Sunday, May 24, 2020

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.




Friday, May 15, 2020

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.

Friday, May 8, 2020

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".