkeys going about their daily business in an outdoor enclosure.
We bought buy tickets for the Sky Rail ride. The Sky Rail was an elevated monorail conveyor-train comprise of  eight totally enclosed cars, each car had four separate two person seats, large side windows, and an intercar loud speaker.  The one and a quarter-mile ride cost a reasonable $2 per adult, lasted almost a half hour and carried up to sixty-four passengers, around the five hundred acre zoo at tree top-level.

During the ride we saw a variety of zoo environments and exhibits, including: the bison, elk, Bactrian Camel, Musk Ox, moose, Siberian Tiger, prairie dogs, the zoo’s large natural Minnesota forest area with its wild squirrels, native birds, swamps and natural ponds.
As the monorail moved between exhibits, our Naturalist guide-monorail operator discussed each environment, the animals that lived there, and pointed out special recent incidents in any of the environments. The monorail ride provided a visually interesting and informative tour of the park, it was a fun experience that made us appreciate the zoo.

When the monorail cars returned to the Sky Rail station, we walked to a near by area where attendants were giving children rides on a young elephant. At first, Jane was afraid to sit on the elephant, however, considering that she was only two and half years old, who wouldn’t be?! During the ride, Jane assessed the situation and realized it was both safe and fun. A while later, after being helped down from the elephants back, she stood on the elevated boarding deck reaching out to pet  the elephant whilst happily exclaiming, ‘Big…Big”.

Jane’s enthusiasm directed us to the Children’s Petting Zoo, for a close up look at a horse, goat, some sheep, llama, geese, etc. Remember, during the previous summer (1985) we took Jane to the Benton County Fair for her first, second and third, ‘horsey’ ride, she never forgot the experience and was eager to see and pet a horse at the zoo.

Around noon we finished visiting the Petting Zoo and realized it was lunch time. We walked  to the Zoo’s large cafeteria and bought a meal of hamburgers, French fries and Pepsi. By this time our legs were starting to feel tired from the unaccustomed walking so the break was welcomed.

Early afternoon was spent walking the Tropics Trail  and the Minnesota Trail in the zoo’s enormous main exhibit building.

The tall glass-topped building was filled with tropical vegetation and various larger animal species, each set in a habitat resembling their natural home. Visitors entered the exhibit from the second floor of the exhibit building and wound their way around and down, along an eight foot wide asphalt trail. The trail had a placard at each ‘view’ with a photograph and  discussion the each animal species. The wildlife was cleverly confined by use of water motes, concrete walls, Plexiglas or net, all unconstructive and built into the design of the habitat. The exhibits along the main trail were well illuminated from sunlight entering through the entire roof.
In order to increase the floor space, the ground had been dug out in the shape of a huge bowl and the ‘visitor’s trail’ wound around and down, zig zag style, between exhibits. At the lowest point of the trail was a large pond with a central island. Ducks and Flamingoes swam or stood in the water. Gibbons swung from branches of several tall realistic looking concrete (?) and dead trees on the island. As we worked our way back up the other side of the bowl, for about a hundred and fifty feet, the  trail wound through a darkened ‘cavern’ where nocturnal creatures  (several types of snake, leopards) were displayed un der dim red lighting within their naturalistic environments. There was also a large windowed aquarium view of the dolphin tank, then back up, across concrete ‘foot bridges’ amongst a cliff-like area where mountain goats lived, then up and out of the bowl and into the exhibit buildings 2nd story.

I was happy to see that the animals had freedom to walk about in a jungle like setting that was not only a lot larger than the steel cage zoos of my childhood, but that there was considerably more variety in their environment.

During my childhood in the 1940s, zoo exhibits consisted of concrete rooms with bars up front for visitors to look through, and steel service doors in the rear. Inside these cages, you typically saw one or two larger animals laying on a bed of straw, usually motionless, expressionless and ‘spiritually’ lifeless in their extreme and unending boredom. If one of these captives was seen moving, it was pacing back and forth, back and forth in its small area of confinement.
As a child, I felt the zoo was unnatural, cold and austere. I didn’t like visiting the zoo, it felt cold and unfriendly, the animals didn’t look happy, the poor creatures were kept in nothing more than concrete prison cells.

Recently built zoos are interesting and much more enjoyable to visit. The outdoor wild life exhibits provide one to five acres, maybe more, for each species to roam about on. Their terrain might include multiple environments, a mix of ponds, prairie, forest, hillside. The Minnesota Zoological Gardens had it all, the park was a pleasure to visit.

Jane particularly enjoyed the Bottlenose Dolphin exhibit. Donna held Jane up on several occasions so she could see over the crowd when the dolphins jumped out of the water.
I asked Jane how many Dolphins there were, she replied aloud by rapidly counting, ‘2-3-4-5-6-7-8’. All of the people around us turned and looked at Jane in surprise. You could almost read the confused expression on their faces, which translated into, ‘I didn’t know children that young could count!’  (At the time Jane was only 2 years 6 months old) Meanwhile, Jane continued laughing, completely beside herself with excitement as the dolphins threw a red ball to the audience, as they jumped up from the water, did ‘tail walks along the water surface, and splashed showers across front row visitors.

As we prepared to leave the zoo, we returned to the Gift Shop and bought Jane hard rubber figurines of a lion, antelope, zebra, penguin, seal and dolphin. Donna and I bought ourselves a molded composition sculpture of an American Bison ($20) and  a raging elephant ($35), both were about nine to ten inches long and seven to eight inches tall.
We left Minnesota Zoological Gardens at 3:00 PM and drove the eighty-two miles home in two hours.

All of our animal friends were happy to see us: Griz, Jessie and young Pepin barked and jumped with glee, the ducks and geese came shuffling up across the yard toward us, quacking and squawking.
We were home, back in the forest and so ended our delightful weekend trip.

This year’s events are continued in Part 2 of Chapter 1986, Age 43-44, Part 2 of 2.

Continued from: 1985, Age 42-43, Part 1 of 2)

A late season, major winter storm
The week following our cross-country vacation  brought absolutely beautiful Minnesota winter weather. The little snow that had been on the ground when we returned home had completely melted by the February 28, leaving us to experience early April-like temperatures.

While the long-term normal average daily high was 29°F and the average low, 8°F, we were enjoying temperatures that were 10°F  above normal, as seen in the table below:

.
Thursday, February 28
We heard a weather report discussing an atmospheric disturbance in the Rocky Mountains, the disturbance was turning into a winter storm, but neither its severity or track could be determined yet.

Friday, March 1,
It was another beautiful day. We’d completely forgotten about that chance of snow forecast for Saturday through Monday and went to bed Friday night under clear starry skies with the moon shining in our bedroom window.

Saturday, March 2
We awoke to cloudy skies and cooler temperatures than experienced over the previous few days.
Just before lunch, Donna and I walked down the driveway to collect our mail from the mail box beside the county road. When we came out of the woods and encountered a stiff wind, coupled with very chilly temperatures, we decided to check the latest weather forecast. During lunch we listened to the weather radio and found that previous forecast which had called for “…the possibility of snow…” had now been upgraded to, “…chance of significant accumulations from a rapidly developing, potentially severe winter storm.” It was thought the storm would track to our south, possibly through northern Illinois.

Sunday, March 3
I awakened at 2:30 AM to go to the bathroom and saw from the bathroom window that the ground was lightly dusted with snow. When I got up at 5:30 AM, the ground was covered with snow, there was blowing snow and a strong wind. Neither of us were particularly fond of snow, so we turned on the weather radio to hear the latest forecast.

To our dismay, the National weather Service office in St. Cloud was saying,

“…travel may well neigh become impossible…snow depths could easily reach a foot or more…there is the possibility of the development of towering drifts…”

Hearing the news and seeing the conditions outdoors, we snapped out of our morning stupor and immediately went into action: I made sure that we had a several day supply of firewood in the rear addition. Meanwhile, Donna started the electric generator to make sure it worked, then began trickle charging the batteries on our John Deere tractor– we wanted to make sure everything was in fully operational order.

At 6:30 AM there was an inch and a half inches snow on the ground.

Since I hadn’t recorded a snow storm for my journal and this was going to be a major snow storm, I decided to write a follow up in a notebook, then transfer the story into Journal 7: A Sideways Glance. As the day passed, I wrote up the temperatures and events leading to the present.

Donna and Jane read and played together then did some work about the house.

Meanwhile, outdoors, weather conditions deteriorated.

Strong winds, light snow and blowing snow continued throughout the day, leading to a rather modest three inches accumulation of fresh snow. By 3:00 PM the National Weather Service was reporting,

“..Winter storm warnings are in effect for this afternoon through Monday…in the St. Cloud area wind gusts have reached thirty five mph…Locally some areas will probably get twenty inches snow by Monday evening… This exceptional storm will continue to produce winds of twenty to forty mph with gusts over fifty mph through Monday. Traveling will be extremely difficult in south and central Minnesota as more snow becomes available to blow around. Most likely very little travel will be possible in central and southern parts of the state tonight and Monday as drifts get higher and blowing causes low visibility…

Before dusk, snow and blowing snow had reduced our visibility to about three hundred feet. The local news had begun announcing that highway ramps were becoming impassable and in some areas, snow drifts two to six feet high were being reported. During the day, we often looked out the window to check the storm’s progress; by evening we saw that it was beginning to snow harder.

Monday, March 4
We awakened at 6:00 AM. Through the illumination provided by our outdoor security lights (nicknamed, Supernova) we could see that it had continued blowing and snowing over night. Curving around our buildings were graceful looking, wind sculptured snow drifts standing about two feet high. Across the flat portions of the yard were undulating snow ripples with an occasional snow embankment standing a foot higher. A sheet of snow was plastered against the west side of the garage, while a gravity defying partial snow bridge had formed almost reaching from the roof of our heat pumps cold frame to the trailer. Suddenly, we were startled by a nearby clap of thunder.

As the morning progressed, we periodically listened to the local news and the National Weather  Service. The reports said,

“We have received eleven and a half inches snow and an additional  six to seven inches can be expected…the Wind Chill Index is -10°F…all school are closed…”

Other reports stated,

“The storm has shut down highways and airports in the southern one-third of the state, thousands of travelers are stranded around the state…three hundred persons are stranded at the Minneapolis International Airport where five hundred flights have been canceled…visibility in many areas is near zero…”

If there was one thing I didn’t like about snow storms, it was being ‘drifted in’ and cut off from potential emergency services. Almost every year, we were engulfed by between one to five winter storms that cut us off from any chance of seeking help or escape should an emergency situation have arisen. Our primary concerns were with the remote possibility of personal injury and loss of space heating due to a power outage. In either case we would be unable to get out to the county road or to town if a major storm was in progress. Also, we were experiencing one of those rare storms that deposited so much snow– there were reports of house roofs collapsing in South Dakota. Since we lived in a mobile home, whose structural integrity was less than that of a regular ‘stick’ house, we were alert to and concerned with the potential for excessive snow loads.

Usually, when there were snow storms accompanied by strong winds, the county snow plows were pulled off the rural roads, to wait until the brunt of the storm had passed.

During the day, I was amused watching Jane’s tricycle slowly disappear beneath the snow. The handlebars were still above the snow in the morning, but gradually became covered, and by afternoon even the highest little red hand grip was submerged in a deepening blanket of white.

I took late afternoon snow depth measurements about the yard and found the snow ranged from fourteen to seventeen inches deep.

We were surprised, and happy to find, that at our 8:00PM bedtime, the full moon had begun shining in through the bedroom window.

Tuesday morning we awoke to find the sky clear and that there’d been no new snow over night. I promptly bundled up, started the tractor and cleared our driveway. There was so much snow to push that it took a record hour and a half to clean out a spot in from of the garage and the center of the 800 foot driveway.

And thus ended our first and only real snow storm of the winter season. In a brief two-day period, our environment went from barren ground with mild spring-like temperatures to, snowdrifts, -10ºF wind chill temperatures and having received over seventeen inches of snow.  Whoa! Minnesota!

[Above, a photocopy of my Journal drawing, The Rune: Keys to the Rune. ‘Want to play a game? Look in here. Coded treasure map directions made clear.’ J7_911.jpg. A coded Rune alphabet, simply entered in one journal, allows deciphering of a treasure map found a 1000 pages and several journals away, which in turn leads to a secret location where 800 year old Anasazi treasures may be found. If the journals have not been read consecutively and directions not followed the several  times  they’re given, the necessary combination of  1) the reader’s memory and 2) the provided code keys will not unlock the directions provided in the map. This page is one of the directions.]

Porky, the parakeet, died on Easter
Ever since returning from our vacation and bringing home Porky from Bobby and Arlene’s, the little birdie was sniffling and shivering. We found that during our vacation, his cage had been set near a floor register where he was apparently exposed to a more or less continual draft. Undoubtedly he caught a cold and couldn’t get rid of it.

On April 7, Easter day, around 12:30 PM, just after our lunch, I had returned to working on my journals at the kitchen table when Porky hopped out of his cage and fluttered to the kitchen floor. I watched questionally, as he walked rather wobbly into the corner beneath his cage, fell over and expired. I called Donna into the kitchen. We crouched beside his cage, looking down at his small still form and  feeling very glum. We said ‘Good bye’ to our little feathered friend, but let him lie where he died for an hour or so until Jane awoke from her nap; we wanted her to see and understand what happened to our pet.

With tears in our eyes, we laid little, “Pork-u-punt” and his favorite toys in a small box. We buried him about four hundred feet southwest of the mobile home, outside the west yard gate, down by the low land. When we left, there were two small, side by side graves in that location, our first parakeet, Icabod P. Tailfeathers and Porky. That was another one of those sad days we had at Nightstar*– saying ‘Goodbye,’ and burying our pets when their lives had passed. Both graves, were in their own time covered with rocks, and then with moss and forest leaves…

[Over the following decade, I occasionally cleaned the leaves off their diminutive resting places and recalled loving thoughts and fond memories of these two playful, little parakeet pets, and of Alexander R. Little, who flew off into the woods and was never seen again.]

My unemployment benefits expire
My extended Federal unemployment benefits expired in early April, at a time when Donna had only five weeks to go on hers. Although Donna’s compensation still was bringing in $129 per week our expenses were $229 per week. We were becoming concerned, but not overly so, because, during the previous few months, we’d bought three one ounce Canadian Maple Leaf gold coins and put $1,000 in Series EE Government Savings Bonds.

Besides these recent investments, we previously had stashed away, some other liquid assets.[edited].

Selling our new Ford pickup
As the weeks passed, my Federal Unemployment Extension benefits, then Donna’s Unemployment and her Federal Extension benefits expired. We were living quite well and making ends meet while we received at least one person’s Unemployment compensation, however, with neither of us drawing an income, our good times appeared to be rapidly coming to an end.

During the latter part of May, we put an advertisement in the St. Cloud Times newspaper Classified Ads Section attempting to sell our one year old, tan, Ford pickup truck.  It was our intention to sell the truck and use the proceeds to pay off the bank loan, thus reducing our overhead.

We still had the Toyota and at that time didn’t need two automobiles.

Our newspaper ad simply stated:

Immediately after the ad was printed in the newspaper, we received a call from a local farmer who said he ‘might be interested,’ that he’d ‘be over to look at it in a few days’. His ‘few days’ turned out to be three weeks. Never-the-less, when he saw and drove the vehicle, he could tell we’d taken good care of it. We transferred the title to him for $4500, which we used to pay off the bank loan. We were out only the down payment and the monthly payments we’d made since purchasing the vehicle. The down payment was the price reduction we received from trading in our old GMC pickup, the truck we used when moving to Minnesota. The monthly payments we’d made, could be seen as cost of renting or leasing the vehicle for the period we owned it.

Donna finds employment at True-Value Hardware
During the middle of June, Donna applied for and was accepted into employment with the St. Cloud True-Value Hardware store. She was hired as the store bookkeeper, with a beginning pay rate of $5.50 per hour and after thirty days a pay raise of $0.50 bringing her hourly rate to $6.00 per hour. Although she was paid less than at Landy Packing, her work conditions at the hardware store were a lot more pleasant. Her boss, W, once an employee in the business, was buying the store from the previous owner.

In order to realign our family’s finances with our current income, we first sold the Ford pickup truck and paid off the associated bank loan. Next, we cashed in our Series EE Saving Bonds and paid off a loan on our heat pump and several small revolving credit lines with Sears, Visa, etc. These actions reduced our weekly expenses from $229 to $151. In mid July, when Donna got her first pay raise, she was bringing home $180 per week, leaving us a weekly savings of $31.

Early in the AIDS epidemic
During early August, I ran across an odd, half page news story stuck in the middle of the news paper,  it’s headline stated: ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — A Medieval Plague For Modern Times.’ Because there is so much sensationalism in the news media, I began reading the story with half-hearted enthusiasm. Finishing the article, I sat back in my kitchen chair as a sense of apprehension swept over me. I’m a fairy educated person who keeps up on the current news through weekly news magazines, the newspaper and television, yet this was the first I’d ever heard about a disease called, AIDS.

I was surprised to find that there were already thousands of people in the USA with the AIDS disease and perhaps up to a million who had been already been infected. What’s more, the method of transmission, via homosexual behavior and sharing drug needles, promised to keep the disease in the population for a long time. I realized that our permissive culture, which almost seemed to cater to deviation, would be an excellent medium for the disease to propagate and spread.

I became immediately concerned with  AIDS because, we modern people, with our culturally defining streak of egalitarianism, would allow the disease amongst us and into our homes. I sensed that our way of thinking would bring about a pandemic, no different from what was brought about by European ignorance of germs and vectors, during the Bubonic plagues of the Middle Ages.

It seemed that immediately after the AIDS news article hit the nations news papers, that the national TV news media and weekly news magazines carried the story. At first, there were quite a bit of AIDS related information in the news, but in a short time new stories diminished and over the next few years one heard less and less about the disease. After initially being washed with the diseases statistics, we became desensitized, after all,  AIDS only affected criminals who shared drug needles and men who were morally deficient homosexuals.

Classic denial spread amongst other nations as well, particularly in the Far Eastern countries, where they ridiculed Western society as perverts. These nations announced that such a disease could not spread in their country, because they didn’t have homosexual problems nor intravenous drug users. Meanwhile, in Africa, the disease was running rampant among heterosexual tribal members and was spreading along transcontinental highways by truck drivers and widespread prostitution. The hand writing was on the wall…

Jane’s learning curve goes geometrical
Jane’s happy, friendly and loving personality, coupled with her good looks and rapid mental growth made her a very special child to us. We knew she was well above average because when asked to get something, or to put something away, she understand and accomplish the job, though still barely even able to talk.

As her second year approached and passed, some of the important things Jane learned or discovered included:
•  Household belongings have a certain place and go back in that place after use.
•  Keys were small, but very important items, they were used to unlock doors and needed to start some equipment.
•  How to operate and thereby ‘control’ a radio, which was somewhat similar to operating a television.
•  That our food ultimately comes from a garden. Some of the things growing in the garden were ‘food’ and therefore good, while some were called ‘weeds’ and were not good.
•  Clothing had to be washed and dried and household items need to be maintained. Concurrently, she began learning how to fill the wash machine with clothes and soap.

During August, when Jane was   1 year-9 month old, I printed out each letter of the alphabet and the numerals one to ten on separate, three-inch by five-inch white poster board cards, using a red marker. Thereafter, every time Jane needed a diaper change, I’d lay her on the bathroom sink counter, make the diaper change, then show her about ten to fifteen of the written symbols, while repeatedly pronouncing the letter or number to her. Jane would imitate me and try to pronounce the letter or number.

We had a good time doing our routine and before long Jane was pronouncing the letters and numbers aloud with only occasional assistance. Of course, when we read her children’s ‘beginning reading’ story books, I’d point out some of the letters she had already learned. The reinforcement showed her that the letters we looked at and learned to pronounce in the bathroom, made the sounds that told the story in the book. Jane quickly grasped the concept that letters and their associated sounds became words which in turn told stories.

Purchasing a used Ford Grenada
On August 30, right after Donna began working at True-Value Hardware, we decided we needed a second automobile. Anything could  happen while Jane and I were at home, Donna could have car troubles in St. Cloud, the Toyota could have a break down at home, in any event, we needed a second vehicle. We found an interesting advertisement for a used car in the St. Cloud Times.

After work one Friday evening, Donna went to look at the car. She came home with a glowing report. The car, a 1977, two door Ford Granada with hard brown vinyl roof, looked and drove as if in very good condition, despite having 87,177 miles on its odometer. The owners wanted $2,400 for the vehicle, a price she thought could be lowered.

Saturday morning, Donna and I returned to St. Cloud to look at the Ford. The owners weren’t home for the weekend, so we were able to look the car over in their driveway without disturbance.

Monday morning, Donna took some time off work to do some dealing on the Ford. She took the car for another test drive and stopped at our auto repair shop to have the mechanics look at it. The mechanic looked the car over, listened to it run and put its electrical system on an oscilloscope. He said there were a couple minor problems that did not need fixing, i.e., the vacuum tank was sucking air. Donna returned to the owner with her short list of problems and complained about the price. The owner caved in agreeing to sell the car for $1,650, we paid his new asking price and closed the deal. That evening Donna drove me back into town in our ‘new Ford’, where we picked up the Toyota and returned home.

The Ford Granada was a nice car with a lot more leg room than our Toyota Corolla, it’s best feature however, was an air-conditioner. In all previous years we’d driven about and simply suffered under the summer’s heat, but with the Ford’s air-conditioner, we learned a whole new level of luxury and were instantly spoiled.
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[Panorama of the upper yard,  five years after  moving onto Nightstar*. The 1.5 acre yard with the pond, 14 ft x 70 ft mobile home, 26 ft x 27 ft garage, solar cold frame (center-left), 12 ft x 16 ft   rear addition, outhouse, generator shed, storage shed, garden, compost bins and fencing.]

An afternoon at the Benton County Fair, August 1985
Around August 1^st, Donna and I took Jane on her first visit to the Benton County Fair in St Cloud. Jane wasn’t two years old yet, but could see from the activity, the gay colors of the tents and happy music emanating from the various attractions, that this must be a fun place.

We walked through the Broadway looking at the displays, watching people play games of ‘skill and chance’, we saw Cupie dolls, teddy bears, older preteens running around together, lots of children with their parents. There were fair employee ‘barkers’ calling out to people, ‘Step right up and win a doll…Take a chance…Try your skill…”
[Photograph at right: Looking north across the Broadway, from atop the Ferris Wheel.]

The Broadway, consisting of booths, food stands, etc., were grouped together at the north end of the fair, while the amusement rides were located at the south end. As soon as we walked past the last tent in the Broadway, we entered the area where the ‘rides’ were set up. The first ride we encountered was the Pony ride, where for 50¢ or a dollar, a youngster could ride a pony. Jane had seen horses on television and in movies, but this was the first time she’d seen and touched one.

When I recommended she ride the ‘horsey’ and that, “Mom will help”, she was momentarily apprehensive. By the time she’d gone around the track once, her nervousness dissipated and she was reveling in the experience. That afternoon, before we left the Fair, Jane requested to ride the ‘horsey’ two more times. What a pleasant memory.

After riding the ‘horsey’, we all rode the Farris wheel. The ride was a little scary to Jane, being so high off the ground, as a matter of fact it was scary for Donna and me too. Yet we could look all around from an elevation and perspective Jane hadn’t seen  before. Over the next couple hours, we rode several rides, stopping back at the Horse ride ever so often; we had soda pop, cotton candy and sweltered in the extreme heat and humidity of the August summer afternoon. We  walked amongst the Fair exhibits, and stopped at the Barnyard Petting Zoo. [Photograph at right: Jane’s first ride on a horse, Donna assists. A fun day for all.]

During this, Jane’s first visit to the Fair, I had just turned forty-three years old and was more of a grandfather in age than the typical father’s age. Jane’s excitement and the fun we had, was always a highlight of the day for me. Her youthful spirit and our adventures of exploration gave me a second glimpse of childhood. The same can be said for Donna, who was in her late thirties; Jane gave us of her expansive vitality and continually made us a proud and involved parents.

Within a couple of years, Jane was old enough and eager to ride the larger ‘really scary rides’ by herself. Sometimes, an older child or young teen would share a seat with Jane as the contraption swung, spun, rotated, rolled, rocked and gyrated. Donna and I stood back in the shade and watched, no longer as hearty as we once were.

Hahaha. There was the time in our younger lives, when the both of us rode similar rides at the with glee,  and ‘threw up’ from motion sickness. Those days were passed by the time we reached our early twenties. These were Jane’s days; when she was having fun, it was fun for us too.
[Photograph at right: Looking south-west across several amusement rides, from atop the Ferris Wheel.]

Dissatisfied with our furnishings and clothing [2]
When Donna and I first moved to Minnesota, our minds were filled with the dream of developing a homestead in a rural setting. Literature such as, The First Time Farmers Guide, Mother Earth News magazine, various ‘back to the Earth’ and survivalist literature fed our minds with agricultural and ‘do it yourself’ technologies, which in turn directed the spending of our discretionary income.

A decade after moving to Minnesota, we had accomplished all of our original dreams: we purchased a mobile home, thirty-nine acres of raw land, installed a driveway, well, drain field, garage, large garden and had thousands of dollars invested in peripheral equipment. By the middle of 1985, we’d come to find that we didn’t need a large electric generator, flour mill, dehydrator, and the one thousand gallon underground gasoline storage tank. Other things, such as our old driftwood bookcase-stereo stand and my huge stereo speakers, once prized possessions, seemed dated and tied to a much earlier time and phase of our lives [3].

It was at this time that a sense of dissatisfaction began creeping into our minds. The mid set that brought us to Minnesota, which fueled our imagination and kept us working on homestead projects, began to fail our current needs. Over the years, we were required to save all of our excess cash in order to purchase the items associated with the homesteading mind-set. Habits die hard, because even when we finally accomplished and paid for everything we wanted, we continued saving every extra dollar. Meanwhile, in our front room there were compound bows and archery equipment hanging  on the walls. The couch was thread bare, our coffee table was banged, bumped and dented. Elsewhere in the house, the bath towels were worn and frayed, our pillows had lost much of their stuffing, and our clothing, even when new somehow just wasn’t right.

On several occasions we walked through the trailer appraising the things we lived with. The synopsis was, ‘Something is wrong.‘

We rationalized that as soon as a certain plateau was reached in our cash savings, we’d buy a new couch and coffee table. As the summer of 1985 slowly passed, we came to realize that the thread bare couch and well used coffee table were not the source of our dissatisfaction, they were symptoms.

I don’t recall the moment, but it was during late summer when we finally arrived at the consciousness that verbalized our thoughts, the essence of which were as follows:

‘The house doesn’t look or feel like someone LIVES here, it looks like people STAY here.’

Such personal conclusions are difficult to reach oneself. With the words expressed, we knew a major project was both required and drawing near.

The concepts of taste, style & class
Since my layoff at Landy’s and Donna’s return to work, I’d taken over the role of ‘house Daddy’, as such, I had time to do research. During August I checked several books out from the St. Cloud Public Library and  began to study Basic Home Decoration and Basic Principals of Interior Decoration. Important points from the books were copied and outlined for future reference.

In September, we bought a variety of home decoration magazines,so we could study the pictures and see how the decoration principals worked in real life. Among the magazines were several monthly issues of House and Garden, Home and Garden, Town and Country, Country Living, House Beautiful, and a few others. While studying the contemporary photographs in each magazine, we found a basic decorating theme running through each. We did not find these principles at work in our house. At even the most basic level, our front room lacked both a conversation grouping of furniture and good illumination. On one visit to the St. Cloud Public Library, I borrowed, Classic Styles in English Homes and Traditional American Homes; both books were filled with glossy photographs.

Finding the flaw in our decorative style
A strange thing occurred… While studying the book and  magazine illustrations, I became aware of a previously unrealized subtlety. Although all of the portrayed furnishing styles adhered to the proper decorating principles, there was a difference. The difference wasn’t directly related to the standard decorating principles, there was some other factor at work. 1) Generally, the house with a small yard and new, gasoline efficient automobile parked in plain view, also had Country or Contemporary style furniture. On the coffee table was seen the hint of a TV Guide or National Geographic magazine. A frosted, glass unicorn, or photographs of the children sat on soft end tables. The happy, broadly smiling owners were cleanly dressed in sports clothes. 2) Larger houses with their larger lawns and shrubbery, also had large dogs or a hint of horses. In the background could be seen a dark-colored Chrysler or other larger American automobiles. Many of these house interiors were furnished and decorated with sets of traditional style furniture. The interior of these houses looked considerably more tasteful and expensively decorated than the smaller houses discussed above. If the husband and wife were shown indoors, they were seen seated on a floral print couch and dressed in evening clothes; if photographed outdoors, they wore leisure clothes, but with ear rings, scarves, rings, white buck or boat shoes. 3) In the third decoration theme, material goods such as automobiles and horses were neither seen nor alluded to. Photographs of the house exterior showed large trellises and expansive flower and rock gardens, terracing and woods. The house interiors were furnished with museum grade furniture from the 19th Century or earlier, original cloth wall hangings and old, original oil paintings adorned the walls. Photographs of the owners were seldom included in these articles.

Each magazine targeted a specific ‘social class’. I’d always mistakenly thought that a family simply bought the style of furniture they just happened to like, the more discretionary money a family had, the better grade furniture that they bought – in that style.

Reverence for the old and antique
Donna and I grouped the magazines according to display of social class. As social class increased , there was an associative increase in reverence for the old and antique, for the non mass-produced, the beautiful.

Conversely, as the magazine’s target subscription population decreased in social class, decorating styles changed toward the contemporary and the new.
•  Televisions were more prominently displayed as you went from upper to lower
•  Paintings were replaced by reproductions and lithographs, then by wall decorations such as brass swans and colorful tin butterflies, etc.
•  Built in bookcases, filled with books in the upper classes, were replaced by standing bookcases, then by wall units which held plants and selections from Reader’s Digest.

At first, income seemed to be the important variable, but on closer observation income was not all that important. If every family had the same taste and values, but their income varied, then mass-produced furniture and furnishings would simulate the more rare tasteful and quality items. This reasoning was not seen in the magazine photographs. Indeed, each social class tended to have their own values and tastes, so that decor was more related to family values than income.

Our furnishing’s reflected our upbringing
It struck us as odd that we hadn’t realized that there were time-honored principles involved in household furnishing. How could we have missed seeing the relationship between class values and the household furnishing style? In order to answer this question, we had to look back at several generations in both of our families.

Both Donna’s father, Don, and my mother, Hazel, were raised on working farms. In any  American farm community of the 1920s and 1930s, there was a fairly heterogeneous population of people whom, for the most part, shared a common heritage with their neighbors.

Don was from a predominately German farming community in southern Indiana. Hazel was born into a Swedish-German farming community in Michigan. Both families had the values, incomes and education common to farmers in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. Being somewhat isolated from the rapid urban progress of the times, these farm families continued to blend expediency, frugality, and their own semi impoverished traditions into their household furnishings. Of course, the life style one learns and lives with during their youth, are models for the perceptions passed down to the next generation.

The story was different with Donna’s mother, Eulah, and my father, Robert.

Eulah’s father, James, was a successful concrete contractor in the early 1900s. For health reasons, James took his wife Maude, (whom was ill), and young Eulah to Arizona. In the first decade of the century he gained title to about four hundred eights acres of territorial Arizona land. A few years later Maude died of an infection. Soon afterward, James was shot to death by Maude’s sister’s husband, who was said to have owed James money[4]. At that time, and being in her mid teens, Eulah was left alone with just her younger brother. At age fifteen, Eulah married a commercial photographer and became the mother of five children. Over the next several decades, Eulah owned and operated the Hickson photographic studio in Yuma, to support herself and her five children. Although Eulah’s maternal great-grandfather, a) Francis,  had been a medical doctor; b) her grandfather, Theopholas, an accomplished music teacher who played five instruments; c) and her mother, Maude Dorr raised in a genteel Southern life style; d) time and circumstance had reduced Eulah to a small business owner and ‘working Mom’.

At the end of World War II, when Eulah met and married Don, she’d already raised her children to adulthood; there had been little time or money for travel, the arts or the finer things. After their marriage, Don and Eulah seemed to have moved every couple years, never really setting down roots or becoming part of the community they lived in. They were not a shiftless family, but Don did seek various employment opportunities, and was required to move due to job transfers; he tried to move into situations where he could hobby farm as well as carry a regular full time job.

My father, Robert, was raised in an educated, suburban Chicago household during the 1920s and 1930s. His mother, Elsie, had been a teacher and even a high school principal for a while. His father, Glen, was a licensed mechanical engineer and teacher. Robert was married after completing two years of college. Over the next four years, the family had three children, of which two survived. Robert was drafted into the military and served in the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War II. During the next decade and a half, the family moved several times across the country. Moving ever so often doesn’t allow time to become established in a community, while the expense of moving and being unemployed several times kept the family from buying quality household furnishings.

As I entered my teens, Mom and Dad turned to religion and Dad subsequently returned to college. There simply was never enough concern for worldly goods in our household to think about ‘style’.

As a result of our parents backgrounds, Donna and I grew up in homes where furnishings, decorative style and related values were unimportant. Our parents did what they could to raise and train us in what was important to their household’s mind set. In both of our childhood homes, the necessity for frugality and expediency, coupled with frequent moves all played together to eliminate concepts of style, class consciousness and a reverence for the old and unique.

For all of our lives and up to this point, Donna and I were unaware of the relationship between household furnishing, family values, and social class. Unaware of the nuances that streamed about us, we lived in the world with a freedom allotted only to the naive and ignorant.

Learning of style and class
Abruptly awakening into the realization that household furnishing was related to one’s social class, I decided to inquire further into the  concept. I borrowed the book, Class, form the public library. Class promptly answered the question I had in the relationship between household furnishings and social class.. There was not only a relationship between household furnishings and class, but between other factors as well, such as clothing style, house style, pets, beverages, foods, money, where in the country one lived, lifestyle, and more.

Many thing that we’d previously referred to as ‘trashy’ or ‘good’ now fell onto the somewhat ill defined structure of social class. We became rudimentarily aware of the subtle nuances of preference and symbols. At the same time, we began seeing our personal belongings and those of our friends, acquaintances and even stranger’s in a new light of understanding.

Starting over, starting right[5]
Having begun to look at our furnishings with new eyes, we understood that nothing less than a complete overhaul would be required. We had already realized that our household furnishings were not an extension of our personalities, interests or tastes. The dissatisfaction we felt stemmed from the incompatible nature of the various incongruent furniture styles and symbols we’d surrounded ourselves with. We didn’t feel at home in our own house. Having studied house decoration and furnishing styles from proletarian to lower upper class, we found our likes and tastes near and perhaps just below the upper middle class.

Using concepts of Basic Home Design, magazine photographs, and the ideology expressed in thne book, Class, we set about remodeling our living environment. What followed was a tidal wave that swept through the house. For awhile it was difficult to let go of some of the familiar items we’d accumulated.

Restructuring •
Our banged up coffee table and driftwood bookcase-stereo stand were chain sawed into kindling for the fireplace.
•  We sold some of our unused hobby farming equipment,
•  bought oriental style throw rugs for uncarpeted floors throughout the house,
•  we reupholstered the couch,
•  replaced the archery equipment that hung on the wall with lithographed images that were related in some way to our ancestral family history.
•  We bought traditional style furniture made of Fruitwood with brass fixtures
• We bought new drapes and curtains for the entire house,
•  Replaced all of our towels and wash cloths, bed sheets,
•  Bought a large set of Revereware pots and pans,
•  two standing bookcases.
•  All of our electronics, except for the TV were moved out of the living room and into a 3rd bedroom newly redefined as the Activity Room.
•  Our  library was moved out of the Activity Room into the living room. The process continued and expanded in scope through the winter and into the spring of 1986. Renovating our household furnishings cost over $5,000, which largely came from a small amount of gold bullion coins we had accumulated.

[After refurnishing: Photo on left: Our livingroom’s south wall, picture taken from the kitchen entry; antique rocker, curio cabinet, wood burning   stove. Photo on right: the livingroom’s north wall. My journals on bookcase top shelf, Alladin lamp at right.]

[After refurnishing: Photo on left: Jane’s bedroom: Jane with Ducky, Rabbit and host of doll friends, cherry finished wood bed frame and nightstand. The south wall in on the right. Photo on right: Jane’s bedroom, south wall on the left. The dresser bought with money from  my parents, Donna’s childhood rocker is seen at lower right.]
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[After refurnishing: Photo on left: Our master bedroom, southwest  corner at left: Brass bed; a quilt Donna and I made, the leather trunk I refinished while at Ted’s house in the early 1970s,  1928 portrait of  Eulah Snyder hanging on the wall. Photo on right: Master bedroom, looking toward the southeast corner. Seen here the two antique dressers that  I bought 11 years earlier from my friend Ted in  California. Photographs of our 19^th & 20^th Century ancestors cover the dresser tops.]

Return to SRAPO[6]
During June, as Journal 7: A Sideways Glance to Other Horizons neared completion, I turned my attention back to my old SRAPO hobby (Stellar Radii And Planetary Orbits). SRAPO was one of the great and interesting hobbies of my life. Thinking within its parameters led me into abstractions and  ‘minds eye’ visualizations that have been extremely enjoyable and a labor of love to explore.

During  Summer and into the Fall, I reworking an accumulation of SRAPO notes and previously written text. I added descriptions about planetary surface features that we as visitors might see, if we could actually journey to those theoretical worlds.

In October, I began writing and transferring the entire SRAPO project into Journal 8, SRAPO. The old graphs were updated and carefully redrawn, new images and charts were added and SRAPO was again ‘finished’, at least for the present. In its mere one hundred twenty seven page journal length, were the keys and information necessary to draw deep conclusions about surface conditions on any planet we might one day find or consider that carried intelligent life.

The study was terminated with ‘data templates’ that allowed the reader to follow the study in two directions: 1) You could create an imaginary set of star-planet relationships, then find the planetary surface conditions and general adaptations life must make to exist under those proposed conditions, or; 2) you could propose the general characteristics of an intelligent life form’s morphology then back track to the planetary surface conditions he might have come from, an environment favoring the proposed characteristics and morphology. Thus answering the question “What kind of environment would a ‘gray’ alien come from, if they in fact did exist?[7].

Although it was possible to move from hypothesized star-planet relationships to planetary surface conditions, I do not think the reverse is possible. General life adaptations on a planet frequently relate to surface temperature, gravity etc, but do not specifically relate back to the parent star’s spectral classification. If you knew the star, planet size and its location in the ecosphere, you would be able to carry the study  to a basic planetary environment and have a fair assessment of and intelligent  and advanced tool using life found there.

I only worked with SRAPO a few times, each encounter separated by about a decade. After each encounter with the hobby, I put all my reworked notes and records away in the file cabinet, awaiting their next expansion. After years passed, I would again pull out the old paperwork for another enjoyable and exhaustive four month study. During each of these periods, all the information, wisdom, and insights that were accumulated since my last study, were integrated. The entire project was then rewritten with its new, increased understanding and perspectives.

SRAPO has been like an artist’s canvas,  filled with the still life images of other worlds. Each decade when I’ve painted, the image of those other worlds has become clearer and more focused.  (Click the SRAPO tab at the top of 4dtraveler blog page to check the progress of converting the study into this public media. Also see Categories in the right column of this blog, the entries are labeled in order:
0 SRAPO: Introduction
Chapter 1: Water
Chapter 2. Average Planetary Surface temperature, etc.

Changing our wardrobe styles
As previously mentioned, there was something disagreeable about the clothing style we wore. Even when we purchased a new shirt or blouse, stockings, shoes or jacket, something was vaguely amiss with the article, something we were unable to fathom.

One day while browsing through the newspaper, I read a review of the recently published book, Color Me Beautiful. Simple stated, the book was designed to help a woman determine her  ‘complexion category’ based on variations in her skin color and tone, hair and eye color. The book then went on to help determine the colors of clothing and accessories that most complimented her given complexion category; at the same time, assisting the woman in organizing her basic wardrobe. While Donna read Color Me Beautiful, I read Color For Men, both books by the same author. In this same period of time, I also read The Official Preppy Handbook, which dealt specifically with upper middle class behavior and their preferred clothing styles.

What we learned was– as with household furnishings, there was a relationship between clothing styles and social class. The distinction did not derive as much from cost, as it did from a combination of color, style and texture. We found that clothing, 1)  made from natural fibers with a traditional or suggested English or Scottish style, 2) that were understated and non legible, had class; clothing made predominantly 1) from man-made materials, 2) with French or modern styles, 3)  that had glossy colors, 4) and were legible, had the least class.

Using the principles derived from the ‘Color__’ books and The Official Preppy handbook brought several pair of blouses and slacks. During the winter of 1985-86, she began wearing, on alternate days,  the new then the old clothing styles. She also began wearing a slight amount of cosmetics, and accessorizing with scarves and earrings. Not only did she feel better about the style change, she looked better! Since the style change worked on a limited basis, we progressed into a major wardrobe overhaul.

One weekend day, we took every item out of our closet and gave it the ‘color-style-texture-legibility test’. Over 90% 0f our combined wardrobe failed and was summarily discarded. In the period of an hour, we filled several large garbage bags (subsequently donated to Goodwill) and about a half dozen paper grocery bags (for burning) with clothes being discarded [8].

Over the next few weeks we upgraded Donna’s wardrobe. One evening she related an interesting observation: Since the upgrade in style and while shopping, she occasionally received quicker, friendlier and generally better service. At first I was surprised to hear this, but recalled that this same phenomena was discussed in  the book, Class. Continuing to reflect on Donna’s observation brought me to the realization that one’s social position is not inherent, it is ascribed by others. If you understand and exhibit the time honored symbols of value within your society, other people will reward you with the appropriate amount of deference and respect.

Shaving my 13-year-old mustache
One day during November, I asked Donna and Jane if they’d like for me to shave off my mustache. The girls surprised me by simultaneously and resolutely stating, “Yes!”. Gosh! Suddenly, I became aware that my thirteen year old mustache was out of favor. The twosome went on exclaiming how much they “…want  to kiss a smooth-faced Daddy.” A few minutes later, we gathered in the bathroom, the girls flanking me and looking on with great interest. I lathered up my face and shaved off that old mustache and have maintained a clean-shaven face ever since.   :-)
I’d walk a mile for a bunch of extra kisses, wouldn’t you?!

Jane’s development by her 2nd birthday
Jane’s second year was filled with travel, adventure and new experiences, including:
1) The wonder and merriment of the blinking lights on the Christmas tree and all the amazing toys that came from those brightly wrapped boxes beneath the tree.
2) Our trip around the western United States aboard Amtrak.
3) Her first meals at a restaurant.
4) A trip to Minnesota Zoological Gardens to see all the large and small animals, and the Children’s Petting Zoo.

By November 30, Jane’s second birthday , she was able to recognize and pronounce each letter of the alphabet and numerals, one to ten – all from her stack of three by five-inch memory cards.

Ever since Jane and I began this learning process, I realized our working together would undoubtedly develop her reading skills, but never dreamed that before she was two years old she’d already be ready to start reading!

Almost daily, Jane and I spent a two fifteen minute sessions sitting together on the couch, where I read stories to her. Periodically, I’d ask her to identify a shape, a color, or some item on the page. Sometimes, I asked her the page number or what letter I was pointing at. Sometimes, I read fast, sometimes slow, often stopping to point out an easy one syllable word, then have her pronounce it along with me. Right after her second birthday, Jane began to learn how to read in earnest.

[Photocopy of drawing from Journal 6: The Travelers Guide To People and Places, entitled, Principle of the Conservation of Genetic Similarity. Relates to the journals genealogical context at,  J6_762.jpg]

Observations regarding toddler age children
Babies and small children have a tremendous learning capacity.  Compared to a young child, adults learn slow and seldom make insightful jumps in understanding. Adults tend to feel that since the toddler is unable to speak they are also unable to understand, this is totally in error. It may take several days for a concept to sink into a tot’s mind, but when it does, the concept becomes a building block in their life’s world view.

One morning , I showed Jane (two year one month old) how a mirror reflects sunlight. The next morning before sunrise, Jane came into the kitchen with a small hand-held mirror, got Donna’s attention and pretended to reflect sun light at her.

What’s on TV tonight?
•  My favorite programs in 1985.
•  Local Evening   News
•  National   Evening News
•  ABC, CBS or NBC evening movies.

Movies
Movies attended during the year included:
A View To Kill  with Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, Tanya Roberts, Grace Jones
Back To The Future with Michael  J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson
Cocoon  with Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume  Cronyn, Brian Dennehy
Ladyhawke with Rutger  Hauer, Matthew Broderick, Michelle Pfeiffer
Murphy’s Romance with Sally Field, James Garner, Brian Kerwin
Out of Africa  with Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Klaus Maria Brandauer
Pale Rider with Clint Eastwood, Michael Moriarty, Carrie Snodgrass
Prizzi’s Honor  with Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Kathleen Turner
Summer Rental with John Candy, Karen Austin, Richard   Crenna, Rip Torn
The Trip To Bountiful with Geraldine Page, John Heard, Carlin Glynn
Wierd Science  with Anthony M. Hall, Kelly  LeBrock, Bill Paxton
Witness  with Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Josef Sommer, Lukas Haas

Themes and Events:
*  President Ronald Reagan is inaugurated for his second term in office. Vice President George Bush is back too.
*  Halley’s Comet makes its return.
*  Obesity is found to be a major killer, in the same category as smoking and high blood pressure.
*  A new form of cocaine called, Crack, hits American streets.
*  Mikhail Gorbachev becomes Premier of the Soviet Union. Unlike his precessors, Gorbachev wants to weaken the Communist doctrine and allow free enterprise into the  East Block of Soviet Republics. Relations between the two major nuclear superpowers begins to warm. President Reagan and Premier Gorbachev have a 2 day summit in Vienna which brings our nations closer together, establishing a new level of relations.
*  For the first time since World War I, the United   States becomes a debtor nation. Also this year, the U.S. Federal Deficit reaches $2 trillion.
*  There seems to be a lot of terrorism toward the end of this year: In October, “The Palestine Liberation Front” hijacked the cruise ship, Archille Lauro, and shot a wheelchair bound American then threw his body overboard.  In December, terrorists simultaneously attack the international airport terminals at Rome and Vienna, killing 18 and wounding 110.

Buttons & bumper stickers:
I owe. I owe. So off to work I go.
When times get tough, the tough go shopping.
Child on board.
Elvis didn’t die, he moved to a better place.

Journal 6, The Travelers Guide
Journal 6: The Travelers Guide To People and Places, was dedicated in its entirety to a massive genealogical research project that I was undertaking. Journal 6 began with an overview of the conditions in Europe during the last Ice Age then rapidly jumped ahead to Neolithic culture and traced the migration of our ancestors, the  Getae, from the steppes of eastern Europe into northwestern Europe.
I researched and associated narrative accounts of the physique and character of individuals in the Norman, English and Irish branches of my family, with their images (photographs of statutes, paintings, sepulchral effigies, commemorative postage stamps, images from the ancient coinage, etc.).
The study progressed down several pedigrees, including that of: William the Conqueror, a descendant of the Danish-Normans who occupied Normandy, France, who married Matilda of Flanders, a descendant of Alfred the Great, King of England, who was himself a descendant of Cerdic the Saxon. Meanwhile, the Irish and Scottish lines beginning with Breogan of Spain, gained power in Ireland and after many generations crossed into Scotland and after more generations, their descendant, Duncan I, married, Maud, 3G-granddaughter of Alfred the Great.
These pedigrees, combined and descended through the Plantagenet’s, Bohun and other English families, and descended through the Sayers family to Richard Sears [1], a direct family ancestor of mine, who immigrated to the Plymouth, Massausecheuttes, in 1630AD.
The work done to assemble the genealogy, collect eyewitness accounts, gather the photographic images and world-wide postage stamps, and later write the one hundred thirty-five page study, required many, many long hours of research at the St. Cloud Public Library, the University of Minnesota, St. Cloud campus library and at home.
Eyewitness accounts of the individuals were extracted from their various sources and combined into a composite of each person. Images were carefully photographed from books, then developed and trimmed to fit in the journal. The postal stamps were ordered and inserted into and along with the narrative as it was written.
Later in this chapter, see the related Journal drawing, entitled, Principle of the Conservation of Genetic Similarity.

The genealogical studies mentioned above that went into Journal 6: The Travelers Guide To People and Places, are being posted in the 4dtraveler blog, see:
My family in history/Old World: The Ancient Family
My family in history/Old World: The Saxons
My family in history/Old World: The Normans
My family in history/Old World: Irish & Scottish,
My family in history/Old World:From Royal Grace to frontier colonial.
Click the Genealogy tab at the top of the blog to find which are (♥) posted or () pending.

The Well Spring, prose
On January 20, I wrote a preface to Journal 6: The Travelers Guide To People and Place entitled, The Well Spring.

The Well Spring [2]
“I Larry, am son of Robert, who was son of Elsie, and grandson of Anna Flora, daughter of Harmon, a Union soldier in the Civil War, who was in turn descended from John Anderson, who fought for the Independence of our nation, the United States of America. These men descended from the families Warren, Howland, and Tilley, who came from England on the ship Mayflower to become among the first permanent Caucasian settlers on the North American continent.

[Preface drawing: “is the sixth Journal of Larry F. Pierce, being written in the year of our Lord 1985 at the forest homestead-Nightstar*.”]

We descended from the Royal House of England, the seed of Norman and Briton, the sons and daughters of the Bourchiers, the Plantagenets and William the Conqueror, who was a Norman descendant of the dispossessed Viking nobility of Norway. Our seed has come down from across Europe through the houses of Kings Merovens of France, Gundicar of Portugal, Cerdic of the Saxons and Constantine I of the Roman Empire.
Back amongst the shadows, in unrecorded time, where names and lives were spent in that mist of antiquity, we grew from the issue of a nation of people known as the Getae and the Aryan tribes. You are the son’s and daughters of the Gatae, your Paleolithic home was during the glaciation, the lush pluvial plains of the Sahara, your Neolithic home, the steppes of eastern Europe, the Iron Age found your people moving into western Europe.
Ten thousand years, ten thousand miles and three continents later, you are the children of those who survived the westward migration, the countless wars and conquests. You are intelligent, resourceful and adaptive, your ways are subtle; you are relatively tall, your cheekbones high; your hair, eyes and complexion are light. You are a blue blood and you stand at once among men and yet above most, for in your blood flows over two thousand years of Getae nobility.
This then is your history…”

Jane and Porky
As Jane grew from her infancy to become an ‘older baby’, she became aware that there was another creature that lived in the house. And that other creature was, Porky the parakeet. Porky was a friendly fellow who loved to sit on our shoulder, the top of our head and who would follow us through the house or fly down the hall looking for us, just to see what we were doing. Porky lived in his cage in the kitchen, right behind my side of the kitchen table, as had his precessor, Alexander R. Little.
Porky’s cage door was almost always left open, he had free reign to come and go through the house as he pleased.

From the time Jane began sitting in her high chair she’d watch curiously as we’d talk to the parakeet, teaching him to speak. And indeed as the months passed Porky learned to screech a few important words, such as, “Hello” and  “Ity bity birdie” He couldn’t speak very clear, but our practiced ears picked up his screechy ‘English’, and the other endearing, cooing, or excited chirping sounds he made.

Once in a while, Jane would sit on the couch beside her mother watching, as Porky came to visit.
When Jane learned to walk, there were several occasions when she’d be walking through the living room and Porky would fly around, squawking then land on her head. The first couple times this happened Jane cried. As soon as she learned that Porky was a friendly bird, Jane began approaching his cage,  saying his name, “Por“, while patting her head with a big smile, trying to coax him to come out and play.

Books read during the year
Class © 1983 by Paul Fussell – A satirical look at what   matters and to whom.
Color For Men  © 1984 by   Carole Jackson – Clothing colors and styles to wear, based on the   individual’s complexion, hair and eye color and physique.
The Official Preppy Handbook © 1980 ed. by Lisa   Birnbach – Growing up looking Prep, being Prep.

An unemployment benefits extension
In early February, I received the last of my Minnesota Unemployment benefits; however, because of the depth of the economic recession we were experiencing, the Federal Government extended benefits to unemployed workers for an additional two months. Upon the termination of my state benefits, I immediately began receiving Federal Unemployment compensation.

About this time, we sold our largely unused Studio #1 Knitting machine for $325. We also sold a large number of yarn cones  filled with different colors of yarn that were once used with the knitting machine. We received $130 for the yarn and a nicely finished wooden homemade yarn rack that  I made in 1974.

Jane goes exploring
Not long after Jane learned to walk, her new-found mobility and curiosity led her to begin a voyage of discovery in the cupboards. For months, she explored our floor level kitchen cupboards, examining and playing with canned goods, plastic storage containers, mixing bowls and all the other goodies that lived therein.

Journal 7, A Sideways Glance
Journal 7: A Sideways Glance To Other Horizons was filled with several topics of interest, including: Our experience’s touring the western United States aboard an Amtrak passenger train, soap making and, the ‘Heritage Concept’.
The Heritage Concept explored ‘multigenerational cooperation’, wherein one person cooperates with individuals in other generations possibly far removed in time. This differs from the more common association where many people, of a single generation, work together cooperatively, ie, ‘working with fellow employees at your place of employment’.

What I did was to buy fairly rare and expensive postage stamps and mount them in clear plastic holders at the center of each Transmission Document. Below the document, I  entered the stamps cost in terms of: loaves of wheat bread, ounces of gold, kilowatt-hours of electricity and current wage income. In circles set in the corners of the document, I entered the date of purchase, cost, year the stamp is to be sold,  leaving the sales cost circle blank (see below).  The stamps were ‘launched’ all from with a few months of one another, but have extractions dates spread across the 21st Century.
Persons in the chain of  ownership of Journal 7, will find at the ‘preprogrammed’ sales date, whether concerted space- time cooperation is possible for human beings.

I did not approach this project with the idea of just ‘doing right for a future person or generation’, The Heritage Concept should not be thought of as beings similar to putting away a cash savings to help your child through college, or perhaps not cutting down a forest, but saving the wood resource and forest habitat for your grandchildren.
The Heritage Concept is perhaps, more like two people in pre industrial times, communicating between remote locations. Here, the message is: Does it work?  Can it be done?
The next step would be to elaborate the transmission document and its data-mass cargo. The little efforts we make today can be magnified over time by leverage. It isn’t important how accurate we are targeting the specific extraction date, because critical focal points within the time stream fluctuate, always magnifying what is immediately ahead. What is important in interpersonal trans time communication, is taking the first step, much can arise from that first step.

“The first telephone voice: Alexander Graham Bell’s notebook entry of 10 March 1876 describes his successful experiment with the telephone. Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell utters these famous first words, “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.”  The Transmission Documents fulfill a similar function.

[Photocopy above is one of a half dozen ‘Transmission Document’ pages from Journal 7: A Sideways Glance To Other Horizons, article, The Heritage Concept.]
Note, document shown above is 27 years into its travel and has 73 years before its message is delivered. The other documents, while all launched at about the same time, will individually become available for retrieval at intervals in the future. Staggering their arrival over the years allows me to access the same person at different periods of their life and to intercept with several successive generations…like skipping a stone across the waters of time.

Traveling by Amtrak to California[3]
During January, our friends Mike and Kay and family, invited us to visit with them at their home in Redlands,California. Donna and I had been at home all winter drawing Unemployment Compensation while periodically applying for work, as well as working on our individual projects and reading, so were agreeable to a sightseeing adventure.
We made arrangements with our neighbor Arlene to care for Porky the parakeet, and water the house plants during our absence.
We hadn’t been on a real vacation for ten years so decided to make the trip memorable.

Instead of flying to California and miss seeing this great land first hand and up close,  we decided to travel by U.S. Amtrak passenger train. We planned a route that would take us by Coach to Chicago, where we’d transfer trains. From Chicago we’d have a private Sleeper cabin while traveling southwest across Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, down into New Mexico, then across Arizona and California. Mike and Kay would pick us up in San Bernardino, California, only a few miles from their home in Redlands, California.

After visiting with Mike and Kay for eight to ten days, we’d board an Amtrak Coach in Redlands and ride to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles we’d transfer trains and be assigned a private Sleeper cabin for the return trip. Our route home would take us north along the California coast, then through the mountains in Oregon, into Washington; and finally east across the northern tier of states, crossing Idaho, Montana and North Dakota, and finally into Minnesota. We would in effect be making a circular grand tour of the western half of the United States, riding through the great plains, the deserts, mountains, and the high plains.

Reservations for our round trip tickets were made ahead of time to ensure our place on the train.
The last couple days before leaving, we were busy putting everything in order, packing and doing those million and one last-minute things that must be done prior to a long trip.

Monday, February 4, Preparation
Monday, during mid morning, another neighbor, Barbara, came over to receive instruction on the particulars of feeding our ducks, geese and dogs. As soon as she left, Donna took the pickup truck next door to Bobby’s farm and bought six bales of straw. Then, while I stuffed fresh straw in the dogs house and laid down a heavy layer of straw on the poultry shed floor, Donna prepared to do errands in town.

Jessie dog required a visit to the Foley veterinarian clinic to have a biopsy performed several persistent sores on one of her ears. While Jessie was at the vet’s, Donna drove into St. Cloud for a haircut, to do some last minute shopping and make bank deposits.

Arrangements were previously made for ‘parakeet Porky’ to stay with Bobby  and Arlene while we were on vacation. In the early evening, Arlene telephoned to let us know she was home from work; we promptly took Porky, his cage, bird seed and night cover over to our friends farm house.

Tuesday, February 5, More preparation
Donna and I were awake and out of bed bright and early Tuesday morning. While I washed the previous night dishes, Donna began setting out Jane’s vacation clothes and packing a diaper bag. Several loads of last minute clothes were washed.
The rest of the morning was spent puttering around with this and that, we were too excited about the upcoming trip to become interested in, or concentrate, on anything.

The afternoon was spent leisurely packing our suitcases. We watered the house plants, carried out the garbage and washed the last dishes. Meanwhile, Jane was becoming excited over all the activity, our packing and all of our talk about traveling ‘far away, all the way across the United  States in a train’, about seeing mountains and deserts. Although she was still small, Jane was, like us, caught up in the excitement of an adventure.

Tuesday evening: Donna drove into Foley and returned with a pizza for our supper. I telephoned Mike, in California,  let him know we were ready to leave and would be seeing him in a few days.
We went to bed a little early and were asleep by 8:00 PM.

Music [midi: Twister]

Wednesday, February 6, “All Aboard!”
I awoke at midnight after only four hours sleep. My stomach was upset and gaseous from our pizza supper and the anticipation of leaving on vacation. Donna had been awake since 11:30 PM. Both of us laid in bed trying to go back to sleep, but neither of us could, for our minds were filled with  details and excitement of the coming day’s events.

Unable to sleep, we got up an hour later and had a cup of coffee.
Donna awakened Jane at 2:30 AM and dressed her for our drive to the St. Cloud train depot. While the girls did their last-minute things in the house, I started the car to warm it up, then carried out our suitcases and other luggage. It was an invigorating -3ºF outdoors, which awakened us considerably from the sleepy stupor we were experiencing in the house.

We left home at 3:00 AM.

We had not experienced a hard winter, temperatures were relatively mild and there was little snow on the ground. What snow still existed, were the icy remnants of a moderate snow storm that we received a month earlier. The mild weather made it easier for us to leave, because we knew life would not be difficult for the animals, there’d be a reduced chance of our homes water lines freezing up and there was no snow load on the mobile homes roof.

[Photocopy of journal drawing: Front end of the   Amtrak passenger train that we boarded in St Cloud.  J7_915-6.jpg]

Our first item of business was to stop at the train station, pay $788. for our reserved tickets and check in our two largest suitcases. With an hour and a half hour wait until the train arrived, we drove a couple of miles to Perkin’s restaurant for breakfast. We relaxed and chatted happily amongst ourselves while enjoying our meals.
Donna’s and my breakfast consisted of: two eggs each (over light), a generous slab of ham, hash brown potatoes, two slices of toast with jelly, and a “bottomless” pot of coffee. The meals cost $1.99 each and an additional 55¢ for the coffee. We left the restaurant satisfied and wide awake after the caffeine from several cups of coffee.

Our Amtrak carrier, The Empire Builder, arrived at 5:30 AM, we anxiously walked out of the depot to the loading platform. From our vantage point, standing right, next to the train, we were surprised by its massive size.  We were both dwarfed by the two-story tall cars and deafened by a ground vibrating, deep, sibilant hum from the locomotive engine. We stood looking about, a little confused at first, then found a conductor who looked at our tickets and directed us into a couch.
The silver-colored Coach had what appeared to be an aluminum skin with a red and blue stripe painted down the entire length. The colorful stripes continued down the length of the passenger train, running just below a row of large windows located high on the side of the passenger cars.
The Coach car stood about sixteen feet high, while passenger eye level in the second story was about fourteen feet above the ground.
There was a single door at the bottom center of the Coach and inside a luggage compartment and a spiral stairway leading to the upper, second story. There were several large sitting rooms in the down stairs level, but these were reserved for groups who were traveling together.
We walked up the stairway and made our way down the central aisle looking for four adjoining seats. The train was back in motion before we found a place to sit. I noted there were very few people in the Coach, which had seating for about sixty people; its few passengers were either sleeping or attempting to sleep.

Donna and Jane took seats on the left side of the aisle (facing forward in the train) while I took a seat next to them on the right side of the aisle. We set our coats and carry-on bags on the empty seat next to me. We settled back in our seats to survey our immediate surroundings and get a visual perspective of the terrain passing by outside our window.
We were scheduled to arrive in Chicago around 3:00 PM so would be in the Coach for about ten hours.

[Our initial Amtrak Coach seating, with less leg and seat space than in a Sleeper compartment.]

A half hour after departure, the train was moving through Minnesota’s partially wooded and snow covered countryside, traveling at forty five to fifty miles per hour.
At about 6:15AM, it was still dark, and except for the sound of the trains heavy wheels clicking on the tracks, it was peaceful and quiet. Here and there were seen isolated farm houses, their interiors seemed illuminated by a single light, probably in the kitchen where breakfasts and lunches were being prepared.

On our way to Minneapolis, as we passed through several small communities, we saw an ever-increasing number of cars and other vehicles moving along the streets and highways, all carrying their occupants to work.

Meanwhile, Jane was having a grand time, bouncing on her seat, looking out the window and exclaiming, “aat! hmmm, egh…” Once, when Jane would turn to me and say, “hi-daa!”,when  I turned to look at her, she was smiling and waving at me. I threw her a kiss.
-= xoxo =-

At 7:18AM, when we left the Minneapolis train depot, there were only eight people aboard our Coach, including the three of us. About that time, a pleasant, older, colored fellow, wearing a white jacket came through the car introducing himself as Earl Woods, ‘Chief of On Board Services’ and advising us that if there was anything we needed to just let him know. Earl pointed out a sign on the wall, at the back of our Coach which give the prices of the various beverages that were available.

Table of Beverage price list on the back wall of our  Coach

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With day break, it became lighter in the passenger car, looking around, I was able to more fully appreciate the compartment we were riding in. The Coach looked relatively new. There were a pair of seats on either side of a central aisle that ran the length of the Coach. The seats on either side of the car were staggered about six inches, so they were not directly sitting side by side.

We had wide, comfortable reclining seats, with an adjustable foot rest. An extendable, fold down table retracted from the back of each seat in front of us, allowing us a small personal space to temporarily set food, magazines, or other personal items.
The seat fabric was attractive, having been designed with various small geometric shapes and colored with combinations of soft beige, orange, dark blue, light blue and gold. The Coach walls and ceiling were covered with a rough textured carpet in beige and light brown. The floor was carpeted in an ox-blood and blue design.
Above each seat was a high intensity lamp with an adjustable beam for personal lighting, and reading at night. The lights were built into a recess above our heads which also was the bottom of a “carry-on baggage” luggage rack. The ample sized luggage racks extended down the length of the Coach and afforded lots of room for our carry-on bags, and small suitcases.

The train jiggled too much to use the table for writing my journal entries, so I decided to record  notes on a note pad. The  incidents and thoughts would be written as they were encountered, then when we returned home, I’d decipher the scribbly text and rewrite the events into my journal.

Running along beside the Mississippi River, we slowly made our way through the Twin Cities.
Beyond the windows of our cozy coach, was a cold, gray, early winter morning. Businesses were just beginning their work day. As we sped past, here and there, men could be seen, each caught up in the minuscule of their job. City streets were quite filled with traffic, as commuters hurried to their jobs, trucks were beginning to make deliveries, heavy equipment was being moved, and school busses carrying children to school.

Nearing Red Wing,Minnesota we entered hilly terrain and sped amongst the steeply sloped hills that rose abruptly one hundred fifty feet or so above the train. We continued winding through hilly terrain beside the Mississippi,  until we crossed the river and entered La Crosse, Wisconsin.

We were surprised to find that having crossed the river, there was about a five-inch accumulation of snow on the ground and high fog. As we continued across Wisconsin the snow deepen to about seven inches then gradually declined to perhaps one inch. I realized that the most recent snow storm encountered by the Midwest, must have passed to our home to the south, on a northeast track that brought the brunt of the precipitation up through central Wisconsin.

At noon, Donna opened our well stocked “food carry-on bag” and made us each a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which we had with water. We found that the train’s kitchen makes sandwiches at a cost of $2.25 each, so we saved $9.00 on the meal.

Chicago, Chicago
Approaching Chicago during mid afternoon, we passed through miles and miles of city enroute to the main passenger train depot.

While modern freeway arteries approach a city from its growing side, railroad tracks enter from what was, more or less, the prosperous part of town,  over a hundred years earlier. The once hopeful, affluent homes and attendant business’s seen from the railroad tracks, are now old and dilapidated. The streets are narrow, the neighborhoods have become home to the lower working class, ethnic and racial mixes. This is an interesting, but blighted part of America  that the automobile traveler seldom, if ever sees.

From our position high on the train and atop raised railroad tracks, I could see deep into the dingy and shadowy slum neighborhoods. I was appalled by the communities we passed through. The homes and buildings were obviously old and in various stages of dilapidation. I don’t recall seeing new paint anywhere, there were just miles and miles of decaying neighborhoods. Frequently, I saw large buildings that had been closed, their windows were boarded up. Here and there, narrow streets were blocked by delivery trucks which were backed up and unloading boxed products at steamy and foul looking docks.

That portion of the city that the train passed through was, ‘ethnic’. It was well-known and acknowledged among whites all over the USA that, “If you were driving through parts of Chicago (St. Louis, Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit, etc.) and your car broke down, they might never hear from you again.” By the looks of those neighborhoods and the thought of some elements that might arise from there, I believed it.

Union Station, the main Chicago passenger train depot was located right down town. At 3:00 PM, when we disembarked from the train, we were surprised to see the Sears Tower skyscraper, the tallest building in the world right across the street [4]. We carried our tightly packed, heavy suitcases, “carry-on bags” and the video camera bag through a long underground passage from the train yard to the depot. I don’t know how many stories high Union Station was, whether we were on the main floor or in a sub ground level area.

The depot was a rambling structure with a seeming profusion passages leading  in different directions. The central corridors were lined with many small shops which carried newspapers and magazine of all description, curios, and expensive fast food.
Even  in the dead of winter, on a Wednesday afternoon, the depot was crowded with all sorts and ‘flavors’ of people of all social rank. There was a great deal of activity, load speakers calling out arrivals and departures, people were either carrying their luggage or pulling it on small wheeled carts, many people were simply standing around chatting or being alert and watchful of the many strangers.

We sat on a long wooden bench, in a crowded Waiting Room, our suitcases stashed safely between our feet for the next hour and a half; until,it was finally time to board our train for the trip across country.

We left Union Station at 4:40PM aboard Amtrak’s, South West Chief, Sleeper Car #31, Economy Sleeper compartment #2.
We immediately found that the Sleeper cars had better suspension and provided a smoother ride than Coach cars.

From what I’d seen, my impression of Chicago and the depot were negative. I found it reassuring that there were policemen patrolling the corridors and large public rooms of the depot. As the South West Chief  traveled southwest, leaving the city, I saw graffiti spray painted on a wall, it’s message was simple and straight forward, ‘FUCK WHITES’.

Wednesday evening, supper
At dusk, after we’d just left metropolitan Chicago and were streaming through the countryside, Donna went to the Lounge car and returned with two plastic glasses filled with ice. We dug into our “carry-on food bag” and brought out a can of 7-Up soda pop and a pint of brandy. After two drinks each we began to rapidly collapse from the day’s excitement and our lack of sleep the night before.

At 6:00 PM, we went to the Diner car for supper.
For our entrée’s, Donna ordered Salmon Creole ($7.25) and I ordered Boneless Short Ribs ($8.00). We split a bottle of Burgundy wine. Each of our entrée’s was served with the following;

We had a leisurely dinner filled conversation, periodically turning to watch the outdoors pass by and excited at the experience of eating in such a nicely furnished, unique, mobile restaurant. Jane sat at the table with us, looking all about, while sampling bits of our mixed vegetables,  mashed potato and drinking from her bottle.

When our meal was finished, we brought the two cartons of milk and three dinner rolls back to the Sleeper compartment. Donna filled two of Jane’s bottles with the milk.

The Sleeper Car steward helped pull down the upper berth and make the lower seats up into beds. We visited the bathrooms, changed into our bed-clothes and crawled into bed. Donna and Jane slept together in the larger bottom berth, while I slept on the top berth, my nose only inches from the ceiling.

Wednesday, February 6, Table of Onboard expenses:

Thursday, February 7, early morning
Donna and Jane  had an eight hour sleep during the night, not awakening until nearly 5:00AM.  While Jane continued sleeping, Donna and I took turns going to the downstairs bathroom, for a wash cloth bath and to change our underwear and socks.

We awoke this morning just before reaching Hutchinson, Kansas.
Outside it was still dark.
With the cabin light on, all I could see was limited to our compartment. While Donna was washing up, I listened to a small portable radio we’d brought in the “carry-on bag”. The local, Kansas news reported, “…the low is 38ºF and we expect a high of 53ºF. President Reagan gave his second State of the Union address to Congress last night…”

I turned off the radio, settled back against my seat and looked out into the darkness beyond the compartment window. Our train gently rocked from side to side, while from beneath the train, arose the “click…click…click” sound of steel wheels rolling at a high speed on the railroad tracks.

I was coming to realize that trains were almost anachronisms of a bygone era, possibly existing today only because the US Government was subsidizing the national Amtrak system.

Railroads flourished as America expanded, during the days when raw materials were being transported from source to factory, from farm and range, to market. In those not so distant days, the land was  basically unsettled, still largely wild and pristine. There were few roads across the western territory and no economically viable alternative method for transporting large quantities of raw materials over long distances. With the discovery of oil, manufacture of automobiles and creation of the Interstate highway system, trucks came to replace much of the commercial function previously held by trains, while passenger jets move people from coast to coast in a matter of hours and at cheaper fares than offered by Amtrak.

Configuration of Amtrak’s,  Southwest Chief

C=Coach, S=Sleeper car, = Our sleeper compartment, D=Diner, L=Lounge, B=Baggage, E=Engine

 Jane awoke while Donna and I were sitting in a vacant compartment across the aisle. She pulled back the Sleeper compartment curtain and gave us a big smile, Donna gave her a bottle of milk and thus began Thursday.

Jane held up quite well during the first day of our trip, despite having been awake since 2:30AM while we were still at home, then having only a 1-1/4 hour nap during the day.

[Photo of one side of the Sleeper compartment. The small, wall hinged, folding table is shown opened for use. The individual controls for light and tempered air, to call the car attendant, etc., are in a control panel seen in  at upper left, next to the head rest. Each seat has its own set of controls. The curtains close, when necessary, to block out light and for privacy.]

Music [album: Out of Africa, I Had a Farm in Africa]

As the minutes passed, twilight extended across the land, breaking up the shroud of nights darkness and giving form to the images that passed beyond our window. It seemed strange to speed through the countryside, at 60-70 miles per hour, catching glimpses of the familiar and the unfamiliar: seeing people for just an instant, watching houses rapidly pass into, then out of view.

To me, the train and our compartment were a unit of continuity, a relatively fixed point in space. The world beyond our cabin window was in apparent continual motion, the sights it offered were brief and fleeting. Yet, I realized that to those people waiting in their automobiles at the train crossing, that our passing train and the faces in the window were similarly, fragmentary flashes in the relative continuity of their static and familiar world.

Watching isolated new houses, then isolated old houses repetitively flash past our window, suddenly gave me a deeper understanding of the visual aspects of Space travel vs. Time travel. Although the concepts were already understood, it was the process of seeing the new… old… new… old, that lent a recognizable everyday visual dimension to the concept.
The concept arose: In Space travel, the environment appears to move relative to your craft, but the houses look the same. In Time travel, the environment appears to remains stationary relative to your craft, but the houses change.

Ideas such as this, can develop while traveling on a train, because as a passenger, one becomes almost a total observer. I had not realized this effect while driving a car. While driving and even as a passenger in a car, ones attention is preoccupied with road conditions, traffic and other busy distractions.

The evening before, when we went to bed, the ground over which we crossed had about a six-inch snow cover, but this morning, west of Dodge City, Kansas, there was only a twenty percent patchy snow cover, with accumulations primarily confined to roadside ditches and occasional wooded areas.

As it became lighter outdoors, we could see to the distant horizon, and found the ground was flat with only an occasional low hill. Scattered here and there across the plain, we saw an occasional broken down windmill water pump; the old farms and families they once served, were gone. The windmills were rustic reminders of a bygone age, they were rusting sentinels in a changed land.

Corn and wheat were the primary agricultural crops raised in the southwest quadrant of Kansas. Every so often we passed a grain elevator that was built alongside the tracks.

At one point, we passed a railroad spur to a huge cattle feed lot which held many thousands of head of cattle, the lot appeared to be about a mile wide and at least a half mile deep.

Approaching the Kansas-Colorado border, the landscape gave way to sage brush with few trees. Amongst the wide expanses of low brush were 120 to 160 acre agricultural fields with a fifty percent snow cover. It was apparent that in this region, the human population density was even less than the sixteen persons per square mile density we had at home, in rural Gilman,Minnesota.

We continued our trek west, racing across the flat countryside at seventy miles per hour, occasionally reaching eighty mph.

Donna brought two cups of coffee from the Lounge car. As we sipped our brew,  we chatted while looking out the window, occasionally commenting about the interesting and desolate environment we were passing through.

An old deserted farm came into view and a few moments later, whisked by, quickly leaving our sight and falling behind the train. The house had weather worn and unpainted exterior walls, its window panes were no longer filled with glass. A broken down windmill and a stand of old trees stood in what had once been the yard, near the house.
I considered the history of the abandoned home, realizing that it was once some families place of joy and love, up until fifty to eighty years ago, perhaps earlier.

A little after 8:00 AM, Bruce Brooks, our Sleeper car steward,  brought us each a complimentary cup of coffee.
Bruce, in his mid forties, looked, talked and had an easiness of character that was amazingly like the persona of famous movie actor, Robert Redford. When we engaged him in conversation, Bruce leaned against our compartment door and continued charming us with his  friendly informative banter.

He told us that all the Amtrak passenger cars east of the Mississippi River were old cars and that those west of Chicago were newer, being made as recently as 1979 or 1980. The newer Sleeper cars, like the one we were traveling in, were too tall to go through the old, short height railway tunnels in the East.

[Riding the rails. Photocopy of my Journal drawing: Top: Route map of our travel across the midwest to Los Angeles, then up the Pacific coast and back across the northern tier of states.   Lower left: Drawing of our Sleeper Compartment. Lower right: Cut-away view of one of the Sleeper Car bathrooms. J7_931.jpg].
.
Mr. Brooks said that the track we were riding on, belonged to the Santa Fe Railroad. We were surprised to learn that the Conductor and Engineers, who work for in this case, the Santa Fe Railroad, only operate the train for about three hundred miles then are replaced by a new operations crew. However, he and the other Amtrak employees stay with the train all the way through to its final destination.

Bruce was concerned over losing his nine-year old job with Amtrak. The Federal Government was considering a large reduction in subsidies given to the Amtrak system that could have taken effect as early as that coming October.

Ever so often as we continued west, Bruce would stop by. Once he brought a newspaper I wanted, he periodically offered us coffee and was always a cheerful and pleasant person.

At 8:30, with the fresh coffee our steward provided, we opened a box of powdered cake donuts that were brought from home, and began thinking about breakfast. Once again, Donna dug into our ‘food carry-on bag’ and pulled out a meal consisting of: an orange followed by breakfast cereal. While Donna had two each four ounce boxes of Corn Flakes, I had an equal serving of Raisin Bran. The milk for our cereal was purchased from the Lounge car.

After breakfast, Donna followed Jane as the twosome began exploring the central aisle of our Sleeper car.

The Sleeper car bathroom
While the private Sleeper cabins were located along, and on either side of a central aisle on the second floor of the Sleeper car, each Sleeper car also had six bathrooms located downstairs on the first floor.

Each private bathroom was a fully enclosed unit, with a lock on the inside of the door. When locked, the locking mechanism exposed a small sign by the handle on the door’s exterior, alerting anyone who might try to use the facility that the room was “Occupied”.

The bathrooms were small, very clean and well illuminated. Their walls were sheathed in stainless steel near floor level and a lime green plastic, the rest of the way up to the ceiling.

Inside, and to the left of  the bathroom door, was a stainless steel sink with faucets for warm and cold running water. Above the sink was a large mirror, to the right of this were two 120 volt outlets for electric razors, hair dryers, etc. Immediately to the right of the sink was a liquid hand soap dispenser, on the left were built-in stainless steel compartments for trash, sanitary napkins, disposable baby diapers, etc.

Directly across from and facing the door, was a toilet that when flushed, screeched with the loud sound of a ‘rushing gurgle’. On the wall, above the back of the toilet was a fold down “diaper changing table”. Beside the toilet, and next to the sink, was a cabinet with a recess containing a roll of toilet paper. Above the recess was a built-in tray that dispensed paper hand towels at the rate of one-at-a-time.

When I said the bathrooms were small, I meant that when you’re sitting on the toilet and lean forward, your head would touch the bathroom door.
As it turned out, the bathrooms were just the right size, because their confining walls kept you from falling down while using the facility. All during the trip, our Sleeper car was jiggling and swaying, making it difficult to keep one’s balance while taking a wash cloth bath, brushing teeth or changing clothes. If it weren’t for the support offered by the walls, we’d have likely fallen to the floor and received an injury. Instead, we were periodically tossed off-balance, bounced against a wall, and somewhat thankfully, retained our footing.

Later Thursday morning
The South West Chief continued speeding along beside a highway, we were traveling much faster than the cars and trucks.

A dense ground fog we entered earlier in the morning began to burn off, as we approached La Junta, Colorado, revealing the distant terrain. We were beginning to move out of the flatness of the Great Plains, into small mesa like formations. An arid environment stretched out beside and in front of us as far as we could see. Vegetation consisted primarily of various sage and Century plants, all the plants displayed small, moisture conserving leaf forms.

Between La Junta and Trinidad, Colorado, we crossed snow covered range land. The soil was a yellowish-brown color, possibly a very sandy loam; what vegetation there was, consisted of short grass, scrub and an occasional Cholla cactus.

During our early February trip, the riverbeds we encountered were dry; their intermittent seasonal flow had in years past, cut deep arroyos into the underlying sandstone. Trees were only seen, sparsely growing along the lower banks of the riverbeds.

I noticed that over the hundreds of mile, there had slowly occurred a change in the type of cattle at pasture. In the Midwest we’d seen mostly Jersey cattle. Once out on the plains, the Jersey’s gave way to Herefords, which were a hearty range stock.

Looking through a distant blue haze that hung on the horizon to our west, we could see the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains. At the north end of the range stood 14,125 foot Mt.Lindsey. In a moment of reflection over trivia, I recalled that the Sears Tower in Chicago was one tenth the height of the mountain.

As the miles sped by and we approached Trinidad, Colorado, we noticed that the mesas were becoming larger and more pronounced geological features. The train was also slowly gaining elevation and before long we were traveling amongst gnarled Junipers.

Southeast Colorado appeared to be a dusty, ‘big sky country’, hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There was little evidence of material affluence; human subsistence appeared to be derived from cattle ranching. There were few houses and they were spread far apart. Reflecting on the conditions, I wondered how the area would be to live in after retirement, if you located relatively near shopping and medical facilities. I supposed that housing and rents would be low and the climate would be neither as cold as Minnesota nor as hot as Arizona.

Trinidad,Colorado was surrounded by high, Juniper covered mesas.  Approaching Trinidad, we began to see adobe houses and other homes with stucco siding. Indian or Mexican influences were beginning to show up in decorative symbols, such as stylized Thunderbirds, or an occasional house painted turquoise, or pink. The better looking houses in this high plain region, did not appear to associated with ranching. When we passed a mobile home park, Donna pointed out that all the homes had ‘swamp coolers’ (evaporative coolers) on their roofs.

During our cross-country trip, it was interesting to watch as the deciduous forests of southern Minnesota and Illinois gave way to the Great Plains of Kansas, then the plains gave way to the arid prairie in south-central Colorado. It had been a long time since I traveled across the southwest; it was a refreshing experience to once again see these arid lands.

Near the New Mexico-Colorado border, the train began climbing a grade  into the mountains. Our steward informed up we were gaining one hundred seventy-five feet elevation per mile of track which explained why our ears were popping to equalize pressure.
Just inside New  Mexico, at an elevation of 7,588 feet, we passed through the half mile long Rayton Tunnel.

During late morning, I videotaped our Sleeper compartment, a bathroom, the Diner car, Lounge and a Coach car. Trying to navigate through the aisle while filming was a little harrowing. The train was swaying as I walked with one eye to the camera’s viewfinder, whilst simultaneously trying to compose, narrate, tape, keep my balance and not bump into other people, like wise navigating the corridor.

We bought our video camera relatively early after the instruments became available, so not a many people were familiar with the bulky shoulder held cameras. As I walked about, trying to make the tape, people occasionally stopped to ask questions about the camera, an attempting to find out if I was shooting a private or commercial tape. The attention added to my self-consciousness, making my work all the more difficult.

In the Snack Bar, which was located on the lower deck of the Lounge car, there was a rather seedy looking Colored fellow of about twenty-five years old, sitting at a table with a white girl, who was perhaps eighteen years old. On the wall, above and behind the fellow was posted a price list of sandwiches, drinks and other goods sold at the Snack bar. While I was attempting to tape the sign, I kept my left eye open and looking about while my right eye monitored the image in the monitor, which was like a small one inch wide television. While looking about, I noticed the fellow was trying to hide his face behind one hand, yet trying not to make it obvious that he was hiding. He peered out from his hand glowering at me in a nervous and threatening manner. When I saw his body language, I figured he was probably ‘wanted’ by the law, and may have even been on the train in flight from the law.

Later, the Amtrak cooks invited me into the Kitchen galley, on the lower level of the Diner car, to tape their facilities. The galley was entirely surfaced with stainless steel. There were large work counters along one side, with a sink and water. Under the counters and along the opposite wall, were refrigeration compartments and other storage bins holding plastic cups, etc.
I was surprised to find that there were no foods actually prepared on the train. All the meal entrees were frozen and only needed  to be microwaved before serving. The mixed vegetables and tossed salad came in bulk plastic bags and were scooped out in serving sizes at meal time.

Sixty mile south of the Rayton Tunnel, we passed one of the most prominent land marks on the prairie, the Covered Wagon Mount. The shape of the tabletop mountain looked a little like the silhouette of a covered wagon, for which it was named. The train’s engineer announced that the landmark was used for navigation purposes on the prairie during the mid 19th century. I vaguely remembered that many years earlier, while passing through the area, my parents family stopped at a store or gas station in the small community.

Shortly after passing Covered Wagon Mount, we came to Watrous,  New Mexico, which was located in a small valley. Passing through the small community, while continuing to follow the old Santa Fe Trail, we saw the ruins of a wagon train “Way Station.”   I was surprised at the large size of the structure, the building’s perimeter appeared to be 60 to 70 foot square.

Thursday afternoon and evening
By 2:00 PM, we were thirty miles southeast of Santa Fe. The train was descending a steep grade, going zig zag on tracks that could be seen curving out a “S” like shape, far ahead in our direction of travel. We were descending into a huge bowl-shaped valley surrounded by distant flat-topped mesas.

Human habitations and the infrequent Cottonwood trees were seen clumped together in lower areas, near the banks of dry stream beds. Most of the rural houses were either: 1) Stucco covered, 2) faced with unpainted, weathered clapboard siding or, 3) were mobile homes. There was little discernible affluence in northeast New Mexico.

Looking across the plain, I saw that the sparse vegetation consisted primarily of grasses, more or less evenly spaced Junipers and an occasional Yucca. On the mid distant plateaus, I thought I could see Pinion and Bristle Cone Pine, while in some low areas there appeared to be Cholla or “jumping cactus”, all evidence of dry, high desert conditions.

Run off from intermittent cloud bursts had carved deep arroyos across the arid landscape. Extending across the landscape, the soil and rock strata had warm colors which ranged in pastel shades from brown, tan and red to purple. The ground was strewn full of various size shale like rock of different size. The soil color and general rockiness reminded me somewhat of Martian surface photographs returned by the Viking Martian Lander.

At fourteen and a half months of age, Jane was proving to be a great traveling companion. Although, because of her very young age, she slept longer at night than we and napped once or twice daily, but when she was awake, she played hard. It didn’t take long after we’d transferred to our Sleeper in Chicago and Jane had gotten use to the novelty of our small cabin that she began to curiously explore her environment for new adventures.

As we walked around the train, Jane discovered several pastimes that proved great fun. Firstly, she enjoyed the game like effort of trying to walk and keep her balance, while the train rocked and swayed its way along the tracks. As we’d walk down the corridor, she was occasionally thrown off balance against a compartment wall, fall on her behind (which was protected by diapers and pants) then clamber back to her feet, wide-eyed, smiling and vocalizing her approval. Secondly, she found endless pleasure climbing up and down the stairs between the Sleeper cars first and second level. Stair climbing was a new experience, not only was each step an obstacle, but the room changed perspective as she climbed. At home we had lots of neat places to explore, but nothing like stairs and a strange floor that wiggled and jumped beneath her feet.

In the vicinity of Lamy, New Mexico, we saw the remnants, perhaps the last bastion of the Hippie lifestyle.
Here and there across the local countryside, were ‘poetic’ houses made from refuse, there were cheap solar applications made from plastic sheets covering makeshift frames, we saw very old mobile homes (for their age, more aptly named “trailers” ) and a variety of vans and trucks which were converted to ‘living spaces’. Expensive modern houses were built right next to trashy, unkempt houses, and the aforementioned ‘poetic’ shelters, an interesting socioeconomic mixture that I thought would someday lead the offspring of these divergent lifestyles into intellectual and biological hybridization.

Just north of Albuquerque, New Mexico, we passed a modern Pueblo Indian community on a Reservation. At first we marveled at the couple hundred nice, free standing, government built houses and at the  modern water storage tank that stood on a hill nearby providing pressurized water to the Indian houses.

As the train grew closer, we didn’t see glass panes filling the windows of the fairly new houses. None of the Indian houses had a lawn, trees or evidence of other landscaping, the houses simply stood on almost barren sandy soil.   There were bits and pieces of trash discarded and windblown about the ‘front yards’ and across the entire community, while each back yard had its own pile of garbage and trash. Many back yards had a homemade, mud glazed, adobe bread baking oven. Parked haphazard anywhere around the houses were newer model pickup trucks, few passenger cars were seen.

I imagined that the Indians were given the houses by the US Government, but still didn’t have the cultural background, education or interest required to maintain the free dwelling or the community.

West of Albuquerque we sped through the desert.
The area was a great flat expanse that was virtually uninhabited. The soil was a brownish mix of granular sand and clay, while vegetation consisted of closely spaced sage brush measuring only six to eight inches tall. There wasn’t a tree in sight.  As we moved through this inhospitable terrain, Donna went to the Lounge car and bought us four Margaritas. We sat in our compartment sipping the drinks while quietly chatting and watching the sun set. The palate of orange sunlight, brownish soil and long purplish shadows amongst the sage was beautiful in this desolate land.

We went to the Diner car at 5:45PM for our evening meal.
Donna ordered the Boneless Short Ribs entree; I had a Half Chicken with Spanish rice. Our side dishes were the same as those served with the previous nights meal. Once again, supper was excellent, the dining experience an adventure in itself. I left the waiter a $4.00 tip.

Just after 7:00 PM, our train stopped at Gallup,New Mexico, meanwhile Jane was drifting off to sleep. Donna and I sat back for a bit of relaxation, unwinding and preparing ourselves for a good night’s sleep.

Ever since leaving Chicago, we’ve essentially had two Sleeper compartments for our daytime use. The cabin directly across the aisle from ours was empty, so we’ve used it to sit in while Jane napped, and at other times to see the best sights, or to escape from the bright sunlight, which for a while was glaring through our compartment window.

During the day, our steward, Bruce and the Diner’s waiter, provided us with five free cartons of milk for Jane. Their thoughtfulness was appreciated.

Thursday, February 7, Table of Onboard expenses:

We pulled down our berths just before 9:00 PM, then went to the bathroom to wash up and brush our teeth. Returning to our compartment we said good night and crawled into our respective beds.

Since our journey began, I’ve slept in the narrower, fold down top berth. Donna and that ‘tiny bed hog’, Jane,  have slept together on the wider bottom berth. The bottom berth was created when the two, wide, facing cabin seats were folded down thus filling the space in between.

During the few minutes that I remained awake in my bed, I thought about our day: Traveling through New Mexico brought memories I’d experienced in my youth, when our family traveled about Arizona and New Mexico during family vacations. It was pleasant to once again smell the musky earth scents of the desert. It was good to once again see the table top mesas, Cholla cactus, the miles of sage brush and dry sandy desert soil.

As we sped through the landscape there was a continual sense of adventure, undoubtedly brought about by the rocking motion of the train, traveling through a long dark mountain tunnel, seeing the parallel railroad tracks gently curve downhill to become a single line in the distance, watching distant mountains draw slowly nearer and wondering what sights lay ahead.

Friday, February 8, San Bernardino
I awoke briefly at 12:30 AM. with an uncomfortable pressure in my ears as the South West Chief rapidly descended from the mountainous region to the west side of Flagstaff, Arizona. After spending a few minutes yawning, trying to equalize the pressure in my inner ear, I drifted back into a dreamless asleep…and was again awakened at a little after 3:00AM, by the jiggling movements of the Sleeper and the need to visit the bathroom. Gingerly, I slipped down from my berth, dressed as best I could in the narrow space available, between our berths and the cabin door, then groped my way along the dimly illuminated aisle and down the stairwell to the bathroom.

Dressing in an economy Sleeper cabin when the sleeping berths were folded down, was a bump, grind, and twist proposition. There was only about a ten inch wide space between the berths and the cabins sliding glass door, just enough space to stand, but not really enough to dress. While standing there on one leg trying to reach down my side and grasp, then tug up my pants, the train was rocking and occasionally lurching, which made the initial dressing ritual- very difficult. I later found that as we approached Barstow,California, the train was running at ninety miles per hour!

We found the best way to dress, was to simply pull on ones trousers and a shirt, then while holding everything together, carry the rest of your clothes and washing materials to the bathroom to finish. When the berths were retracted, that is when they were converted, back to seats there was plenty of room for one person to change, while your companion travelers took a short walk down the train aisle.

Donna awoke and went to dress about the time I was coming back from the bathroom. We had a cup of coffee, made Jane a bottle of milk, and awaited the first leg of our trip to end.

We arrived in San Bernardino, California at 6:00 AM, twenty minutes behind schedule. A few minutes later our hosts, Mike and Kay and their children, Joe, David and Laurie arrived to pick us up.
We had a splendid trip and an exciting adventure aboard Amtrak. The best part was that we were only two days into our vacation.

Visiting with old friends[5]
Several side trips we took while visiting with Mike and Kay opened our eyes to the population changes that were occurring in the southern California, including:

Music [midi: Terminator 2]

In the desert east of L.A.
On Thursday, February 14, after our friend’s children had left for school, Mike and Kay packed a picnic lunch with plans for us to visit Joshua Tree National Monument, located about seventy miles east of Redlands.

The terrain east of Redlands was a very hot and arid desert, filled with Creosote bushes and various cactus. Eleven years had elapsed since Donna and I moved to Minnesota from the Los Angeles urban region, and about sixteen years since I’d driven on the road on which we were traveling. My memory of the desert between San Bernardino and Palm   Springs was one filled with great vistas. It had been a largely unspoiled desert where one could travel for miles and miles and not see a single human habitation, or any sign of the presence or passing of Man. It was a place where one would occasionally see a solitary hawk, or perhaps a flock of buzzards circling high on the thermals. The only other things I ever saw move in those miles and miles of desert were an occasional grasshopper and a distant “dirt devil” whirlwind.

Over the preceding sixteen years, things had changed! There had been a staggering amount of residential building east of San   Bernardino and Redlands, urbanization extended  miles into the desert on either side of the highway.
There were large subdivisions built in places so hot, sandy and forbidding that I thought the area would remain unsettled well into the 21st Century. Alas, the scenic desert vistas had become broken into patches of development and large clusters of homes. Looking to the distant horizon, one could see smoke-signal like dust trails, rising behind far away cars that traveled down gravel roads. (Note: California built out its freeway system and expanded greatly into counties such as Riverside and San Bernardino. Indeed, in San Bernardino County, population quadrupled from 1960 to 2010, from five hundred thousand to over two million, with the attendant homes, public infrastructure, state highways, and freeways.)

Laid out across the desert in a grid like pattern, were the local distribution poles for electric and telephone service, while coming around the mountains from Los Angeles, were large steel, power transmission towers carrying electricity to Palm Springs.

Worst of all, were the wind generators, those industrial creations of favorable tax finance, who looked like hoards of leviathans  with steel spines rising from the soil. Spread across the desert valley’s and extending up along the top of the foothills on either side of the freeway, were hundreds and hundreds, perhaps thousands of wind generators. Having never seen a “Wind Farm” (where the wind is harvested) I initially thought the sight was interesting, but only as a novelty.

Of course Man had “harvested” the wind for quite some time to drive sailing ships, to rotate the grinding wheels a wind mill, to pump water for livestock and rural homes, but the wind farms were a new phenomena. As an effort to develop wind-electric generator technology, experimental work had been done in particularly windy locations along  the northeastern U.S. seaboard and in the San Francisco area during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The wind farms were apparently in the late experimental and early industrial production phase during 1985. The towers had diverse designs, height and construction, as were the types of generators, number of generators per tower and the number of airfoil blades on the rotors.

The generator towers were not uniformly spread across the desert. Here and there, over the  approximately ten  to fifteen square mile area, were large groups of generators laid out in a checker board grid. From the layout, spacing and technology seen on the ‘farms,’ it was evident there was some combination of the following factors at play:  1) Corporate land ownership was probably not continuous across the valley and hills;  2) There were experimental divisions within and between farms based on tower structure, airfoil numbers, airfoil type, etc.;  3)  There may have been different tax requirement, tax needs and tax incentives at work with the different corporate owners;  4) There appeared to be different levels of advancement in the technology between one  ‘farm’ and another. In any respect, there was a lot more diversity evident than could be justified by slightly differing wind gradients across the ‘wind farming area’.

All that I saw, was an explosive continuation of urban sprawl and technological blight spread across the desert. If the southern California infrastructure continues to support such rapid growth over the next century, then all those currently new, nice looking desert communities may become slums and the desert will have been trashed. Where in lies the value? Where does the water come from?

Lunch at Bob’s Big Boy
On Saturday, February 16, while we were all in Pasadena visiting the ‘old Howard Street neighborhood’ (Chapter 1959), we stopped at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant near the corner of Lake  St .and Colorado  Blvd. for lunch. I walked out of the parking lot to stand beside Lake St. in order to get a good vantage from which to videotape the familiar, mountain configurations. It so happened that few minutes earlier, when we were in the old neighborhood, a mere two miles north, we could see the mountains, but from our downtown location, the smog obscured their detail. Try as I may, I couldn’t see the mountains in the viewfinder nor get their image on videotape.

A moment later, when our party entered Bob’s Big Boy restaurant, a hostess asked, ‘Smoking or non smoking?’ Her inquiry was a question commonly asked before determining where to seat a restaurant’s patrons. In a joking and slightly mocking voice, I asked, ‘What difference does it make with the smog so bad you can’t see the mountains?’ The hostess gave me a dead pan look and thankfully didn’t reply to my comment. A little embarrassed, from having stated the obvious to a disinterested functionary employee, I still found it a little macabre that the residents should worry about protecting their lungs for thirty minutes when eating, while their homes, jobs and lives were spent submerged in a yellowish-gray sea of air pollution, with a visibility of less than two miles.

El Monte revisited
After lunch, Mike and Kay took us southeast through El Monte so Donna and I could see the apartment we’d lived for a couple of years just prior to our move to Minnesota.

Our entourage almost missed the 11633 Basye Street apartment address in El Monte as there had been a lot of change in the community since we lived there.
We turned onto Basye Street knowing that the driveway entrance into the apartment complex was still a block down the road. Donna and I were filled with enthusiasm, little realizing that about three minutes later we’d again be at that same corner leaving this neighborhood in stunned disbelief.
In the time it took us to drive that one short block, someone in the van pointed to a window in the apartment complex which had been broken and was then simply covered with a newspaper taped over the hole. Someone else pointed to the fact that bed sheets were being used as an alternative to curtains, over apartment windows.

Just before we turned into the  apartment parking lot, we passed a black, dilapidated ‘bean wagon’ (Mexican gang style car). Sitting inside and standing outside, leaning against the vehicle were six or seven Mexican males all appearing to be in their twenties and early thirties. All were wearing plain white T-shirts with the short sleeves rolled up, all were drinking beer or wine. Since it was illegal to openly drink alcoholic beverages in public, most were drinking from bottles kept ‘out of sight’ in paper sacks. They looked like a tough bunch and were probably part of a loosely affiliated local gang.

Feeling a little apprehension, we turned into the parking lot and drove toward the rear, where there was an area to turn around. Originally, we’d intended to get out of the van and videotape the ol’ apartment complex, however, the disintegration seen about the neighborhood made us decide to stay in the vehicle. Between Mike’s $25,000 to $30,000 van, our manner of dress, the video equipment, etc., we’d be prime targets for robbery in this type of neighborhood.

As we drove slowly through the parking lot, we looked through the breezeway hoping to glimpse the swimming pool. We could see the small commons lawn had been replaced by gravel. The walls along the back of the complex had been profusely sprayed with graffiti.

Parked about the parking lot were several more ‘Bean wagons’ in various states of decomposition. The ‘Bean wagons’ all shared similar characteristic, regardless of how old or dented the paint job or auto body had become. They all had either a black or purple paint job; all displayed shiny, expensive hub caps; there was some combination of  decorator cloth fringe around the windows; fake fur on the dash board; religious figurines and-or other gadgetry dangling from the rear view mirror; all were older, cheaper model cars.

Mike turned the van around at the back of the parking lot, near a growing pile of refuse. At the spot where Donna and I use to park our car and motorcycle, we noted that an adjacent privacy fence had been sprayed with graffiti and partially knocked over, undoubtedly having been rammed by a car. At this point everyone was anxious to leave the neighborhood and get back out amongst the anonymity of traffic that flowed down Peck   Road, this was not the kind of place to stop.

When we turned out of the parking lot back out onto Basye Street, someone pointed to a peculiar sight, something we’d missed a couple of minutes earlier. In the apartment complex across the street from ‘ours,’ each apartment had its own private balcony. A decade earlier, people were frequently seen sitting out on their balcony reading the newspaper, talking, or having a barbecue. Things had really changed! Nearly every balcony had sprouted a spider web like clothes line, each filled with laundry. The scene was jarring, because of the juxtaposition between a relatively modern apartment buildings and a ‘turn of the century’ tenement district.

Several blocks further south on Peck Road, we passed the location where there had once been a large thriving shopping center. The buildings remained, however, all the retail merchants had left and the store windows were boarded over with sheets of plywood. We drove past the two-city-block-size site, our mouths agape with surprise. Pieces of paper, a few cans, an automobile tire and a few pioneer weeds were all that graced the huge parking lot where we once browsed and shopped.

In 1974, the ratio of ‘whites’ to other races in El Monte had been about 85:15, by this time, our 1985 visit, the ratio had reversed. Over that short period of time, whites hadn’t just drifted out of the area, they were apparently in full retreat. Meanwhile, the working class neighborhood had become  impoverished. Almost overnight, as time is measured in the affairs on Man, El Monte became become a Third World city [6].

Music [midi: Terminator 2]

Tuesday, 19 February, “All Aboard!”
After a great visit with Mike, Kay and the kids, our time to leave arrived.
On the morning of our departure, we traveled from San Bernardino to Los Angeles in an Amtrak coach.  The large Coach compartment was clean, comfortable and identical to the one we rode in from St. Cloud to Chicago a couple of weeks earlier. Once again there were few people riding in the Coach, so we had pairs of adjacent seat on either side of the aisle.

The three of us were feeling ‘a little under the weather,’ when we left, undoubtedly a result of all the nervous excitement we’d experienced traveling, eating different foods, and the changes in our daily habits and schedule. Donna had a sore throat, I felt puny, as if I were on the verge of coming down with a cold, and Jane was cranky.

Although the ride to Los Angeles was only sixty miles, it provided a very interesting overview of the Los Angeles Urban Region.

Around 6:30 AM, at mornings first light, we crossed over the new eight lane #210 Freeway, once again traveling through communities from a vantage point few people see. I sat silently by the window, grimly observing as the train passed through residential neighborhoods, behind industries and near retail centers. It was disheartening to see a continual eyesore of refuse built up just out of sight of the roads that passed by the front of the buildings. I wondered why, with the trash collection facilities available, the people didn’t pick up their effluent.

In one large working class community, individual back yards fell into three fairly evenly divided categories: 1) Clean and well-kept, reflecting the pride of ownership; 2) Trashed, with stripped automobiles and auto parts laying about, as well as junk and refuse of unknown origin scattered about the yard. 3) Yards that had literally reverted back  to the wild, complete with knee-high or taller grass and weeds, bushes that had over the decades  escaped care and spread profusely, and small trees some of which simply died in years past and now stood without their bark.

Business’s in Los Angeles made liberal use concertina wire, more so than in any other city seen during our trip. We saw many places of business with the razor-sharp ‘ribbon’ style concertina strung in winding bands along the top of chain link security fencing and, or, along the top perimeter of business roof tops.

Several times, while crossing the city we saw the symbols “D swastika T.” Upon inquiry we were told it meant, ‘Dog of a Town’, a symbolic reference to the oppression, ostensibly used by whites, to keep the poor ‘Chicano’ population in poverty. Where ever Mexican graffiti has a social message it is aimed at whites. Most of the graffiti consisted of names or terms (probably much of this is gang related), i.e.: JOC ROC NO 1,   El Chino, TONY“, etc.. Some of the Mexican inspired graffiti was even a little artistic, at least more so than what we saw in the Colored ghettos of the upper Midwest.

We arrived at the Union Station depot in Los Angeles  at 7:20 AM and found some comfortable chairs for our two and a half hour layover.

Union Station depot was a large, older building, looking ever so much like it had been constructed during the 1930s or 1940s. It’s wide floor space was ‘T’ shaped, while the floors themselves were of inlaid marble that was well polished. The building had a very high wooden ceiling, so high in fact, that several pigeons had made their home inside. The half dozen or so birds freely flew about, well above our head, as they went from location to location watching for crumbs of food on the floor.

There were very few people in the depot, so it was rather quiet, but whenever someone coughed or dropped a suitcase, the noise seemed to echo through the empty expanse of the building. Along the ‘lower leg of the T’, was the depot’s main Waiting Room where Donna, Jane and I sat. At juncture the ‘top of the T’,  was a forty-foot wide by thirty foot high arch. Almost beneath the arch was a coffee shop and a magazine store. Beyond the arch and down either side wing of the depot, were more Waiting Rooms with polished wooden benches, large clean bathrooms and ticket booths. We chatted for a while then took turns watching the luggage and browsing around the building, going to the bathroom, and visiting the News shop.

About 9:30 AM we heard an announcement over the station intercom, stating, “First Call to Board the Coast Starlight Number, Number 14, at Gate E!” Shortly thereafter we boarded the train and chose vacant cabin #4, in Sleeper car #2.

While the train prepared to leave, our sleeper car attendant, Jonathan Davis, introduced himself saying he would  be with us to Portland,Oregon. Mr. Davis was about a thirty-five year old white man, with black hair that was beginning to gray. He had a medium build, stood about 5 foot 8 inches tall and had a slight tendency to stutter.

About 1:00 PM we were an hour north of Los Angeles and traveling amongst steeply sloped coastal hills. The hills were covered with lush vegetation, various grasses and brush which at this time of year made them a pleasant green. Among the hills were moderate value homes situated on five to ten acre lots. Many of the homeowners were seen raising a couple of horses, complete with horse sheds and white painted wooden cross fencing. I surmised that being so close, within commuting distance of a major Los Angeles suburb, that the acreage might cost as much, if not more than the house its self.

Ever so often we passed more gentle slopes that were planted to lemon orchards.
As the train came out into a widened valley between the hills, we found much of the flat space planted to vegetable crops. The tillable ground  appeared to be a sandy loam. Long, removable, irrigation lines had been stretched out along the crops rows in several fields and a fine mist could be seen spraying out over the vegetables. A couple of men were standing nearby in each irrigated field, probably waiting a given amount of time to move the sprinklers.

Approaching Oxnard, California, the train moved away from the coastal hills and inland onto a flat plain. Essentially the entire plain was planted to citrus orchards or vegetable row crops. Here and there in the large vegetable fields were groups of migrant Mexican workers. In one field they were picking cauliflower, in another lettuce, elsewhere broccoli and cabbage. While most of the workers were bent over picking the vegetables, then placing them in either a wooden tray or cardboard box, others had the duty of carrying the filled containers to a nearby truck that followed as they progressed across the field.

Configuration of Amtrak’s, Coast Starlight

C=Coach, S=Sleeper car, = Our sleeper compartment, D=Diner, L=Lounge, C-C=Coach with Crew quarters, B=Baggage, E=Engine

Afternoon and evening
Donna went to the Snack bar at noon and bought back two cans of soda pop, where upon, we had a picnic lunch of Italian sausage sandwiches, that Mike and Kay made for us that morning.

By early afternoon the train had moved back to running along the Pacific coast.  North of Oxnard we traveled through miles of sand dunes, where all we saw was dense chaparral brush, telephone or electric power lines and the rail road track. There were  long expanses where no other traces of Man could be seen.

WHile the sky was overcast in the morning,it cleared during the early afternoon. Meanwhile, a strong and continuous wind blew across the landscape, buffeting the chaparral and causing the grasses to dance on the sand dunes, making the vegetation appear to be in a rushing current.

Having lived in Minnesota for eleven years, we found it enjoyable looking out over the ocean, where we could see spray blown from the white caps, and watching waves break along the shoreline. At one point, we watched two fishing trawlers at work about a half mile out. Nearer shore, several hundred sea gulls were bobbing about in the water, while several thousand gulls stood on shore watching. I guessed that the fishermen and birds were waiting for a school of fish to arrive.

Ever so often we passed an offshore oil platform. The platforms appeared to be one to two miles from shore and were spaced between five to ten miles apart along the coast.

A sudden announcement over the trains intercom system startled us, stating, “In California, smoking cigars or pipes may be done only in private cabins or rest rooms. Marijuana is illegal and may not be smoked at all on the train…”

The announcement continued, listing a variety of rules, regulations and restrictions of which I did not take note. Interestingly, California has found it necessary to expound rules and regulations, more than all the other states that we’d traveled through, combined. From my brief and limited observation, particularly in the southern half of California, the residents are engrossed in a plethora of legal sensibilities to the point of ad nauseum. It reminded me of the hostess at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Pasadena, who inquired, ‘Smoking or non smoking’, before seating us, while outdoors, visibility was limited to less than two miles by the smog.

We went to the Diner car for our 5:30PM table reservation. Donna and I both ordered the prime rib entrée, which came with steamed mixed vegetables, mashed potatoes, a variety of warm dinner rolls, tossed salad, and milk.

During the first half of our meal (about twenty miles south of Salinas, California), we watched the sun slowly sinking behind the coastal range mountains. In the distance, we could see fog moving inland, seeping amongst the valleys, between the hills and surrounding their bases. We had a quiet supper, enjoying the sunset and sights that whisked by, relaxing after another fun and event filled day.

Returning to our cabin, we opened several premixed Margarita’s and sat back to take in the view while we chatted amongst ourselves. Low in the darkening western sky, we watched Venus become visible.
Before long it was pitch dark outside and our attention turned inward to chatting and playing with Jane.

As we came around a hill and began descending, suddenly we had a large panoramic vista, one which offered quite a visual impact: At an elevation below us and extending for miles, was a virtual sea of illuminated dots. The air was crystal clear making the myriad of lights appear to be sparkling jewels or a sprinkling of Fairy dust. There were a great number of amber street lights intermingled with red ‘stop lights’ and green ‘go lights.’ Scattered about, were the long display lights seen on billboards, while all across this spectacular menagerie were the moving lines of automobile headlights and red auto tail lights, several floodlights were moving about criss-crossing in the sky.

As we drew nearer, muted whitish-yellow and yellowish- gray interior house lights became visible. Occasionally, when we passed a home near the rail road track, we could see into the windows where there appeared to be lights of variegated color, emanations from the household’s color television. It looked so dreamy and peaceful outside amongst the lights.  When we crossed a freeway overpass, the sight of  high density traffic brought me back to the realization that beyond our cabin window was a teeming mass of humanity and that we were entering San Jose, California–a major sprawling city.

Music [Album/midi: A.I., Dreams]

Wednesday, February 20, In silence
I awoke at 4:00 AM, wiggled into my clothes and went to the bathroom.
Returning to our cabin, I found that Donna had folded the bottom berth back in the seat configuration, then crawled into the top berth with Jane to get a little more sleep. I turned on a small overhead personal lamp in the lower seat, retrieved my pencil and note pad from our ‘carry-on case’ and looked out the darkened window to get my bearings.
Outside, it was very dark and overcast. I surmised we were in the mountains, because the infrequent lights I saw were well below our elevation and far, far away. To my right rear, shining from a nearly recessed fixture on the wall was a high intensity lamp which I’d switched on allowing me to see and write. As we rolled on through the night, the train swayed this way and that, making the bright circle of light on my stenographers pad move back and forth with small swirling jumps.

Looking about, and listening, I noted how very quiet it was aboard the train during that early hour. The only audible sounds were the “rumble, rumble, clack, clack” of the trains heavy wheels on the track and the “jiggle, jiggle, squeak, squeak” of our Sleeper compartment door.

Our cabin door was closed and its heavy privacy curtain pulled shut. Sitting in the small compartment with the upper berth folded down to within inches above my head and unable to see out into the Sleeper car’s corridor made it feel like I was inside a mechanical womb. Thinking about this, I realized that private cabins that will exist on early space stations and our first manned planetary probes will undoubtedly be something like this. Of course they will be designed with concepts of human engineering and therefore adequate, but they maybe too small for many personal memento’s a pioneer would like to have brought along. The inadequacies will only become meaningful after the first few weeks, when the excitement evolves into routine.

I came out of my early morning daydream when a growing discomfort in my ears was suddenly relieved, and the air pressure was equalized. Although it was too dark to see out the cabin window, I realized we were changing elevation and were definitely in the mountains.

Around 6:00AM, Donna and Jane got up and dressed. About that time, we were gaining elevation, and skirting Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon.
The train was not moving so fast as it wound its way through the mountains.
As light from the morning sun diffused through the cloudy sky  and down amongst the valleys, we saw we were traveling through a pine forest which had about an eighteen inch snow cover. A sign posted along the railroad tracks pointed out Sharp Peak (elevation 5,960) several miles to our west. Our map showed the peak to be very near Crater Lake National Park.

Later, as we crossed the Cascade Mountain Range, enroute to Portland, Oregon, the snow became quite deep.  We could see from the freshly graded piles of eight foot high, canyon-like snow, beside the track, that the railways snow removal equipment had recently been at work.

As the Coast Starlight creaked along its steel trail on the side of the mountain, I craned my  head to look up the nearby slope. There were large pines with heavy snow loads on their boughs extending up the mountainside as far as the sky. Beside the train, the snow banks were becoming very deep making me wonder about the possibility of an avalanche.

[Photograph taken from our Coast Starlight Amtrak train, as it traveled through the wintry mountains of  the Pacific northwest.]

For a few moments, the sun broke through the clouds and cascaded down between layers of low flying clouds, creating a very beautiful and panoramic sight. Above and around us were ominous dark gray clouds, yet far below us and bathed in brilliant sunlight, were clouds clinging to the mountain slopes and spread intermittently along the valley floor. It was as though we were traveling through a great crystal palace with shimmering light, snow-covered conifers and bright colors. The brilliance was contrasted by bands of dark clouds that scudded past overhead, white and gray trees beside the tracks and the ghostly fog crowned mountain tops.

This magical apparition was short-lived, because after a few minutes, we entered a cloud bank and our view of the mountains and valley melted away. Inside the fog, our world shrank and became a mottled gray, all that was visible were the hulking masses of conifer trees that passed only a few yards from the Sleeper car windows.

As we descended from the higher mountain elevations, the snow depth rapidly decreased from about five feet, to one foot, then to a few inches. When we passed McCredie Springs, along Oregon Highway#58, enroute to Eugene, there was no snow at all. West of McCredie Springs, the conifer forest gave way to a leafless deciduous forest as we traveled down a long meandering valley. Running through this valley was a shallow fifty foot wide rushing river, with green water. In the valley, everything was wet, there was moss was growing on the tree trunks and in patches on the ground, mud puddles were seen practically everywhere. A timely message was broadcast over the trains intercom, pointing out that this time of year was Oregon’s ‘monsoon season’.

I had always though Oregon was a mountainous state, but found to my surprise that between Eugene and Portland, the soil was low and almost waterlogged. Along this leg of our route there was a lot of very shallow standing water and waterlogged land. The standing water, short grass and gray skies made me think one might expect to see a similar sight traveling in Holland or any area recently reclaimed from the sea. We learned that most of the mint raised in the United States, comes from this area of cool moistness.

Wednesday afternoon
We arrived at Portland, Oregon at 1:30 PM, ending our ride north on Amtrak’s  Coast Starlight. We had a three-hour layover in Portland before boarding Amtrak’s Empire Builder, which would return us to St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Boarding the Empire Builder, we found ourselves in a brand new Sleeper car, which had an upstairs bathroom, only five steps from our cabin!

Leaving Portland, we crossed the Columbia River into Washington and began traveling west. At this time our train was quite short, consisting of only four cars. Since our Sleeper was the last car in the train we took the opportunity to stand at the  open ‘back door’ and watch the edge of town, then the rural environment pass behind us. It was an interesting and unique perspective.

Initial Configuration of Amtrak’s, Empire Builder

S=Sleeper car, = Our sleeper compartment, C=Coach, L=Lounge,  E=Engine

Before long, Jane began rubbing her ears and crying, a sure sign that she was overly tired and wanted to sleep. Donna changed her into her fuzzy, soft pink pajamas and placed her on the top berth for a nap. After supper, which we ate in our cabin, Donna and I had a margarita as we relaxed before going to sleep. We climbed into our berths at 8:00 PM under clear, starry skies and fell right asleep.

The train continued to speed across Washington.

Wednesday, February 20, Table of Onboard expenses:

Sometime during the night we awakened briefly, just long enough to realize our train had stopped in the Spokane, Washington railroad yard, where other cars were being connected to the Empire Builder.

Thursday, February 21, Mountain & Plain
It was a pleasant and exciting experience to awaken each morning to the “rumble rumble clack clack” sound of the train’s heavy wheels on the track and the “jiggle jiggle squeak squeak” of our compartment’s door. The sounds and swaying movement of the train seemed to bracket our day with the promise of adventure, interesting new sights and experiences.
In a moment of reflection, I recalled traveling by train with my mother. That was in 1946. We took the train from Chicago to Seattle to visit with my father who was on leave from the Navy, then we traveled back to Chicago. I was four years old at the time and on a train that went through St Cloud, Minnesota and traveled the very tracks the Empire Builder was now traveling.

At 3:00AM Thursday morning, we climbed from our berths to greet the day. Even though we were up quite early, we felt as refreshed as though we had a full night’s sleep. So as not to disturb Jane, we quietly converted the bottom berth back into seats, then moved Jane unto the top berth to finish her night’s rest. While one of us stayed with Jane and our belongings, we took turns going to the bathroom, to brush our teeth and take a delightful, early morning wash cloth bath.

As soon as we were both washed and dressed, Donna went to the Diner car and brought us each back, a cup of coffee. While Donna was gone, I checked the train schedule against a map of the western United States and  found we were near the Idaho-Montana border.

Note: Even though there was no one up and about in the Diner car at 3:00AM, we previously found that the Conductors always kept two pots of coffee warm overnight– for the engineers and himself. It was from this special supply that we had been getting our early morning coffee, ever since our second morning aboard Amtrak, two weeks earlier.

Before dawn, we entered the seven miles long Flathead Tunnel, the second longest railway tunnel in the Western Hemisphere. The interior walls of the tunnel appeared to be only about four feet from the side of the railway cars and about the same distance above the roof. About every half mile there was a recession in the tunnel wall that was large enough for several people to stand. These were the only areas in the tunnel which were illuminated. During the nine minutes that we were in the tunnel we must have been changing elevation, because my ears felt discomfort and popped several times to equalize pressure.

When  the sun first peeked above the horizon, we were leaving Whitefish,  Montana and winding up into the towering landscape of the Rocky Mountains; continuing to gain elevation, we worked our way back into the mountain range. The sky was dismal, overcast and gray, the ground covered with eight to ten inches of snow.
Before long we were skirting the southern border of Glacier National Park. The crests and saddles of all the mountains were covered with snow. Many of the north facing slopes carried so much snow that few trees had found a niche to grow. Meanwhile, southern facing slopes were covered with dense coniferous forest.

Occasionally, we’d pass an isolated rural house and see a TV satellite dish in the yard. It was strange, but not surprising to see backwoods homes with satellite dishes, television might be amongst the only socialization some of the residents have for weeks on end during major snowstorms.

We noted that in the high mountain valleys, that houses were built with steep angled roofs, so snow would easily slide off. Where the snow was seen to have slid off a roof, it lay heaped in a pile four feet high along the sides of the house. Some houses had a very heavy snow load on their roof. One deserted cabin roof had collapsed under the snow. Passing through the small community of Essex, we saw wisps of bluish gray wood smoke exiting  home chimneys, the sparse community looked warm, peaceful, and friendly, but seemed very remote.

Slightly ominous thoughts came to mind when I thought about the combined factors of that environment: The inhospitably rugged and rocky mountains; the nearly isolated small homes that possibly depended to a large degree on their fireplaces for heat; the deep snow packs; the obviously cold, long winters and short growing seasons found there on the edge of Glacier National Park [7].

We rolled through Marias Pass, elevation 5,216 feet at 8:30AM, thus crossing the Continental Divide, which incidentally was the lowest pass between Canada and New Mexico.
Just east of the pass summit, we entered a strange land, made up of small knolls. The windward side of these rock hills were windswept, barren and clean, but on the lee side, lay snow drifts twelve feet high. As we passed through this high area, hunger over took us so we folded down our cabin’s small table and dug into the ‘food carry-on bag’ for breakfast. Donna had two each small boxes of Special K cereal, while I had two small boxes of Corn Flakes. We bought milk for our cereal from the Snack bar.

A mere forty-five minutes after crossing Marias Pass, we were rapidly descending from the mountains, moving eastward out onto an immense treeless, grassy plain. As the miles passed, we moved further and further out onto what became the practically featureless and visually boring Montana flat land. Looking back, behind us, to our west, we could see clouds obscuring the peaks of the Rocky Mountains where we had just been.

By the time the train reached Cut Bank, Montana, we were seeing evidence of ‘strip farming’.
In an attempt to control soil erosion, winter wheat was planted in strips about one hundred feet wide and up to a mile long. Between the tilled strips were fallow strips of the same length, so that only one half of a field was under tillage at any one time.

About one hundred fifty miles out onto the Montana plains, we passed perhaps a half dozen small communities with a combined population of maybe six thousand people.

As the Empire Builder traveled east, paralleling the US-Canadian border, which laid some twenty-five miles to our north, we passed across miles and miles of land without seeing a single house; I estimated the population density to be on the order of one person per square mile.

When we approached a small town, it made me think of how it might look approaching an oasis, these were the only places where deciduous trees grew. The newer houses were mobile homes, most of which were clumped together in small mobile home parks. There was no urban sprawl, a communities homes were all located close by one another. I didn’t see any evidence of affluence, infact, most everything looked old, haphazardly set in place and well used. Although there was an agricultural base across the state, the farms appeared to be enormous, being simply grain based. I had no idea what the majority of the people did there for a living.

With an unobstructed sky and no appreciable incandescent light scatter, an astronomy hobbyist with telescope could have the perfect observatory– for part of the year.

The environment looked so dry, I wondered where, in centuries past, the Blackfoot Indians and huge herds of buffalo got their water. Looking at the miles of grain fields it was easy to assume that when 19th Century ‘Whites’ killed off the buffalo, that Man eventually replaced beast as a consumer of grains that had grown there.

Meanwhile, as we traveled, I spent some time each day taking notes for my journals, playing with Jane and chatting with Donna. Jane frequently sat on Donna’s lap, while the two read stories, or Jane sat on the floor playing with a doll. Every so often, Jane would accompany one of us as we walked through the train. Occasionally, we’d sit in the Observation car’s swivel seats and look at the passing terrain through the large window,s that curved up over the top of the train.

[Photograph, Amtrak Observation car. Standing in the second story, Amtrak Observation car, with its side facing swivel seats. A lower floor (stairs center left at dark colored sign) has a snack bar, couch, several tables and a television.]

Several times, we sat in the sofas and browsed through magazines in the Observation Car or went down stairs to the Snack bar. When Jane became tired, we’d let her sleep on a seat in the empty cabin directly across the hall from ours. Occasionally, Donna and Jane would sit together in the adjacent cabin, until Jane fell asleep.
We certainly had a great trip to California and the return trip was equally as nice. We fell in love with traveling by train.

Crew and passengers
As previously mentioned, our family walked through the train several times, exploring and on round about trips to either the Diner, or combined Observation car – Snack bar. During several trips, we counted the number of people and found the train was carrying about of one hundred sixty passengers, and was therefore loaded to fifty seven percent capacity. The numbers entered  in the following diagram, directly below the Sleeper and Coach cars, represent the estimated ‘full capacity’ of these cars, not counting the Amtrak crew.

Configuration of Amtrak’s, Coast Starlight

S=Sleeper car, = Our sleeper compartment, C=Coach, D=Diner, L=Lounge, C-C=Coach with Crew quarters, B=Baggage, E=Engine

As we found earlier, the train’s crew was made up from two groups: 1) The railroad employees who operated the train and, 2)  the Amtrak employees who ran the passenger services. The following lists show the jobs of each crew member, we guessed at their job title’s.

There were eighteen ‘operations and service’ personnel on a train carrying about one hundred sixty passengers. Discussing this with our Sleeper Car attendant, we found that during summer months, the train is continuously filled to capacity and reservations for a Sleeper cabin must be made months in advance.

At Havre, Montana, the train stopped in a railway yard to refuel, dump garbage, and recharge the toilet’s water reserve. The stop was long enough for us to get off the train, and give us the opportunity to look around at the large freight yard which contained ten or eleven sets of parallel side tracks. On one track sat twenty-one flatbed cars loaded with new wooden railroad ties. On another track  there were more than thirty grain hopper cars strung together with an additional assortment of tankers, box cars and some unknown types of what looked like railroad track maintenance equipment.

About seventy miles east of Havre, our train was sidetracked at Wagoner, Montana waiting for a west-bound train to pass. It was an unusual ‘town’ with a history.

We were surprised that Wagoner was even shown on the map as being a town, because it consisted of only about six very old buildings sitting in the midst of the huge, featureless Montana plains. Most of the buildings, which I took to be houses, were built fairly close together, huddling together while surrounded by vast empty spaces. Some of the buildings appeared to be uninhabited, all were weather-beaten and none were painted. Scattered everywhere amongst the buildings were a decades old accumulation of trash. There were soda pop and beer cans, papers and countless pieces of various flotsam laying about.  There were several rusting automobiles bodies from earlier decades of this century as well as a couple broken down autos from more recent eras. Dotting the landscape  in and about Wagoner, were automobile tires, a rusting metal bed frame with springs, all partially covered by sand. Several houses had sagging unpainted fences. We didn’t see any people moving about outdoors or any newer vehicles, so I couldn’t tell if the ‘town’ was  deserted or not. If Wagoner wasn’t a ghost town it certainly was well on its way, whatever happened to the town, it had seen better days– a long, long time ago.

It was right there, in Wagoner, in 1901, (probably within only a few yards from where we sat) that Kid Curry, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid jumped and robbed the Great Northern Oriental Limited.
Looking out the high window in our Sleeper compartment, I could almost see the robbery plan. Geographically, Wagoner was located about half way between Chicago and Seattle, Washington. The gang had come in by horseback over the plains. I wondered how long they waited, in what must have been the ‘busy’ young frontier town of Wagoner before the train arrived. Old photographs I’d seen of the three bandits, showed they were all well dressed and looked rather “dandy” to be way out in the middle of Montana. Surely, their presence must have raised some questions in the wild and woolly days of 1901. In any respect, the Great Northern stopped to take on water when the outlaws overcame the train’s crew. The gang blew up the Express car and rode out across the plains with $68,000, a large sum of money for the turn of the century. [In 2011 the purchasing power of their $68,000 take would be equivalent to around $2,000,000,000!]

Thursday’s supper reservations
At 5:55 PM an announcement was made over the trains intercom stating, “Person’s holding 6:00 o’clock dinner reservations may now come to the Diner.”  That would be us, and a few others… (smile)

When we arrived at the Diner car, the Maitre de directed us to our table. The tables were set on either side of an aisle along the windows. Each table had a complement of four wooden chairs, two on each side of the table;  each table was covered with a clean, textured, tablecloth.

Several dinner accouterments had already been placed on the table before we arrived.
In the center of the table, near our window was a clear glass vase with a fake, but realistic looking yellow pedaled flower. Although the flower wasn’t real, it’s presence added a sense of elegance to the experience. Beside the vase sat a small oblong container  containing small packages of sugar and imitation sweeteners. Set beside the sugar and sweetener container was a small bowl with individual servings of whipped butter. Beside the vase was a stainless steel wire rack which held three stainless steel bowls. Each bowl contained a half dozen or more small, individual serving size packages of salad dressing, blue cheese, French and Italian dressing. Our sturdy, white plastic eating utensils were neatly wrapped in napkins at each place setting.

Soon after being seated, our waiter set each of our places with a plastic glass of water, handed Donn and me a menu and bid us a good evening.

A few minutes later, the waiter returned for our order, and left a basket containing a variety of five very tasty warm dinner rolls. The rolls were wrapped and covered with a white cloth napkin to help retain the warmth.

That evening I ordered Meatless Lasagna ($5.00), while Donna had the Boneless Short Rib dinner ($8.00).

Shortly after we’d placed our order, our waiter brought us each a Styrofoam bowl filled with a crisp, lettuce and tomato tossed salad. The salad consisted of a mixture of various types of lettuce and a single large wedge of tomato. We immediately chose our preference of a small container of salad dressing from the previously mentioned stainless steel bowls that sat on our table. The protective film of tinfoil and plastic was peeled off the top of the containers and the individual size serving of dressing was poured over the salads.
[View into the Diner car, where we enjoyed tasty, sunset suppers whilst traveling through the scenic western countryside.  The kitchen is located downstairs.]

Next, we peeled the tinfoil-plastic film off our small tubs of whipped, imitation butter and scooped the contents out onto our dinner roll. By that time, the waiter had returned with three cartons of milk and a set of clear plastic glasses.
We ate our salads and roll in leisure, while chatting and watching the countryside pass at dusk.

Just as we finished our salads, the meal entrees arrived. Each entrée, and side dish, came in an oblong, rigid, white plastic dish measuring nine inches long and seven inches wide. In the center of the dish was the meat (or meatless entrée) which was flanked on one side by mixed, steamed vegetable and on the other by mashed potato.

When our meal was finished, the maitre de brought our tab and returned a few minutes later to collect the pay. We found that ‘change’ was made in such a way so it would be easy for the patron to leave a tip. As customers stood to leave, the waiter would approach  the table lean forward, crane his neck and look about anxiously to see if a tip was left for his services. I thought the procedure lacked taste, but suppose the waiters were paid minimum wage and depended on tips to earn a decent living. We didn’t disappoint.

Upon returning to our cabin, Donna changed Jane into her pajamas and laid her down to sleep. We celebrated our last evening abroad the train by sharing a couple of cans of premixed Mai Tai’s whilst chatting about the sights and experiences from our day.

By this time we were starting to think about home and were hoping everything had fared well and with property and pets during our absence.

Friday, February 22, “Saint Cloud!”
Our travel alarm awoke us at 4:00AM on Friday morning.  We hurriedly dressed and made sure all of our ‘carry on’ belonging were securely packed. As we walked along the trains hallways that one last time, everything seemed so different.

The sedate, dim illumination along the aisle, the rocking motion of the Sleeper car and squeaking sounds of our cabins door that greeted us every morning and throughout the days of our trip, seemed all part of the mystery and magic of the trip, but as we prepared to leave the train, their accustomed friendliness faded into the mechanical disturbances they were. That morning we weren’t simply embarking on another day of adventure, we were almost home.

The Empire Builder arrived at the St. Cloud train depot at about 6:00 AM. Before we collected our baggage from the station master, the train was pulling away from the station en route to Chicago.

Looking about, we were surprised to find that late February’s early morning temperatures were still quite mild and that there was little snow or ice. We loaded our suitcases and ‘carry on bags’ into the trunk of the Toyota and quietly drove to Perkin’s restaurant for breakfast.

The rest of the day was spent unpacking and glumly moping about the house. We were tired and sad to see our vacation end, but happy to be back at our little house in the woods.

Events from the second half of 1985  will be posted in: ‘1985, Age 42-43, Part 2 of 2′.

Themes and Events:
*  This is the year of the “yuppie” (Young Urban Professional). The “minivan” is introduced and quickly becomes a popular vehicle. Those of us old enough to know, see it as a reinvention of the station wagon.
*  Visa is the first to begin using holographic 3D images on its credit cards for security reasons. McDonald’s sold its 50 billionth hamburger.
*  Bell Laboratories announced the development of the 1 megabyte computer memory chip.
*  TheU.S.economy is having the best year since 1951, expanding at 6.8% while consumer prices (CPI) rise only 4%.
*  A crisis in the Savings and Loan and Banking industry looms on the horizon when the government rescues Continental Bank in Chicago from collapse with a $4.5 billion loan.

Buttons & bumper stickers:
*  I’m not fat I’m just short for my weight.
*  Are we having fun yet?
*  The computer is down.
*  El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.

A year’s supply in the pantry
For about ten years, Donna and I had been concerned with the possibility of a thermonuclear war and with the real increases in energy prices. As the years passed, we found that the world just puttered along with occasional ‘saber rattling’ and ‘brush fire wars’ on the periphery of the industrialized countries. During this time, we bought rural property, a home,  installed a huge garden, were raising livestock and finally reached the point we’d only dreamed of a decade earlier.

By January 1984, our Rear Addition’s  ‘food room’ reached its peak as a storage pantry.

Two years earlier, in 1982, our food storage program consisted of previously listed canned and dry goods, cases of freeze-dried foods, garden produce, and frozen goods in our freezer. Between that time and the beginning of 1984 we’d increased storage to include a years supply of various new items [1]. As we used items from the food room they were replaced with new similar goods, so that the quantity of supply remained static.

List of products bought and maintained in a year supply quantity:

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A new pickup truck
It had been ten years since we first bought our GMC pickup truck in Los Angeles.
In the summer of 1974, the truck pulled a small California One-Way moving trailer with all of our household belongings over the Rocky Mountains to Minnesota. We’d used the pick-up to haul firewood to our home in Rockwood Estates Mobile Home Park; we packed our canoe around central Minnesota; and pulled our Starcraft Tent Camper all over the state. We’d used the pick up truck to carry our tools out to our rural property when we were first taming the driveway and homesite; we’d driven it to work for years.

This last winter the truck developed a variety of problems: the clutch and transmission were going out, the brakes were worn, the heater no longer worked so we were on the verge of freezing while driving to work, the tires were worn and almost bald, and the body was badly rusted. We were having a difficult time starting the vehicle on cold mornings and it was only driving about ten miles per gallon gas.

This February we began pricing new trucks and found that Foley Ford had the best price on pickup trucks in the vicinity. We took a look at what they had on the sales lot and picked out a new 1984 tan-colored F100 Ford pickup, with a heavy-duty heater. The vehicle cost $5,400, less the trade in we received on our old GMC. We financed the truck with an automatic First American Auto loan installment plan and drove home that afternoon  in our new vehicle.
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[Photograph: Our new F100 Ford pickup truck. Jessie dog laying in driveway. My ‘antenna system’ creation, consisting of: 1 Citizen Band antenna, 3 TV antennas, a wind gauge, bird houses, thermometer and rain gauge. The antennas were eventually removed and mounted on the rear addition roof.]

A couple of weeks after buying the Ford truck, we bought a light weight, tan colored camper shell to cover the bed of the truck and provide security for things we bought and were carrying about town on shopping days.

Our work schedule at Landy’s
Since Donna and I both worked at Landy Packing, we could have continued to get by owning one automobile;  however, our schedules were never the same. I started work at 6:30 AM and got off any time between 2:30 PM and 3:00 PM, occasionally having to stay until 4:00 PM – or later. Donna often started at 7:00 AM, but occasionally had to start at 8:00 AM; her shift’s end time varied correspondingly. One year she was required to take an hour lunch, another year she took a half hour lunch. When there were custom shipments of meat to Canada, she stayed at work until 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM to make sure the International Transit papers were complete. Generally, we could count on getting off at a certain time, but these times changed erratically, having two vehicles was somewhat a matter of convenience, but almost a necessity.

Employee grumbling and my wage increase
After the Meatpacker Union’s new wage contract took effect in December, many of the older employees lost their former pay brackets, some jobs were eliminated, others took severe pay cuts. Quite a few knowledgeable, long-term employees quit during January and February, which caused concern amongst management. Not only were the meat cutters quitting, but several key office personnel, including the computer programmer and credit manager sought employment elsewhere.

When “Quit Fever” reached a high pitch, I used management’s fear to my advantage.

I was earning a dollar per hour less than the City of St. Cloud employees who worked at the Public Utility’s waste water treatment plant. Knowing that I would be harder to replace than practically anyone at the company, because of my specialized job, I requested a raise in pay.

The request shocked my boss, Jim Landy, never-the-less, I had both logic and management’s fear of losing key personnel on my side. I maintained a humble, ‘good employee’ attitude while talking with him. He had to confer with his uncle, Max Landy, the company’s owner, and would get back with me. By the end of the day I had the full raise, a whopping $1.01 per hour.

Books read during the year
During the year, I read books on various topics, mostly whatever was either important in our lives at the time or of general topical interest to myself, including:

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Jane begins traveling with the family
Donna was pressured to return to work at Landy’s in the middle of January, when Jane was about one and a half months old. We didn’t like the idea of someone else looking after our baby in either a daycare or babysitting environment, never-the-less, Donna interviewed several women and found a conscientious woman babysitter in St. Cloud, only a couple of miles from our work.

As the weeks passed, we took Jane with us grocery shopping, to the movies, out to dinner, where ever we went Jane went, tucked safely in her car seat carrier. We beamed with pride when people in the various stores would stop to talk to her and comment on how pretty she was.

Some babies are ugly as sin, and most are homely, but Jane had fine and cute features, she was a good-looking person as a baby and all through her childhood years. Nor was Jane a fussy baby, she slept well at night, her babyhood was a pleasure to both Donna and myself. (Xoxo to Jane)

The Castle Wall
The Castle Wall, a poem I wrote on March 26, to preface my Journal 2: The Realm: Of Dark Places and Castle Walls, Of A Looking Glass and A Crystal Ball, follows below:

THE CASTLE WALL
Out of the past, on a castle wall, I see their names written, great and small.
Each name is a life and a work of love,
whence I am a descendant of.
I hold my child and she holds hers,
And time itself begins to blur.
Out of the future they come to look,
And wonder at the life each ancestor took.
I too am here on this castle wall,
And beneath me is my child so small.
At the pace you read this print,
Past our lives seem to sprint.
The days, weeks, months and years,
The joy, tranquility and many tears.
They lie with us now, we are but names,
Though time and the world haven’t really changed.
So,
Love your child Give that youth your all,
Though this child be big or small
And we’ll cheer you on from the castle wall. lfp

Of books and guides
Writ preceding, Family Genealogy, from Journal 2, page 220. (see below)

“I stand gazing at the sun as it rises over the horizon.
Before me grows a forest, the trunks of the trees cut dark lines across this great orange rising orb.
And I feel joy at being part of this process of life.
The awesome sense of ‘Being’ I feel extends into the abyss of time on either side of me, and there I see fleeting images that come and go. For I am a living man, the son of a man, and we, the sons of men, are sons of MAN.
And from the earliest times, I have walked the Earth in my fathers and now they leave footprints through me.
 We have filled every niche between commoner and knight, to princes of the material and priests of the mind and soul; we are adventurers in time and sometimes, guides.
And you who are to come, the children of my children, and those beyond, know then that it has become my lot to be a scribe of the common.
From  these journals you will develop an understanding that will allow you to see fleeting images through time.
These journals will provide a historical backdrop and a guide, for herein lies human life: with its attending problems, choices, solutions and outcomes, all specific for me in these given moments, but whose general concepts are human and scalable for all, for you, in your own time.
And now, look back, across the form shaping field of which you and I are part, and understand the collectively similar memory style of our descent…for you now stand in the ‘life light’.”

Music [midi: Speed]

A terrible spring thunderstorm [4]
The most frightening thunderstorm we ever had, occurred on a Thursday night, April 26th.
Our skies remained dark and cloudy all day, the local weather forecast was predicting the possibility of severe weather in the evening.

About 4:30PM, when I arrived home from work, I connected our 5KW emergency electric generator in case there was a power failure while supper was being prepared. A while later, when feeding the ducks and geese, I noted that the southern sky had become quite dark and lightning flashes could be seen. Looking at the approaching dark line growing on the horizon, it was apparent that before long we would certainly have storm conditions.

About an hour later, Griz, who is afraid of thunder and lightning, began barking at the front door, wanting to come inside. I let both Griz and Jessie into the rear addition then hurried through the house closing all the windows as it was beginning to rain. As the dark and rolling clouds approached looking ever more ominous, I turned on the radio and found that there was both a Tornado and a “Severe Thunderstorm Warning” in effect for central Minnesota.

Donna arrived home from work a few moments after it had begun raining and exclaimed,” I encountered walnut size hail on the way home.’

Looking south toward Foley, we could see an amorphous, fuzzy gray, dark mass low in the sky moving our way. We then became frightened that some very dangerous weather was approaching and we were in a relatively fragile mobile home. We immediately phoned our neighbor’s Bobby and Arlene in regards to spending some time in their cellar. We quickly changed clothes, stuffed our small stash of five each one ounce gold coins in our pockets, covered Jane (now five months old) and ran to the pickup truck. Our dogs, sensing the weather and our behavior, wanted to go with us; Griz even went so far as to try to get in the front seat ahead of us.

Just as we drove out from the end of our property onto the county road, the storms squall line hit.
Immediately to our south, the clouds were low and churning. Within moments visibility reached nearly zero. I sped into our neighbor’s yard and parked near their back door. We scooted out one side of the truck and fairly ran down the stairs into the cellar. Donna was carrying Jane in the car seat carrier. Bobby and Arlene were still in the barn finishing up their evening milking chores. They waved at us out a window, then returned to their work.

Donna and I looked about at our unfamiliar surroundings in the cellar- storm shelter.
The room had low head clearance, dim electric lighting and a somewhat muddy, earthen floor. On the positive side, it had concrete walls, a very solid heavy-duty roof and a brick house built above. For the next few minutes we had pea size hail, then a terrible wind accompanied by hard rain.

When the wind and rain subsided, we hurried over to the barn to visit with Bobby and Arlene. After cleaning the milk house, Arlene took Donna and Jane back to the house. I stayed behind to chat with Bobby, who was feeding the cows. Just as he finished his chores, the rain suddenly increased and a second squall line hit us.

Our first warning that the storm was intensifying came with the rush and roar of a mighty wind. Seeing the severity of the wind, Bobby ran through the barn to turn off the lights in the  silo room which was attached to the southeast, back-end of the building. Meanwhile, I stepped just outside a partially opened sliding door on the north side of the building.

As I stepped through the doorway, my cap lifted straight up off my head. I looked up to see the cap spinning and moving in lazy circles as it gently floated straight up along the three-story high building. Nearing the roof, it instantly took off toward the northeast and disappeared into the darkness…as I stood there transfixed in a moment of awe, something else flew past over the top of the barn. Standing by the building I was protected from the roaring wind and driven rain which were coming out of the south-southwest.

At this time, I began seeing events occur in slow motion. I turned to my left and looked into the farmyard which was illuminated by a security lamp. There, I saw a heavy electric cable standing out horizontally as it extended between the out buildings. Sheets of rain ran past the side of the barn, they were moving laterally in staccato pulses, without any apparent downward motion.

I stepped backwards inside the barn and spun around looking for Bobby, he was still in the silo room. All of a sudden the barn gave two or three rapid, deep creaks and I realized the dangerous force that the wind must be exerting on the structure. Although the hayloft was still half full of bailed hay, I was sure that any stronger gale might collapse the barn. I yelled through the din of the storm, “Bobby? Bobby! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

I backed into the barn door turned and stepped into the aperture to look outside. Nothing had changed in those few moments, I was still seeing in slow motion. I tried to gauge the safety of walking over to the cellar in such a strong wind. As if in answer, the family’s wooden dog house, came sort of rolly-bouncing out of the dark and into the illuminated area. A few shingles were ripped from the roof of a shed next to the barn and flopped through the air across the yard.

I called for Bobby again, then continued peering apprehensively from the barn door. The dog house, which had momentarily stopped rolling, laid upside down fluttering in the yard. Suddenly, it came alive again and like a tumbleweed began rolly-bouncing toward the road. A few moments later Bobby and I briskly walked, through the momentarily subsiding wind and rain, to the house.

Once we were in the cellar with the women folk, we four adults each had a can of beer on our empty, nervous stomachs, all the while complaining about the “Shittin’ weather.” While listening to the local radio news and found that a tornado had hit Minneapolis, destroying a shopping center and a six block residential area. Wind gusts in St. Cloud had been clocked at sixty mph. A little later we found that the dome-shaped metal silo cover on top Bobby’s silo had ruptured at the seam, the elevator door on his grain room roof had blown away and flying roof shingles had broken several barn window panes. We had a nervous, late supper with the Bob and Arlene before returning home.

Coming up the driveway we were stopped by a fallen tree that forced us to leave the pickup truck down the driveway, about five hundred feet away from our mobile home. Donna covered Jane to protect her from the diminishing rain, while we made a dash for the house. We climbed over the tree trunk and hurried up the muddy driveway.

While Donna took Jane inside, I walked around the yard to see if we’d suffered any damage. Two dead trees had blown over. One blew harmlessly against another tree just behind our mobile home. A large dead tree east of the homesite had fallen across the yard fence, it’s upper limbs forming a “V” on either side of and just missing the dog house.

Laid off and ‘plugged up’ at the water plant [5]
In May, almost immediately after I received a ten percent (!) pay increase, Landy’s began closing the plant on Monday’s in what was apparently becoming an annual practice.

During the previous winter, Landy’s had begun buying offal from Robel’s Meat Packing (an equal sized packing house practically next door to Landy’s) and process it in their Rendering Plant. That provided full-time work for the Rendering Crew to retain their Monday employment, however, everyone else except the office personnel were laid off.

From late February through April, I sat home on Monday’s writing in my journal and working about the property.
Meanwhile,  the Rendering Plant was running full-bore and dumping its normal amount of effluent down the company drain. All those little pieces of organic material: blood, fat and grease went down the sewage line and accumulated in the waste water plant’s large underground sump, floating in a 3-4 foot thick layer on top the water,and 6″ to 10″ deep on the surface of the primary clarifier tanks.
Since neither I was nor the other operators were there to process the material, bottlenecks occurred which caused a breakdown in the plants automated functions. When the breakdowns became serious enough to holdup production on Tuesday morning’s, I was asked to begin working a half day (which amounted to 5-6 hours) on Monday’s.

(Chuckle) I knew from the beginning of the ‘lay-offs’ that the company would develop problems if they thought they could count on the so called, ‘automated systems’, to handle even a fraction of a days work load. I also knew that when Landy’s had it in their mind to do something, it was best to go along with them, anything less than absolutely full compliance would signal possible hostility, while ‘making excuses’ was seen as, ‘dragging your feet’.
So, like ol’ Brer Rabbit, I jus’ stayed home while dey throwed punches at da Tar Baby.

During this period, my chemical laboratory technician, Tom, left our employment. It took a month to find a decent replacement and another month to teach him the fundamentals of the job.

Anomalies at work:
When a Waste Water Plant position was being filled, I would run an advertisement in the St. Cloud Times newspaper, which typically resulted in my giving five or six job interviews.

One of the applicants for the position was a an attractive and lithe young woman of about 30 years old. While I don’t recall her resume or specific qualifications, I certainly remember the events of her interview.

I looked at the young woman’s resume and seeing that she did qualify for the job, decided to show her around the plant and discuss the type of jobs she would be expected to do, in addition to the lab work. Returning to the lab she asked if there had been other applicants, I replied that there had been. She emphasized that she was really interested in the job, and said, “I’ll do anything to get it.” She stared into my eyes, in an attempt to make a personal connection. Then she said, “If you have any other questions about my qualifications, you can come over to my apartment one evening and we can discuss them”. I gasped quietly to myself, thinking, what an offer. There were a lot of things wrong with the situation: I would never cheat on my wife,  what kind of person with what kind of problems would make such an offer, I would never jeopardize my livelihood for over a risky proposition, it all sounded unreal, like maybe she was a private detective, put up to the proposition by the Landy family to check my integrity. At the conclusion of our interview I thanked the young lady for her application and said there were several other scheduled interviews before a hiring determination would be made.

That story brings to mind another odd social interaction: The Waste Water Plant didn’t use a lot of different types of chemicals to treat the water, but what we did use, we used a lot of. Every couple of months I ordered a semi truck load (the big 16 wheelers) of Ferri Floc, and  three or four 55 gallon drums of polymer.

One day I received a call from a salesman. I think we’d tried his polymer once and were looking into a couple other polymers with slightly different chemical compositions and reactivity’s. The salesman wanted my home address so he could send me a gift. Immediately, I became suspicious. There was no reason to send me a gift and certainly not to my home address. Everything I did at work was professional, there were no private entanglements, just business. I wondered if the salesman was perhaps disgruntled that we weren’t using his product and was checking to see if I would accept private gratuities or again, maybe the Landy family was checking my loyalty and integrity. Anyway, I accepted the gift, but asked him to mail it to the attention of Max Landy at the company address. After the conversation, I told my boss, Jim Landy, about the call and that Max should be receiving a gift. I checked several times over the next few weeks, the gift did not come.

These two events occurred over a matter of several years. It’s just good personal policy to remain ‘above board’ in your professional dealings. People will, for whatever reason, occasionally appeal to you with petty offers enticing lust or greed.

Peaks, troughs and averages
During the period of extended layoffs, my net- taking home pay was $232. Once I returned to working  those ‘half day’ Monday’s, then had to put in a lot of overtime during the remainder of the week, my net weekly pay went over $300, which was a very good wage for the time and area. Actually, I was earning more money by working a half day Monday and putting in the required over time  than working my normal five day week with no overtime ($290), so I ended getting ‘paid back’ for several of the lost Mondays where my weekly pay had been reduced  to $232.

In late May, Landy’s brought in an ‘efficiency expert’ to help return the company to a healthy level of profitability. The expert didn’t walk around studying worker performance, but spent his time in the Conference room talking with the Landy’s and studying the company account books. I’d seen efficiency experts at work before, when I worked for Gregg Iron Foundry in El Monte,California. From what I heard and saw, an efficiency experts presence didn’t bode well for’ jobs’. I also recalled hearing from Donna several months earlier that the company had conferences with a ‘union busting’ lawyer.

The bottom line: Something was wrong with Landy Packing Company’s financial operations.

Water, water every where
June 1984 was the rainiest, wettest month I remember ever experiencing [6]. While June’s normal rainfall in central Minnesota is four and half inches, this month we measured a little over eighteen inches precipitation in our rain gauge. The two heaviest rains, separated by four days, each brought five and a half inches of moisture. Most of the rain occurred in the first half of the month.

During the middle of the month, while driving through the countryside to work, I noted a decidedly different environment than what I was use to seeing. Most elevated, bare, red clay fields looked so water-logged and muddy that the soil surface appeared shiny. More than a few forty acre fields were fifteen percent covered with standing water.  In the lower areas, there were several locations where runoff had completely filled the roadside ditch and part of the highway was submerged. In one place a shallow, inches deep, stream of water was flowing across a forty-foot wide section of road. All that could be seen of one field were the top three inches of the fence posts. A lone house above the banks of one small river was surrounded on three sides by a foot of water.

What also seemed unusual was to see flocks of ducks flying north at this late time of year, usually the migrating birds come through our area from late March through April. Adding to the odd weather was that Tower, Minnesota, located only one hundred seventy-eight miles northeast of Gilman, had a hard frost of 29ºF– on June 11th!

Emperor Weather, a poem
After a very wet spring and early summer, I was prompted by weather conditions seen about our community, and from news reports in locations around the USA, and world to write the  ‘tongue in cheek’ poem, that follows:

                        “Emperor Weather
We beseech thee, oh ‘Weather That Changeth Most Rapidly’.
Mercy onto those from whom thou hidest the continence of the sun.
Thou who destroyest our tenderest crops with an early hard freeze
And who buriest our fields with snow so early in the season.
Whose snow pack reaches above our humble door step, to our window sill.

And yea, thee Weather, wherest thy late winter be so warm that floods develop and mud becometh deep.
It is thy cloud that bringest moisture in such great quantity.
All hail to the thundercloud
Rain without beginning
Rain without end

Thy flood washeth away the roads, gardens and crops of the people and leaveth them poor.
Thy wet grass keepeth the home owner from his yard
where the grass overcometh his cutting blade.
Yea, and each part of thy yielding land has too much of a good thing.

I am buried in mud. My neighbor afar has a heat wave.
And another, violent storm after violent storm, after violent storm.
And yet another sees no drop of rain as the months pass by.
Another has a very late Spring hard frost.
Each area after it’s own nature
So receives he, more and more.

And the continence of the sun was hidden from the face of man by the angry weather.
And man learned to fear the rain, to fear the drought,
to fear storms and to fear the weather.
And a cry arose from MAN…and he cried
All hail to the thundercloud
Rain without beginning
Rain without end…Amen

And somewhere deep beneath a mountain, a great subterranean cavern filled with lava. Surface moisture began seeping into the caldera and turning to steam. Pressures built within the bowels of the Earth as the volcano prepared to offer yet a greater insult to the beautiful skies and turbulent weather and the lives of MAN”  lfp

The final layoff at Landy Packing [7]
Friday,  June 29, rumors were quick to spread, everyone knew something was wrong when the Swing shift workers were not given their paychecks at noon on Friday, as was customary.
Early that afternoon, when the earliest dayshift employees got off work, they were handed their paychecks, with a ‘layoff notice’ attached. During the next two hours, there was a lot of talk amongst employees, not even the salaried, supervisory employees were given their pay until their the end of their shift.  As each department finished work for the day, they were handed their pay with an attached layoff notice.

That afternoon, I received my notice too, which simply stated:

I was apprehensive and concerned over the manner in which we were being laid off this time. In the past, we saw the company tighten its economic reins on expenditures and maybe a few new employees were laid off, before there was announced a general layoff.

This time was different, the lay off came as a surprise.

I phoned Jim Landy from the laboratory to find out to what extent I should close down the Waste Water Treatment plant. His answer exposed the fact that we’d be off work at one or two weeks, and maybe longer.

Besides my concern over our family’s cash flow, I felt a little betrayed, like I’d been treated like dirt. After working for the company for nine years they would get rid of me without so much as a “Good Bye”?! I wasn’t just a faceless rank and file union employee, but a supervisor who was in the main office discussing this and that with the Landy family at least twice a week. The thought that they might be closing down permanently, giving less than two hours notice, hurt.

When Donna arrived home, I found that the only people still working, included several office girls, of which Donna was one, the central computer operator, office manager, accountant,  and the Landy extended family.

The Crystal Ball, a poem
On July 1, I wrote the a poem (below) for the prefix page of Journal 2, The Realm: Of Dark Places and Castle Walls, Of A Looking Glass and A Crystal Ball.

THE CRYSTAL BALL
Out of dark places forms a crystal ball,
Suddenly I’m drawn down a darkened hall.
Then I become part of a scene,
The vision with wide eyes I am seeing.

Barely a second does elapse
And the warp in time begins to collapse,
But in that instant that the warp did exist,
To another time I was whisked.

Clocks have no meaning in hyperspace,
And distance is a pointless place.
From inside the crystal ball I did gaze,
And outside pass seconds, hours and days.

In that timeless moment I look,
What I see would fill a book.
Now for some tales as happened to me.
Some are recent, some are past,
Soon we’ll search for the Looking Glass. lfp
.

Jane takes swimming classes
On July 11, Donna and Jane began a ten session swimming class, for mothers and their babies. The half hour long classes were designed to provide a pleasurable water experience for babies and toddlers and prepare them for swimming later in their childhood years. Jane did not have any bad experiences in the class.  By the end of the course, Donna carefully holding her up, Jane would tolerate water up around her ears while she splashed about happily blowing water bubbles.

Unemployment Compensation Benefits
Monday morning, following my ‘lay off’, I went to the Minnesota State Unemployment Office in St. CLoud and registered for Unemployment Compensation Benefits. While waiting my turn to do the claim’s paperwork, I spoke with two other Landy Packing Company supervisors, who were also waiting. I was advised that, members of the Landy family had told them to, ‘look for other jobs’. Now it was starting to look like the plant would to be closed for a while; however,  I remained optimistic that it would reopen, in a couple of months.

Upon filing my unemployment claim, I found that I would receive $198 per week compensation for six months. Considering I’d been laid off work most Monday’s during the spring and still earned $232 net per week, my $198 per week compensation (a 15% reduction), for staying home, was more than adequate.

In a hurry to get my vacation pay
During the middle of July, Donna advised me to apply for my vacation pay, as it looked like the company was rapidly going broke. I immediately applied for the three weeks vacation pay that I had coming – a tidy sum of $982. Donna put my ‘vacation request form’ in with a few other vacation requests that she thought the company might still honor, and indeed, I was paid in full.

Actually, I was fairly certain that whether the company opened again or not, at some point they would want me to come back in long enough to ‘mothball’ the Waste Water Treatment facility. If they failed to pay the money owed on my vacation, I would not return to close the plant down. It would cost considerably more to hire several other people to figure out how to do that job.

Landy’s file for Chapter 11, Bankruptcy
On August 29th, Donna was instructed to type out a memo to Landy creditors and ex-employees, informing them that Landy Packing Company would reopen when market conditions improved. Landy’s immediately filed for protection from their creditors under the Chapter 11 Bankruptcy laws.
The next day, August 30^th,  Donna telephoned home with a tinge of excitement in her voice, the company office was filled with angry creditors demanding pay for their products and services.
On August 31^st, Donna was laid off work. On the way home, she stopped at the Unemployment Office and filled out the necessary forms to receive her weekly unemployment compensation. 

Music [midi: Lawrence of Arabia]

The Chronolog [8]
During the early days of September, I dug into the file cabinet and pulled out my old, Fingers Of The Future study. Although it had been almost ten years since the study was done (when we first moved to Minnesota), I found it a fascinating research project and read it every few years. With each rereading, I’d update  the predictions that had been made, in order to see what milestones of change America and the World were supposedly approaching.

During the late 1970s, I programmed the Fingers Of The Future text files into our first computer, P.A.M.E.L.A.
At the time, I dressed up the low resolutions visual presentation, wrote an introduction to each ‘time segment’ of predictions, and continued research into the topic’s of housing, land, population, war, economics, and how to prepare for the predicted future.

In early December 1984, I entered Fingers Of The Future into my journal, renaming it, The Chronolog. The following  paragraphs are the prefix statements for  each section in, The Chronolog (by lfp):

…THE CHRONOLOG
I am a collection of facts, ideas and projections regarding your ecology.
My purpose is to assist you in developing ‘thought and action’ processes that are on time in a world of rapidly changing international power, energy problems, cyclic economic factors and a diminishing resource base.”

…YESTERDAY
“Yesterday was a good time, things were simple.
Machines were really helpful and the world was peaceful, except for an occasional war.
Since you were born, things have gotten progressively worse.
Man’s appetite has run rampant in a diminishing world.
Man planted the seed of change — you are the instrument of this change.
Choose the time you wish to enter and see the tree grow and your world’s problems become aggravated.”

…TODAY
“The seeds we plant now are to change our world tomorrow.
For what we plant, is what we reap and as we husband today, so will we care for tomorrow.
Economy, ecology and energy become national rallying cries.
A scramble for the new wealth is occurring.
Secure your resources now.
For ‘they’ of the world have started to gain control of their resources, and the degree of control they have over your resources, will be their profit — and the lowering of your way of life.
Maintain a strong, but flexible position.”

…TOMORROW
“I look from the past, through the present and into the future.
The imperceptible forms out there in time seem to mix and swirl in apparent disorder.
Yet they are not disordered, only my dim vision and narrow-sightedness make them appear so.
Choose the time you wish to enter. May your tomorrow be happy and your children well fed.”

…BEYOND
“As each technical generation ages, it finds the world
much different than it was in their youth. Each
generation the changes come quicker
testing the fabric of man and his
institutions. Survival in the 21^st &
22^nd century will depend on
your ability to change
rapidly. Come and
see…”

“Come visit me again. Many such trips into the past and future are possible.
Let me be your guide as you choose a path between what was and what is to be.
Chronolog”  lfp

Donna takes Human Relations at SCSU
On Tuesday, September 4, just four days after Donna was laid off from Landy’s: We were at the kitchen table eating a light lunch of tomato soup, saltine crackers and milk, meanwhile talking about Donna’s chances of finding a job teaching. Donna reminded me that all she needed to receive her Minnesota Teaching Credentials was to take a specific six unit Human Relations course. As we continued eating our lunch and chatting, I recommended she phone St. Cloud State University to find out when the class was offered next.

A few minutes later, after several telephone calls, Donna told me that the class had just begun and that it was not too late to register for it. We agreed the Human Relations course should taken and the opportunity did exist to do so. Donna telephoned the University again and asked to be placed in enrollment.

The next day, Wednesday, Donna attended the Human Relations class from 4:00PM until 9:00PM.

During the next two weeks, we applied for jobs around the St. Cloud area. I applied for laboratory technician, supervisory, boiler operator, chemist and maintenance jobs. Donna concentrated on part-time substitute teaching, so she could attend her Wednesday night class and complete the required homework.

The scramble to cash Donna’s last paycheck
About a week after Donna was laid off from Landy’s, we received a note from our bank stating that her last paycheck had bounced due to insufficient funds in the company’s account. Donna phoned Landy’s and spoke with the office manager who said money was being wired from a bank in Texas, where it arrived she could cash her check. Donna kept checking Landy’s bank account in St. Cloud to find when the money arrived. A small amount of money was put in the account just before closing time one night. The  first thing the next morning, Donna and I drove to Landy’s bank in St. Cloud where she took her pay as cash.

Inventory and closing the Waste Water Plant
On October 1, I was called into Landy’s and asked to make a complete inventory of everything in the Water Plant laboratory and all items in the main waste water treatment plant, everything loose that was not considered operationally important equipment. At the same time, they wanted the water drained from the pumps and instructed that all the pumps and gear boxes were to be oiled, greased and cleaned up.
I spent the better part of three days doing the work.
[Image at right: The WWT plant Electric room with disconnects and VFD (variable frequency drive controls) in blue cabinet, an early industrial “computer control’]

It was very quiet and  eerie to be ‘at work’ when it was so still.
As I moved about doing my inventory, changing oil, etc., there were no sounds other than the scraping and patter of my boots  and the slight echoing ‘clunk’ and ‘tink’ of my tools; there were no trucks or other equipment passing, no telephone’s ringing or calls on the intercom. The familiar deep hum of motors and roar of my boiler, the occasional distant sounds of men shouting to one another, the indistinguishable sounds of various machines operating about the company had provided a continuous low-level background din, now there was dead silence.

Somewhere outside the waste water plant’s back door, a few birds chirped amongst themselves in the bushes.
[Photograph at left: Sludge removal: Large white tank on left and smaller white tank on right referred to as ‘grease tanks’ . The screw conveyor on extreme right was used to remove sand and other smaller particles to a dump truck.]

[Image at right: My sump pumps. Just inside the employee door, 20 HP pumps used alternately to pump water from the large subsurface sump, over the Hydrosieve screen and into the 80,000 gallon clarifiers for treatment.]

Genealogy and Journal 4: The Passage
During the previous several years, my Dad, Uncle Bill and I had been working together on our family genealogy.
Genealogy is such a broad topic of research that we were never looking for the same information on any one ancestor at the same time. We each followed what ever ancestors trail that we fancied, until we ran out of leads, then veered off to track another ancestor. When ever we found a new batch of data, it was shared amongst the others. As a result, each of our monthly letters (actually, 8-1/2″ x 12″ manila envelopes) contained varying amounts of information, photocopies, etc.

As the months passed, I noticed that the types of data we were finding consisted primarily of hard facts, i.e.: birth  dates, marriage records, death dates, burial location, other children’s spouses, etc. These facts are the bare bones of genealogical research, but they tell little about the people themselves.
I realized that, what a descendant, like myself, really would like to have, would be stories written by those ancestors. Just the thought of having a letter, journal or other written communication penned by ones long past ancestors would provide immense personal value and contact through those documents.

Since no journals or historical family writings ever have surfaced in the family, I thought the only way to remedy the situation would be for someone to begin the endeavor.  I’d had a modicum of experience completing three journals and began entertaining the idea of assembling the writings of many living relatives into one book, which would act as a base for future family members.

The hardest part is starting, because journeys into uncharted territory are largely explorations; it’s hard to start or tools to take  when you don’t know where your going.

I began Journal 4, The Passage, in early October, a book dedicated to the writings of other family members. I wrote a prologue and a couple pages of topical and formatting suggestions hopefully providing future writers a frame of mind and a broad idea of what to write about.

Over the years that followed, relatives who wrote into Journal 4: The Passage were:
•  Donna’s mother, Eulah Clara __ wrote about the ‘Early 1900s in Arizona’
•  Donna’s father  Donald Ray__  discussed ‘Living on the family farm as a child – 1920s through 1930s’
•  My uncle, William Glen Pierce wrote ‘Memories of my Parents’, about Elsie Grubb and Glen Kenyon Pierce, a story which has been included in the ‘Glen Pierce & Elsie Grubb’ genealogy post in this blog.
•  My elder cousin, Doris Irene (Grubb) Hughes wrote ‘Memories of Our Grandparents‘ about Anna Flora (Anderson) and George Grubb (the parents of Elsie Grubb)
•  Don, Donna & myself  wrote parts of ‘An Account of the Death of Eulah Clara (Roberts)_’, also, ‘Mother’s Farewell Gift’.

I sent the journal to my parents, in which to write some story of significance from their lives. Although I pointed out in a letter that there was no hurry to return the journal and to write at their convenience, Mom and Dad sent the book back with a note stating they were’ too busy to write’.

Jane exposed to the printed word
In October, according to the instructions that I read in the book, Teach Your Baby to Read, Donna and I began showing Jane printed words . I cut stiff white tagboard into five-inch high by twenty-two inch wide strips and printed one common word on each card, using a bright red ink marking pen. I then divided the words into sets of five. At each session, over the course of the day, we both showed and pronounced the words from a different set to Jane.

Each day one word was taken out of each set and a new word was added. Our times together looking at and saying the words were fun, for all of us.

Even though Jane couldn’t say the word, she’d laid there wiggling, smiling, cooing and paying attention as she heard and saw the bright red markings. All the while she was learning that the symbols had importance, which at that time in her development, was the only purpose of the exercise. :-)

Some of the words we showed to Jane during these sessions, were:

Discovering Afterlife in a dream
During the early morning hours, on Sunday, October 14, I awoke and went to the bathroom. Returning to bed, I had difficulty going back to sleep. As I laid there both, comfortable and quiet in the darkness, I recalled something I’d recently read in a book entitled, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
The book described a method for changing the mode of consciousness from one’s right brain hemisphere to the left brain hemisphere. The author claimed that if you attempt to draw a picture which had been turned upside down, that your eye-left hemisphere’s normal cues are bypassed and the complexity would be too great for the left hemisphere to handle. Because of the complexity, the job of drawing the unrecognizable picture, would be transferred to the brain’s right hemisphere, which normally deals with global, and holistic concepts. The right hemisphere’s mode of thought doesn’t deal with data, time, symbols and visuals, in the same manner as our left hemisphere’s mode.

As I attempted to return to sleep, I visualized a photograph of an imaginary person, turned upside down. I couldn’t make much sense of the reversed photograph, but that’s as it should have been. In my mind’s eye, I began to draw the photograph very carefully, by first making its silhouette.

I didn’t finish the silhouette, but awoke from a very unusual dream an hour or so later.

My dream had many of the common elements reported by people who’ve had a ‘near death experience’. In such an experience, people report looking down on their body from above, seeing the room or setting about themselves; they report going into a white light, down long white corridors, wearing white garments; of being met by other people, or guides; there are reports of floating; of being aware of one’s timeless condition; such experiences are also reported to have led to an increase in one’s holistic thinking after the person was brought back from the brink of death.

The dream
During the early morning of Sunday, October 14, I had a very unusual and realistic dream, which unfolded like this:
“In my bed, I closed my eyes to dream and in my dream I died, but I would not leave.
I knew my body was gone, but that did not matter. In a reflective moment, I noted how unimportant the body was after it had been left.
I turned to look at Donna and thought to myself, “Just because I’m existing in something other than life, doesn’t mean that I’m going to anywhere else. I’m staying here with Donna.”
But there was an unknown power or force at work cloaked all about me, which I could neither feel or see. Yet, I understood it’s purpose was to dissolve my view of the world and -or to erase my memory thereof so that I would move on to some specific other place — a place where the newly returned all gathered. The force of life had been strong in me so I was not immediately drawn away by the power at work about me.
In a peculiar form of sight, I still saw Donna, but the memory of living was beginning to fade. As I felt myself slowly slipping or being removed from the sight and place of my loved ones, I came to the realization of my Will.
Mind you, the place where I found myself, was in no way harmful or frightening, it was sensationless. I was either standing or floating in a dimensionless void and existed only as my self-awareness. There were no other life forms present. Exterior to myself, but associated with my self-awareness was a mind’s eye view of Donna as she moved about. The mind’s eye view provided scenes equivalent to views seen with our biological eyes, except that my new eyes did not focus, they did not look about, nor were they distracted.
Again, I sensed some invisible power at work about myself. I could not determine if it was the force that I felt before, but I knew that I was either submersed in it and it was attempting to carry me away, or it was growing inside of my mind at the same time erasing my self-awareness.
What ever the nature of the force, it was growing stronger. However, I had rediscovered my Will and tried using it to escape. Like a trapped animal, I instantly offered resistance, closing my mind’s eye to fight the force whose bonds grew about me. The nature of my resistance had the feeling like when a you tighten all the muscles in your body making it become rigid. I clenched my fists very tightly and tearfully exclaimed over and over, in a voice that was half scream and half growl, “I will not go! I will not go! I will not go!”
Moments later, I opened my mind’s eye to see, and could feel that the force had withdrawn, I was entirely free of it.
 And there below and before me was Donna. She was wearing a nightie and was propped up on the bed, on her left elbow. I floated down toward her from a position near the ceiling. As I approached her, I became aware that time had passed and continued to pass for the living, this was a bit of a surprise revelation, because I’d forgotten about time.
You should understand, it had been just a few moments since the unknown power had attempted to carry me away and only a few moments before that, since I realized how unimportant my body had been. In those brief moments, hours or even days had elapsed for the living.
Now beside Donna, I touched her shoulder and her naked leg and realized my touch was not corporeal as with fingers. What Donna felt was more like a localized warm draft or warm feeling. Looking into her eyes I could see her thoughts were far away from her immediate surroundings. I sensed her feelings. In a strange sort of way, she felt that I was there with her. She seemed to sense my touch, but there was that awareness one has in life which created an impenetrable barrier, that neither of us could cross.
I was a happy now, because I was with the person I wanted to be with.
Time passed for the living and I saw Donna seated at a restaurant. I could only see Donna and the table which she’d just sat down at. The table was well illuminated by scattered sunlight, which lead me to believe that this was a luncheon. Upon seeing the frilly lace tablecloth, napkins and the crystal glasses, I surmised that this was a fancy and expensive restaurant. From about the room I could hear chatter of people in conversation, the “tink” of silverware on plates and an occasional  muted “thunk” as a glass was set down.
Suddenly, as if in a blink of my mind’s eye, I was no longer observing Donna at the restaurant – they had caught me!
I found myself being escorted down a white hallway along with several other children.  The three or four tall, slim creatures that guided us were all dressed in white, tight-fitting suits that made them almost blend in with the glowing white color of the corridor. The guides stopped us before an open doorway. Inside the room were many more children.
I immediately realized that in this new place, where I had been whisked away to, that I was no longer a man, but had become a child of perhaps seven years old.
Although I have placed symbolic forms on the human like entities that guided us, making them adult like and myself childlike and short, I realized that this was a living system of thought and sight. I knew that I was not a little boy, but in relation to my guides, I was in effect a child. I initially thought the guides would be upset, because I’d refused to come to this place a few moments earlier, but they were not, they paid me no special heed.
After pausing for a moment at the doorway, the guides ushered us into the room. Inside the room were other guides or adults and more children. I looked about, but the room was so very white I could see no corners or determine its size. The guides were all dressed in white suits of uncommon design, we children were all dressed in silvery white suits.
Here and there I saw an adult having a serious discussion with a child and I realized the adults were counselors.
Near me, a counselor was discussing something with a child and the child began to sadly nod in agreement. I looked over the counselors shoulder and saw him holding a small hand-held instrument with a meter window on its face.
The meter had a scale which read “-” negative at the top, “0” in the center and “+” positive at the bottom. During their discussion, the counselor touched the child with the meter and I saw a needle on the scale waver back and forth over the “0”. With this the counselor turned and said, “She’s OK now.” I looked about trying to determine the significance  of what I’d just witnessed.
Then a counselor began talking to me. He was saying that by now I surely recognized that this was not life, but something very different. He touched me with the meter and the needle wavered above the “0” on the “-” side. The counselor went on talking to me in a soothing tone, but I did not hear him. For in a flash of insight, I recalled life and I knew what they were attempting to do here. This was a sort of debriefing room, the counselors were attempting to calm the souls of those who had left life. They were explaining a new reality to us, in preparation for our sojourn within this new plain of awareness and existence.
Again I closed my mind’s eye and stubbornly clung to my Will and recalled life. Clenching my fists, I became rigid and yelled that I wanted to go and be with Donna. The counselor touched me again with the meter and the needle jumped to the top of the scale, to the “-“.
Evidently they decided to leave me alone for a while. I became aware of again being in the long white corridor, where I first found myself after being whisked away from the restaurant. When I opened my mind’s eye, I was alone and floating along in the corridor. Here and there I saw other adults, but they were neither guides or counselors. After aimlessly floating about for some period, I came to a much wider hall, which reminded me of a lobby. There was a lot of activity in this place, adults were going this way and that, all preoccupied with what ever they were doing. I saw a baby wrapped in white laying on an elevated cart. The baby looked very tiny, which led to the realization that this baby had not yet been born. This was not a living baby, but was a soul baby. Once again, things were not as they seemed here. My symbol system made the soul look like a baby, but then I was a child too. This was not actually how things were, but how I understood them using life’s structured thought.
I asked a nurse, “How long until the baby will be born?”
“Pretty soon,” she replied.
Not satisfied, because something in my memory was beginning to stir, I asked, “How many minutes until the baby will be born?”
The nurse looked at me in a rather odd way, went across the hall and looked at a clip board that was hanging on a wall column. She turned back toward me and politely said, “The baby will be born in ten minutes.”
The memory I sought deep in my mind, came to consciousness. And that was, ever since I’d been in this great white place, I’d not thought about time. I had not considered how much time had passed for those who lived. While the nurse was still there with the clipboard in her hand, I asked her, “What is the date– for those who are alive?”
She replied, “August the fourth, twenty eighty-one.”
I repeated the date to myself with wonder and surprise,
“A u g u s t   4 ,  2 0 8 1?!”
I held up a hand and began to count the decades on my fingers. Donna had been born in the 1940s, the exact year was unimportant. I became sidetracked and had to begin counting again. As the count progressed, I began moving toward a door which I knew separated this place from infinity.
I never finished the count, because I knew that 140 years had passed since Donna was born into life and I knew she was somewhere beyond the door waiting for me.
I plunged out into the darkness, sobbing with an excited glee and cried out,
“Donna!”

I awoke and opened my eyes in the darkness of our bedroom, I felt the warmth of tears running down either side of my face and about my ears. A noise from nearby made me raise my head a little and look down our mobile home’s hallway. There I saw Donna carrying Jane, coming toward the bedroom. Donna laid Jane on the bed next to me, then climbed into bed herself and pulled the covers back over us. While tears from the dream dried on my face, we laid in bed making small talk and kissing Jane. I said nothing about the dream for several days as I needed time to think about what had occurred.

Analysis and conclusion
The morning after my dream, I had a converging insight regarding our brain’s left and right hemisphere’s, their differing modes of thought, public reports of ‘near death experiences’ and how this one dream could have accessed such symbolism.

I thought about the book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards,  knowing that recent exposure to its concepts and my experiment the night before had triggered ‘a right mode shift’ at the time I was falling sleep.

It seemed to me that our self-realization and primary mode of interaction with the world existed as relatively greater activity in our trained, left brain hemisphere. We typically go to sleep with our consciousness still attached to the symbolic forms of the left hemisphere. On the morning of the dream, I’d returned to sleep just after transferring my mode of thought into my brain’s right hemisphere. As such, I had locked my self-realization into what was an alternate mode of ‘sleep thought’; a mode of ‘sleep thought’ which I and almost all adults are grossly unaccustomed to.

Upon reviewing my dream, it became apparent that my holistic right mode did consult with my left mode for specifics: Firstly, for description and operation of the hand-held meter used by the counselors, and secondly, the realization and meaning of time’s passage. This was interesting, because it showed that whatever mode one is in when they go to sleep, that problem solving awareness does temporarily cross over into the other hemisphere for the specific kinds of information generated there. It also shows, that the mode you go to sleep in, will provide its over-riding method of definition for symbols and events that occur during any subsequent dreams.

I came to believe that our self-awareness was more comfortable in associating with the left hemisphere’s mode of thought, particularly when we went to sleep. It’s like, that little spark of our self-awareness is happy bounding about through our mind during wakefulness, when ‘all the lights are on’. But, when we reduce physical and sensory activity and drift off to sleep, our self awareness prefers sitting quietly in it’s dimly illuminated, comfortable and homey little shack  in the left hemisphere’s mode of thought, where conditions-pathways are familiar; where we can sort through the previous days activities in a direct and simply understandable manner.

I came to believe that we are in essence, feral children of the left hemisphere. The more we individually come to rely on our left hemispheric mode of thought for ordering the immediate world, the more difficult it becomes to access those holistic and timeless conceptualizations provided by our right hemispheric mode of thought.

Cash assets at the time of the layoff
At the time of our layoff from Landy Packing, we had $3,770 in cash assets, of which $3,200 was invested in gold and silver bullion coins and bars. If no jobs were found after our unemployment compensation benefits were exhausted, the liquid assets provided about fifteen weeks living expenses.

At the end of October, four months after my layoff,  we’d increased our liquid assets an additional $1,700 to $5,470, of which $4,500 was invested in gold and silver bullion coins and bars. During that period, we had a respectable, if not outstanding, $90 per week savings from our Unemployment Compensation checks! By then, our liquid assets could provide us with a full twenty-one weeks, a half a years total living expenses!

Don and Eulah visit/ Jane’s first steps [9]
October 19 was a big day at home for two very good reasons: Donna’s parents arrived for a visit and Jane took her first steps.

Don and Eulah flew out from Redding, California for a several day visit with us. During the early afternoon, when they arrived at the Minneapolis International Airport, Donna was waiting to bring them home in our pickup truck. She would have taken the Toyota, but the back seat  is so compact that Don wouldn’t have fit in comfortably and Eulah would have been likewise cramped. At the time, Don was sixty years and Eulah eighty-three years of age.
During the previous few weeks, Jane has been struggling to her feet while holding onto items of furniture. Usually, she would pull herself to her feet and just stand there wobbling, looking at us and smiling as we praised her new-found dexterity. We’d try and coax her to walk to one of us, but after a few minutes she’d sit back down with a ‘kerplunk’.
[Photograph at left: Jane with her maternal  Grandma Eulah and Grandpa Don. They greatly loved, Jane.  This was our last visit with Eulah.]

On the day while Donna was gone to the airport to pick up her parents, Jane took her first three step walk, with this turn of events she became, ‘a big girl.’

That day was Jane’s first meeting with her maternal Grandparents. At their first meeting,Jane cried from the uncertainty of being around strangers; however, after a few minutes, the  ‘Grandparent-Grandchild bond’ kicked in and Jane became right at home with them.

During Don and Eulah’s visit Jane continued to practice walking, and was of course, the continual center of attention — as it should be. Eulah mentioned on several occasions, proudly stating, “Jane is even prettier than her pictures.” Several times, Eulah said “I can’t believe how strong and active my Granddaughter is.”

As is usual, when ever we had relatives or close friends visit, we gave our bedroom over to our guests; Donna and I slept on cots in the rear addition. My relationship with the in-laws was interesting. Don was never particularly happy about Donna’s and my marriage. When we first met I wasn’t earning enough money, then we moved far away so visiting was infrequent. Even though I had made good money at Landy Packing, had been a high responsibility employee and a  supervisor, Don still had his reasons to feel I wasn’t up to par as a son-in-law.

Eulah acted differently toward me. Although she would periodically scold me for this or that, her complaints were never taken seriously. In fact, I often said and did things just to get a ‘rise’ from her. So, while I would pester her by word or deed, she’d scold me verbally or with facial or body language. We didn’t really talk to each other about anything important, but had a friendly, almost affectionate relationship based somewhat on teasing one another.

While Don and Eulah visited, we took them out to breakfast once and they took us out to dinner. We didn’t go anywhere special, everyone just wanted to spend our few days together visiting, in particular Grandma and Grandpa wanted to play with and getting to know Jane.

Exchanging ‘Good-byes’ with Eulah
Don and Eulah were scheduled to leave on October 23d, which was also Don’s sixtieth birthday[10]. It was a sad morning when they left, we enjoyed their company, and  soon they would be missing their daughter and grand-daughter.
Even though everyone had the ‘Goodbye Blue’s’ there was a momentary incident that burned into my mind.
As they prepared to leave, I walked out the front screen door. Eulah came outside right behind me, cautiously making her way down the front steps and walked over to where I’d stopped along beside our concrete pad walkway. Eulah looked up into my eyes. I saw a tearful glaze in each of her eyes. Very earnestly and warmly she quietly said, “Good Bye, Larry”. Eulah stood there for a moment looking into my face, then turned and slowly began walking away down the walkway. Eulah wasn’t just saying goodbye until the next time that we happened to get together, she knew this was the last time we would ever see one another.
A moment later, chatting gaily amongst themselves, Donna, who was carrying Jane, then Don with a suitcase,  came out of the mobile home and down the stairs. Both were oblivious to the brief conversation Eulah and I had, and its import.  I looked back toward Eulah as she slowly and carefully continued walking away, her body slightly bent over from advanced age. Small tears stung my eyes. I liked Eulah.

Beginning Journal 5: The Numina-Janus
On October 31, almost immediately after setting up a preface to Journal 4, The Passage for my relatives and descendants to write in, I began a massive undertaking for the next journal. The title of Journal 5, The Numina Janus refers to the two faces of one entity. I used the conceptualizing differences of the brains left and right mode of thought to write two major articles that filled ninety seven pages of the journal. [See following picture and associated poem].

The first article, exposing the brain’s left hemispheric mode of thought, is entitled, A Naive View Of Nuclear Conflict: A Twentieth Century Nightmare. It is a hard and analytic study of the concepts of international conflict escalation, nuclear war targeting objectives, the home fallout shelter, a variety of civil defense measures and post war reorganization. The article is almost inhumane in it’s omission of the real life, personal consequences and suffering that would ensue following a nuclear war, never-the-less this is the manner in which the concept was widely viewed.

The second article, Looking Glass, explored the brain’s right hemispheric mode of thought . Looking Glass started  with an essay concerning the idea that our minds are composed of a Primary and a Secondary Observer and discusses the different modes of observation each use. It continues with a description of the method I occasionally use to call up the Secondary Observer and elicit a rapt experience. Finally, the third essay compares our left and right modes of thought with a silhouette or ground view and an overhead view of a distant city. [See the Looking Glass section title page image, earlier in this post.]

The Eyes of Janus
by lfp (The text below refers to the image above. Inverting the picture shows a group of ancient humans sitting around a  small fire, just before sunrise; overhead, a flock of geese cross the face of the moon.)

And there beside me were windows, into which I looked, dimly seeing.
Now, on my right, I saw processes unfurl at a rapid pace. I saw continents cover the Earth’s polar regions, I saw the onset of a great era of cold. I saw people in caves, then in huts, then in cities. I saw their beliefs transformed, I saw their tools transformed. I saw and understood the nature of change. I touched infinity, then looked back into a dream world of little or no consequence. And there on my left, I saw the reflections of urgent space, with earth and stars, all things in place. A world of faces and machines and of clocks that run slow, where existed left, right, above and below.
Over my shoulder I saw my shadow disappear behind me into a past, where sunrise and sunset mingled over an evolving, changing landscape.
Turning, I was transfixed by a beautiful  sunrise, which I gazed at ever so long, until I became aware of activity under my feet.
How strange was this hard surface upon which I stood. For it was composed of particles which were continuously popping in and out of existence. I felt their transformations occur, as they came and went in their unusual way.
Eventually, I looked up and saw a beam of unknown energy issuing forth from a glowing chamber. The beam curled around and about, then ran back into a void before me. And the beam was a unifying force, for it was of a nature related to all things which existed beyond that window to my left.
Right before me was a great and long hall. Although I could see door behind door extending down this hall, I could see no other thing beyond any door, except the next door.
Beyond the window to my right there stood a long procession of lives ready to open the first door, but I knew it was my office to do so, and now it is yours.
Reading Journal 5: The Numina Janus, you now stand on this plane, before the doors, with windows to your left and right.
As you read the ensuing two major articles, you must create in your mind’s eye, pictures, to envision those things of which we shall speak. You must remain aware of the different kinds of feelings evoked by these articles. You must try and place yourself in a context where by you understand the thoughts and times which created such a horrendous state of organization amongst men that they deemed nuclear warfare a social, economic and political tool.
In a moment we shall see nuclear conflict as the epitome of those sights that we see beyond the left window. Then we will turn, look into and step through the right window, which is the “Looking Glass”. What we seek is a twofold understanding. And this understanding, is of the nature and the manner of presentation of what exists beyond the windows — which are your left and right brains higher functions.
Now, turn and look, then see.

Disaster at Bhopal, India
On the morning of December 3, a cloud of toxic fumes (methyl isocyanate) escaped from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India and drifted through part of the city. Some 2,500 people were killed immediately, another 3,329 eventually died from inhaling the fumes and 20,000 people were injured, many of these permanently blinded, in what was the world’s worst industrial disaster.
American lawyers [11]  rushed to Bhopal in what accounted to over a $1 billion in claims against Union Carbide.
The disaster at Bhopal became the measure of a modern world run amok.

What’s on TV tonight?
My favorite programs in 1984.
•  Local Evening   News
•  National   Evening News
•  ABC, CBS or NBC evening movies.

Movies
Movies that Donna and I attended during the year included:
2010 with Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Bob   Balaban
Beverly Hills Cop with Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Lisa Eilbacher
Children of   the Corn with Peter Horton, Linda  Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong
Dune with Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Jose Ferrer, Freddie Jones
Ghost Busters with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver,  Harold Ramis
Iceman with Timothy Hutton, Lindsay Crouse , John Lone
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan
Police   Academy with Stever Guttenburg,  G.W. Bailey, George Gaynes
Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Ron O’Neal, William Smith
Revenge of the Nerds with Robert Carradine, Anthony Edwards, Ted McGinley
Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito
Splash with Tom Hanks, Dary Hannah, John Candy, Eugene Levy
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock with William Shatner, Leonard Nemoy
Starman with Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith
Supergirl with Faye Dunaway, Helen Slater, Peter O’Toole,   Peter Cook
The Karate   Kid with Ralph Macchio, “Pat” Morita, Elizabeth Shue
The Last Star Fighter with Lance Guest, Dan O’Herilhy, Robert Preston

Themes and Events:
*  The game Trivial Pursuit is introduced into the United States and becomes an instant success. Two of the most popular movies of the year are Return of the Jedi (sequel to Star Wars) and Never Say Never Again (a James Bond action thriller). The “Cabbage Patch” doll becomes popular this Christmas.
*  The VCR (video cassette recorder) is becoming popular; old movies are being copied unto video cassettes for re-release. CDs (compact disks) and their digital players become widely available and begin cutting into the sale of 33 1/3 RPM records and stereo record players.
*  During this year, Sally Ride becomes the first woman in space, later Guion Bluford becomes the first Negro astronaut. Both ride the shuttle Challenger on different missions.
*  33% of the babies born in New York City are born out-of-wedlock. The government announces that as many as 23 million Americans are functionally illiterate.
*  In the first attack by computer ‘hackers’, a group of young computer experts electronically invaded some 20 major computer systems across the country, including the one at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

 Buttons & bumper stickers:
*  Bag your face.
*  We’re spending our children’s inheritance.
*  Get revenge — Live long enough to be a burden to your children.
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Somewhere In Time: Prelude to my journal
On Saturday, 5 February, Donna and I went to the movies and saw the sci-fi time travel movie, Somewhere In Time. There was something provocative about the movie’s concept, it was a dramatic time travel love story, still there was something more… We enjoyed the movie so much that we sat through it a second time before leaving the theater.
Sunday afternoon, we drove back into St. Cloud and saw the movie a third time. Donna rented the videocassette and we watched the movie again several times on weekday evenings. We bought the film’s musical soundtrack and borrowed the book from the library…

On Monday, 21 February 1983, I sat down and wrote a letter to my friend Mike. In the letter I described what happened in my life, in relation to the movie, over the previous few days, particularly on Friday, 18 February.

I began keeping a journal as a direct result of seeing the movie, Somewhere in Time, and the events that followed.[1]

The story (printed below) was so unusual in its effect on me, that I made a photocopy of my letter to Mike; and several months later the correspondence was entered into my first journal, Journal 1, The Gordian Knot. That story, with some minor wording changes, is as follows:

Music [Album; Somewhere in Time, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini]

Monday, 21 February: The prelude
“Donna has just left for work. I have taken today off as a vacation day, I’m feeling terribly run down.

I have been pacing back and forth in the kitchen, thinking about how to write this letter to you [2]. Filling my senses are the background music from the soundtrack to the movie, Somewhere In Time.

Without any foreknowledge, I began an odyssey two weeks ago tonight. It began when Donna brought home the videocassette movie, Somewhere In Time. Monday and Tuesday we watched and agonized our way through it three times. That Saturday we borrowed the book, Bid Time Return, from the library and bought the soundtrack on audio cassette. (The movie, Somewhere In Time was based on the book, Bid Time Return.)

Saturday afternoon and into the evening I read the books two hundred seventy-six pages. Sunday, I reread the book, while the soundtrack played over and over in the background. Again on Monday and Tuesday, February 14 and 15, we watched the movie. Tuesday was the 8th and last time we’ve seen it so far. Donna’s currently reading the book.

Wednesday and Thursday of this last week, I was like a madman, bristling with some unknown energy inside myself. I whistled the theme song, Somewhere In Time and Rhapsody On A Theme of Paganini until my mouth was tired. I read and reread portions of the book. I was becoming haggard to the point that Donna commented on how I looked.

I went to bed Wednesday night, my mind racing in an unknown and uncharted direction, sleep came slowly and fitfully. Thursday morning on the way to work, I still felt haggard, rundown and washed out. As I drove to work, through a light fog, I listened to the soundtrack on audio tape while wondering why I was so moved by the movie and the book. What in my experience was causing this? Was it a longing to have known my Great Grandmother, Anna Flora Anderson-Grubb, whose pictures are in the family photograph album? Years ago, my father gave me Anna’s wedding ring to keep as an heirloom, just as he had once been given this very ring. Was it from seeing the many photographs of our ancestors at various ages?

Thursday night when I returned home from work, I got into the drawer on the bottom of my dresser, a dresser made before my time. I rummaged through the drawer past an envelope containing the last half-dozen letters my Grandmother, Elsie Grubb-Pierce wrote to me. Then deeper past my baby brush and comb, down to the “Bluebook” (The Anderson family line back to Charlemagne.)

I reread a note written back in the 1800s, The family had moved west to Iowa. I remembered that in my youth, Grandmother Elsie (Grubb) Pierce told me the story of the Anderson brothers and their families, moving west with covered wagons and horses. This was the same story her mother Anna Flora (Anderson) Grubb told her when she was a child. There was a bad year for crops and one branch of the family had been forced to grind flowers to make a flour filler for bread.

After looking through the family heirlooms, my troubled mind felt more at ease. Thursday night after supper, we watched the videocassette rental, Saturday Night Fever — seeing it was a waste of time. Then, Donna went to bed, I sat up listening to the soundtrack from Somewhere In Time. This was the first time I just sat enjoying the music and was not wrapped up in the story imagery. Whatever it was that haunted me, was pacified, that night I slept well.

Friday, 18 February 1983: Transposition
This morning at 5:15 AM, I was again driving to work while listening to the morning news on the car radio. For about fifteen miles the fog was horrendous. In those early morning hours, with such fog as is seldom seen, I could not see off either side of the road, nor behind me in the mirror. Visibility was so poor that I accidentally strayed into the left lane and had to swerve sharply to keep from running off the shoulder, on the wrong side of the road. As the miles slowly ticked by, sounds from the radio faded from my consciousness. I became aware of only the fog which seemed to distort the world. I rode through the fog, warm and comfortable while sipping a cup of coffee. The white lines painted in the center of the road came out of the fog and disappeared, passing behind me into the fog. All around me was a cosmic void, a whitish gray substance that obliterated the present.

…5:45AM Friday
I approached St. Cloud and the fog slowly dissipated. Just as gradually the sound of the radio returned announcing the Farm Commodity report. Headlights from other cars were seen passing at the intersection ahead.

…5:55AM Friday
I punched in at the time clock at Landy Packing Company. The next hour and a half were very busy, the only thoughts on my mind were the immediacy of my job: Meter readings came first, then the ‘grease tanks’ and ‘sludge tank’ needed pumping to the tanker truck. I chatted briefly with the tanker driver. I oiled two pumps and made up two batches of chemicals to clean the waste water. Then, I poured some deodorant on the floor to freshen the smell of the waste water plant. Some sludge had spilled out of its holding tank over night so I squeegeed it up. Unsatisfied with the job, I hosed that section of floor and squeegeed it again. Time passed rapidly and before I knew it, it was break time.

…8:55AM Friday
I went into the water plant laboratory five minutes before break began and poured a cup of coffee. Absent-mindedly, I tore a piece of scratch paper off a pad beside me, pulled a pencil from my breast pocket and began writing.

Music [Album: Somewhere in Time, Somewhere in Time]

…8:56AM to 9:20AM, Date unknown
The room faded from my senses, while the roar of my twenty horse power pumps and the din of the boiler vanished beyond some distant past horizon. There was only that piece of paper and the blur of my pencil. I did not see it write, but never-the-less it wrote. There was light all around me, though now I realize it was only the fluorescent ceiling fixtures. But at 8:56 AM there was light, there was a piece of paper of indistinguishable size…

I was unaware of the fleeting moments as they passed…

Out of the piece of paper a vague human form evolved.

Instantly, I knew it was me, yet paradoxically, it was not me. For an increment of time too small to measure, I felt a gentle tug from the present, then the room flickered. I felt huge tears in my eyes, I felt their salty sting and…I was gone.

In that instant of transposition, with tears in my eyes and wearing greasy coveralls, I opened myself to what was occurring and began to understand. I was joyous and sorrowful at the same time. Tears stung my eyes. The vague human form again evolved, but now out a light that was everywhere in front of me. It was neither male nor female, it was both. The baffled and confused me. It was a child, then it rapidly aged. I wondered if it was beautiful, ugly or handsome. A suggestion came to me, more as a statement than a question, and it whispered in my mind, “Does that matter here?”

The form was directly in front of me, being perhaps only fifteen inches away. We looked into each other’s face. It was not changing so rapidly now and I could see it was for a short time a young woman, but with each blink of my eye (so to speak) she aged. The form morphed into a young man and he aged. Once again the form lost definite facial features, if indeed they had ever been definite, but we remained in very close proximity.

I looked down into the eyes of the creature and a second great transposition took place. I was evolving out of a piece of paper and the creature, a DESCENDANT OF MINE, was looking down at me. He became real in time and space. At first I was an amorphous form, then I evolved into a living being. We looked into each other’s eyes, then merged in some mental plane of understanding.

Another surge of tears stung my eyes and I felt a pain in the creature who looked down at me and tears were in its eyes. This was more felt than seen. Once again, the form lost its static features and began to rapidly age. There passed one, and another, and yet another person before my silent gaze. The rapidity of times passage made the people blur like multiple overlay images or as though a continual morphing process were under way, only I remained static.

Again and again, I felt the tears well up as I saw and felt the presences before me. Through their eyes I saw that I was a book or manuscript. A thought crossed my mind, stating, “So, that’s what became of me.” For a moment now and again, the forms were as moved by me as I was by them. At these times I felt overpowering surges of love for the form and we shared wonderment and awe for each other. In this way we communicated, touching each other’s lives as creatures sharing the same time, giving to each other the pure energy of love and undemanding understanding.

…9:20AM Friday
I became aware of the paper in my hand. The lab was again around me. I looked up at the wall clock, it was 9:20 AM. I was at work and coffee break had been over for five minutes. I put away my lunch box and thermos, opened the laboratory door and listened to the overall din of the boiler and motors. I know the sound made by the wastewater treatment plant when everything is running properly, nothing sounded amiss. After standing in the doorway looking and listening to the plant for a few moments, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the paper I’d just written on.

 Words written during transposition
“Here we sit, staring at each other across time and space. I am a flesh and blood being, so are you. Currently, I am embodied. My words give you but a ghostly shimmer of my world. I know in my heart that you are there in front of me. You are here with me now…

To you, I have been arrested in time, an entity in time’s cage. This entity has a variety of faces: youthful, teenage, young man and middle aged. All are one, for I am encapsulated in these words. A point in times past.

To me you are ageless. I can consider you and love you no less, for you are a kindred creature of my flesh and spirit. You are youthful, a teenager, a young adult, middle aged, older, an old bodied person with the spirit of a child. Though you come back to me a thousand times in your life, there is a part of you that never changes. Your body blossoms to maturity and wilts, but the You inside, You are as I am Me. You are a child in time.

We, You and I, have so much in common, we are ever so close now. We are like the upper branches and lower limbs of a tree. You are like an upper branch, nodding in the winds of time to come, while I am a lower branch, swaying in the breeze of times past. I looked below me on the tree and old dead limbs fell, crashing to the ground. As I watched they became topsoil. When I looked back up the tree, you had sprouted, your leaves uncurled and you became a twig.

How strangely to speak. Yet our being united like THIS has caused tears to well up in my eyes. You sit and read, wondering with a hint of anticipation at the words I shall speak with you. As your years pass these words will change. Like a kaleidoscope, meaning will shift and vary, but it is you who are the kaleidoscope. Your interpretations and attached values and interests will shift again and again, as you look back through these pages and into my eyes…”

I began writing into Journal 1, The Gordian Knot, on 19 May 1983, see the Journal’s introduction graphic at the end of this chapter.
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Porky the parakeet finds a home
It had been a couple of years since our parakeet, Alexander R. Little flew away and died in the forest. A few days after he left, we cleaned up his cage, and stored it away in our garden shed. This spring, when we began thinking about raising another parakeet, we pulled out the old cage and recleaned it. Making a trip into St. Cloud, we visited all the stores where we’d seen parakeets for sale in the past. While we looked, for a large supply of healthy birds, we bought new seed, seed bells, mirror, perches, ladder and other toys.

On the first really warm day of spring, we went to Woolworth’s and bought a young fellow. After he’d been at home for a few days, and began to settle in, his character seemed to indicate his name should be, Porky.

In the months that followed, Porky became a member of the family.

Very often, when I was working on a journal at the kitchen table, Porky would fly over to the table and walk up and into the opening between my left wrist and my long-sleeved shirt cuff. He wasn’t taught to do this, but liked the warmth and dark. I was writing with my right hand, so seldom needed to move my left wrist when he was ‘at work’. He’d stay with me about ten minutes, snuggling in my shirt cuff, then  would back out, climb on my left arm and walk up my shirt sleeve to my shoulder.

Porky, like Alexander, and Icabod before him, were spoiled at the dining table. Each bird, in his own time, was given little piece’s of snack chips, fried egg white, tiny pieces of lettuce, an occasional vegetable. Once in a while when particularly inquisitive, one of the little fellows would fly to the table and walk amongst the dishes looking onto each plate and occasionally making a lunge for something that looked good. Such behavior was met with instant, loud scolding and shooing from Donna and myself. The hapless bird would usually fly straight up, then circle in the kitchen or front room while loudly squawking his displeasure at being chased away.

Books read during the year
During the year I read several books, including:
Lucifer’s  Hammer © 1977 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle – A terrifying novel that answers the question of what would happen if a large meteor hit Earth. 640 pages.
Bid  Time Return © 1975 – by Richard Matheson – A novel of time travel and love. 278 pages.

More layoffs at Landy Packing
At Landy Packing Company, the period from Spring through early Summer remained a slow period for business. After closing the plant for a week and a half during 1979, Landy’s tried a new tact by laying off production employees every Monday over a period of several months.

During 1982, the United States entered a recession. Seeing the relatively poor times and the numbers of people losing their job, plus hearing the government’s promise to reduce inflation, Landy Packing forced a one year wage freeze on its employees.

On top of the wage freeze, our Monday layoffs started earlier than usual. Everybody was unhappy, not only were we not getting a raise to make up for inflationary losses, but we were taking a twenty percent reduction in our income by missing work on Monday’s.

As a result of tightening economic conditions at work, Donna and I began saving money in earnest, while planning to fully stock our pantry with as much food as was possible.

The solar cold frame
In an attempt to extend the growing season for a limited number of cold hearty vegetables, we constructed a small, insulated solar cold frame. The value of a cold frame lies in its ability to convert short wave solar radiation into storable heat. On a sunny or partially sunny spring or fall day, sunlight heats the soil on the interior of the cold frame. At night, when the outside temperatures drop, the soil becomes a thermal flywheel, slowly giving up its heat and moderating the interior temperatures.

We made a four-foot by eight foot wide base of two-inch by six-inch pressure treated wood and set it in a two foot hole next to the garden. The base of the frame was faced with one inch thick ‘below grade foam insulation’, then refilled with topsoil and compost. A four-foot high insulated, sloped structure was built on top of the base. The structure was vertically on the north side and angled to face the low spring and fall sun, on the south side. Hinged, double thick clear, plastic doors were made and installed on the front for access to the growing area.
[Image at left: Our solar cold frame in the  garden, with the strawberry pyramid to its left and asparagus patch at extreme right. Our red raspberries, grapes and fruit trees are out of the picture to the right. The garden is    immediately behind and to the left of  the camera.]

In the spring we started pepper, tomato, eggplant seedlings and lettuce in the cold frame. During the fall we again planted lettuce, Chinese cabbage, chives and Swiss chard amongst a few old tomato and eggplant vines.  As temperatures turned colder we began closing the cold frame’s hinged doors at night. In the fall the tomato and eggplant both still had flowers.

We were able to harvest several tomatoes, a full month after hard frosts had killed their kind in the garden.

Our records showed that, lettuce in the cold frame continued to grow nearly two months after the firs, frost, in late September, killed off most of the garden, and about a month after lettuce growth in the garden stopped growing, during mid October.

Hardy produce raised in the cold frame, easily survived the first snow in early November, which stayed on the ground for some time. In mid November, when overnight exterior temperatures dropped to 24ºF, the cold frames interior air temperature only declined to 30ºF, while the soil temperature held overnight at 42ºF.

Life inside the cold frame continued, at a considerably reduced rate, up until Thanksgiving, when we usually had to brush snow off the cold frames glazing to gain entry.

Overall, our soil and air temperature records and observations indicated that the insulated, solar cold frame was capable of sustaining the viable growth of vegetables approximately a month longer than their unprotected counterparts in the garden.

In synopsis, it would have been nice to have later built a large solar cold frame (sixteen feet wide by eight feet deep) with water and rock heat storage surrounding small beds and potted vegetables. The key: large sloping surfaces for thermal storage, small pockets of embedded plants, housed in a well insulated, clear glazed structure.

Another precognition, the earthquake
During April, Donna and I took a one week vacation, and decided to stay  home and work on projects around the property. On this particular day, we’d been shopping inSt. Cloud and purchased a goose feather down sleeping bag and two air mattresses. That evening, in order to test the comfort of our new equipment, we blew up the air mattresses and laid out our sleeping bags. My air mattress was set on the front room floor right next to our fifty gallon tropical fish tank. At our normal bedtime, we undressed and climbed into our sleeping bags. We chatted for a while and Donna drifted off to sleep. I fell into a nexus between wakefulness and sleep, where with a start, I suddenly became worried that an earthquake would knock the fish tank over on me. The irrational thought made me restless and left me tossing and turning unable to go to sleep. The worry finally prompted me to awaken Donna and take her into our bedroom to sleep on the bed.

[Above right: A rustic flower bed we had in the early years, located beside our stepping stone walkway, made with sawn logs set into ground, a simple wire fence. It lasted about 5 years before a 4×6 inch pressure treated     plank border was installed. Garage in background.]

While browsing through the next evenings newspaper, I was shocked to see an article about an earthquake. The previous night there had been an earthquake in the north central Midwest. The article stated this region of the country was an unusual area for earthquake activity and that the earthquake had been stronger than the norm.

A shadow in the sandstorm
One afternoon during the summer, as I hurried absentmindedly about some mundane chores in the Waste Water Treatment Plant, there suddenly grew within my mind a sense of impending urgency. The feeling washed through me with such uncalled for suddenness that I stopped my work and stood motionless for a few moments, my head tilted off to the side, my mind receptive, as I attempted to fathom what was happening.  The feeling of urgency was like an ocean wave approaching land, when it broke on the shores of my consciousness, the message gave me a chill of fear, for in the future beyond my time there lurked a dizzying pall of doom. I immediately understood that mankind’s greatest battle for survival would be fought in the future, although I had no idea what form the battle would take.

As I stood there in the middle of the water plant, between my two 80,000 gallon, water clarifiers, I wished there were something I could personally do to contribute my assistance to that future. As the sense of urgency faded and I came out of my trance-like state, shook off the odd occurrence and went about my job. A few minutes later all about me faded and I looked out onto a strange environment…

 Dust and grit hurled toward and past me.

 As I began to look about, sheets of sand were lifted from irregularities on the ground and from a knoll to my left. I found myself standing on a large, nearly flat plain. The vast area before me was sandy, there were rocks laying about on the surface. My first thought was that a nuclear weapon had exploded, but I realized this was no target area, there were no other life forms or manmade objects visible.

 I felt that this area had once been alive and fertile, not always the desert that now existed [3]. There was nothing available for me to determine how long the area had been arid and desertified.

Looking up, I could not see the disk of the sun, but variations in the density of the blowing dust, allowed me to see a brightness that suggested the sun was high in the sky.

  I then became aware that I could neither hear or feel the wind or the driven sand particles that were being whisked through the air. I realized I was not in the scene, bodily. It was as though the flesh and blood observer were my kin in that future day. I saw through his or her eyes and for a moment we both saw through one pair of eyes.
[Image above left: The sandstorm in my vision was similar to this photo.]

In the months and years that followed, I occasionally thought about the vision. The environment I saw was not hospitable to Man. It was a desert of the worst kind, composed of fine material, sand, and a scattering of partially buried rocks of all sizes. I saw an area where the top layers of soil were unstable. There was no soil bed, sand and dust were freely carried on the wind.

Whether the desertification was initially brought about by global cooling or warming, multiple nuclear explosions, bio-engineered organics, a meteor impact, or changes in the atmosphere’s constituents was immaterial in the vision. The result was a grossly altered climate that existed in the future. I realized that Man’s greatest battle would not be a war of immediate violence, not the release of great explosives, but something more subtle. The planet’s ecology had been both greatly reduced in diversity and poisoned. One species, Man, had expanded out of control and had rendered the environment less capable of recovering from worldwide change brought on by natural, possibly even cyclical, global effects. It was a process that began as a whimper, then grew and spread relentlessly across the generations as a poison to the planet’s circulatory system.

Goodbye, Pioneer 10
By June 13, The Pioneer space probe, launched in March 1972, became the first manmade object to leave the Solar System. [Image at right: Pioneer 10, an artists conception]

Attempting to make wine
Since moving to our rural property, Donna and I had experimented with a variety of ‘hobby farm’ technologies. When we put in our garden and orchard, we planted two rows, or a total of ten grapes vines. Half of our vineyard was composed of the very hearty, but tart, Beta grape, while the other half was Concord. Unfortunately, our climate was inhospitable to the Concord variety, so their production was much less than the Betas. It took two years of vine growth before grape production was large enough for us to attempt wine making.

Anticipating a good overall harvest this fall, we bought the required primary and secondary fermentation tanks (several each five gallon plastic buckets and narrow mouth glass jars), fermentation locks, wine yeast, etc. We dutifully followed the printed instructions to make our own wine and ended up bottling ten gallons of tart red wine.

We waited six months for the wine to age before opening the first bottle. The batch was still quite tart so we let  the remainder age another six months. By the end of 1984 we found the wine still tart and barely tolerable, so it was dumped. We decided not to make any further batches. The unused wine making equipment was sold to an employee at Landy’s.
While I don’t remember mentioning it earlier, over the years we also made a batch of Ginger beer and a batch on Dandelion wine, both remained tart and almost undrinkable even after aging for two years. The batch of grape wine we made in 1983 was the last of our ‘fermentation’ experiments.

Other improvements
1) The outhouse (for potential emergencies) A few years earlier, when Butch Chemielewski dug our ‘trash can pit,’ we also had him dig a 5-6 foot deep shaft for an ‘out house’.  Immediately, we built a pressure treated wood, lath framework and set it in the hole, then back filled around the exterior with rocks, straw and dirt.

[Various  additions and improvements made in the back yard: 1) our  emergency outhouse, 2) a 1000 gallon underground gasoline storage tank with electric pump,  3) compost bins (center left), 4) rock pile (center-rocks from the yard and fence line), 5) part of garden are seen at left in this picture, 6) while the young vineyard and orchard in the left center background. Griz (next to the outhouse, is watching my activities.]

During our first couple years on the property we were installing the garden, yard fencing, and building the Rear Addition,  so it wasn’t until 1983 that we built a classic, one seater outhouse. [see photograph above] We mounted a regular toilet seat with lid on the wooden potty bench, had a roll of toilet paper stored in a sealed coffee can, a candle in holder was mounted on the wall, matches were available, I even made the door with a moon shaped ‘window’ (covered with screen) to help illuminated the interior. Although we only used the outhouse a few time, and never in an emergency, it was pleasant to ‘sit on the throne’ with the door wide open and look out onto the woods while doing business. The small structure had tongue and groove lumber siding which was painted light green and covered with a green shingled roof.
2)  In order to lock in low prices and ensure a large supply of gasoline, we bought a 1000 gallon steel gasoline storage tank. When delivered, I painted the tank exterior with coal-tar epoxy. Next, we had Butch Chemielewski out with his back hoe, to dig the hole and help set the tank in, with its fill and pump bungs oriented vertically. I installed the piping and the hole was back filled. We bought a pump and had our electrician do the wiring between it and an electrical outlet at the back of the garage, about 30 feet away. Finally, we had Kackley’s Gas and Fuel, from Foley, deliver 1000 gallons of Regular gasoline, and with, that another piece of system was completed.
3)  In the photograph above, you can see the back side of our twelve-foot long by four-foot wide compost bins.
4)  To the right of the compost bin, is the large rock pile created by removal of rocks from the yard and garden. Many of these rocks were too large for Donna and I to move and required our tractor.
5) Looking to the background, between the compost bin and the rock pile, is the homesite’s north fence line gate. The trash can pit (photographed and described in a previous year) is about 30 feet to the right of the gate.

Garden Produce comparison: 1982 – 1983

Notes: 1) The goose eggs weighed the same as 2.33 large chicken eggs, while each duck egg equaled the weight of 1.25 large chicken eggs.

Household expenses, strategies and cash flow
As the years passed, in an attempt to maximize the reduction of our overhead expenses, we made several economic maneuvers.
1)  When we purchased our mobile home in the spring of 1977, we paid cash for it thereby reducing our rent expense. The apartment rental fee in SE St.Cloud had cost us  approximately $184 per month.
2)  By moving into the mobile home at Rockwood Estates Mobile Home Park, we reduced the space rental fee to $45 per month. The $135 monthly savings was funneled into our Savings program which was in turn earmarked to buy rural acreage.
In 1980, when our thirty-nine acre Contract for Deed was paid in full and we’d moved the mobile home onto the property, that eliminated the Rockwood Estates space rental fee, which  had risen to $65 per month during our three-year residence. The rental savings went toward paying off a bank loan for the work we had done installing the well and drain field.
3)  Installation of the wood burning stove and use of firewood cut on our property reduced our heating bill by about $200 per year (keep in mind that the raw acreage cost us $225 per acre).
4)  Food production from the garden, bees and livestock during 1983 yielded $492, equivalent to ten weeks food expenses.
We were slowly, but surely, converting our dollars from funds paid to someone else for services, into real wealth, which we owned. The mobile home, land, well, drain field, wood burning stove and various homesteading tools had the effect of increasing our cash flow, our wealth and to a degree our economic freedom. At the same time, we had a quiet, beautiful, park-like environment to live in and a pleasant lifestyle.

Household expenses, a multiyear chart (actual costs, effects of inflation seen in the numbers)

Codes used in the table above:

Weekly family income, 1983

The US Marine barracks in Beirut
On October 23, a Terrorist drove a truck load of explosives up to a hotel housing a Marine headquarters and barracks in Beirut,Lebanon and committed suicide. More than 200 Marines were killed in the attack promptly causing the U.S.to withdraw from its peacekeeping role in that country.

Grenada
On October 25, US troops invade the tiny Caribbean Island after the government experienced a bloody coup, to restore order and protect eleven hundred Americans on the island.

[Photo at right: Early morning on the road fronting our property’s east side. Looking SSE along County Road 14 (125^th  Ave NE) from our mail box. The population density of our rural neighborhood in  1984 was about sixteen people per square mile.]

Prelude to the birth of Jane Elizabeth Pierce
On Monday, November 28, Donna and I awoke around 4:30AM. Looking outdoors, we could see a lot of snow had fallen during the night and that heavy snow was continuing to fall. After dressing and starting a fire in the wood burning fireplace, I shoveled snow off the rear addition steps then handed wood in to Donna from the outdoor woodpile to refill our indoor firewood storage ring.

The morning weather reports were advising, ‘absolutely no travel in central Minnesota’. Snow plows and sanding trucks had already been pulled off the roads due to the severe early winter storm. So far we’d received about six inches of fresh snow, bringing the snow cover to thirteen inches.

At 5:30AM, I telephoned Landy Packing Company and told them we’d be late to work, if we could get out at all. Meanwhile, the news was reporting that another four to six inches of snow was expected to fall. Already, our snowfall for November was breaking records going back 35-40 years, to the mid 1940s.

At 11:00AM, I brought the tractor out of the machine shed – garage and began clearing the driveway. While working, I wondered if I was going about a fool’s errand, since there was drifting snow and more snowfall forecast. Donna sat on the tractor bucket to scoop snow away from the leading edge of the  yard gate. She then climbed on the back of the tractor and rode with me as I plowed down to the county road. The only vehicle seen driving was a four-wheel drive pickup truck. We watched as it braved its way slowly, in zig zag fashion up the road, through the eight inches of fresh snow.  About noon, just after I finished plowing, the county snow plow made a single pass down the road, opening one lane.

Donna called our neighbors, Bobby and Arlene and invited them over for lunch. Everyone was home from work and all outdoor activities had stopped due to the weather. Bob and Arlene were happy for the distraction and came right over in their four-wheel drive pickup truck. We chatted about the weather and told jokes while the girls made a large lunch consisting of soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. After lunch, while Donna and Arlene chatted in the kitchen, Bobby and I sat in the living room playing two new video games: Swords and Serpents and The Dreadnought.
Over the years, we came to see Arlene as a cheerful, outgoing, energetic, happy type of person. Bobby was fun to be with, if you could get him to actually arrive at the function, he had a way of being cursedly late to everything. Many a supper meal was held up an hour to an hour and a half waiting for him to finish a chore “Ya just can’t walk away from somethin’ like that.”

That evening, after our company returned home, we were still full from lunch so Donna made a light meal around hamburger patties. We ate little and put the rest in the refrigerator for ‘leftovers.’

[Left: The driveway on a fall morning. Taken about 150-200 feet up the driveway from the county road. The homesite is about 300 feet beyond the curve.]

Donna’s ‘water’ breaks
The next morning at 4:05AM, five minutes after Donna got up, she hurried back into the bedroom and awoke me, exclaiming, “Larry wake up! Larry get up! My water’s broke. We’ve got to go to the hospital.”  So, I awoke out of a peaceful sleep into an emergency situation, sat up rubbing my eyes, then climbed out of bed. Donna was across the bedroom moving about in a nervous, agitated state. She took a wet towel from between her legs and pointed to a wet spot on her side of the bed while talking. Still groggy, I began to ascertain Donna’s condition and decide what to wear for the day. A stream of thoughts passed through my mind: “Donna is not hysterical or in pain, so we don’t have an imminent emergency. Should I wear my work clothes? No. Maybe I won’t go to work today? Should I wear my home clothes? Yes. Should I take my work clothes in a paper bag and change into them if I go to work?”

By now approximately 10 seconds had passed since I had awakened, my mental fog was clearing and the situation becoming better understood. Donna was scampering around gathering things for her upcoming hospital stay. Meanwhile, I went into high gear, dressed in my home clothes, then telephoned Landy Packing to tell them the situation and say that I wouldn’t be to work that day.

As I grabbed my winter coat and turned on the outdoor security light, I wondered: “Had we’d received the other 6 inches of snow that was forecast? With an expectant mother waiting, it would not be a good time to have to plow the drive way! Would there be an impenetrable pile of snow out by the county road that I’d have to dig through to get out? What about breakfast or at least a cup of coffee?”

Fortunately, we had not received additional snow and there was no drifting. We drove down the driveway and out onto the county road without problems. I stayed on the main road, driving down Highway 25 then west to St. Cloud on Highway 23. We stopped at Perkin’s downtown restaurant for a cup of coffee “to go,” then drove up 9th Street to the St. Cloud Hospital, on Northway Drive.

Admission to the hospital
At the hospital, the Admissions nurse had Donna sit in a wheelchair and took her to Room 315. While Donna was getting situated in her room, I signed several admissions forms. The hospital’s floor plan must have been designed by a ‘video game freak’, because it was a maze of corridors. If it weren’t for the elevators which at least take you to the floor you want, a person could wander for hours trying to locate such treasured spots as a bathroom or food service. Still in a daze from the mornings rapid events, I exited the elevator on the Third floor. A student nurse gave me directions, a few moments later, another nurse gave me directions, finally I found Donna in Room 315. The thought crossed my mind that I might never find my way out of the hospital, but I’d found where they’d placed Donna.

Room 315 was a ‘Two Occupant’ room, in the hospital’s Maternity Wing.  Just inside the door, in the first bed, was a groaning, expectant mother. Leaning close beside her was her husband who, for some reason was making wolf like, howling noises, in her ear.

Donna was in the second bed, which was separated from the first by a room dividing curtain. As we chatted, we also stopped on occasion to listen to the menagerie of sounds drifting through the curtain from the other couple. I couldn’t help but think that the nurse’s ought to drag off the father and operate on him. While the wife was keeping her head and undergoing periodic labor contractions, the husband was issuing breathing instructions, “Breathe in…. not too hard…” With each instruction, he would try to breathe in an exaggerated, empathetic way with her, as though he too were in labor. We chuckled at the ‘frantic father to be’ and his heavy breathing punctuated with gasping instructions.

Donna laid on her bed chatting with me, she seemed so out-of-place there in the hospital. Since she was in no pain and had no apparent medical problem, it was as though she were just a healthy person laying on a hospital bed.

Around 9:30 AM, I went in search of, and found, the hospital cafeteria. The menu listed two eggs and toast, cake, etc., but there was no meat offered. The waitress said they normally didn’t serve meat, but she could have the cook fry up some thin strips of ham for salads. I ordered the “cakes” and asked for lots of syrup. A strange look came over the waitresses face and it dawned on me that “cake” did not mean ‘pancakes’; she affirmed my realization.  My breakfast consisted of two eggs and toast, a small pile of odd-looking ham strips, coffee and a ‘Long John donut’. While eating I noticed that I’d developed some mental disorientation and a nervous twitch in my right eye lid from the mornings nerve-wracking events.

After breakfast, I returned to Room 315, to find Donna in good spirits and wondering when she’d begin having contractions. I stayed with her until 1:00 PM. During the preceding eight hours, Donna had only been checked once by one doctor. This seemed to indicate that her situation was currently not nearing term and that nothing would be happening for a while. I left the hospital at 1:00 PM and drove across town to the Crossroads Mall, where I bought Donna a new winter coat and the video game Microsurgeon, as welcome home presents.

Music [Album: Somewhere in Time, The Old Woman]

30 November: “Jane, I presume?”
I awoke early Wednesday morning and made a quick breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast. After feeding Griz and Jesse, and packing my work clothes in a paper bag, I hurried to the hospital to see Donna. There had been no change in Donna’s condition during the night; she was still waiting for ‘something’ to happen. Having been in the hospital for twenty-four hours without food, Donna was about to ‘climb the wall’ for a steak. During this time and for the next few days, Donna’s nourishment consisted of a five percent glucose solution, fed intravenously.

Since Donna hadn’t begun labor contractions, there was some talk of attempting to ‘force labor’ later in the day. Evidently, once an expectant mother’s water breaks, it’s best to achieve birth as soon as possible, before any potential infection develops that might affect the baby. Since our baby was arriving one month early and there were still no contractions, Donna was given steroid injections to help finish the development of the babies lungs. About 9:45AM, I left the hospital and drove across town to Landy Packing Company.

Donna telephone me at work a t12:30 PM to say the nurses had just hooked her up to an ‘IV’ to induce labor. At this point in time, Donna was still in good spirits, but sounded a little apprehensive. I made arrangements for my swing shift relief operator to come to work early, he arrived at 1:30PM, whereupon, I changed clothes and went back to the hospital.

During the morning, Donna was moved to Room 317, a Single Occupancy room. By the time I arrived, the ‘forced labor chemicals’ had begun to cause contractions, leaving Donna in considerable pain. I was a little frightened seeing her wither in agony, almost to the point of not recognizing me. There was a nurse in the room with Donna, monitoring her condition.

Around 3:40PM, Dr. Olinger came in and checked Donna’s chart. He turned and said to a nurse, “There’s no use messin’. Have ’em prep O.R. for immediate use. We’ll take the baby right away.” I followed Dr. Olinger out of Donna’s room and into the hall to find out what prompted his brisk instruction to the nurse. He briefly said (paraphrased), “By 4:00 o’clock she’ll be in the operating room. By 4:15 PM she’d be under anesthetics and five to ten minutes later you’ll have your baby girl.”

As the doctor walked away, I stood alone in the corridor digesting what he said. When he’d said ‘right away’, he meant, ‘right away’, I glanced at my watch and realized that in a half hour, we’d have our baby. I turned and started back into Donna’s room, but the attending nurse shooed me away. Others were already washing and shaving Donna for a Cesarean operation.

My mind went into a fog again. I felt like an useless appendage walking aimlessly down the hall.

Then, seeing Dr. Olinger talking on the telephone, and he being the only recognizable point of authority, I walked over to him. In a moment he hung up, turned and said. “Follow me.” I obediently followed him down the hall. Rounding a corner in the corridor, he pointed to a room with a sign above the door stating, ‘FATHERS ROOM’. He told me to wait there until a nurse came for me. I started to walk towards the Father’s Room, but he called me back. I was then taken down another corridor, through a pair of doors, and down another corridor to a window in the Baby Ward. Dr. Olinger said that I would be called right after the baby was delivered. At that time, I should leave the Father’s Room and come here to the Baby Ward where I could see the infant.

I made my way back to the Father’s Room and watched TV for a couple of minutes. Unable to concentrate on the television program, I walked down to the main floor Gift Shop for a candy bar. I recognized the Gift Shop’s lady volunteer worker, as a friend of our neighbor’s Bobby and Arlene, a lady whom we’d met at a polka club Halloween party a year earlier.

As we chatted. I suddenly jerked my head up and to the left. For an instant, I felt as though something had gone ‘ping’ in the deepest recess of my soul. This happened while we talked there in the gift shop. I doubt anyone noticed my being startled. I continued with the conversation for a moment longer and excused myself saying, ‘I should go now, because the baby will be here any minute.’

Even as I excused myself, I already knew that just a few moments earlier, Jane was born.

Looking back on this event, I felt a combination of things, described as: When you’re in the lobby of a tall building waiting for the elevator, they sometimes announce their arrival with a ‘ping’ like sound as though from a muted bell. Since you don’t know exactly when the elevator will stop, you’re usually lost in some thought when the little ‘ping’ sounds. The muted little musical note startles you and you jerk a glance toward its source.

In my case the ‘ping’ was not heard, it was felt and yet it was not felt by the bodies sensors, it was known from another level. I had no subsequent rush of adrenaline. I was immediately aware of what had happened, for the ‘ping’ told me, that the essence of continuity of my soul had arrived.

I made a beeline back to the Father’s Room.

Two or three minutes after my arrival, a nurse came for me and I followed her down the hall and into the Baby Ward.

I looked about, standing around me in the room were five or six nurses and a doctor. Across the room, laying on the counter on a small blanket, was Jane.

The nurses had wiped the birth fluids off Jane’s body, except around her scalp. She was beautiful! A nurse approached me and asked if I wanted to hold her (Was she kidding?)  of course I wanted to hold her! I was a very happy and proud Daddy! And here was that little girl…

A nurse asked me, “Well, what do you think? Do you want to take her home with you?” I answered, “Yes, “ while thinking, “These people are regular comedians! All I want to do is wrap Jane up, dash out of the Baby Ward, rescue Donna and all three of us hurry back home.” Alas, they took Jane from me, gave her a vaccination, put silver nitrate in her eyes (which were still closed), then placed her in an incubator.

Later I learned, they rate babies at ‘one minute’ and ‘five minutes’ after birth to see how their metabolic systems are working. The Normal gradient is between seven and ten. Jane’s one minute evaluation was an eight, her five-minute evaluation was nine. A nurse told me that it was rare for a baby to receive perfect ten rating. I was relieved, thinking to myself, “So far, so good.”

Visiting and cleaning up
Thursday, after my regular 6:30 AM to 3:00 PM shift at Landy’s, I  changed my clothes and hurried back to the hospital to visit with Donna and Jane. Jane was visiting with her Mom when I arrived, in fact Jane was attempting to get the hang of nursing. She was so small that Donna needed to use a nipple extension so the nipple would fit in Jane’s mouth.

Jane was a pretty baby. She was born with a lot of auburn hair and pretty blue eyes. When I pressed my right index finger into her hand, she closed her fingers on me, but they didn’t reach all the way around my little finger.

Later in the evening, when I returned home, I found that between my working all day, shopping and visiting at the hospital, chores at home were not being done. Jane’s month early arrival had caught us unprepared. In the kitchen, soiled pots and pans were stacked precariously on the kitchen counter, the dishes on the bottom had hard, dried food on them.

Down the hall, the bed wasn’t made,  there was a load of dry clothes in the wash basket that need putting away, the hamper was full of soiled work clothing so I didn’t have anything to wear to work. Griz and Jessie were outdoors barking in complaint, because it was well past their supper time.

I threw a load of soiled clothes in the wash machine and went to make supper. Supper consisted of two leftover hamburger patties from the previous Monday night, a large serving of instant mashed potatoes, a half can of corn and a piece of bread. While my supper cooked on the stove, Donna and I spoke together on the telephone, simultaneously, I made a sack lunch for my next day at work. After supper, I fed the dogs their chunky food mixed with all my leftover mashed potatoes. When I ran water in the sink to do dishes, I found the wash machine had used up all the hot water. The pile of dirty pans and dishes grew a little higher.

Cleaning up around the house, Part II
After work on Friday, I went to the bank and did some grocery shopping then went straight home.

I needed to work on a rapidly accumulating batch of chores about the house, amongst which were: the dishes, laundry, and general house cleaning. Before starting on household chores, I had to begin shoveling a layer of deep snow off our mobile home’s roof; on the kitchen table there lay a four-inch high stack of unopened mail; outdoors the dogs were barking, wanting to be fed their supper.

While a batch of clothes dried in the clothes dryer, I went through two batches of water in the kitchen sink washing dishes and silverware. Even with a scratcher pad , it was difficult removing some of the old and unforgiving, dried egg from those bottom dishes. The pots and pans, which literally covered the top of the stove, had to wait another day before being washed.

Big day, bad pizza
Saturday morning, I had to go in to Landy Packing and work six hours, from 6:00AM until noon. At noon, I changed clothes and drove across town to the hospital for a visit with Donna and baby Jane. We visited throughout the afternoon. We sure are happy with our tiny tot. Donna is complaining about being fed a liquid diet at the hospital and ‘wants to be released so she can go home for a decent meal’.

At dusk, I left Mother and Daughter with intentions of stopping at a restaurant for a balanced meal myself. Just as I pulled into country Kitchen’s parking lot, a sudden craving for pizza swept over me, I turned the car around and went to a pizza parlor. Back at hom,e I finished cooking my pizza, popped open a bottle of beer and sat down to eat while watching a rented video cassette entitled, The Beast Master (a terrible movie).
During the previous week, my homemade meals had been quite bland, so as if in making up for the lack of spice, I added too much hot pepper to the pizza, then ate the entire greasy thing.
I awoke several times during the night with an upset stomach and terrible gas pains.

Videotaping in the hospital
I awoke Sunday morning feeling na. Before long, diarrhea drove me to the toilet, where the hot peppers from the previous night pizza, burned a second time…

Around 11:00 AM, I began a videotape entitled, ‘Jane Elizabeth Pierce’, while walking about on the driveway,filming the environment and home that Jane was born into. Having begun the tape’s introduction, I drove into St. Cloud to visit with the girls. Just as I stepped into the hospital elevator with my video camera, an armed police officer stopped me and asked what I was doing with the camera. I answered saying I was there to see my wife and baby and not just wandering through the hospital taking pictures. A nurse subsequently told me it was OK to film, but that it should be restricted to our room only.

Donna had her first solid food in six days for lunch, a meal consisting of small portions of: turkey,  dressing, peas,a  dinner roll, some custard and a cup of coffee. Jane spends most of her time sleeping in a bassinet and nursing at her mother’s breast.

5 December, Monday
I went home after work to finish washing clothes and dishes.

Donna and Jane come home
[Photo at right: Jane, 1 month old. Precious Jane, asleep on the couch, early afternoon, Christmas day 1983. Am I just prejudiced, or is she one nice looking baby girl?! ]

Since Tuesday, December 6, was the day that Donna and Jane were scheduled to come home, I left work several hours early, at noon. When I arrived at the hospital, Donna’s nurse, Marie Olson (about forty-five years old) and I carried our personal belongings from Room 341 to our pickup truck. Jane was wrapped up in baby blanket and ready to go home. We left the St. Cloud  Hospital and drove out-of-town, headed for our home at Nightstar*, two proud parents and one baby, Jane.

Jane moves in
A few days after the girls came home, Donna set up a cot and began sleeping in Jane’s bedroom. The two-some were up and down two, three, even four times a night, feeding, going to the bathroom and all that mother’s and the ‘little people’ do.

Initially, Jane spent most of her day sleeping, but as the weeks passed into months, she spent more and more time awake. Every evening when I came home, I’d give Jane a big kiss then change out of my work clothes. At every meal, even if she was asleep, we brought Jane to the kitchen table in her car seat carrier and set her on a chair seat where we could look at her and talk to her.

Even before Jane was able to see, she was a ‘regular’ at the table.

Regarding the layoffs at Landy Packing
Our ‘one day a week’ layoff’s at Landy Packing, began earlier this Spring and lasted  a whopping twenty-two weeks, making it equivalent to missing an entire months income for the year. Fortunate for our family resources, Donna and the other office personnel continued to work Monday’s. Since I was the supervisor in the Waste  Water Treatment plant, I did put in a few Monday’s working on various projects and was able to get some overtime hours during the rest of the workweek. Unfortunate for the rank and file production people, their families simply had to scrimp between paydays.

In the fall, when ‘full time’ work resumed, it became apparent from rumors and gossip that there was going to be a real row between management and the Meat Packers Union during the upcoming Union Contract negotiations. Donna and I had already started an economic ‘war chest and were saving as much money as we could, without pinching ourselves too tightly.

I was in a peculiar position at Landy’s, I was a supervisor, but was neither in management or in the union. I was told that at the October and November union meetings, the workers demanded a wage hike while management demanded a pay cut. The infighting continued with each side asking for the impossible. Finally, the Union Representative, from the Meat Packers Union Regional office in Minneapolis told the employees to go along with the wage cut. The employees were mad as hell. You see, as long as they were in the union, each worker had to contribute $20 per month in union fees. Everyone thought they’d been sold out by the union, whether the workers got a pay raise or pay cut, the union still got its $20 per member.

The Landy family kept banging away at their approximately one hundred forty meat-packing workers, chipping away at their resolve by threatening to move the business to South Dakota or ‘just close the doors’ if things didn’t go their way.

During mid December, the union voted on a last-minute proposal which included: A three-year wage freeze; newly hired employees would start at greatly reduced wages; when new employees reached full pay scale for a given production job, their labor would be paid at $1.50 per hour less than current the employees earned [4].

What the wage cut meant
With the three-year wage freeze at the going rate of inflation, each of Landy’s two hundred union and non-union workers would lose about $1.00 or purchasing power (approximately a 13% decline in purchasing power) over the period. The idea was that the savings from wages would be used by the company to buy cattle and keep the business open and more workers employed. I thought about the sensible logic the company was using then did a little arithmetic:

The $352,000 savings seemed a sizable sum until it was put in perspective, the company paid $600 to $800 per beef cow.

At a cost of $800 per cow, the company would only be able to buy 440 head from their savings. That may also sound like a lot, until it’s realized that we typically processed 600 to 1000 head of cattle per day! The saving from wages only represented one half days work out of approximately 220 work days per year, or about 0.23%– one-fourth of 1 percent.

This was definitely not much of a gain for the company, yet it would become a burden for the families of the employees. That $1.00 an hour lost in purchasing power would probably eliminate any saving the families had. At the same time, the wage freeze would press families into an economic spiral that changes  the shopper’s purchasing ability, slowly forcing them down the food chain at the grocery store, from steak, to chicken and eventually to beans.

Immediately after the Amalgamated Meat Packers accepted the austere, three-year wage freeze and other wage busting measures, the company spent $20,000 to $25,000 to remodel the office.

What’s on TV tonight?

My favorite programs in 1983.
•  Local Evening News
•  National   Evening News
•  ABC, CBS or NBC evening movies.

Movies
Movies that Donna and I attended during the year include;
Cujo with Dee Wallace, Danny Pintauro, Daniel Hugh-Kelly, Christopher   Stone
Doctor Detroit with Dan Aykroyd, Howard   Hesseman, Donna Dixon
High Road To China with Tom Selleck, Bess Armstrong, Jack Weston,   Wilford Brimley
National Lampoons Vacation withChevy Chase,   Beverly D’angelo, Dana Barron
Somewhere In Time with Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, Christopher   Plummer
Sudden Impact with Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle,   Bradford Dillman
The Grey Fox with Richard Farnsworth, Wayne   Robson, Jackie Burrought
Trading Places with Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis,   Ralph Bellamy
Wargames with Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, Ally   Sheedy, John Wood

——————   ♦   ——————-

The Introduction to Journal 1:
[In retrospect, the preface seen below sounds corny and the drawings aren’t very good, that’s how personal endeavors start. Journeys begin with the first step, which are sometimes awkward, crude and tentative.  Its the process of travel, internal growth and the expansion of one’s abilities that bring personal enrichment in time, that too is, Nature’s Way.]

“JOURNAL 1 –THE GORDIAN KNOT

A

Long time

ago in a galaxy

far far away, there

upon a planet called

Terra, a child was born;

a distant descendent of kings and

adventurers.

And it came to pass that the world chaffed

under the power of a great force,

Economic Empire.

The force of life upon the land was rocked by the

Empires great power, which sought to enslave all.

But

Fate & Destiny

the twin powers of

non linear time and space

caused a ripple to emanate

across the ethos, it whispered…

A still, nearly silent voice

spoke through the void,

it came from the clouds and from the soil,

it carried on the wind and whispered through the  leaves,

it carried from the wave crests like spraylets of driven water

and rose in the swamp like the morning fog,

it danced across the sands of the desert…

A young child living on the

great desert looked into

the night sky, he felt more

than heard a still murmuring

voice, a intelligible whisper

that spoke to him. He  had a vision.

The years passes and clouds

began to form within the Empire.

Out of the turmoil arose a man.

Life can be as great and glorious, as full of adventure and

mysterious forces as any tales of the heroic past or future. Real heroes

to a degree, may overcome the constrains of an empires, though ‘overcoming’ is

a relative term. In real life, there are few absolutes and many shades

of possibility in between. The scales of our battles and the spoils of

our victories, over time, may be few or many, large or small.

If our lives were compressed into a few moments and only our life

theme studied, our deeds would appear great and fierce, our bravery,

piety, or sacrifice would  be legendary, our love and passion would inspire awe

across time, our humble wisdom, eternal.

But, I who write and you who read, we for the most part, have lived

many uninspiring moments. We do things that we don’t really care to

do, we dream of things desired, we wash our armpits and care for our

mammal bodies, we catch colds, our shoe strings break, clothes need

washing, we need a home, warmth, safety, bills must be paid. There  are

simply many many  moments in life that simply—not inspired!

But,

Waiting inside,

Is that spark of

transcendent vitality that

creates and nurtures the seed of

our sojourn in life. When this spark is

   fanned into a flame, a man or woman can rise

  to become a prince or princess.

This journal is the story of a child, of family

 and Man’s eternal struggle with

the forces of the economic empire into

which he was born. It is an autobiography and

the map of a conscious and unconscious mind,

it is both a process of growth and an end product,

it is a ‘how to book’ and a glimpse of the Twentieth

Century, it is the mental matrix of Larry Francis Pierce:

                                                                      A Traveler in Time.”

Themes and Events:
*  By the end of the year the economy is climbing out of a recession. During the recession: unemployment hit 10.8%, a post WW II high, while the nation’s factories were operating at only 67.8% of capacity, the lowest since records were collected in 1948. The poverty rate reached 14%, the highest since 1967 and the federal budget deficit for the year climbed to a record $110 billion. On the bright side, however, the CPI declined to 3.9%, the smallest inflation rate since 1972.

Buttons & bumper stickers:
*  If you think the system is working, ask someone who isn’t.
*  Hungry? Eat your foreign car.
*  I may have my Ph.D., but I’m not stupid.

[Sunrise pouring through the trees near the east property line, taken from about 200 feet east of  the mobile home’s kitchen window.]

Jessie dog comes to live with us
The year after our move onto the property: With Donna and I at work in St Cloud for most of the week, our dog Griz seemed to become unhappy about being alone. Upon seeing his forlorn look every morning as we drove off to work, we decided to get him a companion. From spring 1981 to the spring 1982 Griz had a young Blue Heeler, named, Blue, with whom to pal around with. Blue was however, an adventurous fellow who just wouldn’t stay in the yard. He liked to walk six hundred feet down the driveway, cross the county road to a corn field and an occassionally bring a chopped corn stalk back to the yard. After living with us for a year, Blue was hit and killed by a car one night directly in front of our property. We buried Blue near our east property line and covered his grave with rocks.

A couple of weeks later, in April, Donna and I found a newspaper advertisement stating:
“Puppies, ½ German Shepherd, ½ Black Lab, $25…”

We drove into St. Cloud to look at the litter and happily brought home a six-week old, black female pup. A few days later we named our new dog, Jessie.
In the months that followed, Griz and his little floppy eared friend, Jessie, became the best of friends. When ever one was seen sniffing about, or napping in the shade, the other was not far away.

As Jessie grew, her jet black fur coat was seen composed of short, coarse bristles and she had floppy ears both common to a Black Lab, however, she had the build and stance of a German Shepherd. Jessie grew to have adult weight of sixty-seven pounds and weighing eighteen pounds more than Griz.

Books read during the year
During the year, I read books on various topics, mostly whatever was either important in our lives at the time, or of general topical interest to myself, including:

Einstein’s   Universe © 1979 by Nigel Calder – A   study and extrapolation of Einstein’s concepts of energy, mass and time.
Life   After Nuclear War © 1982 by Arthur   Katz – Expansion of a study by Katz presented to a Congressional Joint   Committee on Defense Production, studies the economic and social impacts of   nuclear attacks on the USA. 422 pages.
The   Day After Midnight: The Effects of Nuclear War © 1982 Edited by Michael Riordan – Based on a   report by the Office of Technology Assessment, effects and Civil Defense. 143   pages.
The   Self Sufficient Gardner © 1980 by   John Seymour – A guide to growing and preserving all your own food. 256   pages.
The   Solar Greenhouse Book © 1978 by   James C. McCullough – Construction and operating principles of a solar   greenhouse. 328 pages.
Hard   Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression © 1970 by Studs Terkel – Eyewitness accounts of all   phases of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

 Beekeeping
During the spring we began beekeeping. Actually, this was more Donna’s interest than mine.  The procedure where one had to take the frames out of the hives for the honey, and in doing so deal with jillions of angry bees, was not my kind of thing. True, they were ‘smoked’ first which pacified most, but it seems Donna always got a sting for her valiant efforts. I just didn’t like bees. I stood at a respectful distance watching, while she worked. Several times I was apparently marked as the culprit for a hives aggression and was chased up across the yard and into the house by two to four angry bees.

We bought the necessary paraphernalia including a quality, two frame, stainless steel, centrifugal extractor and an electric comb knife.
I painted the six hives, assembled the frames, helped extract the honey and did clean up afterwards, but Donna wore the net bee bonnet, went into the hives and removed the honey frames.
That fall, we extracted one hundred eighty pounds of honey (!), besides leaving a considerable amount for the bees to feed on over the winter. Donna sold one hundred sixty-five pounds of honey at 90¢ per pound and kept fifteen pounds (twelve pounds per gallon) for ourselves. We made $162 from the sale which helped offset the cost of the hives and extractor.

The herb bed
One of our Spring projects was to make a permanent herb bed, at one side of the garden. Our procedure was to set a rectangular, pressure treated wooden frame around one of the four-foot wide by twenty-five foot long raised garden beds. The frame was held in place by wooden stakes driven into the ground and spaced about the perimeter. The herb bed was almost completely filled with a mix of top soil, rotted manure, partially decayed leaf mulch, straw then repeatedly rototilled. When soil temperatures were warm enough to begin planting, we planted Jerusalem artichokes, basil, garlic, chives and thyme in the bed.

Although Jerusalem artichokes were not herbs, they were planted in this bed for two reasons: 1) So we could more easily control its prolific tuber growth. 2) Jerusalem  artichokes are left in the ground over the winter and harvested in the Spring, but if they’d been left in the general garden, their presence would have interfered with the Fall and Spring rototilling and bed maintenance process.

The garden expands
[Photo at right, late summer. Our Bio-organic,     French Intensive, raised bed garden.]

When the 1982 garden was planted, we increased the crop variety and brought our food production facilities to a peak. We had several years experience with gardens and that summer, handled the largest, most varied garden to date.
Since  we were both working full-time, maintaining a household, and very large yard, we realized our expansion was going to take all the time we had available, particularly during Fall harvest. The vegetable crops we raised included:

Our gaggle of geese, ducks and sheep
I building an 8 ft deep x 10 ft wide x 7 ft sloping to 6 ft shed, with dirt floor, two windows and French (split doors) in the lower yard about 125 ft from the bee hives.
We stocked the shed with:
•  Twenty six White Peking ducklings,  that had been ordered from Sears Home and Farm Catalog for $39. The ducklings arrived on 25 June 1982, while my cousin Bob was visiting.
•  A few days later, on July 1, we ordered eight Goose goslings through Sears.
•  Donna found an advertisement stating a local farmer was selling Suffolk-Colombian cross lambs,  we bought four.

As time passed, we found that the geese had a tendency to pick on the smaller ducks when all were kept in confinement. After their first  winter together, we divided the shed with fence wire to keep the ducks and geese separate at night. During the cold months, the shed’s dirt floor was covered with a thick mat of straw so the birds could make sleeping nests.

With the purchase of ducks, geese and lambs, we became, ‘hobby farmers’.   :-)

The big ‘fly in the porridge’ became evident on the day it was time to slaughter our first duck. It was my job to chop off the ducks head with a hatchet, it was not a pleasant chore (!), never-the-less the deed was done. I plucked his feathers, turned the carcass over to Donna who roasted our duck.

Our ducks and geese were not raised in cages, nor exclusively fed corn; they grew up wiry, muscular, running around the homesite chasing young frogs and bugs. Frequently, we’d watch as the ducks or geese walked in a rough side by side formation across the yard, scaring up ‘things’ in the grass, then making a mad dash to catch and eat the unfortunate insect before it could hop or fly away.

When it came to cooking the duck, yes, the meat tasted alright, but it didn’t have the same texture or benign taste as a restaurant’s “Pekin duck’ (a $16 per plate of corn-fed, cage raised duck). Ours birds had a tough, sinuous, wild taste.

What made matter worse, was that when I took a second duck to the wood pile, the entire flock followed me then stood about twenty feet away watching me through the yard fence—yes, watching and quacking amongst themselves. I felt terrible and knew that they understood that I killed their sibling. That second duck was the last duck slaughtered, er, murdered.

Likewise, we only ate one goose. Our ‘feathered friends’ did however help pay for their keep, every spring and summer we collected duck and goose eggs, which due to their size practically over whelmed our ability to keep up (our gathered egg statistics are given in ‘Produce comparisons’, Chapter 1983).

The remaining ducks and geese lived a life of country luxury, being fed kernel corn in the morning, then browsing around in the upper and wilder lower yard, swimming in the pond. They roamed about the  acre plus sized yard as miniature predators, hunting bugs, eating an occasional weed, involved with their social lives while always watching out for hawks, owls and anything furry sneaking through the weeds.
Over the years, about half were killed by wildlife or dogs, there were a couple unfortunate accidents, but the rest died, one at a time, of old age.

[Livestock: Our ducks,     geese and sheep. ‘Yard  boss’, Griz     looks on. Camera pointed SE across the front yard. The Lower yard  is across the driveway. Pond  and SE corner yard fence posts are seen     in the distance.]

It wasn’t long after the ducks and geese came to live with us, that we grew use to seeing them they became pets, of sorts. In synopsis, one could live on duck and goose meat in an extended emergency situation. The meat would be tough so would need to be diced into small chewable portions and cooked in stews, otherwise, buy my advice is to buy the meat at a supermarket. Raising the sheep was successful, slightly profitable, fun and in the end, the lamb tasted good. The problems with larger livestock is ‘input’, you have to put a lot into the endeavor, take chances, and depend ofn services that may not exist when you need them. Also, sheep are quite small animals, under all that wool is a small creature without all that much meat. Think ‘tall thin dog’. By the time you pay to have the animal slaughtered, the meat cut and wrapped the value of raising the sheep is small.
I didn’t see ‘raising sheep’ as a profitable, sustainable, or time efficient endeavor for an extended emergency situation. It doesn’t sound romantic, and certainly flys in the face of ones desire to be self sufficient, but I  think unless you’ve been raised and worked around livestock, and have experience with farming-ranching, that you’re better off purchasing 2+ cases of  #12 (gallon size cans) of Mountain House freeze-dried meat. The alternative is: installing fence; depending on luck and the vagaries of animal disease; predators; inbred-genetic problems; maintaining a supply of feed and antibiotic supplements; working out the information and techniques to process the animal; then have freezer storage capacity to hold the meat. There is a lot of ‘know how’ and luck involved with raising large livestock, processing them into meal size parcels, and storing the butchered carcass. What do you do if the power is out?

Music [midi: Within You]

Donna has thyroid surgery
One day while sitting at her desk at Landy Packing, Donna noticed that her heart seemed to be beating quite hard for a person sitting and at rest. When she took her pulse she was surprised to find it one hundred twenty beats per minute. Being concerned, she telephoned our neighbor and friend, Arlene, who was a Licensed Practical Nurse  in a Sty Cloud doctor’s office. Donna asked Arlene if her pulse was normal, Arlene spoke with the doctor and made an appointment for Donna to immediately come to the office for an examination.

An hour later, the doctor found, that indeed, Donna did have an abnormally high pulse rate, her blood pressure was abnormal as well, being low on one end and high on the other; she also had an enlarged thyroid.

The doctor informed Donna, “You are a walking stroke case!”

The over riding diagnosis was, “Hyperthyroid”. Donna was given a prescription of liquid iodine which was to be taken as a mixture with water; she was also referred to Dr. Hans Engman, a Specialist in Internal Medicine. Over the course of the next few months, Donna had a series of blood tests and a thyroid scan at the St. Cloud Hospital. It was determined that her thyroid gland was growing into a butterfly goiter and that surgery would be required  to correct the situation and return her to normalized health. However, before the surgery could take place, Donna’s pulse and blood pressure had to be brought down into the normal range; he was put on a stabilizing regime of medications.

In early September, Donna was admitted to the St. Cloud Hospital for her thyroid operation. Late that same day, the surgery was performed which removed ninety-five percent of her swollen thyroid gland. Donna recovered nicely, without complications or problems. She remained in the hospital another five days recovering and for observation, before returning home. After about a week’s rest at home, Donna returned to work. The operation was so successful that no post operative medication was required.[1]

Although surgery is always a major event in one’s life, the thyroid problem didn’t cause any hardship or suffering. It was simply something that was discovered and needed attention. When the thyroid was ‘fixed’, the family went on as before.

Heat pump and cold frame
Ever since buying our mobile home, we were acutely aware of the rising heating costs each winter. Every hot and muggy summer afternoon, we sat in the mobile home with the windows open,a large circulating fan set blowing on us, while we continued suffering from the heat.

In early 1982 we became aware of the concept of a heat pump. Heat pumps were devices that during the Fall and Spring, could wring a little heat from the cold air outdoors and transfer that heat into the house.  During the summer, the heat pump acted like an ordinary air-conditioner, pulling heat from the inside of the house and transferring it outside. The heat pump was therefore either a space heater and an air-conditioner, depending on the outdoor air temperature.
[Photograph: The ‘cold     frame’ I built over the heat pump. The south-facing structure helped warm the spring and fall air, thus increasing the efficiency of our heat pump.]

As an economic tool, it cost 25% to 50% less to move heat from the outside, into the house in the spring and fall, than to generate the same amount of heat with our forced air electric heating system.

After shopping around, we purchased a high efficiency, General Electric ‘Weathertron’ heat pump.[2]

The heat pump was installed on May 21, at a cost of $2,430, for parts and labor. From that day on,  we enjoyed the luxury of air-conditioning throughout the summer, then had reduced heating bills during Fall and Spring months.

The heat pump was installed partially as a backup system to our mobile homes main electric heating coils, the whole system tied into a more complex thermostat located on the front room wall. We set the thermostat for the air-conditioner to come on when interior temperatures rose above 74ºF.

The thermostat was set to provide heat from the heat pump when interior temperatures dropped below 65ºF during the day and below 60ºF at night. During the Fall and Spring, when night temperatures could drop quite low, the “automatic” setting on the thermostat first called on the heat pumps heating coils. If the pump was unable to keep up with the heat demand, then a single bank of the electric furnace heating coils would automatically switch on in assistance.

According to its specifications, the heat pump was supposed to be able to draw heat from outside air as long as temperatures were above 10ºF. In practice though, the heat pumps coils spent so much time defrosting in the low teens, that we figured the efficiency was too poor for practical use. We found that the heat pump provided its more efficient heating down to about 20ºF. So, on nights when the temperature was to be in the teens we left the furnace set to “emergency” which bypassed the heat pump and only used the electric furnace.

Generally, from December through February, the heat pump was turned off and we heated the mobile home with the electric furnace’s forced air. From some time in MArch through late November we used either the heat pump to provide either cheap heat or air-conditioning.

Garbage disposal at the rural acreage [3]
When we first moved to our rural homestead, we had to restructure our thinking and make plans to dispose of all of our rubbish ourselves, there were no garbage trucks, no dumpsters, ‘waste’ became our problem.

The procedures we settled on included:
•  Paper and other combustibles were incinerated in a fifty-five gallon steel drum which I set up off the ground on concrete blocks.
•  Clear glass was stored in a fifty-five gallon drum. When the barrel was full the glass was transferred into cardboard boxes and sold at the St. Cloud Recycle Center for 1/2¢ per pound. Once we collected a “whopping” 50¢ for our labor (grin).
•  Colored glass (brown and green) was treated the same as clear glass, except that it was stored in a different barrel and delivered separately to the recycle center.
•  Aluminum cans were smashed flat (by foot) and stored in a fifty-five gallon drum. These were also delivered to the recycle center, where they brought 16¢ to 22¢ per pound. Once we received $5 for a three-quarter full drum of flattened cans.
•  Tin cans, wire and other small pieces of metal were thrown into the ‘trash can pit’ about one hundred fifty feet north of our trailer, or about forty feet beyond the back yard fence.
•  Table scraps and grease drippings that accumulated during the day, were temporarily kept in a small plastic container. Every morning these scraps were mixed in with our dogs commercial, pelletized dog food to improve palatability and fed to our happy, hungry pets.
•  Compost scraps which accumulated during the day were temporarily stored in a conveniently sized, open container. When the container was full, its contents were dumped into a tightly covered flexible plastic, five quart ice-cream pail. When the covered pail was full it was dumped into our compost bin and eventually returned as soil to the garden.

Memories of the telephone system 1982 [4]
In a process that started in the late 1960s and continued  into the 1980s, Long Distance telephone companies were switching from copper telephone wires to microwave receivers and transmitters set on towers. The tall microwave towers began showing up here and there on the horizon, along with television signal repeaters, AM-FM radio transmitters, TV transmitters, and other narrow beam and broadcast antennae.

The 1970s and 1980s were a time of rapid growth in various information systems. Cable television spread across America, through cities and into small towns, but not to the separate, isolated rural farm houses.

[The pond in the southeast  corner of the yard. Dogs, ducks and geese, and later the Girl Scouts–all  enjoyed  the pond.  Seen here, our  White Pekin ducks.]

When the US Government broke up the monopoly held by American Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (AT&T) in the early 1980s, it eliminated telephone company policies regarding the use of “other equipment” on their lines, this made it easier to buy a decorator phone take it home and plug it into the wall jack. After AT&T was dismantled into a half-dozen regional ‘Baby Bells’, these splinter companies developed a really voracious appetite for consumer money. Basic telephone rates rose dramatically across the country [5]. The public cry over rising phone rates were heard for about a year. When everyone, on all sides of the issue had their say, the rates stayed high and continued rising, meanwhile service quality slipped. So the gi=overnment, looking out for our interests broke up a monopoly, and pushed prices higher, just the opposite of what was supposed to happen.
(When dealing with government policy, things frequently go worse, do less, and-or cost more than originally proposed; this effect should be recognised as a law of nature.

In the latter half of the 1980s, telephone ‘Directory Assistance’ changed and was no longer a free service. Residential users were allotted two free Directory Assistance calls per month, beyond this we were charged 50¢ per ‘Assist’.

The ‘sound’ of Directory Assistance changed with the times as well. The service line which always had been answered by a woman was more frequently answered by men as well, however, the number you requested was given by a computer generated voice. Since a computer gave the information then disconnected the line, there was no further chance to request additional information, unless you redialed  the 411 Directory Assistance number again to ask the operator.

Meanwhile, the cost of a phone call made from a ‘public pay telephone’ rose rapidly from 10¢ to 25¢.

Meanwhile, a new kind of ‘pay telephone’ was starting to appear at the major airports. Sitting side by side along with the coin operated pay phones were telephones that collected their fee from special prepaid debit credit card. These cards were inserted into the machine, then extracted past the internal scanner and ‘read’. Plastic credit cards were already very widely used by the public for almost any retail and service transaction.

Over the decades, the perception that utility poles, with electric power or communication cables strung between them, had been a symbol of progress, that idea was being replaced by an attitude that saw them as “eye sores” and “blight.”

New plastic sheathing allowed the cables to be buried, which helped clean up the scenic view and resulted in lower maintenance costs. When I lived  at the Dixon Street apartment in Hayward in 1969-70, there was a thicket of telephone and electric wires running in all directions above my apartment’s outdoor patio, and through the entire apartment complex. Now some twenty-five years later, Donna, Jane and I live in rural Minnesota where the telephone wires are buried; even the electric line is buried as it comes six hundred feet in from the county road to a transformer behind our mobile home.

The rear addition and pantry [6]
Donna and I became concerned about the long-term availability of food after seeing the grocery store shelves empty in Arcata, California, due to a trucker’s strike, around Thanksgiving 1971, . Reinforcing our concern was another truckers strike in 1973. The strike only lasted three weeks, but once again resulted in the grocery store shelves being completely emptied of meat products. Meanwhile, there was the possibility of NATO’s ‘Cold War’ with the Soviet Block breaking out into a nuclear war.

[Building the rear addition. With winter rapidly approaching, I was  rapidly working to enclose the rear  addition.]

In the first year after our marriage, all we were capable of doing was to maintain a kitchen cupboard full of canned food and dry goods. Our first attempt to increase food storage had been to build a six-foot high set of shelves, which were painted bright colors and stocked with canned food. These storage shelves were left in California when we moved to Minnesota.

Soon after arriving in Minnesota, we began raising vegetables in a small, rented garden at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in St. Cloud. The size of our garden’s expanded, and quadrupled when we moved into our mobile home at Rockwood Estates, then tripled again in size when we moved to our rural Gilman acreage. Overall we had a full order of magnitude increase in garden size, not counting the orchard.

Once we were living on our rural property, I built a 16 foot wide by 12 foot rear addition onto the mobile home. The room was divided into two each, eight foot by twelve-foot, rectangular rooms. One room found a variety of seasonal uses, including the storage of boxes of kindling and a three-foot high by eight foot long emergency wood pile during the winter.

The second room, became our pantry, We installed shelves against three walls, which were  then filled with a rather large supply of common everyday foods, and non perishable products, see the table below.

[The ‘rear addition’ finished and in the process of being stocked.]

We kept our 19 cubic foot freezer in the pantry. The freezer held about $320 worth of frozen meats and produce [7].
From Fall into mid Winter, the pantry was also used to store bushel baskets of garden produce.

Typical canned and dry goods stored in the rear addition, in 1982 prices:

Freeze dried food storage
Between November 1982 and January 1983, we developed a very long term food storage strategy, which included the purchase of eighteen cases of Mountain House freeze dried food.  Each case contained six each one gallon (# 10 size) tin cans of nitrogen packed, freeze dried food products, providing a total of one hundred eight cans, of forty-eight different freeze-dried foods. Donna and I put a lot of thought into exactly what we wanted to buy, comparing the reconstituted volumes with other canned foods that we had in storage, as well as considering our annual garden produce.

Before making the bulk freeze-dried food purchase,  we bought a two-day supply of Mountain House freeze-dried food in foil pouches, the type commonly used by back packers and mountain climbers. We rated each reconstituted food and compared it with comparable canned or home-made products. Our findings showed the freeze-dried variety to have about eighty-five percent as much flavor as the normally prepared variety. Some extra spices or shortening were required, otherwise the foods were good.

The freeze-dried foods were estimated to have a shelf life of 30 years under optimal conditions, however, probably would last more like twenty years in central Minnesota. When we placed the order, our cost for the eighteen cases of freeze-dried food was $1,000, delivered

Long term, freeze dried foods in storage[8]

Most of the cans provided between 18 to 20, half cup servings of reconstituted food.

The cases were stacked on planks, several inches above the floor and away from the walls in the rear addition, where they remained year after year, insurance against a dire emergency.

What’s on TV tonight?
My favorite programs in 1982.
•  Local Evening  News
•  National Evening   News
•  Private   Benjamin
•  Magnum P.I.
•  The Greatest American Hero
•  Simon and Simon
•  ABC, CBS or NBC evening movies
**  Marco Polo, a miniseries

Movies
Among the movies that Donna and I attended this year were:
48 HRS. with Nick Nolte, Eddie Murphy, Annette O’Toole, James Remar
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy with Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Jose Ferrer
Blade Runner with Harrison Ford, Rutgar Hauer, Sean Young,   Edward J. Olmos
Conan The Barbarian with Arnold   Schwarzenegger, James Earl Jones, Max Von Sydow
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial with Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Drew Barrymore
Fire Fox with Clint Eastwood, Freddie Jones, David Huffman,   Warren Clarke
Porky’s with Dan Monahan, Mark Hettier, Wyatt Knight, Roger   Wilson
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Ricardo   Montauban
The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas with Burt Reynolds, Dolly Parton, Dom DeLuise
The World According To Garp with Robin Williams, Glenn Close, John Lithgow
Victor/Victoria with Julie Andrews, James Garner, Robert Preston