Donley Lathrop

Donley Lathrop

Both my mom and dad had siblings.  My dad had a brother and sister.  Both he and his brother Donley had served in the U.S. Navy toward the end of the Pacific conflict.  After his four years in the Navy Donley remained a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve for over 38 years.

 I remember visiting Grams and Gramps for a picnic outside and Donley had brought back a submarine periscope, which he had hung up in the tree in their front yard.  I must have been two or three and I cannot remember if my parents were still together at this time or not.

I remember being quite excited to look into the device but also puzzled when the view wasn't much different than what I could see by just looking around the tree.  I don't think that I really understood that it was for looking around while underwater.

Both my dad and his brother had nicknames.  My dad was nicknamed "Jiggs".  I do not know where it came from, but everyone called him Jiggs, without fail.  Accordingly I was nicknamed "Jiggsie" which is intended to mean "little Jiggs".  This was my nickname with the Lathrop family and it was used about half the time by members of the Hanson family as well.  Grandpa Lee had also nicknamed me "Bub" and it was used about half the time.

Donley's nickname was "Donk" and I don't remember anyone calling him anything but that.  Donk seemed to be a really nice fellow.  I am sure I encountered him only a few times as a toddler and once again later in life.

Donk's was married to Olga Lewandowski but everyone referred to her as "Dusty".  She was a very sweet person and everyone seemed to love her.  I think that my mother was very fond of her.

Donk and Dusty had eight children and I do not think that I've ever met any of them.  Eight first-cousins that I've never met!  I am working from Grams' list, provided in her book to me for their names and I believe she listed them in order from oldest to youngest.

Grams listed Frances as living in San Francisco; Christine as living in San Diego; and Cecelia as in the U.S. Navy.  I would not be surprised if the older two were in the Navy as well or married to sailors.

Next came Dudley, nicknamed "Dud" and named after his grandpa.  Then comes Mike and Catherine before Donley Jr, nicknamed D.J. and finally Dianne.  Grams listed them all as living in Grinell, Iowa.

Donley passed away at age 72 in Madison, North Carolina.  His obituary lists his son D. J. and his daughter Frances as preceding him in death.  Christine was listed as living in Las Vegas; Cecelia (Blankenship) in Peterstown, West Virginia; Cathy (Walsh) and Diana (Bullins) in Eden, North Carolina; Dudley III in Stoneville, North Carolina; and Michael of Madison, North Carolina.

He had, at the time of his death, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

I have been able to make contact with a couple of these first cousins and hope to learn a bit more about my uncle "Donk" and these eight cousins.

Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree

                                             Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree


"Go play in the street!" I have heard an exasperated parent or two admonish their kids, providing a little comic relief for their frustrations.  Back at the end of the nineteen forties, however, it was commonplace to have your toddler of two or three years' age go play in the street with minimal supervision, at least in Sparta, Wisconsin.

Grandpa Lee was gone on his route, driving all around some portion of Wisconsin, jobbing orders for the Pet Milk Company and Grandma Lill was in charge.  My father was off trying to break into the business of working with Grandpa Lee and having a tough time of it.  My mother was off doing something, probably going to classes to learn how to be someone's secretary.  Aunt Jeannie was either doing the same or getting married or having just been married and on her honeymoon.  Donna and John were likely in high school all day.

I was in the back yard and in the street.



This picture of Grandma Lill and me was taken at a cottage fishing.  She wrote on the back of the picture that I was 2 years and 4 months old.

Grandma and Grandpa always had interesting back yards.  Grandma Lill loved hydrangeas and there was always at least one big bush of them burgeoning with huge white flowers.  She would dry them and put them in jugs and pitchers all throughout the house.  She loved peonies as well, as did the little ants.  When I related how the peonies always seemed to be covered with ants to an avid gardener, he told me that peonies attract the ants and that they will not open into a flower unless the ants gobble up the sappy fluids they secrete along the bud edges.

We have some of Grandma Lill's actual peonies growing alongside a deck.  The ants still love them.

Grandpa Lee would order seed catalogs and it was an exciting week for him when they arrived.  They were little magazines with pictures of all the little bushes, trees, and flowers that a person could order.  He pored through them while drinking his morning coffee during the times that he was not on the road, circling many, many items and dog-earing pages.  In the end he would order one or two things.  He loved the planning more than the planting, I think.

When a couple of bushes would arrive, he would very meticulously dig the proper hole, line it with the proper amount of additives, spread the roots out and tamp everything down just so, before pouring several buckets of water over the whole thing.

Lee had been a scoutmaster when he was younger and was unrivaled, I am told, in his ability to supply the correct names for trees, bushes, and other plants in the woods.  Lill just loved flowers and pretty, colorful things.  She would plant flowers all around the house and in little spots in the back yard.  At rummage sales, she would buy colorful little bottles, some the shape of violins, and place them on the window sills.  She would sit and have her little glass of tea or Pepsi Cola while the sun shined through these little bottles and splashed colorful ripples on the window curtains, her serene smile revealing new windows into her kind, kind heart.

In the back yard was a crab apple tree.  I don't know if Grandpa Lee put it there before I was born or if it had come with the place.  The apples were little, about the size of an olive or a cherry and were orange-yellow in color.  There would be copious collections of them all over the grass, long stems still attached.  Of course I tried eating one and found no pleasure in that.  They were bitter, as were all of the berries that grew on the bushes around the house.  The birds would eat some of them, but nothing that I ever tried was palatable, and a toddler of two or three years puts everything he finds into his mouth at least once.

Across the street lived a little girl approximately my age.  Her name was Jean, like my aunt, only they called her "Jeannie-girl".  She and I would play in the street, which was rarely driven on.  A lot of people didn't have cars and the ones that did kept them in the garage unless they were making a trip.
We could play in the street, ride our little tricycles in the street, and our caretakers wouldn't even be concerned. 

Toddler memories are rare and fleeting and should be written down lest they be gone forever.  One day I was toddling around in the back yard, playing in the little piles of apples which had fallen.  Little "Jeannie-girl" from across the street toddled over and joined me.  I don't know if we knew many words yet, we were only two years old or so. 

After five or ten minutes of rolling around in the little apples, it occurs to a toddler to doff the plastic underpants and soggy diaper for the simple reason that it feels better to be rid of them.  "Jeannie-girl" did the same, putting me and a female peer in a situation which was not to be repeated for decades.  The scene began to take on disturbing characteristics of the story of the Garden of Eden in the Holy Bible.  A boy and a girl prancing around naked in the piles of apples under the tree, giggling stupidly.

We gradually realized that some of the little apples would stick to us.  The ones that had recently fallen were hard, but some of them had been lying around a few days.  The ants and birds had injured them and they had started to decay and were just a little bit slimy.  If you put one against your skin, it would stick a while, then fall off.

Funnier yet, when you lost your balance and sat down on the apples, a bunch of them would stick to your bottom when again you stood back up. 

"Jeannie-girl" and I were laughing and sticking little apples on each other.  I had probably just tried to pack a handful of them into her butt crack when her mother looked out the window from her daily chores to see what little "Jeannie-girl" was up to.

Our giggles were interrupted by her mom storming across the street, grabbing up "Jeannie-girl" in one arm and her little pants and shirt in the other.  She paddled her and stalked quickly across the street and back home.

Confused, but fearing that she might come back for me, I meandered up and in the back door and asked Grandma Lill for a drink of water.

Dudley Lathrop

Dudley Lathrop

I have only the faintest shards of memory of Grandpa Dudley.  What a shame.  As I have written previously, we occasionally visited Grandpa Dudley and Grandma Clara at their farmhouse west of Sparta.  I seem to remember him as sort of jolly and perhaps a bit large, although to a little cookie-cruncher like me, almost everyone was a bit large.

It occurs to me that it is possible to have personally known, even if for the briefest time, a maximum of about fourteen direct predecessors.  This would be the unlikely case if one's parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all alive at that particular time.  That would certainly be an unusual case and for someone to have known even more of them would be an extremely unusual case.  I can claim only eight.

Julius Lothrope and his wife Barbara Howe were apparently immigrants from England and I am suspecting that, like so many people processed through Ellis Island, their names were shortened to Lathrop to make it easier to fill out the forms.  This is just my guess. 

Julius and Barbara were the parents of Frank Lathrop. 

Meanwhile Theodore Cassabaum, his wife Alvina (Unschuetz), and their daughter Alvina were living near Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, their parents having migrated there from Germany.

Frank and the younger Alvina were married and became Dudley's parents.

 In turn Dudley and Clara met, fell in love, and were married in 1921.  I saved this wonderful picture for my few paragraphs about Dudley.

 What a great photograph.  Dudley is as handsome a young fellow as Sparta has ever seen and Grandma Clara is an absolutely beautiful young girl!

I believe that Dudley was quite intelligent as well as being handsome.  I was told very emphatically by my grandparents that he built the first radio in Sparta.  I have a nagging recollection that he worked for the telephone company but I could be mistaken in this.

Again, I would welcome more information in comments below about Dudley and Clara whom I am so grateful to be descended from.

Elsie Nottestad

Elsie Nottestad

Lee worked on the road, traveling all the time, so when they did any additional car trips, they tended to be short, out and back affairs, to see Lill's relatives.  We would ordinarily go to one of three destinations: La Crosse, La Farge, or Westby. 

Westby, of course, was common to both of them.  Lill's parents had moved into town.  They had a small house a few blocks west of the main street through town.  Westby had a huge ski jump a couple of miles from town and was a somewhat famous for this.  My mother told me that back in the day, a hot-shot from high school rode his bicycle down it in the summer on a dare, breaking the majority of his arms and legs when he landed on the turf below.  I have climbed on the ski jump and looked down it, and I just can't imagine anyone having the pluck to ski down it, much less ride a bicycle down it in the summer.

We called Grandma Lill's mother, Elsie, "Grandma Two".  Grandma Two was like Grandma Lill, only on steroids.  She was a stout, stern, woman, built much like a barrel and her word was law.  If you wonder how the human race manages to survive in this often hostile environment called "the world" you need look no further than people like Grandma and Grandpa Two.  Every family has them and they are survivors.  They are why softies like us are even here. 

Grandma Two and Grandma Lill were so much alike that I often got them confused.  They were both loving and nurturing but you'd better not cross them.  Like Grandma Lill, Grandma Two baked cookies.  There were three main cookies in that day, and I liked them all.  Most delicious were the ones called "sandbackles".  We pronounced them as sun-buckles.  They were made of white cookie dough pressed into little tins that had zig-zag edges.  Once baked, they were tipped over to cool and would pop right out of the tins.  They were wonderful.

Similar cookies that I can remember were called "hats".  These, I think, were made by pressing the dough on the outside of the tins and then covering them with colored sugar, thinly sliced almonds, and the like.  They were kind of a Christmas cookie.

The third most common to my memory was the standard round white cookie with a pecan pushed into it.  Sometimes it would be a walnut half instead.  At Christmas time, of course, the specialty cookies, made by rolling the dough tin and using cookie cutters shaped like stars, snowmen, candy canes, and the like, appeared.  They might have shaved candy cane pieces on them or powdered sugar made to look like snow.

Yet another cookie to appear during the holidays, was the doughy round, thick, cookie with a prune in the middle.  It had a name, something like "kolashes". 

All around Grandma Two's house, a plant called "touch-me-nots" grew.  It was bushy and had nice little unassuming flowers, but little beans, about a half-inch long and shaped like tiny little green bananas grew along the stems.  When they were ripe, these little beans would fly apart if you disturbed them.  I can remember spending hours toddling around the perimeter of the little house, touching the beans and watching them explode.

One trip to Westby is indelible in my mind.  I was riding in the back seat and so was Grandma Lill.  I had been intently searching for white horses all the winding way up Cashton ridge and along the top over to Westby, because she was paying me a "virtual" quarter for each one I counted, as usual. 

We finally got to Westby and pulled up in front of Grandma Two's house.  Grandma Two had noticed and had come out of the house and was walking toward the car to embrace her daughter.  Grandma Lill opened the back door, swung her feet out, and using the door as an aid, stood up.

Cars in that day were real boats.  They had wide bench seats because other kinds of seats were not yet invented.  Seat belts had not been invented either.  You just piled in.  You could easily get three in the front and three or sometimes even four people in the back, depending upon their size.  The cars were built like tanks. 

It is probably lucky for me that Grandpa Lee had bought a Mercury or a Buick or a Studebaker or Oldsmobile rather than something very expensive and well machined, because when I slid over to exit the back seat behind Grandma Lill, she abruptly took hold of the door and gave it a good slam shut.

I had gotten so far as to extend my puny little right arm outside the car, grasping for something to hold onto.  The door slammed shut with me on the inside and my wrist and hand on the outside, and clicked.  It had completely closed.

I let out a yell that was probably heard in Viroqua, Coon Valley, and perhaps even in the states of Illinois, Iowa, and southern Minnesota.  It was good fortune for Grandpa Lee that he had exited the driver's side or it might have adversely affected his hearing. 

Grandma Lill turned around and saw the rear door of the car completely closed with a little hand mysteriously protruding from the crack, and did just what anyone would expect her to do.  She grabbed the door handle, pushed the button in, and with a mighty heave, pried the door back open. 

It is amazing how rubbery little children's bones are, because there are two of them in your forearm and neither of mine snapped during the ordeal.  They just adjusted to the small space between the door and the jamb.  The panic and staccato syllables of Danish subsided and after feeling my arm and examining it, they all gradually extinguished my crying with hugs, pats on the back, comforting words, and probably a good many of the above-described cookies.

Clara Lathrop

Clara Lathrop

I think that in 1949 or 1950 divorce was a shame placed upon all concerned.  My father pretty much disappeared from my life, having moved out of state, and Lill and Lee seemed to take over a large part of raising me.  My additional good fortune was that I had truncated, but fairly regular, contact with my other Grandma, Clara.  She was also a teacher and Grandma Lill and Grandma Clara, or "Grams", as everyone on my father's side called her, remained close friends.

This was somewhat amazing, in retrospect, considering that it was 1950.  In those days Catholics and Lutherans were not overly fond of one another like they are today, sharing mass and so forth.  Grandma Lill attended the Congregational church and I am certain that she faced a certain degree of criticism when her daughter turned Catholic to marry.  That, and the divorce after only a couple of years, would have driven a wedge between a lot of people.

But Clara and Lill were not ordinary people.  Grandma Lill could give you a good tongue-lashing or cut a willow switch to give you a spanking, but she saw the bigger picture.  Both, although they owned very little, were generous even to complete strangers, and they were equally generous with their good will.  I think that it had a lot to do with sharing the burden of living through the Great Depression and of raising children in difficult times. 

Clara gave me a nice little scrapbook later in her life.  I am sure that she made a similar one for every grandchild.  It details the family ancestors on her and Gramps' side and it is, as probably all of them were, personalized to the recipient.

The very first page has glued to it a folded page which reads:

                                                         WITH
                     VERY                         BEST                     WISHES
                                                            TO
                                  JOHN           LEE                     LATHROP
                                                          FROM
                                     THE          LATHROP             FAMILY

The inside contained a little poem:

     Dear Grandson John,
          It is not so much, who we are,
          As it is, what we are,
          But sometimes we wish to know,
          And why we are just so.

          Now Julius Lothrope had red hair,
          Freckles and curly,
          He passed these on to Frank,
          One of seven sons, quite early

          Then Frank passed the traits along
          To Dudly his eldest, who slipped
          Because his eldest was a girl.

          So to bridge the generation gap
          And add to the confusion
          You are the eldest of the youngest
          Will you be the conclusion?

          So, you see why you have red curly hair and freckles.  The grand sense of humor must, just must come from your mother's side of the house.  I hope your mother does her family tree for you.  What an interesting book this could become.  Lovingly,  your Gram.

So Peter Willger and his wife Barbara Adams came to America from Essen, Germany in 1855.  John A. Willger was their son, and he and his wife Anna (Rinehart) Willger were Grandma Clara's parents.  Clara was the youngest of their ten children.  Anna Rinehart was the daughter of Ferdinand Rinehart and Hannah (Wasmund) Rinehart, who had migrated from Iowa to Nebraska in 1860.

Grams and Gramps lived in a farmhouse out on a county road parallel to Highway 16 west of Sparta.  I can remember going out there several times as a child and Grandma Clara was always accepting and loving. 

Grandma and Grandpa Lathrop had a long chicken coop sort of out building and I would explore in and around it.  They also had a large tree in the front yard which might have been an apple, because I seem to remember eating fruit from it. 

Grandma Clara had a smooth, firm voice and she always finished her sentences in a descending tone, as though she was accepting what she was saying.  It was very relaxing and nonthreatening to have a conversation with her, even as a little child.  Maybe it was the teacher in her.

Because I was merely a toddler, and because I lived under the care of my maternal grandparents, I simply didn't have the day to day contact with Grams and Gramps.  It wasn't as though they lived just down the street within range of my tricycle.  It is my loss that I don't have a rich treasure-trove of intimate memories like my cousins on the Lathrop side do.

Events were soon to take me farther from both her sphere and that of Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee, but I am grateful that both of my ancestral families never degraded into animosity for one another.  I have never felt estranged from my cousins on my dad's side of the family and I think that this is a great tribute to both Grandma Clara and Grandma Lill. 

 Since the primary motivation of my writing these little blurbs is to provide my grandkids with an idea of what it was like to be a child in the old days, I would welcome comments from any of her other grandchildren or great grandchildren in the section below this post to help memorialize her wonderfulness, and I will have a few more to share a bit later on.

Leland Fay Hanson

Leland Fay Hanson

Grandpa Lee was born in or near Westby, along with a brother and three sisters.  The farm was located near a little town called Bloomingdale.  He worked on the farm and, until fairly recently, if you visited the old place, his initials were painted on the corner of the old barn.  There has been some renovation and the last time I visited, they were gone. 

From the Bloomingdale cemetery on the hill above, you can see parts of the farm fields and this cemetery is where many of the people I will try and remember things about lie in repose.  It is a beautiful place and must have been a magical little bubble in which to be a child, grow up, and fall in love.

The things I have been told about Grandpa Lee include doing a lot of farm chores, playing baseball, fishing, and sleighing and ice skating in the winter.  When he was older he got a job with the Pet Milk Company which had a plant in Sparta, many of the buildings of which are still there but used different ways.  He apparently had a knack for doing the chemical tests on the milk in various stages of the condensing process.  The road down from Cashton Ridge to Sparta was, in those days, convoluted and steep, winding around from one hill to the next.  Grandpa Lee used to follow the snowplow in the winter, lest he not be able to make the climb or descent.




This is a on old picture of Grandpa Lee and Grandma Lill with my mother.

He also worked many years as a "jobber" for the company, which simply meant that he traveled routes through various towns in Wisconsin, visited the outlets (mostly grocery stores), took orders later to be delivered, and set up displays.  By the time I was born, all of the above was ancient history to Lill and Lee.  When their kids were in high school, Lill would sometimes trust my mother to be in charge and she would join Lee on a run for a few days.  They might get in a couple days of fishing and card playing at Eagle's Nest flowage between Tomah and Necedah.

According to my uncle, this was leaving the foxes in charge of the hen house.  In the younger years, the three girls apparently would lock my uncle in the closet so they could party. When he was older, the four youths took turns having beer parties in the house; then cleaned it up before their parents' return. 

Lee and a friend had developed an ice cream stabilizer which they marketed for some time either through the Pet Milk Company or through connections they had made.  They named it "HiBub" and my baby picture was on the label.  "Bub" was his nickname for me.  My mother received a couple of hundred dollars in royalties for the use of my picture, which she kept in a bank account.  I don't think the product lasted in popularity all that long.

Grandpa Lee always had a deal going on, usually with cars.  He had an Edsel at one time and I can remember the push-button shifting.  He would have a Mercury from time to time, always fairly big sedans because, after all, he had four kids.  You could put four people in the back and three in the front, easily, with these oldsters because they had not yet invented bucket seats. 

Lill and Lee would occasionally make a drive, either up the Cashton Ridge or up the Norwalk Ridge to visit either their parents in Westby or Lill's uncle and aunt in La Farge, alongside the Kickapoo River.  An easier trip was to La Crosse to visit siblings there, but no trip was quickly made like it is today.  As I mentioned the drive up the ridges took forever, unlike today after the roads have been widened and straightened.

I can remember being about three years old and in the back seat with Lill in the front and Lee driving.  I'm not sure who was in back with me but I do not believe it was my mother.  We were driving south from Sparta on Highway 27 to go up Norwalk Ridge and on through Ontario and ultimately to La Farge. 

I was in a bad mood and I can very clearly remember throwing a tantrum for the first five or so miles.  We were almost as far as Farmer's Valley, which is now called Janus Avenue.  At about the point where the Farmer's Valley Cemetery is located, Grandpa Lee pulled over and they put me out on the shoulder of the road, which, in those days was just grass, and drove away.

I stood there, watching the car get smaller, and burbling the equivalent of expletives for a three or four year old.  The car stopped, then backed up.  I was told I had to behave if I wanted to get back in.

I got back in and pouted for a while, but the tantrum was over.  Grandma Lill would try and keep me engaged, as she later did with the other cousins, by looking for white horses in the fields along the way.  I was to get a quarter for each white horse.  I would find several but I really do not remember getting any quarters.

In that day, Highway 27 had to go through a little tunnel under the railroad track that eventually became the Sparta-Elroy bike trail.  Grandpa Lee would always toot the horn when we went through the tunnel.  If he forgot, I reminded him.

On the way home from any of these drives, Lill and Lee would always stop at the A & W Root Beer Stand on the corner of Water Street and Wisconsin Street.  It is still there, although it is now Rudy's Root Beer Stand.  I would get what they called a "baby beer", which was a small mug of root beer which amounted to about a cupful.  It was a great idea and I loved it and clamored for it.  I'm sure many of the cousins yet to be born at that time can remember getting a "baby beer".

Lee always had a big idea fermenting.  At one point, while my mother was still in high school, he moved the family to Madison.  They had a small cottage style house down by First Street where Johnson Street cuts through to get over to East Washington.  I am typing these words not more than two miles from that house.

My mother had to go from teeny tiny Sparta High School to East High in Madison, which looks like something between a castle and a fortress, even today.  She went in one door, freaked out, and went back out another door and home, so the story goes.

I don't think that move lasted more than a year before everyone agreed to go back to Sparta.  Lee tended to move the family a lot and I know of five or six houses or apartments in Sparta where they lived.  In fact the Cottage Street house might have been purchased upon returning from Madison.

I lived like a little child-emperor with all these loving people to adore me and take care of my every whim.  Sparta was not a big town yet and I could roam freely in the park, stick my head into the cannon, ride my tricycle around the block and up to the cemetery and do mischief with all the flowers and pots beside the graves, and play in the back yard.

I remember playing with a boy who lived about a half block away and who was a little bit older than me.  He had gotten the old newspapers and carefully rolled up sand from the backyard into them to make a stack of  "grenades" which he hoarded in their garage.  The atomic bomb had been used to end the Pacific War and he called these little packages "A-bombs". 

He hurled one against the inside wall of his garage and yelled "A-Bomb!" as the newspaper broke and sand went all over the place.  We took a few outside and were throwing them.  I was yelling "B-Bomb!" and "D-Bomb!" and "Z-Bomb!" when one hit me directly in the face, filling my eyes, nose, and mouth with sand.  I ran home crying and told Grandma Lill.

There must have been a boy delivering the newspaper, and I must have seen someone paying him, because I got the idea in my head that I could take the old newspapers from the stack in the kitchen and peddle them throughout the neighborhood.  I would take a couple and go down the street ringing doorbells.

I can remember only one success.  There is a beautiful old house on the corner of Montgomery Street across from the park.  I can remember the man inviting me inside to meet his wife.  They were a little older and probably grandparents missing their grandchildren.  Here was this curly haired little street urchin on the porch selling newspapers.   I thought it was a bridge too far to have to go inside and pitch my newspaper, but I did always get a dime.

Arlene Lillian Hanson

Arlene Lillian Hanson

Owing to the divorce of my mother and father, and the fact that my mother was probably twenty-three years old, we fell into the safety net of living with my maternal grandparents, known to everyone as Lill and Lee. 

Grandma Lill became as much a mother to me as her daughter was.  We lived in the house on Cottage Street in Sparta as if nothing had happened.  I was simply added to the four children they already were raising.  My mother had studied to become a typist and secretary and likely had sporadic employment and I would not be surprised if much of it was at Camp McCoy, the nearby army base.

We are in the year 1949 now and I am two years old plus.  I have considerably more memories but they are still fragmented.  The cottage street house was on a corner, across from a park that consumed an entire block.  The park was largely green lawn space, but in one quadrant was a small cannon, placed there as a memorial.  The street was unpaved then but there were some sidewalks, and I can clearly remember riding a little tricycle up and down the sidewalk.  I played and rode the trike barefooted because I can remember looking down at my feet on the pedals and seeing that my big toe was bleeding.  I had stubbed it on the concrete while pedaling.  I went crying into the house to show Grandma Lill.

Grandpa Lee, my mother, and her sisters smoked cigarettes at times and I had seen them use book matches.  I can remember finding a partially used book of matches in the dirt street while playing.  I removed a match and rubbed it on the scratcher, holding it tight to get a good enough grip on it to move it.  It flared alight and burned my finger.  I went crying into the house to show Grandma Lill.

Arlene Lillian Hanson was born in Westby, Wisconsin, about twenty five miles south of Sparta and up on the ridge.  She had three sisters and a brother.  Her family lived in a valley north of Westby, down in a valley through which a creek ran.  I have been to the location many times, but there is no  house or farm building left from her time there.  In fact, the family fled the house in a flood and ran up the hillside.  I do not know if it was destroyed and relocated or if they just mitigated the damage and kept on living at the original site.

In recent years the site has become developed as a religious retreat and church camp called "Living Waters."

She attended school through the eighth grade, after which, she went to La Crosse and attended "normal school" which prepared her to become a teacher.  I believe she and grandpa Lee were already sweethearts by then.  She returned and taught school in Bloomingdale, hiking or using a horse drawn sleigh to go "cross country" to the little one-room school across the fields and light the fire so that the little building was warmed before the children arrived.  She and grandpa Lee courted and I believe that the rules for teachers meant that she had to be single and not dating, so the teaching probably ended when she and Lee got serious.

Grandpa Lee had taken work in Sparta, some fifteen or twenty miles away and they bought the house on Cottage Street to raise their family in.  I have surprisingly many memories of that house.  I remember the kitchen, which had a door to the back yard and I remember toddling in and asking her for a cookie or a drink of water.  There was a little tree in the back yard which grew hundreds of little miniature apples about the size of a marble.  They were bitter and inedible but I would not be surprised to learn that she made jelly or sauce out of them nonetheless.

They must have been having trouble toilet-training me, because I can remember my mother, having talked to the doctor, placing a piece of tag board on the inside of the cupboard door in that kitchen.  When I would have a good day, I would get a little colored star to stick on the tag board.  I can remember being enthusiastic about the stars.  They were in a little box, like a match box, up on a shelf inside the cupboard.  I can't remember actually equating the stars with any behavior on my part, but I do remember climbing up on the counter top, opening the cupboard door, and getting into the little box.  I licked and stuck all the stars on the tag board.

Lill and Lee had a thin metal kettle which was filled almost to the brim with used sundry items, like nuts, bolts, nails, pieces of wire, thumb tacks, upholstery tacks, and the like which just couldn't be thrown away because, of course, they would be needed at some time.  I know this is true, because I have always had a similar stash of items just like them that I simply could not throw away.

I have a clear memory of sitting at the little kitchen table watching my uncle paw through the little kettle looking for a nut or a bolt that he needed.  He would pile little items that were in the way of his search on the table.  One item was an electrical plug, the kind that could replace a broken one on the end of a lamp cord.  It had no wire, just the prongs, and I picked it up and promptly plugged it into the electrical outlet above the table.

Sparks and blue flames started flying out of it, startling my uncle who was a high school kid at the time.  The little connections within must have been just close enough for the current to arc between them but not so close as to allow an absolute short, which would just have blown the fuse.  I remember him gingerly grasping the plug and pulling it out of the wall before admonishing me not to do anything like that again.

I didn't pay any attention to his advice, of course, and continued fooling around with outlets from time to time until I pressed my sweaty thumb up against one and got a paralyzing jolt which not only hurt but frightened the daylights out of me.  I gave them a wide berth after that.  Life lesson learned.

I remember fondly the occasional evening event of that magical treat, popcorn.  My uncle seemed to be the best at making it.  He used a lot of butter.  Everyone would be listening to the radio and out would come this big yellow bowl, the biggest one grandma Lill had, full of popcorn.  Everyone raced to get the top part  because it had the most butter.  I can remember sitting on the bowl once it was half empty, opening and closing my legs to allow people to grab handfuls of the popcorn.  They were howling with laughter but my uncle thought it not so funny. 

I can remember him lifting me off the bowl, shaking his head, and saying, "not a good idea."

The little cannon in the park was a fascination because, if I got someone to lift me up I could stick my face right into the bore and feel its coolness and see its darkness.  The cannon is still there and, on a bike ride this past summer, I realized that a commemorative marker had been placed next to it with some explanatory information.

The cannon was captured at the battle of Vicksburg, Mississippi during the Civil War and brought back by one of the Wisconsin Divisions.  My great, great grandfather Peter Hanson was in that battle and would have been in the outfit that captured it and brought it back.  I don't think that anyone in my family knew this!  How ironic that this soldier's great-great-grandson would be sticking his head into that cannon!

The real attraction, however, for an obsessive-compulsive toddler, was in the basement of the house.  Once down the wooden stairs, I navigated my way through the dark, spider-infested shelves holding Grandma Lill's canned vegetables and fruits to the front corner where, beneath a dirty, miniature window was the greatest mystery in the world.  It was a metal case with a thick glass front and inside were all these little clock-faces with tiny little hands.  One of the hands was nearly always moving and rarely stopped near the little numbers.  Another of the little hands was clearly moving, but at a much slower pace.  Two or three more didn't appear to be moving at all, but if I stayed there watching long enough, they were! 

I don't recall ever wondering how Grandpa Lee's car worked, or the refrigerator, or the radio, but this little device, hidden away where my aunts and uncle didn't even know it existed, was truly baffling, and I could sit there on a couple of peach crates and watch it for tens of minutes, wondering what the heck it was.  It was, of course, just the water meter, but it kindled a curiosity in me and probably had a lot to do with making me the kind of kook that I am, always charting things and analyzing things.

John Frank Lathrop

John Frank Lathrop

What a pity to have had a father who was pretty much a nice guy and to have known him so very little.  John, or "Jiggs", as he was commonly called, tried to work with my mother's dad for the Pet Milk Company located in Sparta.  He was the son of another good Sparta family, of which I will write more later and it happens that my maternal and paternal grandmothers were both teachers in the areas surrounding Sparta.

(Picture of John Frank Lathrop courtesy of Clara Lathrop)

I am sorry that I do not have childhood memories of my father, and so I will have to rely upon hearsay which I will give much credence to primarily because none of the things that have been told me about him are particularly bad.

The U.S. Navy destroyer, USS Smith (DD378) was attached to a squadron of ships serving as screens for the aircraft carrier Hornet.  On 24 October 1942 they joined with another group protecting the carrier Enterprise in the South Pacific after a large Japanese carrier force was spotted converging on the island of Guadalcanal.  My uncle John tells me that my father was aboard the Smith, although I have no other confirmation that the story is true.  The timing seems appropriate, as my mother would have been in high school at the time, probably beginning her junior year, but possibly her senior year. 

Two days later the Hornet was hit by bombs and the Smith was attacked by 20 Japanese torpedo planes.  One plane crashed into the forecastle of the destroyer but the torpedo did not detonate upon impact, but a short time later, causing even more fire and casualties.  The forward part of the ship was enveloped in a sheet of smoke and flame.  The bridge had to be abandoned.

The gunners downed six of the torpedo planes and the crew extinguished all the fires by afternoon, thanks to a decision by the captain to steer the ship into the wake of the USS South Dakota, helping to douse the fires.  Smith maintained her position in the screen with all serviceable guns firing although many of the powder magazines were flooded.  When fighting broke off she limped to Noumen for temporary repairs and then to Pearl Harbor.

Since my parents were married for such a short time, I have no idea of whether my father was a seaman or a fireman (whether he worked above or below decks) nor did I have opportunity to talk to him about whether he was aboard during this skirmish.  If he was aboard the Smith, I can only imagine the horror, because in the South Pacific naval encounters, I don't believe anyone survived if they went into the water.

The timing works out, because when Smith went to Pearl Harbor for more extensive repairs, sailors would have been transferred to pare down to a skeleton crew, and John Frank Lathrop might have been discharged from the Navy and returned home to marry Elsie Patricia Hanson and father me.

My mother tells me that he was basically a good man with a great sense of humor and adventure and that he wouldn't take "guff" from anyone.  The times being what they were, I am of the opinion that partying and a goodly amount of drinking were the norm.  Everyone who had survived the Great Depression and World War II had a lot to be thankful for and lived it up.

She related a story to me of a trip to San Francisco to see my dad while he was in the Navy during which they had drinks in a park and someone stole her purse and shoes.  My dad apparently asked around and they wound up in an upstairs apartment having a couple of beers with one fellow's girlfriend while he plied his acquaintances for information.  Amazingly, the purse was returned, minus a little money but with the important things (like travel tickets) intact.  The shoes were not found and the girlfriend loaned my mother a pair which were three sizes too big. 

Others arrived and the little beer party was interrupted by an argument where knives were produced and my dad quickly ushered her out onto the street.  She had to continue her visit clomping around in the oversize shoes. 

My grandfather purchased a small cottage on the La Crosse River which cuts through Sparta.  I remember my first birthday taking place there.  It might be that "Jiggs" and my grandfather were away working, probably in Madison, but I remember some gifts.  One was a rubber airplane with Mickey Mouse in the cockpit.  I promptly chewed Mickey's head off and had to play with the plane from then on with only his severed neck protruding from the toy. 

I was also given a candle which was about a foot tall and had gradations embossed on its surface about a quarter of an inch apart.  They were numbered and the idea was to burn the candle to the next mark each birthday, which my mother and the others present promptly did, with great seriousness.  I never saw the candle again.  It may even have been a baptismal candle--I am not sure.

The other toy was a large plastic egg, two-toned, the halves welded together.  There were holes in it.  One was tiny and a small crank protruded through it.  When the crank was turned a tune was plunked out and could be heard through the somewhat larger hole.  When the crank was turned backward, the tune played backward.  If you looked into the larger hole you could see that a wide rubber belt moved around when the crank was turned.  The belt had bumps on it which plucked the various tines of a little sound board.

I truly believe that my interest in how mechanical things work dates back to this little toy and its inner workings which could be observed by the fascinated eye of the one-year-old peering in through the hole.  What was truly amazing about this toy was that the little belt inside was made of a material that had a peculiar smell.

After my grandmother's death, this little egg surfaced in a trunk of her belongings and I was astounded to discover the memory of it in my mind as well as a memory of the little tune, a memory of how the tune sounded backwards, and a memory of how the little belt with the bumps on it smelled, which it still did.

My grandparents and my uncle and aunts seem to have an affection for "Jiggs" and my mother tells me that his main fault was that he just couldn't settle down and be responsible.  Around the time I was a year old, the number one song for a number of weeks was "Manana" by Peggy Lee.  Jiggs may have been a "manana man", a procrastinator.  I sure am.  I have tried to live my life by the lyrics of this song so it might have been the case that I underwent some subliminal personality molding from exposure to it at age one.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou5vsdpsoAE

Some of the guys at work even used to call me "Johnny Manana".

Because the Lathrops were Catholic, my mother had to turn Catholic, in those days, to be married in the church and I was baptized Catholic at some point in my infancy, before the marriage went bad.  My mother and father divorced when I was around the age of two.  She did not remain a practicing Catholic.  I am told there was an effort at reconciliation and indeed I have a snatch of a memory of moving away to Council Bluffs, an extension of Omaha.  This was a very short move and I can remember only exploring the yard a little bit.  I can't even remember my dad in the event.

There is also a story about "Jiggs" apparently learning to fly a small airplane.  The crux of the matter is that he was forbidden to take me up in the airplane but that on occasion I would return from an outing crowing "cows!"  "cows!".  Then they knew that I had been up in the airplane. 

Ultimately the divorce took place and my mother and I lived with her parents in Sparta in a little house on Cottage Street adjacent to a city park.  In those days a divorce was a real black mark and the families involved often did not continue to associate with one another out of the shame of it all.  The mother almost universally kept custody of the children and I am not sure alimony or child support was a sure thing at all.  In many cases the father moved away from town which is what I believe happened in our case.  "Jiggs" went out to seek his fortune and my mother and her parents undertook to raise me. 

It is a sad consequence of the way things were that I did not meet my father again until I was in high school.  Because there had been a dearth of involvement and because of my own immaturity, I was not overly excited when I did meet him.  I developed a fondness for John Frank Lathrop and we exchanged visits, but it was not until a bit later in my life.  We will return to him, but after the divorce he apparently had moved to Council Bluffs, and ultimately lived in Nevada, Iowa and worked for a large company there that managed the mailing out of samples of consumer products.  He met and lived with a very nice woman named Dorothy who also worked there.  I don't know if they officially ever married, but they conducted the rest of their lives as though they were. 

My grandparents on both sides liked one another, however, and I am thankful that I often had contact with his side of the family.  As I write on, my experiences are largely skewed to my mother's side of the family, but we visited the Lathrops freely and I am lucky to have some fond memories there as well.

Elsie Patricia (Hanson) Lathrop

                                                              Over The Rainbow

My earliest memory is of being held in my mother's arms while she sang "Over The Rainbow" and rocked me gently.  Although I haven't encountered anyone who claims to have memories of infancy and have heard it said that the mind does not retain them, I nonetheless do indeed have this snatch of memory and cherish it.  This song and George Gerschwin's "Summertime" stick in my mind from her singing them to me so much.  I didn't sing "Over The Rainbow" to my children when they were little, but I did fumble around sufficiently with a guitar to find four chords that augmented "Summertime" and I would sing it to them at bedtime.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSZxmZmBfnU

A few years ago, I had the occasion to recreate this moment with two of my grandchildren and when I started to sing the words, my scant infantile memories and those of my own beautiful children snuggled safely in their beds flooded my mind and I was so overcome that I had to croak out some of the words in the dark.  Afterward, my little granddaughter, Annabelle, commented from her top bunk, "Grandpa, that was so beautiful that I almost broke out crying!"

"Over The Rainbow" was sung by Judy Garland in the movie "The Wizard of Oz" in the 1930's and "Summertime" was from the play Porgy and Bess in the same era.  My mother would have been a fourteen year old girl when these gems came out.  They were already 'oldies' by the time I was born but Garland continued to sing her song for thirty years, never changing the way she sang it. 

The first hit song that I would have been likely to hear from my dresser drawer, which doubled as a bed, was Perry Como's hit titled, with considerable irony, "Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep)".

I was born in May of 1947 to Elsie Patricia (Hanson) Lathrop, a beautiful young mother of 21-years who had married her high school sweetheart after he returned from serving in the Navy toward the end of World War II.  The marriage was not destined to last very long and, things being as they were in the middle of the 20th Century, I subsequently did not know my own father, also named John Lathrop, very well at all and I don't have memories of him at all from my infancy.

My mother always went by Patricia, using the E or the total Elsie for a middle name.  She did not like her first name, presumably because she was called "Elsie the Cow" by other children when very young.  "Elsie the Cow" was the mascot for Borden dairy products and was prominently featured in advertisements and embossed upon the glass bottles that milk and cream came in. 

In those days, there was a milkman, much like a postman, who once or twice a week made his rounds and left full bottles on the porch, taking away the empties for refilling.  However many empty bottles one left on the porch was the number of bottles the milkman would leave and it was likely that "Elsie the Cow" decorated each one, to my mother's chagrin.

The first person in a child's  life is his or her mother.  I believe awareness of one's mother to even preclude awareness of one's self.  Once the self is perceived, the journey has begun and I was immensely fortunate to have my journey begin, not in one of any number of inhospitable places, but in Sparta, Wisconsin where the glaciers carved huge valleys out of thirty-million year old limestone and sandstone, their melted remains digging tracks like the Beaver Creek, which runs through Sparta and into the La Crosse River and ultimately into the Mississippi at La Crosse, twenty six miles distant.

My mother and father grew up and went to high school in Sparta.  Camp McCoy, an Army base, was located about eight miles to the east.  Japanese Americans who had been unjustly sequestered by the government, were housed there at times, as were German prisoners-of-war.  But mostly, Camp McCoy was a training base for infantry and artillery. 

The constant presence of rotating military staff and trainees ensured that Sparta was an active party town in those days and ever since and I can only imagine the competition my father and his classmates endured from the steady influx of handsome and exotic young men for the attention of the girls, as well as the consternation of the parents of the local girls when the night spots and dance bars were overrun with these intriguing fellows.

This situation, added to the fact that the war had ended, led to an aura of general festivity and celebration, which resulted in what is referred to as the "baby boom", of which I was at the front end.  The soldiers and sailors who survived the war and made it home were regarded as heroes and either married sweethearts who waited for them or found sweethearts to marry.

My grandmother wrote a journal about her life and, to give one shocking example of the changes in her time, she recounted that she was courted in a horse-and-buggy in Westby, Wisconsin yet lived to fly in a jetliner to Germany to visit her own daughter and to watch a man walk on the surface of the moon.

My own series of stories is intended to continue in that vein, with the hope that my own grandchildren and great-grandchildren might one day be amused to read what life was like for a boy growing up before such things as arcades, shopping malls, computers, cell-phones, and the internet and by my memories of those wonderful, wistful, and hard-working giants, their ancestors!

As for my mother's story, it would be impossible for me to condense it into one brief, smarmy essay.  She will appear many times throughout, her history being a long braid consisting of strands of exuberance, delight, success, failure, triumph, but always with a string of sadness entwined within, because she was a beautiful person, not superficial in her ability to think and experience, but who was burdened, like us all, with some tragic flaws.

My memory of her love for her infant child is fleeting but intense, and it is the earliest thing that I can claim to be a witness of, but based upon experiences of my life with her I can make some speculations.  I believe that the milieu in which my mother found herself being an adolescent was one of great relief that the great depression was over, but also one of great trepidation about world events.  After all, the boys of her generation were dying in Europe and in the islands of the South Pacific.

I know that my grandmother rented, from time to time, a room in her house to various wives of servicemen overseas, and that sometimes the husbands of these women would return and there was a happy ending to their stories.  In other cases the women got tragic news.  In both cases, I cannot imagine any of these poor ladies thinking of my grandmother as anything other than a surrogate parent.

It was the proximity of Camp McCoy that fostered all of this and my mother and her siblings would have shared in the drama surrounding it all.

Elsie Patricia Hanson, or "Patty" as everyone including myself called her, didn't get high grades in home economics and cooking.  She got high grades in reading literature.  She was lousy in mathematics but wrote nice poetry.  She was very pretty, so she got a lot of attention from the boys. 

She was the oldest of four siblings and, from what I've been told, they all were party animals while in high school and after, but only when their mother was preoccupied elsewhere and my mother was left in charge.  The music and dancing of the day were wonderful, almost any town in Wisconsin had at least one brewery, and in the case of Sparta, there was an army base next door which supplied a plethora of dancing and drinking partners.

I think that Patty Hanson was quite a rebel.  I think she likely tried to defy most of the rules and constraints placed on her, even if it meant going underground to do so.  The 1940's were not times when women were particularly liberated.  I never heard of my mother or her two sisters considering attending college.  They went to secretarial school and learned to type and take shorthand.  I believe she learned quite early to view other women as competitors for the attentions of men. 

Like myself, she was quite capable of being alone and finding ways to entertain herself.  She read voraciously and loved to collect books.  She never developed much of an adeptness for technical or mechanical matters and remained so all her life.  She never learned to drive a car, although she once tried.

My mother, probably at age 19 or 20.

I have this notion, although it is pure speculation, that as a 20-year old she was having a great time but, like many young girls of her day, wanted to marry and live happily ever after and felt that time was wasting and that perhaps even within only a few months she would be an old spinster and realize that life had passed her by.

I have this notion, although it is also pure speculation, that my father bounced around the Pacific Ocean wondering how he had gotten into that mess, dreaming of the day that (if he survived) he would be discharged, go home, and find the girl of his dreams and live it up, because it was all going on without him.

They both likely were too young to be married and should have lived life a few more years before trying.  Lucky for me that they were impatient.

Margie Dolezal Linzmeier

                                                       The Beatles Sing Margie

Margie Dolezal loved the Beatles and so, to get in the proper mood to write about her, I directed Alexa to stream Beatle music and am sitting quietly for a while, alone and gazing out the window across a sun dappled yard that is slowly collecting birch, red maple, and walnut leaves.  I nearly weep, wondering where all the years have gone.  I stumbled across this yard as a first grader when it was a cow pasture.

The Beatles were never received very well by the two generations before me.  My grandparents thought they were satanic.  My mother thought a little better of them, primarily because she couldn't simply agree with her own parents, but probably more because my immersion into music had proved a less nerve-wracking pastime than committing delinquent acts.  As I listen to them now, fifty years later, I am struck by how sweet and clean their music was, particularly in comparison to some of the things that were yet to come.  I can see why Margie loved the Beatles. 

My mind slips back to La Crosse, Wisconsin.  The year is 1970 and I am living on Badger Street, practically on campus.  Cathy and I have struck up a romance which looks like it is going to last, and she has moved into a house about a mile away on Madison Street.  She has a roommate. 

I have four of them, of course, to make expenses less.  Lined up in the little 25-foot long upstairs bedroom is an assortment of five cots and beds.  Cathy's brother Steve and her cousin Vern are in two of them at night.  The other two belong to the Stogis brothers, Ken and Jim, from Illinois.  We are living in a predicament of squalor which has been repeated by endless streams of college boys all over the world and throughout modern times.

I was back attending classes, and more seriously than I had leading up to my "flunking out" for a semester, which extended my proposed graduation date to January of 1971, in direct conflict with my class ring, which had 1970 inscribed on it.  With my one point eight grade-point average, I am fairly certain that the officials at UW-La Crosse had no expectation that I could attain straight A's in order to meet the standard.

I had a lot invested in the timeline, however, since I had joined the U. S. Navy Reserve because my college deferments had run out and I had drawn number 15 in the very first draft lottery.  I had gone to boot camp and had six months of reserve meetings before I would have to go on active duty. 

Every Wednesday night I attended my required meetings at the Naval Reserve Center on the south side of the city.  In addition I had to spend one weekend per month there, drilling, standing at attention, and attending various classes designed to prepare me for life in the Navy.  Cathy, intent on impressing me with her cooking skills, offered to make dinner for us after my meetings in her new apartment.

The first dinner she made was chicken Kiev and it was my first visit to her place.  I rang the doorbell and the door was opened by a tall, beautiful girl with long black hair and a shy, impish smile. 

"I'm Margie," she said.  "I'll get Cathy."

Cathy and I ate our dinner at a tiny kitchen table.  Margie conveniently disappeared to give us privacy.

That is the way it went on Wednesday nights for many weeks.  Somewhere along the way I proposed marriage to Cathy and she accepted, with some provisions regarding the Navy. 

Cathy's younger brother, Chris, was also attending classes at the university by now and, as all women are matchmakers at heart, Cathy thought to introduce him to her roommate.  I can't remember exactly when and how this introduction took place, but Chris has an elaborate personal legend about it. 

Apparently he was awestruck by her immediately, but owing to a combination of cowardice and discretion, he felt he probably didn't have a chance of interesting such a beautiful girl.  He asked to see her and she responded something like, "I'm very busy but I'm always at church at the Neuman Center.  Why don't you come there?"

I'm thinking he went and she didn't happen to be there that time, frustrating him greatly and sinking his hopes.  Chewing at his fists and occasionally slapping himself, he temporarily gave up.

Now we have to fast forward to July 24, 1971.  I had miraculously graduated college and attended Naval Radio School in San Diego.  I was on two weeks leave before going to my first duty station, Washington D.C.  Cathy and I were married in Blenker, Wisconsin, and the reception was held in the front yard of the family home.  I think that Margie and Chris were both in the wedding, but their various duties kept them occupied.  Chris remembers that his dad sent him to the house to set up beer or perform some errand and that he missed the dinner altogether. 

There was a record player set up in an upstairs bedroom with the speakers jammed into an open window.  I remember seeing Chris and Margie up changing records in that window briefly, but the evening ended and everyone went wherever they went.  Cathy and I drove away to our honeymoon in northern Wisconsin.

A week later we were on our way to Washington D.C. and a year and a half later we were finished with my active duty and back in Wisconsin.  We had rented an apartment in Madison from my old college roommate Duane and I was trying to use my G.I. bill to get into graduate school.  I went to the University of Wisconsin for a semester as a special student, taking courses in psychology.  We decided to throw a party in our new apartment.  Chris arrived with a girl he was interested in but who was breaking up with him.  There was a knock on the door and when it opened, there was Margie with Cathy's brother Steve!   I think Steve had agreed to pick her up and bring her to the party, but the logistics of the whole thing didn't promote their being together.  I am of the opinion that Chris was probably as surprised as I was to see his brother bringing a girl who, in retrospect, was a person of high interest to him.  I don't have any brothers but I can readily appreciate the irony.  It almost qualifies as a corollary to Murphy's Law which states that if something disastrous can happen, it will happen.

I had enrolled for the spring semester and it didn't look promising for me to get accepted as a graduate student at Madison with my 2.01 undergraduate grade point.  Someone made me aware of a program in school psychology that was looking for applicants.  It was offered at a place none other than my alma mater, UW-La Crosse.  I drove up there and got admitted to the program provided that I attend summer classes and prove myself.  I enrolled and was eventually accepted.  Cathy and I rented the downstairs of a house out on Jackson Street, not far from the Heilmann Brewery.  I loved the program.  While we lived there, Cathy gave birth to our first daughter, Sara.

Over the next two years, we had several parties and all our friends would visit from time to time.  Chris even moved in with us for a few weeks while he worked at a cooler plant.  Cathy tried to continue her role as matchmaker, setting Margie up on a date with my colleague Jim French, but it didn't bloom into a romance.

I think that Cathy could read that Chris was infatuated with the elusive Margie.  One weekend we were staying in my grandparents' spare bedroom in Sparta.  Margie's parents lived in Hillsboro a few miles away and we picked her up to go out.  Cathy invited Chris to join us and we went to a few bars and probably got dinner somewhere.  A blizzard was occurring and the roads were deteriorating rapidly.  Citing some bogus excuse, we asked Chris to take Margie back home.  The poor guy drove up over the Norwalk Ridge and up and over Wildcat Mountain in the raging snow and ice to take her home.  He slept on the family's couch with Margie's sisters and brother peering at him.

Eventually I graduated and took a job as school psychologist for the Green Bay Public Schools.  We bought a little house in the suburb of Preble.  We invited people to visit and somehow Margie and Chris both visited us at the same time.  Margie was home from a teaching assignment in Houston, Texas, and after a couple days, she returned there.  Chris returned to central Wisconsin. 

Chris had finally had enough of Murphy's Law and decided to take action..  We got a phone call from him that he had gotten in his Volkswagen and was halfway to Texas to visit Margie in Houston.  The car didn't make it but Chris did.  About three days later we got a giddy call from them both that they were engaged.  To this day, he laments that he was in love with her at first sight and that due to perverse timing and chains of events, all that time was wasted that they could have been happily together.

Chris and Margie did get married.  They had three children, Ben, Dan, and Jon.  Our lives have intertwined for fifty years.  For a time they lived in Green Bay.  When we moved to Portage, Wisconsin, they moved to an apartment there, later buying a house in nearby Rio.  Ultimately they moved to Wisconsin Rapids and then built a house in his hometown of Auburndale, where they lived for many years before selling it and moving to an empty nest apartment in Elk Mound, Wisconsin where their youngest son and wife teach school.

This photo is of Chris and Margie with their oldest son, Ben.

We have gone on vacations, weekend road trips, and cruises together and Cathy and Margie have travelled together overseas.  Some of these adventures I have chronicled elsewhere, but generally speaking we have probably been closer to them than anyone else over the course of our lives. 

Now, as I sit here writing and reminiscing, Alexa is playing "Blackbird" by the Beatles, and indeed the blackbirds are swooping about in the little valley outside my patio window.  All of the lovely early Beatles songs are reminding me of Margie.

Margie, smiling and giggling as she answered that door in her and Cathy's apartment.  Margie, giggling as she thanked me for swatting out the flames when her fur collar caught fire from being too close to a candle at a supper club.  Margie, smiling as she triangulated all of Chris's foibles and saw past them to the essence of the man she was in love with. 

Margie, laughing as she attended game after game after game of her three boys, from grade school through high school and college and beyond.  Margie faithfully never missing church and unflinchingly clinging to her faith in God in the face of two successful fights against cancer and a third against a form of leukemia.

Margie, getting up and going to work early and staying late despite recovering from radiation, chemotherapy, and surgeries.  Margie, putting up with the stresses of teaching and going the extra mile, always, because she had standards which she would not let slip.

Margie, smiling lovingly as she spent her first year of retirement babysitting her grandbabies while their parents went to work.  Margie, delighted, when Chris agreed to obtain a passport so that they could make a trip to Ireland, then pensively accepting when a series of seizures and a fourth cancer diagnosis put an end to their foreign travel plans.

Margie, giggling and enjoying life even as cancer progressively limited her universe.  Margie projecting forth the strength to fly to California for a wedding and to Florida to visit us.  Margie, enjoying going to church and to breakfast out, when it was difficult but all she could physically manage.  Margie, smiling lovingly at Chris, her caretaker, when she could no longer leave the bed without help, and smiling and laughing with her sisters when they visited.  Margie, using all her strength to reach for and gently kiss the hand of a newborn grandbaby that no one could be sure she would ever see.

A year and a half ago, I agreed to go with Cathy on a trip to New Zealand.  The flight was long and I spent most of it with my head resting on my hands with my elbows on the little swing-down tray.  After an eternity we landed in Sydney, Australia, where we were to catch our final flight.  As the plane taxied to the gate, Cathy's phone rang.  It was her brother, Steve, calling to tell us that Margie had passed.

We lit a candle in a New Zealand cathedral for Margie and less than a day later we encountered, on a hike, a young woman with long black hair, a willowy look, and a giggling smile, traveling alone.  Blackbirds were swooping around the trees.  We have lit votive candles in other places in Margie's memory, not because of our own devoutness, but in respect of hers.  A few weeks ago we lit one in the final home, in Epheses, Turkey, of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Margie would like that.

Now I'm sitting and reminiscing on one of the last warm, sunny mornings before autumn closes in and Alexa is playing the Beatles.

The Beatles are singing of Margie.