The Horseshoe Tavern

The Horseshoe Tavern


I would submit for your listening the following song, which I heard many, many times at the Horshoe Tavern as an eleven year old.




It can be played on YouTube and it's a great song.  All the drunken and half-drunk patrons at the Horseshoe Tavern played it incessantly.  It is a short song, but it embodies a vignette about the relationship between a man and a woman when little problems turn into bigger ones and they split.  It's a good drinking song and drink they did and laugh they did at the Horseshoe Tavern which was just a dingy little joint on the left side of the road just as you crossed the Root River and before the road climbed up into Hokah and turned right a bit past the Catholic Church and School.

There was at least one more bar on the stretch through town but my mother and Al liked the Horseshoe Tavern best.  There was, of course, a U-shaped bar, hence the name of the place.  They had become increasingly regular customers there when I was in 5th and 6th grades.

The problem for me was with my attention span.  After a couple of strawberry sodas and bags of potato chips or candy bars, I became very bored hearing Don Gibson sing his hit song over and over and over and would have liked to go home where I could play with my toys, read, and such.

My mother and Al would slowly be getting more and more intoxicated and just when I thought they had had their fill the door would swing open and someone would stride in to reignite the fun.  More drinks would be ordered and another forty-five minutes would be added to the game clock.

There was a narrow hallway which led to the bathrooms and the bartender stacked all the old newspapers at the end of that hall.  I took to sitting on the floor and going through them, reading the short comic strips and looking at the weather maps with all their arcane markings.  I would sometimes do this for more than an hour until they determined that it was time to go home, sometimes because they were the only two left.

Al had a Pontiac and it had an air-flow duct right in the middle of the dash in front of where I sat between them.  It was three concentric chrome circles fanned out so that the air could pass in.  It resembled a small steering wheel and I would put my little hands on it and pretend to steer.

Al would weave down the highway for about two miles in the direction of La Crescent before turning left up into Pfeffer Valley.  Sometimes they would be laughing about what had transpired in the bar but sometimes they would be sharp with one another over some transgression or other.  In either case they were pretty potched and I became more nervous with each weaving across the center line.

Fortunately there was little or no traffic in those days, especially on that lonesome stretch of road, so it didn't matter all that much.

The part of the ride I dreaded was just past Langens' farm where we would bend left and up a steep grade to the top where we would pass the farm driveway to Al Thompson's place.  The road followed a very exposed stretch of maybe a quarter of a mile with no guard rail, just a barb-wire fence separating the road from a steep clay drop off to the pastures perhaps forty-five feet below.

I was certain that Al would fall asleep at the wheel and that we would go over that cliff, and I would grip the little air-vent steering wheel and try and bend it to the left as though I had some impact upon the steering of the car.

We always made it and followed the road down again past the Dahlkes' driveway and then on to our own, where I breathed a sigh of relief.

The marriage was not going so well as I entered the 6th grade in 1958 when Don Gibson had his famous hit, and although I like the song, I sadly associate it with this fact.

As beautiful and loving as my mother was, she did have a problem with alcohol, and could be very sharp, bringing out the worst in Al.  Al, for his own part, became a belligerent drunk and would sometimes be aggressive.

Once, when driving back during the day, the driver of another car honked at him.  Al turned the car around, pulled him over and got out to have words with him, calling him some bad names and offering to beat him up.  When the other driver got out of his car to oblige, Al backed down, got back in and we drove home.  It was very disconcerting to me.

Al had never been abusive or threatening to me but I was beginning to fear him.

On a couple of occasions, once home, he and my mother would argue and throw threats at one another and he would strike her.  I stood immobilized by fear and guilt that I had no means to defend her.  He would get under control and they would tone it down, but eventually it would happen again.

As the year went on, my mother and Al became increasingly cool toward one another.  It was very confusing and dreadful to me and I can remember it reflecting upon how I behaved in school.  My mind was not on my work and it was as if I had checked out mentally.  I fooled around at my desk instead of listening to the teacher.  I can remember the teacher moving my desk up to the front of the room by the chalk board.  It didn't seem to matter.  I sat there and fooled around with my stapler, my pencils, and such.

John Hanford Hanson

John Hanford Hanson

Rounding out Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee's family was their youngest, my Uncle John.  I have very early memories of Uncle John while he was still in high school, making popcorn and listening to the radio in the living room.

Uncle John was very special to me, probably partly because after my parents' divorce when I was still a toddler, I had no other male influence besides Grandpa Lee.  Uncle John was very good to me and to Danny and Kelly, and I am sure, the younger cousins.

I have a memory of him when I was very young, probably four years old.  I had a little plastic aircraft carrier and some tiny planes that I could stack on it.  I can remember holding a plastic plane in my hand and smashing it down on top of the ship, a very immature form of play but it was all I had.  I made a loud crashing sound as I did it.  Then I would quickly jerk the plane into the air, making a similar sound.

Uncle John sat down by me and said, "that's not really how the planes take off and land on the carrier."

He placed a plane on the deck of the ship and moved it slowly toward the front edge and out over the water.

"See!  The plane starts out and rolls down the runway and out over the water.  Then it probably drops down a little bit as the motors go faster.  Then it smoothly takes to the air and up into the sky."  He demonstrated how the plane would come in and smoothly land on the deck.

It wasn't long before Uncle John went into the army.  This is a picture of me sitting on his duffel bag at the railroad station in Sparta waiting for the train that would take him off to the army.

Music was Uncle John's passion and he actually got to go to Chicago and see one of the big bands in a fancy place.  It was Tommy and/or Jimmy Dorsey or someone of that caliber.  He played the trumpet in high school and learned other instruments as well.  He played in an army band overseas.

When he got back he went to college at the University of Wisconsin and marched in their famous band.

When we were a bit older and Uncle John was around, he would notice Danny and me with little to do and say "let's go up to the ball diamond and get a game going."

He would ask what friends we knew of, put us in the car, drive by their houses, ask their moms if they could go with us, and take us all up to the ball field.  Sparta had a big ball field with bleachers, some covered seats, and lights.

He would enlist any other kids that were in the vicinity and soon we had six to ten kids playing.  We had primitive skills and very likely to pout if we got called out at first, but he would sternly inform us that indeed we were out, and would tell us it's no big deal and to go back and wait for another turn.

After we had played long enough, he would call an end to it all and make us shake hands with the kids on the other team and say something like, "good game!"

Then he would take us to the root beer stand on Wisconsin Street, perhaps fifteen blocks away and buy a gallon of root beer we could drink out of paper cups.  We loved Uncle John because he always had time for us and treated us so well.

I can remember wrestling with him, hiking with him on the farm.  Lill and Lee would light up when he arrived home for a visit.  Uncle John would pop in and out of my life throughout the future, always generous.

During the time I was at the farm in La Crescent my mother decided one year to host Christmas.  She and Al had a big living room and a big dining room.  Lill and Lee came, as did Aunt Carrie and Uncle Si, and their son Ron, who was Uncle John's cousin.  Ron had married a girl named Janet and she was there, too.  I cannot remember for sure what other relatives might have come but I'm pretty sure there would have been more, perhaps Grandpa Lee's brother and sisters.

That Christmas I got a box which contained several board games.  Besides checkers and parchesi on opposite sides of a folding board, it had chess pieces.  Uncle John sat me down and showed me all the different moves the pieces made.  I picked it up pretty quickly because I am a very visual learner, but I never found anyone to play it with and it kind of went dormant in my mind until later in life where it would resurface in a fairly big way.

The other prominent gift I got was a crystal radio.  It had an instruction pamphlet which I couldn't understand, and a couple dozen parts that had to be assembled on a little peg board.

Not to worry.  John's cousin Ron was very bright and this stuff was right up his alley.  He and John assembled the myriad parts and, lo and behold, I had a little crystal radio that actually picked up the broadcast from La Crosse and could even be tuned to get several weaker stations, especially at night.

It was only a detector, the simplest decoder of the a.m. radio signal, and it vibrated the little speaker directly with a tiny bit of amplification that was somehow provided.

I loved it!

My mother had always played the radio in the kitchen and I had listened to Howdy Doody and whatever music they played, but now I had a little set that I could play in my room by the window looking down the valley, the one that I peed through the screen.

It was Ron's astronomy magazines and chemistry set that I would get from his mother later when he went off to college or perhaps graduate school.

Uncle John had graduated college and was teaching music in Wauzeka, WI alongside the Wisconsin River about a mile downstream of where the Kickapoo River joins it.  He met another teacher named Mary there and, after a time, proposed marriage.  They were married there and lived in the downstairs of a small building that had been some kind of store or restaurant.  It had a big window in front facing the street.

They had not been there all that long when they invited me to come and stay about four or five days with them.  Perhaps they wanted a dry run of seeing what it was like to have a child around.  I couldn't have frightened them too much because they were eventually to have three sons.

This was all set up with my mother and Al, and I stayed with them, learning cribbage and some other card games from them in the evenings and riding around during the days on a small bicycle Mary had managed to borrow from some friend for my use.

There was a small museum, called the Phetteplace Museum, in Wauzeka, and it concentrated mainly upon geology.  There were all kinds of rocks, fossils, arrowheads, and the like.  The proprietor had a son.  This boy, one other boy whom Mary had chosen for a friend for me, and I rode bicycles around the small town.  It was very joyful.

Uncle John would, much later, teach me deer hunting, critique my roommates and their behavior, and other such things.

I thought so much of him that when the time ultimately came for me to pick a best man for my wedding, I gave thought to none other and the above picture of him is from my wedding party.

Presidential Elections

Presidential Elections


In 1956, while I was in 4th grade at Hokah Elementary, I first became aware that we had presidential elections.  I can remember going with Granpa Lee to vote, probably at a school or town hall.  It was a small building and they gave me a little piece of paper that I could scribble on and place in a children's ballot box.  I can remember some official there asking me who I voted for and I replied, quite seriously, Taft.

Everyone broke out in hilarious laughter.  I have no idea of where I had picked the name up because it had been fifty years since Taft was president.  I suspect that I had heard the names of some presidents and liked the name Taft because it sounded like taffy, as in the soft candy.  Everything at that age would have been about candy or cookies or other treats.

Grandpa Lee was undoubtedly voting for or against Harry Truman, who was the president when I came into the world.  Truman had been followed by Dwight Eisenhower, the WWII general, a very popular man, of course.  I do not remember his first election but in 1956 I believe he was running for re-election against Adlai Stevenson.

I can remember it was election night and for some reason we were with Lill and Lee visiting Carrie and Si Nelson in La Crosse.  All the adults were watching TV and the results were coming in.  I could not figure out why, if Eisenhower was so popular, why did anyone want to beat him and become president.  I didn't really understand that there were political parties.  It wasn't very late into the evening when it was agreed that Eisenhower was going to win easily.  I didn't give it much more thought.

I can remember pontificating that I had learned in 4th grade that water cannot be compressed like air, which is only relatively true.  I really had an interest in the solar system and had memorized the diameters, distances from the sun, orbital periods, and some other facts about each of the planets, and it was at this point that Aunt Carrie, of all people, did a remarkable thing.

She took me down into the basement and showed me the little room which was the "lab" put together by her son, Ron, who was very bright, but who had outgrown all this stuff and gone off to college.  There was a lot of chemistry stuff--beakers, test tubes, funny shaped glass valves, and a tall stack of magazines, which bore the title "Sky & Telescope".  

These magazines were fairly thin, only about thirty or so pages each, but on the back cover, facing the outside, each displayed a glossy, full sized photograph of a deep sky object, portrayed sometimes in false color to make features stand out.  Astro photos in that day were not created by computers or charge-coupled devices as they are nowadays, but by long exposures on special film that had to be "cooked" to make it sensitive enough to the scant light detected by huge telescopes.  

Many of these pictures were taken through the Mount Polamar 200-inch telescope on a mountaintop in California, and they were of wondrously beautiful objects like the Crab Nebula, the Orion Nebula, and such.  

Aunt Carrie boxed up a bunch of this stuff that she wanted out of her basement and gave it to me to take home.

They changed my whole life.

Over the next couple of years, I would cherish the magazines and read all the articles, which were quite beyond me, but they did give me an idea of the problems being addressed at the time.  There was always an article by Otto Struve, and it seemed to nearly always be addressing cosmic abundance patterns.  It took me a long time to realize that this meant the relative abundances of the elements observed in the sky using spectroscopy and comparing these observations with theories about how the elements were created in the first place.

There were columns as well and the one which captured my fancy was one called "Gleanings for ATMs".  I had no idea what this meant; it sounded kind of like they were talking about some kind of atoms, but it was so arcane that I was fascinated.  ATMs turned out to be amateur telescope makers.

Having these wonderful magazines in my possession and some of the crazy glassware Ron had experimented with in his basement lab, fueled my interest in space, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe.  Because I read voraciously and constantly rattled off data and facts about these things gave me somewhat of a false reputation of being a child prodigy, which Ron legitimately was, but of which I was merely a pretender.

I had just as much trouble learning my multiplication facts as the next student.

I kept all these precious things on a little desk in my room that my mother had obtained from somewhere, and I cherished them.

At about the same time, I got, probably for Christmas, a book named Young Visitor to Mars.  It was an exciting fiction about a young boy who got the opportunity to visit Mars by spaceship.  At the time it was believed that Mars was criss-crossed by canals and the boy rode in boats on the canals which were powered simply by dropping a pill into a motor, which reacted with the water, and pushed the boat forward.

I also began collecting plastic models of wartime airplanes like the B-52 Strato Fortress, and model rockets like the Nike Hercules and Nike Ajax and on and on.  I would put them together and display them in my room.  They would have decals which you soaked in a bowl of warm water, then applied to the plastic.  They could be painted, but I didn't try that.

Stories about being shot out into space and out of Earth's gravity by HG Wells and others, could be purchased as comic books, and I devoured them.  I also could get comic books about war heroes, some real and some made up.  Strangely enough, I can remember a G I Joe comic where the platoon involved were fighting against a country I had never heard of--Viet Nam.  This was in 1954-55-56.  I can clearly remember being in Pfeffer Valley reading them and wondering why the heck they had such strange names as Viet Nam.

These were wonderful times of discovery and awakening to the marvelous complexity of the universe and I can remember opining basically the argument that with all the millions of stars out in the universe, it would be ridiculous to think that ours was the only one with planets and that there wouldn't be hundreds, if not thousands, of planets, some of which would have to have developed life on them like Earth had.  

In this simplest form, this argument is very compelling, because it's contrapositive argument seems so untenable, that there would be only a single such lucky planet.  Naturally, I would gradually come to understand that the argument is not so simple.  Issac Asimov wrote a delightful book delineating the actual numbers of each pertinent factor, such as the distance from the parent star, the type of star, the inclination of the planet's axis so as to provide seasons, and on and on and on.

It seemed an open and shut case to me that there was indeed life on other planets.  Many, many planets, and I looked forward to my whole life of hearing of more and more evidence of extraterrestrial beings.  How could I know, of course, that even the celebrated Asimov was merely scratching the initial surface of the problem and that there were so many, many more manifestations of it to come.

But there I was, the little elementary-school space thinker and philosopher, having a ball reading about it all.

Hospitals

Hospitals


I was fairly lucky growing up in the 50's insofar as hospitalizations were concerned.  There were a lot of things that could put you in the hospital.  Al Botcher's brother had a young daughter who contracted something dreadful like tuberculosis and had to live in a sanitarium somewhere in central Minnesota. 

We visited her there one time and it was like a prison.  She was an inmate living in the place so as not to infect others, much like we are today because of the Wuhan virus, only much worse in her case.

We visited the grounds of the sanitarium and she could come out and sit on a little stone bench and talk to her mom and dad and siblings.  They brought her gifts, of course, but you could see the dread in their faces and the strain the situation put them under, especially when it came time to leave.  I was appalled.

My first visit was to have my tonsils removed, a minor bummer compared to what the Botcher girl was going through, but a bummer nonetheless.  My tonsils were so enlarged and infected that I was practically choking on them. 

I got checked into the hospital in La Crosse and they put me in a gown that laced up in back and made me comfortable in a bed.  I lay there for a few hours while they accumulated data about me and did tests.  Then came the dreaded moment when all these people rolled a gurney into the room and lifted me up on it.

They were smiling and saying comforting things designed to calm me down, which of course had just the opposite effect because I knew they were just blowing sunshine at me.  We rolled into the elevator, out the elevator, down a few hallways and through these double doors into the operating room, which looked like they place they might take you for the electric chair.

A nurse put a needle into my arm which was hooked up to a long tube up to a floppy little bottle hanging from a hook.  A plastic vial in the line showed a slow drip, drip, drip, as something was going into the tube and into my arm through the needle.

There was quite a large light overhead and a doctor stood above my head, almost out of view, with a mask over his face.  He asked me a few stupid questions which I knew were designed to relax me.  Then he took another little transparent hose and, with a needle, hooked it into the hose that was dripping stuff into me.  I nervously asked what it was and the nurse told me it was sodium pentathol.

I watched the new color travel down the little tube and precisely when it reached the needle going into my arm, it was like someone clobbered me over the head with a sledge hammer.  It was as if the entire room and it occupants were suddenly scrunched into a black snowball, and I spun over and down into a dark, dark abyss.

I awoke with the most painful throat imaginable and a pukey taste in my mouth, which I soon realized was dried and semi-coagulated blood.  I couldn't swallow because of the intense soreness. 

It was now that I learned that I could have ice cream to sooth.  I tried a little and managed to swallow it.  In a couple hours, I was eating more ice cream and drinking 7-up through a straw in little tiny bursts. 

The situation improved and I think by the next day I was able to go home and continue the ice cream and 7-up diet in bed for a couple days.

A couple years later I had my second hospital stay.  I had become lethargic and feverish and my mother and Al had taken me in for a strep test.  I didn't have strep so they took some other tests and nobody could figure out what was wrong, so they recommended that I enter the hospital so they could find out.

This time I was put in a room on the second floor of an old hospital, called Grandview, in La Crosse.  Many years later I would actually attend a college class in this building, which was one half block from the Main Hall of La Crosse State University.

I lay there for a few days while they took swabs of my throat and sinuses and blood tests.  Then, while my mom was visiting, the doctor came into the room and announced that they had not been able to figure out what I had.  He said that it could very well be an unknown virus and recommended that I have a spinal tap.  It was scheduled for the next day.

I worried all night about this spinal tap, because I could overhear the doctor telling my mother what it was and she was all hysterical, as she tended to be in crisis situations.  My mother didn't drive, because pulling her foot off the accelerator and onto the brake amounted to a crisis situation and she reacted hysterically and without finesse, almost squashing a man between the car she was learning in and his parked car.  The driving school instructor intervened at the last minute and saved the situation, proclaiming afterward that she was unteachable.

The next day a nurse came and told me what the spinal tap would be like.  They would fold me over so my head touched my knees and put a little, itty-bitty needle into my spine and suck out a tiny bit of fluid to analyze. 

Then the doctor came in.  He looked me over carefully, then removed the gown down to my waist.

"Better get three or four more people to help hold him down,"  he commented.  "Otherwise he's going to be jumping and thrashing all over the place."

That calmed me down immeasurably.  I began to weep in fear.

More people arrived and folded my quivering body in half, pinning me down against the gurney.

The doctor stuck the needle in and I'll bet it wasn't that "itty-bitty", but it didn't actually hurt and I didn't thrash around at all.  After a bit he said "OK, done." and I breathed a sigh of relief. 

Then the nurse touched the spot with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol and I almost jumped off the gurney.

They never did figure out what virus I had and after a few more days I got better and went home.  Next thing you knew, I was back in school and the whole thing was forgotten.

George Kindhammer

George Kindhammer

Al Botcher's farm in Pfeffer Valley was the next to the last one on the road.  From the end of our driveway the road continued about a hundred and fifty yards up a small rise and the pavement ended.  There was a barbed-wire fence across it which detached on one side so the fence could be dragged back, allowing passage.  The road continued to crest the small rise, but was a dirt road now and at the bottom, a couple of hundred yards further, it opened into the yard where George Kindhammer lived in an old unpainted, somewhat dilapidated house.

I am of the opinion that poor old George has been deceased now for forty or fifty years and that there may very, very few people around those parts, if any, who even remember him.  When we were his neighbors he was already a middle-aged bachelor, an only child who would never marry and who had promised his mother he would never drink alcohol.

He didn't have a car.  George drove an old Ford tractor, the small grey kind, up and down the valley visiting everyone and spreading gossip like a town crier.  He was a talkative, friendly, and basically benign guy because, of course, no one told him anything they didn't want spread all over.  He was likable and somewhat rotund because he hung around until you invited him to eat.

George's place was interesting because my friends and I could sneak through the woods and down to the backside of his barn, shielded from view from the house, and snoop around and even play in his hayloft undetected.  If George was on his tractor out in the fields or gone altogether, we could probe around more daringly and once we even went into his house.

George lived like you might expect.  Old antique furniture, old beat-up utensils and appliances that you wouldn't even think worked.  He had a wood cookstove, a kerosene heater, and an old studio couch that was his bed, right in the kitchen.

There were other rooms, and we peeked in.  They were full of cobwebs and old furniture that looked like it came out of an old western movie.  The glass in the windows of his house was wavy and the paint was all flaked and peeled off the sashes.  It was really something.  We kind of looked at this adventure as detective work; we were half expecting to find dead bodies or some kind of evidence of debauchery.

George would sometimes let me ride on the fender of his tractor, but he would drive very slowly.  He was a cautious person who wasn't going to make any big errors.  But he wasn't going to let anyone into his life either.

He would appear around mealtime.  Al and my mother were good to him, but got tired of being pestered sometimes and would hold off on dinner until he had left.

From my bedroom window I could see the road about a mile down the valley and sometimes I would time how many seconds it took from when his tractor appeared until his arrival out of the hollow just below our place.  I had a notion that this time was intimately related to his speed, and for a while I fancied myself a traffic cop and would write him little tickets.  I wonder what he thought of that.

Sometimes George Kindhammer would drive his little Ford tractor into Hokah to get groceries and supplies.  That was a big undertaking because it was a couple of miles to the highway and then five or six more to town.  The little tractor was slow and I doubt he went much over ten miles per hour.  It would consume pretty much his entire day, because he had to stop for coffee and gossip at least twice going and again coming back.

About five years ago I had some time on my hands and drove the car over to Pfeffer Valley.  It was kind of poignant and sad.  Our house was there as well as the out buildings, pretty much as I remembered.  I drove up Larry and Tommy Langen's driveway and hailed a guy who looked about my age.

It was Larry.  He remembered me, of course, but it wasn't like we slapped hands and broke into tears at the reunion.  He lived there now and his son was young and into bow hunting and just had to get up in the woods.  We talked about five minutes or so and it seemed Larry was kind of in a hurry, so I bid my farewell.

I stopped halfway to Hokah at the farm in the bottoms where my friend Roger Johnson and his little brother Donald had lived.  There was a person living there but he didn't even know who they were, so the farm must have changed hands a few times.  I mentioned George Kindhammer and he perked up.  He had known George and knew that he had passed away some time before then.  I explained who I was and he told me that George Kindhammer had mentioned the little kid who used to live next to him and had commented, "I wonder what ever happened to that little guy."

Lorraine (Lathrop) Boltik

Lorraine (Lathrop) Boltik

Even though my parents had been divorced and I had zero contact with my father, who had moved to the Omaha area and then Iowa, my two grandmothers had always been, and remained, rather close friends.



Because I would spend weeks with Lill and Lee at the farm in Sparta during the summers, there were times when Lill would drop me off to visit Grandma Clara and other times when Clara would visit us all at the farm.

My dad's brother, Donley, lived in Iowa somewhere and perhaps that had some influence on my dad's moving there.  I don't know for sure.

Clara had a daughter as well as the two boys, however, and she and her husband lived right in Sparta probably not more than a mile from where Lill and Lee had lived before buying the farm.

Aunt Lorraine, like my Uncle Donk, had a bunch of kids.  It was as though Clara's three children had declared a contest to see who could have the biggest family, and my dad lost badly.

Aunt Lorraine was a very sweet person and my mother and her were quite close early on.  Aunt Lorraine's husband was named John, I believe, and I cannot remember ever meeting him.  I do not think I ever was with anyone who actually visited Lorraine at her house, but sometimes Lorraine would accompany Grandma Clara to visit Lill at the farm, and sometimes one or two of her older children, would come along as well.

Lorraine's oldest was named John but was called "Jack".  He was a few months older than me.  His younger brother Tony was a bit younger than I was.  I liked them both, but in reality they were both far ahead of me in maturity, as were their sisters Betsy and Barb.  There were more children to come but I would not be around Sparta and somewhat of a divide took place.

This divide was destined to take me far from any contact with either of my sets of grandparents and I would even be unaware of Grandpa Dudley's death when the time came.

As years went on Lorraine's younger children would be born.  Some I had contact with, such as Patrick and some I don't believe I met until adulthood, such as Mary, and DJ I do not think I ever have met at all.  I am also unclear as to when Lorraine's husband John left--whether he passed away or whether they divorced.  Since I was an only child to begin with, this was a great loss to me but I didn't realize it at the time, partially because of my mother's life being in turmoil.

Later, when I would visit Grams (Clara), she would, with great excitement, try and fill me in on what CC was doing, what Betsy was doing, Barb had a boyfriend, DJ got a wonderful report card, and so forth.  She was always so positive about them and doubtless she told them that she had had a visit from John Lee.  She would call me John Lee.  I was only Jiggs or Jiggsy to relatives on my mother's side.

I had a lot of confusion because, after all, I was just a child, and she was talking about cousins from both Donley and Lorraine, as though I would have that all down, which I didn't at the time.

I have a lot of my mother's writings, stories she recollected about her youth written at a later age.  Some of them are quite wonderful, but a lot of them expose an emotional and maturational impasse which she ran up against.  I recognize it in myself when I look back at my youth.

My mother was emotionally stuck at an early high school level and she fell back to that level in her relationships with others all her life.  She perceived, even as an adult, other women as competitors for male attention and she would be very aggressive toward them.  This would occur with her sisters as well as colleagues in the workplace and I will discuss it as I go along.  It was quite tragic since she tended to see other women as enemies.

Lorraine and a few of my mother's partying friends were exempt from that fixation, because they were not a threat to male attention, not that my mother couldn't find that if the situation presented itself.  My mother always spoke fondly of Lorraine; I cannot remember her ever saying anything bad about her.  I think that for a short period of time, after the war, Donley, Lorraine, my father, and  my mother and her siblings constituted a group of fairly close friendship, visiting one another's parents and going out to party.

The nice picture of Aunt Lorraine shown here was pirated from her daughter, Betsy's, Facebook page.  I saw her on and off over the years and as she got old her voice began to sound exactly like Grandma Clara's.  Perhaps it always did, but I only noticed it later.  She had the same passive calmness about things that Clara did--the same accepting philosophical approach.

When Aunt Lorraine arrived, a few years ago, at her final illness and was at the care center north of Sparta I went to visit her.  She was reeling from her illness and I thought that perhaps she was only responding to me out of habit and that she might not even recognize me.  After all, I wasn't in her everyday life very much.

When she appeared very tired and it was time to go, I hugged her and told her goodbye and that I loved her.  "I love you too, Jiggs," was her reply.

There is more than a little liklihood that Aunt Lorraine thought that it was her brother, my father, that had visited, and he, like Uncle Donley, had preceeded her in death.

Trying Cigarettes

Trying Cigarettes

If anyone can really be "way out" in third grade, Bob Millen was the closest candidate of all my school classmates at Hokah Elementary.  He cajoled me into learning how to properly light a match, tried to get me to smoke, related to me naughty things about girls, and would have properly led me astray, had I not lived in the country and he in Hokah.

Bob was as street-wise as could be expected in a town of two hundred people, and for some strange reason, accepted me as a friend quite early.  He was scrappy and would hardly take guff from anyone, although he was not a bully.  We didn't really have any bullies; we were all quite good friends.

I remember, early on, when I was a new kid in school, Bob Millen grabbing me and pulling me to the ground to wrestle.  Although I was the slightest kid in school, I was wiry and we rolled around a bit and I actually had the top for a  brief time before I started crying.  Bob helped me to my feet and explained to me that I had him.

We were friends from that time on.

Bob Millen was, according to self-report, constantly under threat of being sent to a place called Red Wing, by his parents.  We all know Red Wing to be the boys reformatory in Minnesota and I have, as an adult, actually seen the ghastly place.  It is the place Bob Dylan sings about getting out of.  At the time, though, I knew nothing of it or even that boys could be sent to a reformatory.

Bob talked of it as though he had been there, or at least seen it, perhaps in some sort of "scared straight" effort.  He genuinely seemed to mitigate his delinquent efforts as though in fear of being sent there.

There was a little community hall in town that had a basketball court inside.  Occasionally there would be some kind of activity in there and the older boys would get a game going.  I even tried it.  I was fast and could dash about with the ball but had no idea how to pass, shoot, or defend the goal, so I gave that up rather quickly.

Bob took me out in the alley behind the building and produced a book of matches.  I cringed because the last time I had lit a match was as a two year old on my tricycle in the dirt street in Sparta.  Bob showed me how to push the match against the scraper pad on the outside of the book, paying special attention to pulling my finger away as the match lit, so as not to get burned.

So that was the trick!

After I had reluctantly succeeded in lighting a few matches, he produced a pack of cigarettes.  They were named "Spuds" and he said that the gas station attendant down by the Horseshoe Tavern, about a block from the Catholic school, was willing to sell them to him.  They cost something like a dime a pack.

I really had no interest in smoking, but Millen (we called one another by last names because it was so cool) insisted I try.

"Take a drag," he offered, lighting one up and handing it to me.  I hesitated, a look of dread on my little face.

He took the cigarette back and put it to his lips, taking a puff and blowing out the smoke, looking kind of like a ten-year-old James Dean.

He handed it back to me and I sort of placed it near my mouth and pretended to take a puff.  Even at that range, the smell of the thing was enough to make me cough.

"Inhale!"  Millen commanded.  "And don't get it all wet!  Put it just at the edge of your lips."

I put the cigarette between my fingers and placed my hand over my mouth and drew a mouthful of smoke.  Then, with great drama, I closed my throat and drew a deep breath of clean air in slowly through my nose, expelling it through my mouth and carrying off the putrid smoke as though I had inhaled it.  I coughed just the same.

Millen dissolved into laughter.

I had to repeat the charade a few more times until, between us, we had smoked and wasted the entire cigarette so we could move on to other things.

We were so cool.  But in terms of social maturity levels, Bob was like an uncle, just back from the army, taking his young nephew around and showing him the ropes.

For all his pluck, Millen, nor any of us, engaged in much offensive behavior in school.  Our teachers were, to us, old ladies regardless of their age, and they were stern.  Larry and Tommy Langen told me that the teachers at the Catholic school were even more so.

Our teachers had the ace in the hole over us, the power of the recess.  We lived for recess because there was the swamp, the grass hills to slide down, the giant pine tree and all the games and activities we dreamed up.  It was a chance to burn off energy and we coveted it.

One day, a new student arrived who made even Bob Millen look like a cherub.  He was lean and fairly tall with long, black, greasy hair and a duck-tail in the back.  His eyes were cunning and he had a permanent sneer on his face.  We frankly didn't know what to do because this guy was going to seriously challenge the pecking order of Hokah Elementary and he looked pretty much like a gangster.  He was also from New York.

We didn't know where New York was, other than on a map, but we had seen enough television shows to associate it with crime, corruption, and killers.

He wore a light leather jacket which he kept on even in the classroom.  The collar was turned up around his duck-tail.

"Where does he live?" I whispered to Don Botcher.

"Down somewhere by the Horseshoe Tavern, I think," he whispered back.

Someone was going to have to take this guy on and it certainly wasn't going to be me.  I just sat there at my desk, mortified.  I wondered if Bob Millen was up to it.  Perhaps this new kid was back from someplace similar to Red Wing.

I chanced a brief smile and hello and was rebuffed by a look of disgust and superior bewilderment that seemed to say are you, cockroach, of the opinion that you can speak to me?

Many of us thought that he probably had switchblade knife in his pocket if not a gun.  His presence was becoming a calamity and he hadn't even been in school two hours!  We all felt like we were on the edge of a precipice and were about to have our little world swept away right out from under us.

But like many things in life, a benign tincture of time solved the problem, and not that much of a tincture at that!  By afternoon, the new kid solved our problem all by himself.

While we were all sitting in our seats gawking and stealing sidelong glances at the new kid, the teacher decided that he was not engaging in anything meaningful at his desk and asked him to get something out and start working.

He cocked his head a bit, sensing that now was the time to establish who was in charge, and mumbled something like piss off.

Our teacher did a double take and said, "did you say something?"

Now the rubber met the road.  The new kid was in for a nickel, so me might as well be in for a dime.

"Piss off," he said, a bit louder, so that we potential underlings could hear it, but perhaps the teacher wouldn't.

We could have told him that wasn't going to happen.

"Stay in your seats," she told us and stepped out of the room.

Moments later she returned with Mr. Wagner, our principal.  Mr. Wagner was a retired naval officer and the Pacific Conflict had ended just a few years earlier.

Mr. Wagner walked up to the new kid, grabbed him by the collar of his leather coat and lifted him out of his seat, dragging him behind and out the classroom door.

I can't help but think that nowadays, the mother, perhaps drunk, would later storm into the classroom and read the teacher up one side and down the other, threatening a lawsuit, then be placated by the diminutive principal as the new kid re-inhabited his seat.  I have seen it happen.

But, alas for that particular new kid, this was 1956.

We never saw the new kid again.  Ever.

The Catholic School

The Catholic School

My only friends in Pfeffer Valley were the only other kids in Pfeffer Valley.  They were the Langen kids, Tommy, Larry, and their younger sister Kay.  I would usually ride my bike the mile or so to their farm and we would either hang out there or go riding bikes even further.

During the school year, Larry and Tommy were not my daily playmates because, alas, they went to the Catholic school.  I didn't clearly understand why some kids went to the Catholic school.

The school bus picked them up along with some other kids in the valley next to ours, then picked up two of my classmates, Roger and Donald Johnson, who lived in the bottoms, the back of their little farm butting up to the Root River.

On the way to our school, the bus drove up the hill and made a right turn around the Catholic church and adjoining school.  Larry, Tommy, and a few other kids got off there and that was the end of it.

I'm thinking about half as many kids went to the Catholic school as went to my school several blocks beyond.

We would have contact with them a few times a year.  Whenever we were going to get vaccinations, or booster shots we would assemble outside our old brick building and march, according to classes, down the sidewalk, past the tavern, hardware store, and several residences and businesses, to the Catholic school.  There we would wait until our turn came, and then stand in line to get our shots.

Polio vaccine was somewhat new and would entail an ordinary needle in the arm.  The authorities came up with some other methods over the months and years, however.  Small pox was really feared and we all got vaccinated.  The small pox vaccination consisted of several pokes which left a circular indentation about the size of a quarter on the outside of your shoulder.

Everybody got one and absolutely every person you ever saw with their shirt off or wearing sleeveless shirts had this little round "coin" stamped into their shoulder, boy or girl.  Furthermore, every person I saw after that had one, no matter where.  It was as much a part of a person's body as their ears or nose.

The tuberculosis test was different yet.  They pried a needle just under a few layers of skin on your lower forearm and injected a little bubble of something which amounted to about the size of an aspirin.  Then you just forgot about it and it went away over the course of a couple of weeks.  They briefly inspected the site after that.  Apparently if you were exposed to tuberculosis this little bubble would flare up and alert everyone.  It never happened to anyone as far as I know.

Once in a while we would be invited to the Catholic school for a picnic in the spring and everyone except a few of us would play baseball.  They had a diamond at the Catholic school.  I never got picked for a team because I had no skill or strength and was the smallest child in my school, including all of the girls except for one.

The small businesses and houses along the route to the Catholic school were unusual.  All small buildings, their fronts were at the grade of the sidewalk, but the backs were up on stilts, because the ground on the north side of the street dropped away significantly.  A person could--and we did, when we got a bit older and had more freedom--hunch down and explore beneath these small buildings.  People stored things under there like old tires, wheelbarrows, extra building materials, and what-all.

On one trip walking down to the Catholic school, I was running my hand along the window frames which each store or house had, because the buildings butted right up to the sidewalk, and had a large wood sliver stick right under my thumbnail about a good half-inch in, and then break off.  I had picked it up from a window sill that had gotten real dry from the sun and lack of paint.

Whatever errand we were on that day was quickly aborted for me and I ended up being taken back to our school.  I suppose that Al had to drive over from La Crosse and take me back there to the hospital, where they dug out the pieces of wood.  My thumbnail, needless to say, turned black and it was weeks before the black part grew out and was replaced.  Even then a line became visible where the nail material had to grow back together.  I can see this line to this day, some sixty-five years later.

Helping Al and Al Make Hay

Helping Al and Al Make Hay


Making a living as a small farmer was a tough proposition even in the 1950's.  Al Botcher and his friend Al Thompson, two farms down the valley, both had day jobs but both also had farms and I think they felt like a farm should be farmed.

They were hobby farmers, I guess.  Al Botcher more so than Al Thompson.

My stepfather tried a number of things, some of which were quite exciting.  We had the chickens and I could sneak up on them or chase them around.  The bantam hens were beautiful and some of them became quite tame.  I could pick them up and pet them.  The bantam roosters were even more colorful.

Al fenced off some acreage for pasturing beef cattle.  They had access to the cowyard and the drinking tub.  They were quite large and I kept clear, considering that I had been run over by an entire herd on Grandpa Lee's farm.

One or two summers, Al had pigs in the pigpen.

The two Als had an agreement where they would make and store a whole lot of hay on one farm while they did crop rotation on the other.  In addition, Al Thompson either owned or rented about forty acres in what they called the "bottoms."

The bottoms was along the flat area between Hokah and our valley where the Root River and all the creeks that ran into it had meandered back and forth for probably thousands of years.  It was low lying land that could flood and be too soggy to farm.  But some summers it was excellent for growing alfalfa.

As I grew a bit older and was in 4th or 5th grade, I found that I could be useful to these guys.

Cattle are constantly finding a place to rub up against the fences and posts and eventually knock over something.  They also have the curious notion that the grass is better on the other side of the fence and will stick their heads between the wires of the fence to try and reach what they perceive as the greener grass.  Eventually, on a rotting post, the staples will loosen and the wire falls.

In either case, before you know it, they are out and going to visit the neighbors.  We didn't have horses and little four-wheelers were not invented yet, so when some neighbor called to let Al know his herd was in their vegetable garden, everything had to be dropped and all hands were on deck.

Depending on the logistics of the situation, the cows could either be pushed along the fence and back through the breach or marched up the road like a goofy cattle drive.  There were usually ten or twelve and they liked to stay together, especially when a little stressed.  I was sometimes useful as a blocker.  The two Als would place me in a spot they didn't want the herd to go and all I had to do was look belligerent.

The Als would gently push the herd up the road or along a fence and I would stand beyond the breach so that they would see it as their best move.  Sometimes they would go around me, but if only one or two did, they wanted to be with the rest of them, so they would return.  I was of marginal help.

On one occasion I took it upon myself to clean out the pig shed with the scoop shovel.  It was hard work but I kept at it, thinking that Al would be proud of me when he saw it.  I hadn't really ever had a dad and the new situation was kindling a desire in me to seek his praise.  He was preoccupied, I guess, when he came back and expressed only a mild response.  I needed much more, but made do.

I learned how to operate the power lawn mower, which was a piece of junk, but I could help out that way.

I was too small to handle hay bales; I was just in the way.  They would cut the alfalfa and timothy and let it dry in windrows, turning it a couple of times with a hay rake.  If warm, sunny weather prevailed, they could get the baling done on a weekend or two.  If it rained on the windrows, they had to be turned and dried again and much of the nutrition was lost.  If it rained a lot the hay rotted.  This could happen even after it was baled.  The bales had to lie in the fields out in the sun for a while and dry.

Two things could happen if hay was baled when it was too moist or if it was put in the barn too quickly after baling.  The first was just plain mold.  The moist hay would rot and when you opened a bale, it contained layer after layer of mold and was no good.  The second was the possibility of spontaneous combustion.  Hay baled up too "tough" or moist and stacked in the barn many layers deep had a possibility of fermenting away and bursting into flame, burning down the barn.

All farmers were very cautious about spontaneous combustion.  If there was any possibility because the hay had had to be baled to beat the rain, it was stacked outside somewhere.  If it dried, you were OK.  If it rotted away, the whole stack was considered to be "manure" and was abandoned to rot even more, until it could just be added in with the actual manure and spread on the fields.

One time the two Als had a bunch of hay that they had baled down in the bottoms and a rainstorm was predicted.  My moment of opportunity to act like a man came, since they had only a few hours to get it loaded on haywagons that could be driven into the barn even if it weren't unloaded and stacked.

They took me with them in Al Thompson's truck down to the bottoms, where they had an old Allis-Chalmers tractor and a few hay wagons.  They started the tractor and put me in the driver's seat.  If they set the throttle very low, the tractor would move forward and I wouldn't have to concern myself with adjusting it.

There was a brake pedal, which I could depress to slow it down.  My job was just to guide the tractor and wagon around the field, past the bales, while one Al would throw the bales up onto the wagon and the other Al would stack them.

I got the hang of it and became quite adept at steering the ensemble down the rows.  There were no hills, so my only challenge was not to get headed into some place where I couldn't circle around and go past some more bales.  Once in a while I drove around a circle to line up my next pass.  The two Als seemed not to mind my inefficiency; things were going well.

When the wagon was nearly full, one of them whistled real loud and I put my foot on the brake and the tractor stalled.  That was all right, because they hooked up another wagon and started it again for me.  Off we went.

When I heard the whistle indicating that the second wagon was nearly stacked full, I put my foot on the brake and nothing happened.  The tractor and wagon just kept moving.  I tried again, but no slowing of my tractor and hay wagon.  Both Als were standing in the field quite a ways behind, wondering what was going on.

I drove around in a few circles before they realized that I was unable to stop the tractor.  One of them jumped aboard and shut off the throttle.  Then they inspected the brake and found that it was gone, just a metal housing remaining.  No brake pad.

I was horrified, thinking that I had wrecked the tractor.  Al Thompson surmised that I had been "riding the brake," which I had been.  I had been making constant slowing adjustments by pushing gently on the brake all this time, and I had worn it off.

The two Als did not see this as a big issue and, actually, had a bit of a laugh over it.  They had almost all the hay, and Al Thompson simply drove the tractor on the flat field without needing to brake as they picked up the remaining bales.

Putting new pads on the brakes was apparently not so difficult.

Television

Television


In the 1950's Al Botcher brought home to the farm the most awesome, cutting-edge device of the day.  He purchased a television set.  For the benefit of my grandkids I have to describe how the earliest televisions worked because they are a totally different animal from the ones we have today, just as the telephones were.

Television as we know it today is digital technology.  It relies upon millions of tiny computational gates printed upon chips.  The picture is really constructed of little pixels, or light-emitting diodes, connected to these chips.

The television that Al brought home was a completely different animal, much like we are a completely different animal when compared to our predecessors the apes.

Our new TV was a big monstrosity in a wooden cabinet as big as a clothes dryer.  It had to be in a big cabinet because instead of a wonderful rare-earth flat screen, it mainly consisted of a picture tube, the front of which was the "screen" that we looked at, and the rear of that tube extended back into the cabinet about two and a half feet.

The rear of the picture tube funneled down to about the diameter of a pop bottle in back and wrapped around it was a "yoke" made up of many, many windings of copper wire in the up-down plane and in the left-right plane.  The whole thing was called a cathode-ray tube.

The idea of the cathode-ray tube is that the little base in back fires a stream of electrons right at the middle of the front of the screen which is coated with a material that absorbs a certain portion of them and fluoresces.  The picture to be shown to us is scanned by a camera that amounts to the opposite of the television.  The brighter part of the picture scanned causes a stronger radio signal, which the TV set intercepts and causes a correlating increase in the amount of electrons fired at the middle of the screen.

But it is of no use to us to have all the information mashed into one point in the middle of that great big screen.  That is what the windings are on that yoke in back.  Electricity is also fed through these windings.  Electricity and magnetism are the same thing in a certain sense, so the current travelling through the windings creates a magnetic field.

In the back of the TV and taking up a lot of room are a couple of aluminum chassis, like rectangular upside-down boxes.  Several more electron tubes are mounted on this chassis along with a lot of other hardware that isn't even used in TV's anymore, but was necessary in the early ones.  All of these things, resistors, capacitors, coils, chokes, transformers, and such were wired and soldered together to make a circuit that caused the stream of electrons to be deflected in a very specific manner by the strength of the magnetic fields created by the current in those windings on that yoke.

The beam of electrons scans the surface of the front of that tube and paints a path across it, drops down an ever-so-slight amount, and paints a path back, repeating this until it gets to the bottom of the front of that tube.  Then it goes to the top and starts over.

This happens many, many times per second.

All the while, the strength of that beam fired from the back of that cathode-ray tube by the "electron gun" is varying with the lightness and darkness of the picture that they wanted us to see.  All this is going on like a foaming froth on the front of that picture tube and the only reason we see the picture at all is that when our eyes are stimulated, the image stays for a quarter of a second before dissipating.

It's a wonder that the whole mind-boggling idea even worked at all, but it did.  All we had to know was how to adjust two parameters of the process.  There were two knobs, one marked "horizontal hold" and the other marked "vertical hold".  What these knobs did was to make tiny adjustments of the speed at which the windings on the yoke of that cathode-ray tube deflected the stream of electrons.

If the vertical hold adjustment was a little bit off, the picture would roll from up to down on the screen.  As you slowly turned the knob the rolling would slow and when you had it perfect it would lock in place.

If the horizontal hold adjustment was a little bit off, the picture would be torn into pieces from left to right and would look like a bunch of nonsense.  As you slowly adjusted the knob, suddenly it would shift into coherence and look like what it was supposed to.

There were contrast adjustments, which simply made the whole picture lighter or darker to your visual preference.

So far we have been talking only about the picture!  The sound had to be processed by the set as well.  Upon another chassis inside that thing was built, out of all these crazy vacuum tubes and components, a radio receiver.

The picture signal came on one frequency and the sound came on a completely different one.  The radio simply played to go along with the picture.  That was all handled at the transmission station, and there were standardized pairs of frequencies assigned to each channel.

When you turned the switch on, nothing happened right away, just as in the case of my mother's kitchen radio.  The tubes had to "warm up".  Their cathodes had to heat up enough to begin firing a steady stream of electrons.  Then all the little devices within them would function to process the signal.

You would look at the blank screen, waiting for something to happen, when suddenly a small dot would appear somewhere, ripple, and quickly expand to an entire picture.  At about the same time there would be a humming sound.  Suddenly the radio inside the TV would start babbling away and you were off to the races.

Al's new TV was a Motorola and it truly was a marvel.  Black and white picture, of course.  It would be a while before they figured out how to do color and that entails an unbelievably complex bunch of gadgetry and some more frequencies, several years in the future.

I now had some entertainment as I waited long after dark for Al and my mother to arrive home from work and perhaps grocery shopping.  There were certain shows, many of them cowboy shows, provided on different evenings, just as there are today.  Paladin, The Rifleman, The Virginian, The Big Valley, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Gunsmoke, The FBI (Just the facts, ma'am, just give me the facts), Sugarfoot, and the list goes on and on.

There were also movies, boxing matches, the news, and Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Orchestra.  Ronald Reagan was an actor then, not the President of the United States, and he would introduce the movie of the night.

Each program had it's theme song and you knew you were missing the program if you heard it blaring away.

Cable TV had not been invented.  Once in a while you would hear the idea of "pay TV" floated and people would say, "no way!"  A major city usually had a channel and La Crosse, Wisconsin had Channel 8.  Their call sign was WKBT.  But Al had to have an antenna to receive the signals.  In La Crosse you would have been able to get away with having a set of "rabbit ears", a V-shaped antenna that just sat on top of the TV or a nearby dresser or bookcase and was wired into the back.

Pfeffer Valley, however, was hidden between sets of high ridges and we had to have an antenna on a short mast on top of the house, and it had to be pointed in the direction of La Crosse, which was pretty much east.

Eau Claire, which was more north, had a channel, WEAU but you had to physically turn the antenna to point more north before it would come in.  We were pretty much stuck with Channel 8 because the ridges were high and La Crosse's transmitter was on a tower up on one of them.

Electromagnetic radio waves can bounce off large objects like rock cliffs, so there was always some part of the signal getting into the nooks and crannies of the land unless you were really isolated or down in a hole.

I watched TV in the evening and when my favorite couple of cowboy shows were over and they played the theme music, I would leave the TV on because otherwise I was afraid of being alone in the dark.  A lot of the material they showed in the movies was scary and after being sensitized by them, the sound of a raccoon scuffling on the concrete step outside sounded like an axe murderer sizing up the door before breaking it down.

The TV could go on the blink and stop working.  If you were lucky it was one of the ten or twelve tubes.  You took off the back, pulled out the tubes and took them to the hardware store where they had a tube checker.  Tubes had usually nine wire pins on the bottom but there were different sizes of them depending upon the amount of current they had to deal with.

The tube tester had several rows of sockets.  The tubes had their identifying numbers etched into their sides.  They were numbers like 6V6, 6AQ8, 12BA6, 12BE6, and so forth.  There were hundreds of them.  Some of them were amplifiers, some were rectifiers, they all did something to the electrical pulses that were going through the receivers.  You plugged the tube into the socket the little book listed and a meter pointer told you whether it was functioning properly or weakly, or not at all.  A new tube, which cost a couple of dollars, would fix the problem.

There are lots of other things that can go wrong and anything deeper required the TV repairman.  There were people that made a good living just repairing radios and TV's.  You could bring the set in or they would come out and service it right in your home.  They had a van with all the testers, most common tubes, and other common spare parts.

Nowadays the TV stops working and we throw it out, buy a new one at WalMart.

The TV stations did not run around the clock like they do now.  The government made them shut down at night because a strange thing happens after dark.  The ionosphere, one of the topmost layers of the atmosphere has been broiling in the sun all day and the atoms in it become ionized, which is why they call it the ionosphere.  The electrons of the atoms have been absorbing energy from the sun and are stimulated into more energetic orbitals in their atom.

At night the ionosphere would "cool".  The electrons would drop down into lower energy orbitals and the whole ionosphere would shrink a little bit and become less transparent to our radio signals, which had been going right on through it into space.  At night, when the ionosphere becomes more opaque, these signals bounce on it.

The government runs a lot of radio operations and there is quite a competition for "bandwidth" because there is only a finite amount of it, before everybody's radio signals start crowding one another.  So at night, when the signals are likely to skip and go farther, they are likely to interfere with other important signals, so the government made stations sign off in the evening.

They still do this with AM radio, only they only make them reduce power from perhaps ten kilowatts to a hundred watts.  If you listen, even today, to an AM station towards evening you will hear it suddenly become extremely faint.

Certain frequencies are much more likely to skip and in the old time television, it was the frequency that the sound came in on that was the worst.

When I was a boy in single-digits of age, watching the cowboy shows, I had absolutely no idea that all this stuff was going on in that television set.

I just figured it was some kind of magic. 

Pfeffer Valley

Pfeffer Valley


In the spring there were basically two routes to explore outward from the little bubble of the farm in Pfeffer Valley.  The first was to follow the topography of the fields and ditches, and this was quite magical, for in the spring, the snow would melt and create a burbling, rippling, stream coming out of the high ridge areas which surrounded the farm on three sides, and down through the fields into the ditches where it increased in its flow until it got down to the next farm, belonging to an old couple who still did dairy farming, the Tschumpers.  They pronounced their name Jumper and their son owned a farm on the other side of the ridge to the south, in the direction of Hokah.  It was the pass between these twos farm that I had seen the UFO come to earth.

Traversing this route required tennis shoes that could be put in the washing machine.  I loved those little magical hikes along the streams.  It seemed like everything was coming back to life after the hard winter freeze.

You could throw a small stick in the water and watch the current take it over and around obstacles all the way to the natural intermittent stream that went under a small bridge and right through the Tschumpers' yard.  They even had another little bridge to walk over from where they parked their car to the house and yard.

If I kept to the road, which was gravel, I had two directions of travel, but only for an eighth of a mile further up the valley.  There the road was fenced off with a gate and was not maintained further on as it crested a small shoulder of a hill and turned downward to the last farm in the valley, belonging to an old bachelor, George Kindhammer.

As soon as the warm weather came, I went barefoot.  I would walk gingerly on the gravel of the road for a few days until the bottom of my feet toughened up.  Then I would walk down it for the rest of the summer just as I would walk on a grass lawn.

Larry and Tommy Langen and their little sister, Kay were the only other children in the valley, and I could walk down to their farm, which was probably a mile away.  Their parents were as stereotypical a farm family as you will find unless you go way back to Per Hansa and Hans Olsa.  They were actually farmers without other sources of income, so they did it all.

Other than curiosity, there was really no reason to expend the effort of exploring that far except that they became my good friends, even though they went to the Catholic school in Hokah and I never had them as classmates.

The water that ran off our fields in the spring followed the little ditches down under the road and past the Tschumpers' yard and out into a wider expanse of the valley.  Then it meandered back and forth past the farm of Al Botcher's friend Al Thompson and down to the low fields below the Langen's.  From there, it took an abrupt turn south and followed the road down to Highway 16 that went between La Crescent and Hokah.  It went under Highway 16 and into a series of ditches and sloughs before bending east and fanning out.  The railway came in and there was a series of low trestles over it before it joined a confluence of the Root River and the Mississippi.

Before this little lazy creek reached the Langens' farm, there was an optimal place to dam it up and that is exactly what Larry, Tommy, and I did.  Piling mud on top of itself, we managed to create a swimming hole about two feet deep in places.  Never mind that cattle waded in the creek just upstream and that the water traveled so slowly that it literally became a mud hole.  We had to hose ourselves off after going swimming before our parents would let us in the house, but it all kept us busy on hot summer days and they let us do it.

Things really changed abruptly the summer that Patty and Al brought home a bicycle for me.  Apparently they had considered that I was old enough for a little more freedom, which was a mixed blessing, but I guess it had to happen sooner or later.

It was a big bike.  I had no clue as to how to ride it.

Determined, I took the bike into the front yard while they were at work.  I could barely get my leg up over the frame and over to the other pedal.  I pushed hard, rolled forward into the lawn and tipped over, the whole contraption slamming into the turf beside me.  Very frustrating.  A boy needs an adult to hold everything steady and provide positive praise for little successes, but I didn't have any of this.  Instead I picked up the bike, returned to the starting line and did it all over again and again, always crashing.

I must have crashed that bike a thousand times, but there came a time when I rolled about ten feet further before I crashed, and then fifteen.  I was getting the idea that if you kept from panic and turned the handlebar in the direction of the fall, you went a little further.

Another eighty or so crashes and it suddenly came to me as though it had been there all the while!  I was able to navigate the bike around the yard with fewer and fewer difficulties.  Before you knew it, I was riding it on the gravel road, keeping to the places where the gravel had been graded aside so that the tires wouldn't bog down.

Bikes in that day didn't have gears or hand brakes like modern ones do, and they didn't have the junior sizes which would have been a blessing for a runt like myself.  The chain connected the sprocket on the pedals directly to the back wheel.  It was hard, like you were in a high gear all the time.  Going up a hill, you would have to stop and walk the bike.

Pedaling backward was the way to brake the bike.  If you stopped pedaling, the bike simply kept rolling along but if you pushed the pedals backward you engaged a mechanism that put pressure on the axle of the wheel and slowed you down.  If you pushed more than a little, the wheel would lock up entirely and the bike would skid.

Having the bike enabled me to visit my friends Larry and Tommy, a mile away, much more easily.  I could coast it down the hill past the Tschumpers' driveway and attack the next stretch upward.  When I bogged down, I then had to walk the bike up to the top where I could get back on and traverse a hillside before coasting down another hill to their driveway.  I could make it almost all the way up their long, long driveway.

At some point they also got bikes and we were off to see the world, all the way down to the Dahlkes' place where the road met the highway.  The Dahlkes were another pair of old farmers.  Their cowyard had a cement tunnel built right underneath Highway 16 so that the cattle could get under it to the pastures on the other side.  We would go in that tunnel and sing, listening to our voices echoing.

Larry and Tommy had chores and responsibilities so I didn't get to see them any time I preferred.  I had to check.  If they were preoccupied, I would simply go on riding my bike down to the tunnel and sing alone.  I was an only child.  I was used to that.

Donna Lee (Hanson) Wallace

Donna Lee (Hanson) Wallace



This is an early picture of Aunt Donna, or "Nunny" as Lill and Lee called her.  Grandma Lill is below and the other children are included in the entire picture, which I will share later.  She was in high school when this picture was taken, and is as beautiful as my mom and Aunt Jeannie were.

I didn't have a lot of early exposure to my mother's youngest sister, Donna, but I can remember her audacious laugh.  She had gotten married to Bill Wallace, an army officer and was living in New Mexico where he had the duty at White Sands Missile Range.  In April of 1955, when I was just finishing up third grade, Donna and Bill became the parents of their first child, a boy, they named Kelly.

All the Hanson girls were beautiful and they had very distinct personalities.  My mother was a rebel and liked bizarre literature and art, the more far-out the better.  Jeannie was a classic beauty, accommodating and friendly to anyone.  Donna was a spitfire.

Their mother, Grandma Lill, was a pragmatic, devout, matter-of-fact, no nonsense person and they all interacted with her differently.  My mother would listen to her advice and then "go right around her" doing what she pleased.  Jeannie would negotiate and reason.  Donna would be right in her face.  I can so remember Donna's voice in a conversation with Grandma Lill, saying something like, "Oh Gawd, mudtherrr!  That is sooo asinine!"

Donna loved to use the word asinine.

Bill Wallace was a pretty neat guy.  He was extremely bright and was a handsome officer to boot.

After a couple summers with my babysitter/housekeeper watching me, I think Grandma Lill got lonesome for me and suggested that I come to stay at the farm with her and Lee for a few weeks in the summer.

This was a great idea because Aunt Jeannie was living in the divorcee apartment upstairs and Danny and I got to play endlessly with his wagon.  We also roamed around the farm playing war games in all of the buildings, sneaking around in the wooded areas, and such.  Danny was five years younger, but my lack of maturity made up for it and we were nearly like brothers.  I don't remember us ever fighting.

This became the norm for about three consecutive summers.  Donna and Bill would come and visit for maybe the better part of a week and we got to know our third musketeer, Kelly.  Kelly was only two or three but he was quite precocious and wanted very much to be included.  We accommodated him most of the time but would sometimes ditch him because, I suppose, we thought we were just too grown up to have him tagging along.  The truth of the matter was that although I was five years older than Danny, I was probably at about the same maturity level, give or take a year and Kelly was probably a bit advanced for his young age and fit in with us quite well if you discount the physical skills.

Usually, however, we could find all kinds of adventures on the farm, and had a lot of fun.

Donna and Bill had a Ford Thunderbird, the one with the little round windows in the back.  It was really sporty; that's the kind of guy Bill was, sort of like a combination of Tom Cruise and Steve McQueen.  He was very assertive and sure of himself.

They both smoked cigarettes and I can remember riding in the back of the T-Bird while they drove into town.  It was hot summer and the air conditioner was on, circulating their cigarette smoke throughout the car, burning my eyes and choking me.

I can remember Kelly asking his dad a question about something some adult had said that was objectionable and made him curious.

"Some people are just ...holes, Kelly," Bill answered, and drove on.

I think that Bill was quite important down in White Sands, because they always seemed to go back there.  I would not see Donna very often, but when my mother and her sisters did get together at the farm, it would always be a huge party with lots of laughter and drinking.

Grandma Lill did not approve much of drinking, but when her girls would be sitting around laughing and chattering, each in her own distinct way, her eyes would twinkle and she would jiggle with laughter.

My aunts were always loving and kind to us kids, and I remember them with nothing but fondness.  It is somewhat sad that each in her turn had a stormy marriage followed by divorce.  Donna and Bill had one more child, the first girl that we knew about.  I will explain this caveat later because their infant daughter Terry was actually just the first girl cousin that we knew about in those days.

Then, as years went on, their marriage broke up and I believe Donna and the kids spent some short time living at the farm while things settled.

Do not despair, dear readers, because better times are coming for all three in due course.

Going to the Dentist

Going to the Dentist


If there was a single, most prominent, dread about life in the 1950's for a youngster, it had to be the fear of going to the dentist.  It may have been merely because I always had cavities, but a dental appointment was counterbalanced only by the relief of getting rid of a toothache, which could be torture in itself.

When I developed a cavity, I tried to keep it a secret for as long as possible, blowing cool air across the spot, avoiding sugary or salty snacks that would aggravate it, and this was probably counterproductive, because it just got worse until I was screaming with pain.

Then Al and my mom had to make a dental appointment.

Believe me, a visit to the dentist in that day was nothing like it is today, and I am understating it considerably!  For starters, we didn't go to the dentist to get our teeth cleaned and have a friendly visit.  No one even thought of making an appointment until the screaming got so intense that it was causing disruption of everyone's life.

The dentist I went to was in the same building that Al worked in as an accountant.  Instead of going to school, I would ride to La Crosse with them and usually have the appointment right away.

Al would leave me in the care of the dentist and his nurse, having shown me where his office was so I could check in with him when I was finished.

The beginning of the appointment was much as it is today, except that the room was dark and clammy, a chair attached to the floor in the middle of a tiny room.  The initial fooling around wasn't so bad, except that I had a toothache and was quivering in abject fear.  The dentist would pry my mouth open and stick mirrors, wads of cotton, and his fingers in.  Then he would have the nurse hand him tools from a little tray which they tried to keep out of my sight.

"Just looking around," he would say, calmly, as he probed around my teeth with what looked like a nut pick.  He would jab it here, tap it there, and then push it right into the hole in my tooth, causing me to jerk my head and bite his hand.

"A little tender, right there!"  He would tell the nurse.

I might be starting to cry at this time.

The nurse would comfort me and hold my hand, while the dentist produced, from behind his back, the biggest shot needle I had ever imagined.  It looked like a caulking gun.  He quickly inserted it into my mouth, saying something like, "this will just sting a little bit."

As he pushed the needle right into my gum about six inches, I tightened my grip on the arm of the dental chair and on the hand of the nurse.  The pain was horrific and tears flowed freely from my eyes.  After an eternity, he would remove the needle, but he might stick it into another spot.

The profession had not yet advanced to the stage where the dentist, like my current one, dabs a little novocaine on the spot he is going to use and lets it numb up a bit so you hardly feel it.

You waited a few minutes while he went away and did something else.  The nurse would ask some lame questions about school to try and take your mind off what was still coming, the drills.

In that day, the dentist did not have at his disposal the technology that we now have.  His drill was like a dremel tool but it did not have a nice little high-speed electric motor contained in it.  It was attached to a big complicated mechanism that was attached to the floor near the chair.  A collapsible arm was jointed at two or three places and little cables turned around pulleys on each length.

He could extend it out and get the dremel tool near your mouth, but all these sections had cables on pulleys that were turned by an electric motor near the floor.  It made a lot of noise and you lay there and watched the cables turning on the pulleys while he ground away at the cavity.

I don't think they had the science of injecting the anesthetic in the proper place near an important nerve down very well, because although your mouth was numb, you still felt the piercing pain when he got near the nerve.  Al could probably hear me all the way in his office.

The first drilling was at a higher speed and wasn't so bad.  Then came the final burr.  The speed was reduced so that it vibrated your whole head.  It produced waves of traumatizing fear and pain.  All the while I was gripping the nurse's hand and crying.

He would remove the drill, squirt some water in and have you spit it out.  Then he would dig around in there with the nut pick.  Just when you were accepting ecstatic relief that it was over, he would frown and start the jack-hammer drill up again.

Finally, when they packed in the filling, they cleaned me up and the nurse dried my eyes with a rag.

"There!  That wasn't so bad, was it?"  She would say.

Feeling like a dead man walking who had just been pardoned, I now made my way over to Al Botcher's office where he would let me sit at a little desk and play with his adding machine.  It was a big clunky thing that had a roll of paper in the rear.  When you tapped the number keys and pushed an elongated lever, it would go "calumph, calumph!" and print the numbers on the paper.  You could keep printing numbers.  "Calumph, calumph!"

"Calumph, calumph!"

As many as you wanted.  Then when you pushed the plus key, it would go "calumph, abooga, calumph!"  The sum of the numbers would be printed.  It was really cool!  He would let me use up as much of the little roll of paper as I wanted.

When I got bored, Al would give me a dollar and let me hang out across the street at the Bodega.  The Bodega was a La Crosse institution.  It was famous for roasting peanuts and grinding coffee and half the place was devoted to these machines that did those two things.  They also sold cigars and pipe tobacco.

Around the side, in an attached room, there was a deli, where you could get a slice of roast beef, or chicken, or any number of things as well as a scoop of mashed potatoes and another side vegetable such as cooked peas or corn.  I would have to wait until later in the day to eat, after my mouth thawed out from the dental appointment.

They also sold comic books.  For a nickel or a dime you could get a Superman or Batman comic book.  There were also others, like Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, and the early Disney characters.  I loved comic books and I truly believe that they taught me how to read.  I was a good reader in school and I think it was because I read words like, "I've got you now, Batman.  I will annhiliate you!"  I amassed quite a collection of comic books, enough to fill a cardboard box.

One time I got to go to a movie after my appointment.  The Rivoli theater was on the back side of the block that Al's building, The Hoeschler Building, was on.  I went and saw The Blob and it blew me away!  It started with the most astonishing concept, a rocket had returned from a mission and stuck right into the harbor of a city.  Nose first, too!  That wasn't very likely, but I had never seen such things.

There it sat with its fins sticking up and smoke emanating from the rear.  A fisherman rows out to it and goes in the hatch and finds everyone dead from the impact, but there is a pretty egg which survived.  He takes it.  Of course the egg is going to hatch and turn into the Blob which terrorizes the whole earth, but I can't even remember how it ended.

It was the scene of the rocket that moved me so.  I became instantly obsessed with rockets and space from then on.  I started looking things up about space in the encyclopedias at school and soon knew a lot about the solar system, having memorized the diameters, periods of rotation, gravity, distances from the sun, and length of year for all the planets.

The teacher asked us one afternoon if we knew about how long it took the moon to go around the earth.  I answered, "twenty-nine days, twelve hours, forty-four minutes, and two and eight tenths of a second." I had actually read that somewhere.

I devoured this stuff and my teachers were very pleased at my new interest.  The huge pine tree in the back of the playground had now become a rocket and I explored the solar system in it with my friends.

I had a new passion.  And it all started with the excruciating visits to the dentist.  And "The Blob".

The Windmill

The Windmill


You can hardly find a windmill any more, but in the 1950's almost all farms not only had one but needed one.

When I moved to the farm in Hokah, Minnesota with my mother and her new husband, we were a mere decade into what was called "rural electrification."  Prior to that time, farms out in the hills simply did not have electricity.  Like Grandma Lill's and Grandpa Lee's parents, people made do without it.

They had lanterns and candles and they limited their activities to the daylight hours as much as possible.  They had hand pumps that brought water up to a spigot.

And they had windmills to draw water for the farm animals.

There was a windmill on the side hill above the barn at Al Botcher's farm, but the electric lines had reached out to Pfeffer Valley and it was no longer in use.  An electric pump drew water for the house and for the tank in the cow yard.

That didn't mean that I couldn't have a lot of fun with the windmill.

Basically, a windmill is a tower which reaches up a hundred feet or so into the air.  At the top, a fan of metal blades is mounted on a wheel.  The wind turns the wheel.  Think of the pedals of a bicycle mounted on the center of the wheel.  As the wheel goes around the pedals go around in a much smaller circle with it, but more importantly they go up and down.  Attached to one of the pedals is a long metal rod which hangs all the way down, nearly to the ground.  The rod is going up and down when the wind is blowing, and it is simply attached to a pump handle and now the pump handle goes up and down, just as if you were standing there working it.

The well below the windmill is a large pipe which has been driven or drilled deep into the ground until it encounters the water table.  Inside the large pipe, a smaller version of the rod continues all the way down into the water far below.  Attached to the rod every few inches are "leathers".  Think of pliable little unbrellas which are facing down into the well.

When the rod goes down, the water in the pipe pushes the umbrellas closed.  As it is being pulled up, they open and pull water with them.  The water travels from one umbrella, or leather, to the next until it reaches the top and gushes out a spigot and ultimately into a storage tank.

Because the tank is located up on the side of a hill, gravity then brings the water down a pipe to the house or barn.  The pressure of the water at the bottom is dependent upon the size of the tank up on the hill, the amount of water in it, and the diameter of the pipe coming down, but our ancestors weren't pressure-washing their cars.  They were darned happy just not to have to carry the water around in pails to make coffee with or water the livestock with.

The rod on Al's decrepit windmill hung about three feet off the ground and there was no pump left to hook it to.  The well was capped.  But I could hang on to it and have the wind lift me up and down.  That was good fun for a little while, but then there is the tower itself.  A metal ladder is built right into the tower because once in a while something goes wrong.  The rod comes loose, or a storm damages the fan blades, or the bearing on the wheel needs greasing or replacing.

I never could summon the courage to climb more than twenty five or thirty feet up the ladder.  The whole thing was creaky and scary, but it was very relaxing to sit in the shade of the windmill and the weeds growing around it and gaze off into Pfeffer Valley stretched out below.  If there was a breeze the metal groaned as the ancient machine tried to do its work even though it was not hooked up anymore.

I would lay in the sun-warmed alfalfa and timothy and watch the clouds and the birds, surveying my little empire, the great outdoors.

I remember sitting beneath the windmill when I was a bit older.  Some movement caught my eye and an object about a half mile distant appeared from the highest clouds on my left and traced a gliding arc to the topmost edge of the farm fields on the neighbor's farm on my right almost where they met the woods of the ridge.

It was over in a couple of seconds and then everything was normal and still.  A UFO, I thought to myself, in alarm!

My mouth fell open as I contemplated that it might be an actual flying saucer that landed way over there and that the inhabitants might be pouring out into the woods.  I don't remember mentioning it to anyone, but I refrained from hiking over to that ridge which was actually a short cut through the fields to some friends I knew on a farm in the next valley.  By this age I had seen one or two science fiction films like The Blob and there was no way I was going over there!

Since no alien invasion occurred, the whole incident receded into the lower levels of importance in my mind and I eventually chalked it up as just a great unsolved mystery.  In retrospect, I think it could have been ice dropping from the wing of a high flying airliner or even the metal door that closes over the landing gear when it is pulled up into the wings or fuselage.

For the first couple summers and autumns, my play was limited to the outbuildings of the farm and the fields that I could easily access, such as the hillside with the windmill, or the little valleys that water ran down in the spring to the neighbors downstream.  I needed transportation to go very far and to get into much mischief.  The beginnings of that transportation were my bare feet on the gravel road or through the thistles in the fields. But this was going to change shortly.