Month: March 2017

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How did this happen?

We see them everywhere downtown. This is Rochester, home of the world-famous Mayo Clinic. It’s common for us to see a person in a wheel chair, often sporting a tied scarf to keep a head warm. The hair was probably lost due to a difficult treatment for some medical condition. I always feel bad when I see a wheel chair pushed by a parent. The parent of a child. A young child, often not even double-digit years old. A child facing life and death. Far too soon. That kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen, but in Rochester it’s not that uncommon.

It never occurred to me that another situation would hit me even harder than a sick child in a wheel chair.

It wasn’t that many years ago that we buried my Dad and Judy’s mother. They were old. Eighties. Life had been good to them, but it was over. We hated to see them go, but that’s the way of life.

I didn’t see the next one coming.

Those of you who know me know that I spend an inordinate amount of my life wandering the halls at the Mayo Clinic, too. I’ve been lucky that my challenges responded to proper treatment. My life is good. I do what I want, when I want, and the bumps from minor medical mishaps enhance, not detract from, my life.

Until that day I was in for a routine blood test. Continue reading →

The Doctor Book
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The Doctor Book

I grew up in my Grandmother Fanny’s house, getting most of my medical care from the same woman who treated Esther in this story. Esther describes the all too common wound of a foot punctured by a random nail.

Henry on crutches – after a 1936 snowstorm.

Henry on crutches – after a 1936 snowstorm.

As a wide-ranging eight year old child, bare foot most of the summer, I stepped on plenty of nails and sticks, pulling them out of my foot before heading home for Grandma’s treatment according to the “Doctor Book” that Esther describes. The standard treatment for foot wounds was to wrap the wound in bacon and wait. It may have worked, as the salt from the bacon could reduce infection.

The other treatment that is much more memorable was for sunburn. In the summer, neighborhood kids went without shoes or shirts. On the exceptionally sunny summer afternoons we’d come home beet red with sunburn. I hated the treatment described in the book. Vinegar. Continue reading →

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That sounds like fun

That sounds like fun. Let’s do it!

A couple of years ago a friend of ours found herself in a tough place. As she tried to put her life back together we talked about what she was doing to ease the transition. People tried to get her involved in activities, partly to get her mind off the difficulties, and partly because she was fun to be around. In a change from the past, she now responded “That sounds like fun! Yes, let’s do it.”

We loved her new way of doing things, partly because it meant we got to do more fun things with our friend. I’ve since realized that the change she made taught me an important life lesson. Unconsciously I’ve been following a similar strategy for years. Recently saying “Yes!” to new opportunities has become more intentional and frequent.

Three episodes come to the front of the line as I think about saying “Yes!” In college, one of my buddies in the next room in Sevrinson Hall asked me if I’d like to take his cousin to the prom, because she needed a date. It would have been easy to say no. What kind of loser decides she needs a date to prom, a week before the big event? There were plenty of parties with my other college buddies that could fill up the weekend. I should have studied for finals. But what the hell? I took the bait, and ended up marrying Judy the next year.

Fifteen years later my friend Jim called and offered to sell his 1953 Cadillac to us. The car was 35 years old, almost as old as us. We didn’t think we needed yet another hobby, as we were fully involved in projects, working, two young kids, and an old house to keep up. We sat on the porch swing and talked about what to do. The whole conversation was something like this: Continue reading →

Mama
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Mama

A hundred years ago a mile was a lot longer than it is today. In this story Esther relates that they didn’t get to visit her grandparents very often, and then just for funerals. The five hundred miles from North Dakota to the old home in Nebraska was just too much.

Grandpa Ted and Fanny in 1939

Grandpa Ted and Fanny in 1939

That distance barrier still existed in the fifties when I was a child. Esther and her husband lived in Montana at the time, and I lived with my mother and her mother (Grandma Luehr) in Jamestown, ND. Once we took the train to Libby to visit them. Once. I don’t remember much about the trip, but I do remember being on the train for a very long time. Maybe it was lack of resources, but we very rarely visited family other than the few who lived within fifty miles of home.

Esther starts this story talking about her mother’s name. I never used the word Fanny to address my grandmother. She was Grandma Luehr. There was no question about that. Continue reading →

1984
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1984

I love to read, and usually dislike reading a book again. For me, even favorite books lose their excitement the second time around. That made studying a little difficult in college. My vision of studying included going over the same material again. This boy wouldn’t do that, much to the chagrin of my study partners.

1984-b-and-nDuring my junior year of college we had a particularly difficult test coming up, and my buddy Dean felt that he needed some help. I knew that my recollection of the material was not good enough, too. We decided to spend the evening studying. I couldn’t do it. Going over the material again was too boring. We had lots of other things to talk about, so we did. Dean didn’t do well on that test.

Back to the books. I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve reread. There are only a couple that I’ve been through more than twice. As I think about that short list of books, I’m drawn to reading some them again. Other favorite books (Phi, for example) changed how I view the world, but I don’t need to go back.

Allow me to take another diversion here. I love reading, but I don’t like to reread a book. Movies usually bore me. We go to a movie every couple of years. Not interested. The interesting part? I can watch my favorite movies or television shows a dozen times. I can bring up scenes and dialogue from Casablanca in an instant. My biggest television addiction (addiction being something I must do that has no direct benefit) is M*A*S*H. I’ve seen every episode a half-dozen times over the last forty years. Judy leaves the room when I’m watching M*A*S*H, because I can speak most of the lines with the cast.

How do I reconcile the difference between books and television? Hold that thought while I return to a book I just reread, again. Continue reading →

Promise of the Prairie
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Promise of the Prairie

The Kunkel House

The Kunkel House

Grandpa Ted caught North Dakota Fever in 1919.

According to other stories about Ted and Fanny, Ted had spent a summer in the Red River Valley working on a farm, fell in love with the land, and decided that’s where he wanted to start his own farm. Thousands of other people caught that same fever. The 1920 federal census shows almost eight thousand residents in Kidder County, compared to less than two thousand just twenty years earlier.

Can you imagine the excitement of those years, as hundreds of people thronged the real estate offices and railroad stations? Every train from the east dropped off new residents looking for farmland or a place to open a store. Greenhorns and shysters everywhere. Continue reading →

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What changed?

Down in our basement are several big plastic tubs. If you took the time to open one of them, which I haven’t in years, you might find dozens, maybe hundreds, of N-scale model railroad cars, buildings, engines, and miscellaneous equipment. Poke around in my home office and you would discover more trinkets, track, and a half-built modular section.

The other day my friend Jay and I were talking at coffee, and we got on the subject of trains. Railroads held an important spot in our lives in the fifties. If you wanted to travel any distance, it was probably on the railroad. Both he and I had taken significant trips by train.

The little house we lived in until I was about ten was across the river from a railroad branch line. The line served the ice house (now there’s a whole ‘nother topic!), a lumber yard and a couple of other businesses downstream from our house. That line was important to me, especially during the winter when the river froze over. We’d walk across the ice, clamber up the steep river bank, and the follow the tracks for a block or two on our way to school. If we had a spare penny, we’d leave it on the track in the morning, hoping that sometime during the day a train would come by to flatten it.

I wish I still had one of those big pennies.

1962 NPRR Jamestown ND

Operations tower – NP Jamestown, ND

If we followed that branch line another three blocks north, we get to the Northern Pacific’s freight sorting yard. The yard extended a block or two east, and at least a mile to the west. To the east was downtown, where I found interesting equipment and operations, especially exciting for a boy who would become an electrical engineer. Just off First Avenue was a wooden tower, probably twenty-five or thirty feet high, with an operations room at the top. There were two or three men in the room, watching for trains. When they saw one coming, they’d operate switches and levers to activate the crossing signals that held car traffic on the avenues.

View looking west from main street switch tower - Jamestown ND - 1962

View looking west from main street switch tower – Jamestown ND – 1962

Those signals were nothing like the huge illuminated arms that block every lane of traffic these days. They were simple “wig-wag” signals, with a bell and a couple of blinking red lights. Hanging off the bottom was a tail like thing with one of those blinking lights. When the men activated the signal, a tail wagged back and forth to catch drivers’ attention. Eight or ten passenger trains, and many more freight trains, came through every day. The guys in the tower didn’t get much time to nap. Continue reading →

Grandpa Guy’s Aunt Esther
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Grandpa Guy’s Aunt Esther

Back in the nineties, when Esther heard about my family story project, she decided to write a few stories of her own. This upcoming series of eight posts includes her thoughts on her parents’ lives on a farm in North Dakota. Esther was my mother’s older sister, born on the North Dakota prairie early in the 20th century, raised during the Great Depression, and lived the good life from Montana to Arizona to Oregon.

Esther

Esther on the farm in North Dakota

Esther shared my interest in family history. In the early 2000’s my brother Linn and I spent a couple of days with Esther at her home in Oregon, looking at old picture albums and hearing her stories. I’ve used notes from that time to augment Esther’s own words and highlight some of the more interesting parts of the stories. For each story, I’ve tried to include some of her pictures and some from Grace’s photo album.

If you’ve read Grandpa Guy’s Stories, especially the stories from my mother Grace, you are familiar with most of the events Esther describes. In some of Esther’s stories, I’ve added links to Grace’s recollection of the same story. Reading the two versions, and trying to reconcile the differences between them and the same stories that Grandma Fanny told me, makes me wonder about other historical stories where multiple versions exist.

Esther during one of Linn and Guy's visits

Esther during one of our visits in 2005

Everyone has their own version of history. Esther (my aunt), her sister Grace (my mother) and their mother (my Grandma Luehr, who Esther calls Mama) shaped my view of family stories. Though their stories are not the same, the essence remains consistent. You can read Grace’s stories in the letters and commentary I’ve added to them. (Grace’s Stories)

After reading Esther’s stories I hope you can imagine life on a farm in Kidder County, North Dakota.

Grandpa Guy Havelick

 

 

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What did we just do?

What a great winter that was! We had taken up cross-country skiing a couple of years before. On most weekends, and not a few evenings during the week, we’d head out to a trail to enjoy the winter scenery.

Judy and Guy on cross-country skis.

Judy and Guy on cross-country skis.

One of my favorite outings was the “Mantorville” trail. One of the local ski clubs had worked with landowners between the village of Mantorville and the county park just north of Byron, Oxbow Park, to mark off a ski trail. Somehow, they had found a dozen miles of forest, plains, trees, ponds, and hills unmatched for beauty and skiing fun. My friend Bill and I could easily finish the trail in an afternoon.

Winters were more winter-like in the seventies. The snow came earlier, often by Thanksgiving, and stayed later, sometimes skiable into March. The best weeks saw a cold snap mid-week, a couple of inches of fluffy snow on a Thursday afternoon, then a dusting of snow Friday night and brilliant sunshine on Saturday morning. We didn’t even care how cold it was if there was new snow. It wasn’t just the Mantorville trail, either. The trails at Whitewater State Park were even better. Hundreds of square miles of bluffs covered with state forest. Big hills and incredible vistas. Even local golf courses were fun to ski on a dark winter night. We always had someplace to go skiing.

When a long weekend demanded better skiing, we’d head off to someplace exotic, like Grand Marais, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. New vistas overlooking the lake. Fantastic rivers frozen into magic. Restaurants we’d never been to. Those were some great winters.

We’d planned a day of skiing for that Saturday morning in February of 1978. Friends would take our baby boy for the day. Everything was perfect.

Except the weather. It got ugly. Sunny. Warm. It started Friday and didn’t get any better the morning we were supposed to head out to the trails. Warmer by the minute. There would  be nothing but mud in the fields by the time we got going. Oh, that’s disappointing.

Now what? Continue reading →