Voices from the junkyard

 

Trees! you give them an inch and they take a mile!

I'm a Jeep!  Jeeps don't belong in junkyards!

So he says to me "I'm taking you to a car show" Does this look like a car show?

Heh, heh, come on man, take me home, I'll be good!

I swear Henry, if you tell me that story one more time about how you beat a Studebaker Hawk back in '62, I will jump in the crusher!

Oh sooo many miles!  I just need to rest my weary frame on this tree for a little while then I will be ready to go.

                Tailfins! yes tailfins! that's why I'm here, he said he didn't like my tailfins anymore!

Fame! Fortune! I tell you I had it all!  I was running with the Jet Set then someone slipped a little Ethyl in my tank.  Man did I fly!  I wanted more and more until I was guzzling Ethyl by the tankful.  Pretty soon the pistons cracked then the valves went, after I blew out both mufflers I was towed here in disgrace.  I could have been a show car! now look at me- oh what a world.

So I does all dis work all my life see?  Den I have a little engin trouble and whamo! they sticks me in here.  Some gwaditude huh?

When I got here I had a few dings, I admit it, but just look at me now!  The bums who work here are the worst!

Oof! Oof! I've been pushing on this tree for years, one of these days it's going down and I'm driving right outta here!

From scooter to sports car with a little help from dad

In my last post I told you about my scooter and how in the end it went to my mom's cousin to be chopped up for parts to make a motorized trike, and that my dad got a 1958 Mercury Parklane convertible in trade for the scooter.  So then in place of a scooter I was the proud owner of the Mercury convertible.  But there was one problem, I didn't want the big old convertible- I wanted a little sports car.  My older brother Bob had recently bought a red Triumph TR4 sports car from Joe Fodrocy and I was just nuts about it.  My dad was really in love with the Mercury and he thought I would like it too, but it just wasn't my style and so I reluctantly had to tell him that I didn't want the big beast, and that I wanted a little sports car.  He took the news rather well and so that started me on a hunt for a little Triumph.  I finally found one by snooping around the back fence at the local British Import dealer in Muskegon called E&B Motors.  Behind the fence I spied a little black TR4 that looked like nobody loved it anymore.  I called the service manager there and he told me it was a 1963 Triumph TR4 that the owners had brought in for repairs but he wasn't sure what they wanted to do with it since it was in bad shape mechanically.  He said it no longer ran.  A day or two later he called me and said the owners would sell it to me for $250.  That was great news but as a junior in high school, I didn't have a regular job and $250 was hard to come by.  Dad to the rescue! He said he would buy the Triumph for me if I gave him the Mercury, I didn't even have to think about it!  A few days later we towed it home from the south end of Getty Street to our garage on Central Rd.  It had no brakes and I'm not sure how dad managed to keep from hitting me as I was the tow driver and he was in the brakeless car behind me.  Regardless, we got it home and into our little garage and it fit right into that little space.  I was on cloud nine!  I'm not sure exactly what was wrong with the car- I was only 16, but dad was a pretty good mechanic and he said he would help me rebuild the engine.  He pulled the head off the engine; got underneath the little car and the next thing I knew we were pulling pistons out of the engine.  He took the head to old Amel Heinz to have the valves ground, and I think he changed the crank bearings and put new rings on the pistons.  I didn't know exactly what was going on, but I was out in the garage the whole time just dreaming of driving the little car.  Eventually he got it all back together and we started it up and it ran pretty good!  I was so happy!  I had a few things to finish up on it and spent many hours in the cold garage with a small wood stove giving off a little heat to keep me from freezing to death.  Sandy came over and did a pretty good job of making me believe she was also interested in the car.  Mostly she just watched me work on it and froze in the cold garage in spite of the small wood stove.  I think I spent more energy working on the car than feeding wood to the stove.  Eventually I got it all back together and licensed and insured.  I think dad paid for that too.  Old Joe Fodrocy relined my brake pads and shoes with a machine that he used to reline brake pads for auto shops during WWII.  Parts were hard to come by for a British car in the US at that time. The car was a blast to drive, it had a four-speed manual transmission, and it was so fun to shift gears, in fact, I liked shifting so much I not only shifted up all the gears, but I also downshifted all the gears which really made the little car rumble and pop when I downshifted.  The fact that I had removed the muffler and put on what was called a "cherry bomb" in its place really gave it that sweet raucous tone that I loved.  My older cousin didn't though, he lived right across the street from Sandy and he heard it every time I came and went with my shifting and downshifting ways making a ton of racket.  He said it woke up their babies at night, but I just laughed and took it as a compliment to my little car.  It was the excuse for Sandy and me to go on our first date, I was just sure she would love learning how to drive a stick shift car and so we went to the blockhouse with a picnic lunch and I showed her how to drive it.  It was a great success, she learned to shift the car and I devoured a picnic lunch fit for a king.  I didn't think it could get any better than that and so the dating began.  My brother Bob lived in Kalamazoo at the time and he invited me to bring the car there and spend a few days with him so we could fill all the rust holes with Bondo and make it look better.  We did exactly that and most of the car ended up with black primer on it to cover up the patches.  The car wasn't very fast, but it was so fun to drive, it was just like a little go cart and could zoom around corners like no other car I had ever been in before.  The American cars of that time were bigger, heavier, and had really cushy suspension for a soft but sloppy ride.  This little car was like riding a skateboard, it wasn't too comfy, but it would turn on a dime.  Getting in and out of it was somewhat of a trick, you had to squat down next to the open driver's door, stick in your right leg under the steering wheel, than slide your body onto the seat, once there, you would have to pull your left leg up as tight to your body as possible while still being able to shove it down under the steering wheel next to your right leg.  Once you were in it was fairly comfortable with your legs straight out in front of you because the seat sat almost all the way down on the floor.  It felt like your bottom was about 4 inches off the pavement.  I do think if I stretched a little I could reach down from the open window with my left arm and touch the ground.  It had a convertible top of course and I drove it everywhere I could with the top down.  In time the reality of not being able to drive it in the winter- too low to clear the snow on the road, and the fact it had a tiny heater, made me look for another more traditional car.  My brother Bob took the car off my hands and paid me what I had in it, I think about $350.  He did a great job of cleaning it up, fixing it, painting it and eventually sold it for a decent sum, I think over $3000.  He offered it to me when he decided to sell it, but by then I was a married man with children and it wasn't practical to own it any longer.  There was one more brief affair with a sports car, a little red Triumph Spitfire, but that came around the time we were married and it just didn't hold my interest too long, it needed a lot of work and I ended up trading it for the only truck I ever owned.  It was a gas sucking Ford F150, I think it was a 1966. The only thing I can say about that truck was that it moved us to Alpena shortly after we were married and I sold it pretty soon after that.  Then for some reason, babies started showing up every couple of years, and babies and sports cars don't mix well.  My favorite Triumph ever made was the TR6 and it is still a pretty good-looking little sports car after all these years.  But it was British made during an era when British made cars were not well made so it isn't worth owning, besides I'm not sure I could do that tricky manuever to get in anymore.

My Scooter

 I was once the proud owner of a 1958 Cushman Road King scooter.  It was two tone aqua and white and is a collectible item now.  But in its day when I had it, it was way out of style.  I had it in the late sixties and the cool bikes were the little Honda's, Suzuki's, and Yamaha's zipping around.  Years before this when I was a little kid my older brothers had motor scooters and go carts but I was too young to drive them. Then by the time I was old enough, my brothers had moved on to cars and I was left with an old frame of a scooter in our decrepit barn just sitting there with no wheels, no seat, and no engine.  It was just a metal frame with a wooden floor and rusty handlebars that I would stand on (no seat) and pretend to drive.  I started asking my dad if we could put wheels and an engine on it and he made the mistake of saying that he sometimes saw engines in the window at the Goodwill Store downtown in Muskegon when he would walk by it on the way from his shop he worked at to the bank to cash his check on payday.  So every payday I anxiously waited for him to come home from work hoping he had an engine for the scooter.  But it was always either he forgot to look, or he didn't go by the store that day, or he checked and they didn't have one, Things were not looking good for me and my scooter.  

One day my luck changed dramatically, my brother Bob was going to work at the Grand Haven State park for the summer and he was also going to rent an apartment in Spring Lake so he needed something to get him just the few miles from Spring Lake to Grand Haven.  He and dad had found the Cushman somewhere for $50 it was decided this would do the job and they loaded it in the trunk of the car and brought it home.  It was big and heavy so that says a lot about the size of the car trunks in the sixties.  I was mesmerized by it, it had a full body that was painted as I already said in two tone paint, a floorboard with a clutch and brake pedals and a shifter on the side of the body to go from first gear to second- that was it, two gears.  Top speed was about 45 mph going downhill on a paved road.  The plan was for Bob to drive it for the summer then I was to buy it from him in the fall for $50 from the money I earned working for Tony Grumet.  I was really excited about this and couldn't wait to get it.  It seemed like an eternity before the scooter came back to our house and when I gave Bob the $50 he said I owed him another $25 for parts he had to put into the scooter to get it running.  I knew nothing about the extra $25 and only had $50 so I insisted that was all I would pay.  Bob got really mad about it and he and dad talked about it for what seemed like a long time, finally it was decided I only had to pay $50 but Bob was still sore about it.  

I was instantly the hit of the neighborhood; I had friends like never before.  Four or five guys would just drop by regularly to ride the scooter.  I was pretty proud of it, especially at first.  Yes, it was old fashioned, but it ran well when I first got it and was a lot of fun to ride on the little road in the woods behind the house.  We soon found out it was no nimble machine though; it was made for blacktop and the dirt road through the woods was a challenge for it.  It was easy to spill over in soft sand and really heavy to pick up right again.  But there were almost always two guys on it so between the two of them it was not too hard.

In time though things started breaking on it and I was not any good at fixing them.  One of the problems was the twist throttle on the handlebar broke and dad said there were no parts to be had for it.  I eventually rigged up a string to pull to make the engine run fast or slow but it didn't work very well and eventually I would just ride it with one hand on the handlebar and lean over with the other hand on the carburetor trying to control the throttle which made it even trickier to drive in the sand.  It got harder and harder to start but the final straw was when the old barn collapsed on it from too much snow on the barn roof.  At first I thought my Cushman survived the collapse with flying colors and I was pretty proud of it.  (Unlike the fiberglass boat that someone had unfortunately stored in the old barn that winter).  But a new problem began to plague the scooter, whenever I would go over a bump, I would get a sharp poke in the butt.  I thought maybe a coil spring in the seat had broken in the barn disaster. and when I went over a bump it poked up from the padding and got me.  I looked and looked for something that was poking me and just couldn't find it.  Finally I noticed that the engine also sputtered whenever I got the poke in the butt.  This lead to see that the wooden bottom of the seat had been cracked from the barn collapse and that the seat would flex down over the engine when I hit a bump and on the top of the engine was the spark plug with an uninsulated spark plug wire which would contact the coil spring in the seat when it flexed down.  So I was getting a shock from the spark plug in the butt whenever I went over a bump.  That and the other problems pretty much killed the love of the scooter at that point.  Besides, I was getting interested in cars by then.  So dad made a swap with my mom's cousin Monte Beegle who wanted the scooter for parts to make a motorized trike, I think he needed the gearbox.  We got in the trade a 1958 baby blue Mercury Park Lane convertible with a huge continental kit on the back.  The thing was bigger than the Titanic and it was now my car.  The only problem was I wanted a little sports car, but that's another story.

A day in the life of a sudoku puzzle

 This might be my day; I feel the pages around me turning.  It has been a long time since I was printed in this Sudoku Volume 101 puzzle book.  Puzzle number 144, and listed as a "very hard", I guess I can take some pride in being called "very hard", although my name 144 doesn't do much for me.  Oh Ya! I think the owner of this book is turning to me now, I don't know his name, some of the other puzzles have names for him though- like The Big Duffus, Dimmy, Dummy, Dork Head, anyway I have been hearing them snicker about him after he has tried his puzzle solving skills on them and I can't wait to have a look at this guy and his supposed "intellect".  It has been about a year since his wife gave him this puzzle book and it seems like an eternity to me for him to finally get to me.  Yup, I'm on deck!  Looks like I am the puzzle to be worked today.   Alright now, let's get a good look at this Duffus guy.  Hum pretty ordinary looking, no movie star that's for sure, kinda big, kinda chubby, gray hair, yeah, I see that dumb look when he sits there staring at me with his mouth hanging open.  Well, now that I have assessed his looks, let's see if he is as bad at solving puzzles as I've heard.  OK well I can see his eyes scanning me over, looking for the easy answers, but remember, I'm "very hard" I'm not giving up much to simple scanning.  Oh, he's not finding much is he?  Putting down some little possible numbers, that's not a bad strategy if you can make it work.  Ha! he missed that obvious 2 there right on line six, OK, this might be more entertaining than I had hoped!  Well, he is done scanning horizontally now he is going for the vertical scan, I'm not giving up anything there. There it is! There it is!  that dumb perplexed look they were all laughing at, Ha! if only I had a built-in camera.  So I can see he is stumped, what is he going to do now?  Oh, looks like he is doing the elimination process, trying all the numbers in a square to see if only one will fit.  Good luck with that Chumpo.  I knew that was going nowhere, what's he doing now?  Quitting? Where'd he go?  Hmm, I hear the fridge door open, yup, just like they said, this guy is a snacking machine!  No wonder he's chubby.  OK he's got his sticky fingers back on the pencil, let's see if his "brain food" of chips and hummus do him any good.  Alright, now were cooking, he is doing his fill out every possible number in a square routine.  What a mess!  He has studied this online and in help books many times but from what I heard; he is a very slow learner!  Now that he has this slew of numbers he has to somehow figure out which ones go where and this is the true test of a sudoku solver.  OK, he's looking really intently in square one at all the numbers in the nine boxes, I think I can see smoke coming out of his ears, I give him credit, he really is trying.  No, not yet, it's another trip back to the fridge, looks like a cold hamburger with no bun, leftover from last night's grill.  A little salt, a few quick bits and down the gullet, wipe hands on pants and back to square one.  Alright, he is making his move, getting out the new fancy eraser his wife bought him for Christmas and clearing out a couple of boxes that are just crammed with numbers and putting in the one correct number that he has deduced goes there.  Ha! Ha! Ha! he's got the numbers reversed!  Oh this is going to be good!  Now look! those wrong numbers are making him put more wrong numbers in the other lines and boxes!  Oh boy! when this guy makes a booboo, he makes it big!  I gotta control myself, if he hears me laughing he might suspect something is wrong and I want to keep this fun going for as long as possible.  In fact when he goes to the fridge for his next snack, I might just switcharoo a couple of my numbers to line up with his mistakes to make it look like he is on track to solving this one in a jiffy.   Oh! there go a couple more wrong answers, this is great!  I haven't had this much fun since I smeared ink all over the hands of that new kid the printer hired to print us in this book.  Anyway, what's the big galoot up to now?  Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! will you look at that!  Three wrong numbers all in the same row but they all look right!  Only a professional Duffus could pull this off!  Oh, this is rich!  Ha, ha, I don't know if I can keep my composure much longer, he is almost done- or so he thinks he is!  So far he hasn't seen the wrong answers staring out at him, I'm doing a good job of just keeping my composure and trying to look like all is well, "no problems here bud, just keep on putting down those numbers, you're doing fine".  OK folks, the end is near, he has only a few more numbers to fill in and then the truth will hit him like a ton of bricks.  It's funny how us sudoku puzzles can hide a page full of wrong answers right up until the very end, then when the last few numbers don't fit in it all comes crashing down.  Yup, there's it is, that puzzled look on his dumb face, is he going to figure it out?  I doubt it, he is in too deep to dig out of this mess.  Look at there! just like I thought- he's going back to the answer page- CHEATER!  You just can't trust anybody anymore- you know what I mean?  Wait now, hmm, he is not just changing the numbers, he is marking out all the wrong numbers, now he is erasing all the wrong numbers?  Well I hope he has an industrial sized eraser!   Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! gimme a break man!  you're rubbing the hide right off of me!  Oh, here comes that crazy little vacuum I heard about, ha, ha hee, hee, this thing tickles!  So he might be a rotten sudoku player, but at least he doesn't just brush the eraser crumbs off the book onto the floor.  Looks like he is going to go at the puzzle another time now that he erased all the wrong numbers.  Well it is definitely easier now that he got rid of all the wrong answers to finish solving me.  Plus he can still faintly see the wrong answers that he erased so he shouldn't make the same dumb mistakes again.  Although I wouldn't put anything past this guy!  Alright, finally done, looks like he got them all right finally, he's not too proud though, I can see that from here.  He hates having to correct all his wrong answers, but what's a big galoot to do?  He can't just sit around and spin his stupid fidget spinners all day.  Besides, I haven't laughed this hard since-I can't remember when, so as far as I'm concerned, this guy's a winner!

A dispassionate history of the Barnhart/Schotts family

 I am going to attempt to make a history of 4 generations of Barnhart history.  I will try to be brief because it covers a lot of time and people but I am sure a few extra comments will end up in here.

The Grandparents

My grandpa and grandma were Uria and Bessie Barnhart and Emmet and Rose Beegle.  I was told the Barnharts came here from Missouri when grandpa got a job working at Continental Motors in Muskegon.  My dad was born around 1925 and attended North Muskegon High School, did not fight in WWII as he was too young and had too bad of eyesight.  He did try to enlist.  Dad started working as a plumbers apprentice but soon switched over to working at Continental Motors and eventually retired there with an early medical retirement due to poor health.  He and my mom had seven children- Bob, Dick, Linda, Judy, Kathy, Mike and Debbie.

The Beegles came from Burr Oak Michigan to Dalton and were mostly farmers.  My mom's mom, Rose (or maybe Rosa) was a Dow and a Butterworth, also farmers.  Grandpa Beegle once ran a garage in Dalton and worked on Model T's I have been told by several people that he was a very good mechanic.  The garage failed during the depression.   They had three children, Floyd, Doris, and Mildred (my mom), Grandma Beegle was shipped to live with relatives in Chicago to prevent her from wanting to marry Grandpa Beegle but it did not work and they still got married.  The Beegles were dancers and drinkers so the Dows did not approve of him.  My dad said grandpa Beegle was an exceptionally good man.  However Grandpa and Grandma Beegle repeated history and did not attend my mom and dad's wedding due to not thinking my dad was a good man.  In time my dad was well like by grandpa and grandma Beegle.  The Beegle grandparents died around the time of my birth so I did not know them.

Grandpa Schotts was married to Ruth, not sure what grandpa Schott's name was, he died fairly young in what was ruled a hunting accident, not sure of the details.  The family was very poor and lived off the land in the White Cloud area.  I will try to list the children, Bob, Dale, Ken, Carl, Jerry, Art, and Kathy.  Dale was in WWII as part of the occupying force in Germany after the war.

Grandma Springer was married to Percy and he was a career army man.  They came from the Maryland area.  Grandma Springer was a short stout woman who reminded me of an English bulldog in appearance and personality.  Grandpa Percy was a tall man with a large belly which he like to keep full of beer.  Grandma Springer was the boss of the family.  They had a son and two daughters, Jeanette and Ester, I can't remember the son's name. He was somewhat of a drifter in and out of marriages and moved around the county some.  Ester was married to a sheriff in the Maryland area and appeared to have a comfortable life.  Jeanette met Dale while she was working in an army commissary in the Maryland area and they were soon married.  Grandpa Schotts took his new wife to live with his family in White Cloud and Grandma Schotts soon found out what poverty looks like.  Grandpa Schotts was self-employed most of his working life.  He was an excellent welder and built trailers for many years.

The Barnhart Schotts connection

I will call Sandy mom from now on because I think the only ones reading this are her children.  Mom and I attended the same small church in Dalton- Faith Baptist Church, and yes, she and her mother were late for every service even though they lived very close to the church, perhaps that was the problem, deceptively close means you don't have to get ready very early.  My older sister Kathy dated mom's brother Pat for years and so I knew her both through church and Pat.  One day mom brought me a plate of chocolate chip cookies for no reason and my opinion of her went up immediately.  I was enamoured at the time with a 1963 Triumph TR4 sports car and mom feigned interest in it and watched me work on it in our little garage.  Our first date was a trip to the blockhouse so I could show mom how to drive a stick shift car and she brought a nice picnic lunch.  A pretty young girl who feeds me?  I was hooked.  We dated though the twelfth grade, graduated in 1973 from Reeths-Puffer high school.  I went to work at the phone company as a janitor just before graduation, mom worked as a messenger girl at Hackley Hospital where her mom worked in the Personnel office.  I attended two years of automotive training at Muskegon Community College and mom attended one semester of Baptist Bible College in Clarks Summit Pennsylvania.  I wrote to her every day and she came home early because she said she was too homesick.  We were married September 9th 1975 at Faith Baptist Church.  It was a modest but nice wedding.  My grandma Barnhart had been moved to a nursing home by this time and so my Aunt Nell who owned grandma's home let us move in to rent it.  It was on Duck Lake Rd, and I found out what "mom clean" meant, this was a new experience for me.  The house was spotless from floor to ceiling and I got to help.  At this time I was still a janitor at the phone company and was itching for a promotion since I was now a married man with a college degree.  We moved to Alpena Michigan with everything in the back of my pickup truck (which I had traded to a coworker for a Triumph Spitfire, I got the better vehicle).  The move was because the job I wanted at the phone company was going to be open the following year when the old maintenance man retired and I was told if I did a good job as a janitor there I had a good chance of getting the maintenance man's job;  Jobs were hard to come by at that time so off we went.  One weekend we drove to Alpena and found an apartment in the want ads of the Alpena News, the next weekend we moved in.  I believe the address was 301 North Avery St, our landlords were the Wisneski's and they lived in the bottom half of the house.  We had the upstairs apartment with an outside entrance, pretty nice place except they controlled the heat and it was really cold in the winter and they got into a big fight and we could hear them shouting and throwing stuff almost every Saturday morning.  They had a cute little girl named Janell and guess where that name showed up again?

Life in Alpena

I worked as a janitor second shift and mom got a job as a waitress at the Big Boy restaurant which was a very popular place there at that time.  She also worked second shift which was tricky since we only had one car (truck actually).  We attended a small Baptist church in Ossineke just south of Alpena where we meet other young couples our age.  Ben was born 12-31-1976 in Alpena General Hospital and we found we had been blessed with the most perfect, smartest baby ever.  I got off work a couple nights a week for a few hours to attend electrical apprentice training at Alpena Community College then stayed late to make up for the lost time.  My goal was to become an electrician, along the way I got the job as a maintenance man.  We moved to Ossineke when our Pastor at Northland Baptist Church was forced out as pastor because the older members in the church did not like him.  We bought their house which was only a few years old at the time.  It was on Hiawatha Lane in Ossineke.  It was a bilevel with no garage, I added a small metal storage building, On 2-17-1979 (my dad's birthday) Steve was born, Alpena was the coldest spot in the nation that early morning-negative 36 degrees, and my 1971 Plymouth Duster barely turned over when I went to start it to take mom to the hospital.  We found we had another perfect baby on our hands and couldn't believe our good luck.  After about 4 years in Alpena I was really loving my job and enjoying the location when my boss's boss came calling to lure me to return to Muskegon as a supervisor.  I really didn't want to leave but mom wanted to go back home and she was always very persuasive so we went.  I was enticed by the nice pay raise and the fact the company would pay movers to move us.

Back to Muskegon

We moved to Muskegon in 1980, I had a hard time putting my money down on a house, they seemed so expensive!  $36,000 for a house?  Who ever heard of that?  So we moved into the little house in front of Joe and Jean Fodrocy's house.  It was kind of rough but I painted it and it got the "mom clean" treatment so it was acceptable for the time until we could find something better.  In the meantime we got a new kid and a new car all in the same year!  Janell was born 10-3-1981 and we drove a 1981 Plymouth Horizon Gas Mizer.  Janell turned out to be the far better and long-lasting deal.  My job was on shaky ground almost from the start in Muskegon, for one I hated being a supervisor and secondly our company was cutting back and consolidating and my job was being eliminated.  In those days you could just stay on in your job until they found another one for you so eventually I was offered a job in Terre Haute IN.  It was sad because now we had to move the kids away from grandma and grandps Schotts and Barnhart.  It was the spring of 1982.

Life in Terre Haute was not bad

I transferred as a building maintenance supervisor in Terre Haute and liked the job much better, Ron Jarman my boss was hard to please but he was in Lafayette IN and the local people and my employees were all good to work with so I was happy again.  We rented a little house from the Godfrey's -our new neighbors and attended Bible Baptist Church and the kids attended Terre Haute Christian School during the seven years we lived there.  Our house was on 25th St very close to the Church which was on 25th and Margret streets.  Our pastor was Bert Baker and he and Mary lived just two houses down from us with children that you all could play with.  Things seemed to me to go well there, we had David and Lisa born in Terre Haute, by now I couldn't keep track of the dates- so I will not attempt it.  We were now a family of 7, a force to be reckoned with.  I liked our life but we needed a bigger house for the growing family and mom didn't want to put roots down that permanently so after seven years we decided to move back to Muskegon.  It was a tough move, we no longer were being moved by the company since I had taken a job back in Muskegon as an hourly worker and we had to do the U-Haul thing this time.  The year was 1989

Back to Muskegon- again

I bought a house at 1208 W. Giles Rd to move the family back to Muskegon while mom and you kids stayed in Terre Haute to finish out the school year.  I gave it the "mom clean" treatment, took about a month after work every night. but I was living with my mom and dad at the time and had the time.  Being back in Muskegon was hard for me, I loved my new job and as long as there was overtime we could pay the bills but when there wasn't we were in trouble.  It got better in time once we pulled you kids from Calvary School but college costs soon came and I was broke for about the next 15 years.  To cheer me up, Daniel was born!   I think it was 1993.  Those were years of working, going to Church and Awana, raking leaves, attending soccer games, band concerts, private music lessons (which we couldn't afford), working on cars- mine, mom's and you kid's cars too, and sending kids off to college.  Somewhere along the way mom and I lost our way and she became very attached to another man.

The end of the marriage

It was a very dark time, I am not happy with how I acted.  Wish I could have been under control of my emotions but I didn't do that and things got out of hand a lot.  After fighting with mom for about a year over the other guy, I filed for divorce in 2002, the divorce was made official about a year later on 11-21-2003.  My birthday.  We had made 28 years of mostly happy marriage and then it was done.

In the meantime...

Kids were going to college, getting married and having babies!  So now it's your turn to see what life brings, I hope it is full of joy for each one of you.

Marriage is like a box of paper clips

 Let me tell you a little story about paper clips.  Paper clips are innocent enough, usually they are pretty mundane, not much noticed while they lay around in desk drawers next to the box of staples and pens and pencils.  But you would be surprised how much of my thinking has been taken up by the little paper clip and all because I decided to get remarried. 

My association with paper clips mainly started off with the Chronicle paper route and the need to attach monthly bills to the newspapers.  We found out that large paper clips worked well for that so eventually we bought a large package of them, probably about 10 boxes of paper clips and we had so many of them they outlived the paper route and just got used for general use mostly by me when paying bills and keeping financial records.  I found I had little use for any small paper clips, they were just too wimpy to hold much and didn't fit my big clumsy hands that well. So little paper clips were banished to the back of the desk drawer and large paper clips were always handy for when I needed them.  And that would be the end of the story except I got remarried and now the paper clip story takes a new turn.

Shortly after we took up housekeeping together, we got rid of the old green desk and everything I had in the old desk of importance had to move to Cathy's desk which was already pretty full of her stuff.  No big deal, I'm and easy-going guy this should work out just fine.  And everything did except for the paper clips, Cathy had a bunch of wimpy little paper clips and they were in a little plastic case that you had to open up to get a paper clip which wasn't that big of a deal but there were no big paper clips in that case, so instead of making a big deal about it I just added some of my big paper clips to the case of little paper clips and everything was wonderful.  But- in time I grew tired of fishing around in the little plastic case for a large paper clip and it seemed the little ones were always on the top and in the way of getting the large paper clip.  Did I complain?  No siree, not me, I'm an easy-going guy and why should I disturb our marital bliss by complaining about a little paper clip?  So, I decided to just handle the matter privately and wisely, which I did by finding a little dish that fit nicely in the drawer into which I put all the large paper clips from the plastic case leaving all the small paper clips in the case for anyone who wanted a small paper clip.  See how easy that was?  No muss no fuss as they say.  Things went along well paper clip wise for a good time until one day I reached into the large paper clip dish to pull out a large paper clip and to my disappointment I found I was holding a small paper clip in my hand; how did this happen?  Well obviously, my better half had decided that a paper clip dish is a paper clip dish and no one really cares what size goes in the dish, right?  On further inspection I found numerous small paper clips had been dropped into my large paper clip dish.  At this point I needed to decide what to do, do I bring up the problem, explain the whole situation from the beginning to the sad state of affairs that the paper clips had evolved into?  I knew doing that would risk me losing my easy-going persona that I rather liked having so I decided I just needed to put up with a few small paper clips in my large paper clip dish and move on with life. No sense making myself look small and petty.  This went on for some time but it seemed the large paper clip dish became fuller and fuller of small paper clips and finally in a flash of brilliance I realized I could just keep a small envelope of large paper clips in my financial folder that mostly only I use to pay bills and take them out when needed and put them away safely out of reach of any indiscriminate paper clip users.  And so that was the final solution, or so I thought.  Because eventually we merged our financial accounts to one bank with joint accounts and of course joint credit cards, so sometimes when Cathy uses the credit card if it something she wants to pay for herself she will attach the cash to the credit card bill for me to pay, with- what else? a small paper clip!  Now sometimes they are colored and cute paper clips but they are still small paper clips and since I have banished small paper clips from my life, I don't want to  put them in my secret large paper clip envelope in the financial folder so I just casually stroll into her little room where her desk is and drop them politely into the former large paper clip dish which is now just chock full of small paper clips then walk out knowing I am a bigger person for not complaining about it and  also realizing that she doesn't even know that the "paper clip war" has been raging on for years now.  

So, my take on all this is that marriage is a very good thing and why spoil it over petty things like the size of a paper clip?  Besides, how do I know that if I shine the light on the "paper clip war" she won't inform me of numerous "wars" I don't know about that she is fighting with me?  I'd rather stay dumb and happy and be an easy-going guy.

The birth of Ben

 Why was this guy in the store smiling at me while I proudly held my new baby boy?  I could only guess he thought as I did that Ben was the cutest thing that ever lived and wished he had one just like him.  I later found out that he probably was smiling because Ben had urrped up a batch of cottage cheese down the backside of my brown winter coat.  Shopping at JC Penny's was serious business and Ben had been handed off to me so Sandy could better concentrate on the shopping mission before her.  Which meant I wandered around the store aimlessly with the little squirt perched up on my shoulder.  Apparently this was before I learned the necessity of a burping cloth under his chin at all times.  Ben came out of the womb with a real talent for urpping milk, he did it in two variations, one was right after eating and that came out in the same consistency it went in but with a lot more force, think projectile vomiting.  Just don't get anywhere in front of him if you like the clothes you are wearing.  The other way was the slow cooker method, he would ingest large quantities of milk and then later deliver little white curds of cottage cheese.  This came out much more daintily and you wouldn't even know it was there until you noticed a curd or two lingering on his lower lip then find a fresh batch on whatever clean clothes he or you were wearing.  

How did two unknowing people find themselves caring for a little baby of which they knew almost nothing?  Well as the childhood rhyme says "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes (insert name here) with a baby carriage!"  But before the baby carriage came Lamaze classes and lots of breathing lessons.  I can't even remember all the different types of breathing that was required for all the different stages of childbirth which was going to make having a baby a pretty smooth process.  It was good to be living in the new enlightened age when just breathing correctly was going to be the difference between having a life and death struggle to bear a child and the joyful experience of birthing your child together.  In fact the husband was no longer banished to the waiting room as in the old days but he was now the coach and equal partner in the process, helping his dear wife concentrate on her breathing so as to move the process along smoothly.  Lamaze even said some mothers chose to have their babies in a bathtub full of water, what a calm and delightful birth that must have been..  I took my lessons seriously and looked forward to the happy birth of our first child.

Contractions started getting stronger and closer together, when they came about 5 minutes apart we headed to the hospital excited to get this done, the new baby was about to arrive!  But the rather naive nurse examined Sandy and said she was not dilated enough to be admitted and sent us home.  Did this nurse really know what she was doing?  We were having contractions 5 minutes apart, the baby must be imminent!  We went home against my better judgement and the contractions did slow down so maybe the nurse was right about this one.  Maybe a lucky guess on her part, who knows?  Later the contractions started up again and we headed back to the hospital, a little less confident this time, I wondered would  the mean nurse let us stay and get this delivery going this time or not?  Happily she let us stay this time, surely the baby will be out soon!  I started coaching, Sandy started breathing, we are doing great, in fact maybe too great.  The Lamaze coach did say it would become rather intense and there might even be a time when Sandy (I could hardly believe this) would have flashes of anger toward me for getting her pregnant but not to worry that would all go away after the baby was born.  There was no sign of any anger coming from Sandy, just diligent breathing and waiting for the big event to happen.  However as the minutes turned to hours and the breathing didn't seem to be moving along the birth in any way, it became difficult to keep up the rah, rah spirit a good coach should have.  After MANY hours of waiting, and contractions, and Lamaze breathing, things finally began to get more intense.  But when we would summon the nurses to check to see if Sandy was fully dilated they would just say "not yet, give it more time".  Somewhere along the way the breathing routine started to get old and when I tried to encourage Sandy to do the "candle blowing" she flashed a look at me that suggested the only blowing she wanted to do was blowing my head off with a gun if one were only available, so I decided to back off on the coaching for now.  Finally the time came, they called the Dr. to come to the hospital, by then it was late at night and I thought the nurses said they had to get him from a party.  In a while a short man with a cocky attitude arrived and started giving orders to nurses who seemed to be very capable of running the delivery room without him.  The time to push came and I saw  a struggle to push and veins popping out that I never even knew existed on Sandy's forehead..  The Dr. did a little checking here and there and then decided he needed forceps.  I don't think the Lamaze class said much about forceps so I watched with great interest as the Dr. inserted these rather large spoon like devices into the birth canal and then clicked them together to form a metal cup around Ben's head.  The Dr. said he had to wait for a contraction and would then deliver the baby with the aid of the forceps.  I anticipated a gentle tug from the Dr. would be just the thing to get that stubborn baby to slip out.  To my surprise the little man crouched down at the end of the birthing table and placed one foot on the end of the table and prepared to pull with all his might when the contraction started.  The contraction started and the Dr. pulled with all his might and I immediately lost all hope of having a live baby come out.  I was confused- why would this cruel Dr. leave me in the delivery room while he pulled our baby out one piece at a time?  Why would he not send me out if this is what the plan was?  To my surprise out came Ben's head and then amazingly, the rest of his body was still attached to his head!  We had our baby at last and he was alive- a little dented up, but alive.  The forceps put dents in his skull but the nurses  said that was normal and other than a cone shaped head, he looked pretty good.  So my moment of despair quickly turned to joy and all was right with the world and our little family.  Sandy didn't look like she hated me anymore and I began to realize the nurses were our best friends in the birthing room, the Dr. was a necessary intruder, and Lamaze?  Well, wasn't Lamaze French and isn't it said that very little in the French culture actually works?  I think now if it had been a German or a Dutch birthing program it would probably have worked, instead of being called something smooth and easy like "Lamaze" it would have been called "Der Gettenouttababe" and a lot of marching around and loud yelling would have proceeded a quick delivery.  Welcome to the world Benjamin James, nothing has been the same since you arrived.