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.
