What inventions have had the biggest impact on your day-to-day life?

Butch

I can think of 4 main inventions that have impacted me; television, telephones, transport, and computers.

Television

We got our first television when I was about 7 I think (1955?). Maybe a little earlier. Prior to that we had gone to the neighbors, the McCoys, to watch shows in the cartoon hour of the late afternoon. The things I remember about our TV was, I think it was an Admiral brand and we kept it between the front entry and the front window. The window had full length curtains down to the floor. Sometimes I would climb up on the windowsill between the window and the curtain and survey the neighborhood. What I remember is while doing this once, I jumped down without pushing the curtain aside and bumped my cheekbone into the corner of the TV. It hurt like I couldn’t imagine.

After that we had many unmemorable TVs over the years. All black and white. When Karen and I were married we didn’t even have a TV for quite a while. Then we got a teeny 10” one. This despite my studying TV production at the University of Iowa. We did get a color TV shortly after that and never bought a B&W again. In 2021 we had worked our way up to a 65” 4K flat screen.

Telephones

I don’t know when my folks got their first phone. Probably long before I was born. My earliest memory of one is when we lived at 3117 Merle Hay Road in Des Moines. At the time our telephone number was only 5 digits long, 9-5353. Still pretty early there must have been a spurt in people getting phones and they needed to add a couple of extra digits to have enough phone numbers. They added the “Crestwood” prefix making our number CR9-5353. When we moved to Cedar Rapids they still had alphabetic prefixes. Ours was “Empire”. Eventually the phone companies dropped the alpha prefixes and made the whole phone number numeric. Ours was 364-7456. When Karen and I got married we got a phone of our own. Our number was 362-0761. We have had the number for the whole 52 years we have been married, except for 6 months when we moved out the country and had service with the South Slope Cooperative Telephone Company. I’m glad we were able to get our old number when we moved back into town.

In 2008 we got our first cell phones. They weren’t smart phones yet, but a big step down the road of technology. We did eventually get smart phones. We have had several different kinds over the years; an HTC, a Windows phone, but mostly we have had Samsung android phones. I am about ready to get a new one any day. Having to get a new one every two or three years is a good way to spend lots of money without getting much benefit out of the deal. But, you gotta do what you gotta do. I’ve got to say that these smart phones have probably had more technological impact on me than anything else, especially when you consider how closely they tie in with computers and the internet.

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Transport

Getting around by yourself when you are a kid is probably the best way to experience freedom. When I was still in elementary school I was given a 20” Schwinn bike. It was blue so naturally it was called the Little Blue Bike. I got really good at riding it. I could go all around the neighborhood while riding it “no handed”. I could turn corners, go up hills, go down hills, and apply the breaks till it got too slow to balance. I loved that bike.

At some point it got repainted white and then was known as the “Little White Bike”. I’m pretty sure that’s what my brother and sisters called it. Judy got a new 24” bike and I was so jealous because she now had a bigger bike than I did, but I got a bigger replacement myself in short order and all was right with the world again. It was a 24” Schwinn with big balloon tires and huge steer horn handle bars. After Junior High School I got one of the first 10-speed bikes in town. It was a Campi racing bike with 27” high pressure tires and full Campagnolo running gear. It was a light weight bike for its time, but still weighed a ton by today’s standards. I rode it to high school 3½ miles one way every day when the weather was good and even rode it to visit my Uncle Ralph in DeWitt, Iowa, one time on a field excursion with my friend Ron Sheriff. That was a 63 mile ride. While it was really cool, riding the racing bike was a bit of a trial. It was built for speed and not for riding comfort. The seat was made of leather and was only about 3 inches wide. Sweat soaked into the leather and caused it to distort and harden, making for a very uncomfortable ride. The tires had very small diameter tubes and had to be inflated to high pressures making them hard as rocks so you felt every nasty bump in the road. Well if you want to look really good, you have to put up with a few annoyances.

My next advance was to motorcycles. They had the same advantages as the bicycles but offered greater speed with less effort. I had seven different ones over the years, starting with a 305cc Honda Dream and ending with a non-vintage Triumph Bonneville. I rode that one till just a few years back. I gave it to my son, Lance, when I didn’t think I could trust my legs and feet to keep me upright at stops anymore.

I talked about my first car in the chapter When Did You Get Your First Car, but I had many cars over the years. Mostly they allowed me to have the freedom to get around as I wanted. There are many interesting things to say about this car or that but I will leave those for other stories.

Computers

Some of my friends had a chance to play around with computers when we were in high school, but I didn’t pay all that much attention to it. These were the days when Hollerith key punch cards were used to program computers. When I started working for the Department of Planning and Redevelopment at the City of Cedar Rapids my interest really took off. We were updating digital maps for use in the 1975 Special Census. As our department’s cartographer I came in contact with the director of the Data Processing Department, TJ Snarzyk, just about every day. He liked me and always took the time to explain to me about why something was done like this or something else was done like that. This was about the time that micro computers like the Radio Shack TRS 80 or the VIC 20 first started to appear. I was homing in on what I thought was a dandy little computer made by Texas Instruments. TJ advised me against it because he thought that Texas Instruments was about ready to go bankrupt. I don’t think they ever did.

I ended up buying a Radio Shack Color Computer. While only having 8 bit registers, this small home computer was almost the same as the early IBM PCs and only just below the Apple MacIntoshes. It was head and shoulders above the Apple IIs, its main rival. I graduated to full fledged IBM PCs after 3 or 4 Color Computers and learned the fundamentals of programming in Basic, Assembler, and C. At that time a person pretty much had to do their own programming, but there was enough software coming onto the market that you didn’t have to do that anymore, unless you wanted to be a programmer for a living. I didn’t want to go that far.

After I left the my job at the City I went into business with my own graphic design studio, Visible Results. Designers got heavily involved with all sorts of graphic software; desktop publishers, photo editors, and design programs. Most of them used Apple MacIntoshes because they had singled themselves out as needing to control this niche market. They did a pretty good job of it. But this field had been developing quickly and the IBMs were making big inroads into their domain. By the time I came to it, Windows, a Mac-like interface had been introduced on the PC and practically every program available on the Mac was also available on the PC. I reasoned that most of the companies buying outside graphic services were PC based and having PC graphics files was prone to fewer compatibility problems. I’m not sure that this did me all that much good, but it didn’t hurt me one bit either. I had a steady supply of loyal clients.

Of course the big thing to come along with computers was the internet. I will talk about all that in the chapter “What impact has the Internet had on your life”.

Karen

There are probably many inventions that are really important that I will leave out but the ones I will write about are truly a big deal. The inventions that have had the biggest impact on my day to day life are television, computers, smart phones.

Television was invented long before I was born but very few homes in my neighborhood had a television in the living room when I was very young. I suppose it was because they were expensive. Our family got a tv because my mom’s brother Everett was moving to California and getting rid of his sometime in the mid 1950’s. It was a big clunky console tv and from the start, it was clear that it was not to be turned on unless we had permission from our parents. For that reason, tv was what my parents liked to see which was westerns, sit coms, and quiz shows. I loved Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy, and I’ve Got A Secret. I longed to learn how to read so that I could read the secret the contestants were trying to guess. We also religiously watched the evening news where Walter Cronkite told us about the important happenings in the world. I’ll never forget the compassion I learned from watching how black people were treated as they fought for human rights, the fear I had about the Cuban missile crisis, the grief of the assassination of our president, and the pride and wonder of a man on the moon. Now, for most of us, television is about entertainment and binge watching but still a big impact on my life during a world pandemic.

It took me a while to warm up to computers. I was not really a first adopter but email was my entry point. I knew computers could do mundane tasks fast, but email meant I could communicate with friends, family, and colleagues quickly and easily.  Word processing was also huge. A person could easily write and edit work and could save and organize files. A huge change from typewriters, white-out and file cabinets. The biggest impact was access to the internet. Information at our finger tips, commerce, entertainment, teaching and learning applications…it does it all. This information explosion has fundamentally changed the way the world works.

The third invention has given us the whole world to carry around in our pockets. When cell phones were invented they provided a nice convenience, but I also rather resented the notion that I was supposed to be available to everyone 24/7 wherever I was in the world. The big change came when the telephone feature became less important than the access to entertainment and information. Whenever we have a thought or a question, we can immediately look it up on our smart phone and get more information. More arguments about movies, song tiles, obscure facts etc. can be settled on the spot with little fanfare. My favorite feature however, is GPS. I have a terrible sense of direction and at the same time a terrible fear of of getting lost and being late. I love it that my phone will talk me through my route, turn by turn, and get me someplace on time and without stress!

Cast of Gunsmoke – James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon, Dennis Weaver as Chester Goode, Amanda Blake as Kitty Russell, Milburn Stone as Doc Adams

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
At the ButchieBoy main page click the Storyworth category to see all the entries

Describe your experience with the derecho

Butch

On August 10, 2020, people in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, experienced a derecho. It is sometimes described as an inland hurricane and it progressed along an East/West line that extended right through the middle of town.

The storm did tremendous damage and caused the loss of about 2/3 of our tree cover in town and more loss in the future as more injured trees die because of the damage they received.

A few weeks before, my friend and fellow sculptor, Steve Piper, had borrowed my pipe bending tool to use on a project he was working on. On the day of the derecho it appeared to be shaping up as a perfectly nice and normal day. There was a storm predicted to come later according to the weather service, however. Steve called and asked if I was going to be around so he could return the tool. He stopped by and returned the borrowed items having made a dandy little storage box for some of the parts. Then he stayed for a little while and we chatted on our deck. We were careful to maintain the correct social distancing since it was right in the middle of the Covid Pandemic.

As predicted, the sky darkened and Steve took off for home. All hell started to break loose. We were inside but our house has lots of big plate glass windows and we live on a wooded lot with a jillion trees. The rain was like a waterfall blowing sideways. We could see branches that had fallen outside when there was an occasional break in the intensity of the wind. We were pretty worried because we have quite a few very big and very old trees that are close to the house. Any limb of which would probably be big enough to punch right through our roof if it fell on us. After a while, things began to die down and we could go outside to inspect the damage. What a mess.

While limbs fell of course, none did any serious structural damage. There was lots of damage to the fascia trim which is more serious than it might seem since it is vital part of keeping the surface of our tar and gravel roof intact. There was only one small hole punched in the car port and it was easily fixed. But all around the house there were so many small downed limbs that they were almost impassible. The storm knocked out the electricity, the telephone, and the cable tv which is where we get our internet access from.

One of our biggest problems of being without electricity was all the stuff in our refrigerator could spoil. So not only would we be without anything to eat, but we would have to buy everything again when the electricity returned. Remember, all the grocery stores were having the same problems we were. Steve came to our rescue later in the day by bringing his generator over and letting us run it for a couple of hours to see that the fridge stayed cold. We could see that having electricity was going to be a problem. Our son Lance also helped with a generator that he got through his boss. There was some expense involved in having it so it was not a very good long-term solution. We decided to buy a generator of our own. That could have been a big problem since everyone in town was trying to buy one, but there didn’t seem to be a shortage of them. Using one was not without a few wrinkles itself. We had to fill it with gasoline just before we went to bed to try and make it last till morning, then fill it up again for it to run through the day. But it did the job. We learned all the little tricks of how to get the most use out of it. Now we have one if the need arises again.

To get onto the internet we had to drive over to Bruegers Bagels and take advantage of their free WiFi access. This was cumbersome because we had to do it while we were in our van so juggling our laptops was a trick. We also only had limited battery life, so the easygoing continuous use that we were used to was a little curtailed.

Over the next few days we started the process of cleaning things up. Karen and our friends Linda Rutherford and Diana Tharp worked like troopers dragging fallen limbs out to the street. They did a super job. I tried to contribute by cutting up logs with my chainsaw, but ran into nothing but frustration. My saw was dull and hardly worked and I found I was having a really hard time walking around on the uneven ground. After a while I realized I was a danger to myself and it was better for me not to have a powerful, sharp, mechanical device within easy range of chopping off some of my parts.

In time, we had to deal with the insurance companies and finding arborists and roofers to do the necessary repairs. The tree guys were not hard to find since the whole town was swarming with them. They must have some kind of network that alerts them when a disaster occurs. We had bids all over the spectrum, from a few thousand dollars up to over $20,000. We ended up with a company that agreed to do all the work we needed for what the insurance company would pay. This included removing a huge catalpa tree that had started to split despite the fact that we had had it cabled when we moved to this house. By calling around I found a saw mill just a few miles out of town that would collect the trunk and would store it till it was cured enough to process. We worked out a deal where we would get a prime slab the length of the trunk with “live edges”. The saw mill would do all this for having the rest of the wood.

The work on the roof was another story. How this process worked turned out to be not so good. Since our roof was in need of repair, but didn’t actually leak, we were way down the list compared to people who had gaping holes open to the sky and were just worried about keeping rain out of their houses. It was a year or so before we could get anything done with that. Based on things we were told along the way, there was some misunderstanding and disagreement about just what was covered. We ended up paying way more than I think we should have, but in the end it all got done. Luckily we had enough savings to cover all the expenses.

Karen

August 10, 2020, began like any other August day. It was hot but normal for that time of year. There were no storm warnings in play that we knew about. A friend of Butch’s, Steve Piper, had borrowed a tool and said he was going to return it that morning. Otherwise we had nothing planned in particular and were just going about our regular day. We never have the tv on during the day as a rule so if a warning was issued later in the morning, we didn’t know about it. The skies were clear.

Shortly before 12:30 in the afternoon we did notice that the sky was darkening and the wind was coming up. Steve decided that it would be best to head home. It seemed like just minutes after he left that the sky got even darker and the wind and rain hit hard. Butch was upstairs in our bedroom and I called for him to come down in case trees hit our roof. The wind howled and a glimpse out of the big windows showed big trees swaying and bending with the force of the storm. We had truly never seen such winds before. Visibility outside was very poor and shredded leaves from the trees began to plaster onto the windows. We began to hear loud thumps and bangs as debris landed on our roof and the power went off. Usually, Iowa wind storms are over in just a few minutes or at least die down pretty quickly. This storm howled and battered us for at least 45 minutes that seemed like hours. It was very frightening because I was sure that a tree or big limb would crash through our roof at any moment. Finally after what seemed like forever the wind and rain began to die down.

I opened our front door and realized that it was blocked by limbs and debris and that we couldn’t get out that way. I tried the tub room door and it was the same story. I could get out of the carport door and get as far as the edge of the carport roof in that direction.

The front stairway was packed with limbs, potted plants and other debris. The neighborhood was a wreck. Trees were down everywhere, our driveway was blocked, power lines were down, and it was eerily quiet. We had debris all over our house and shop but no windows were broken and we had no evidence of roof leaks. I saw a couple of neighbors in the street but I was afraid to pick through the debris to walk down the hill. We shouted our assurances to each other that none of us had been injured.

It was very hard to get information about what had happened. Our power was out and was down for 13 long days. Internet was gone from our neighborhood and it was over 5 weeks before we were connected again. We also lost cell phone service but that was back in a spotty way after only a day or two. The only information we got at first came from friends and neighbors. Many people were tremendously kind and helpful to us. Our neighbor, Chris Schultz and his girlfriend Dalin cleared the end of our driveway and took the trees off the fence between our yards. Unfortunately, their house suffered significant damage to their roof and three rooms at the back of their house were smashed. Our friend Steve came by the next day and loaned us a generator for a few hours. We plugged in our refrigerator and charged up all lanterns, phones, computers, etc.

We realized we had some big problems. Power was out in every part of Cedar Rapids so that meant we had no access to gas, ATM machines, or stores for food and ice. We got a tip that we could drive to Central City for gas so we decided to try it. That way we could use the car to charge devices and even run small appliances like the coffee pot. We don’t usually keep much cash on hand but there wasn’t a reliable way to use credit cards without power. As we ventured out of our neighborhood the full scope of the destruction was evident. Roads were blocked everywhere and the beautiful trees of our city were shredded and down. Later we found out that 70% of the tree canopy of the city was destroyed. It was also estimated that 90% of all businesses and homes in town suffered some kind of damage. On our drive to Central City we saw that power poles and lines were down along highway 13 for mile after mile. After a couple of days, it was clear that we would be without power for a while so we decided to buy a generator to keep the refrigerator going. We also bought some battery powered and rechargeable lanterns and fans to get us through the long nights. For internet, we mainly went up to the Bruegers Bagels on the corner and tapped into their free WiFi once per day to stay in touch with the world.

In the days that followed we learned that the storm that hit us was called a derecho, a term we had never heard before. It is a kind of inland hurricane characterized by very strong winds. Cedar Rapids had been hit by winds of up to 140mph.

The damage to our house was mostly on the roof. While there were no holes, the entire edge of our tar and gravel roof was dented and gouged by trees and limbs that fell on it. This metal edge provides the structure that holds the tar and gravel surface on the house and had to be replaced.

Also there was an enormous amount of tree debris down in our yard. I counted 17 trees larger than 6” in diameter that were completely down. The largest loss was the towering catalpa tree from the back of the house. It had cracked all the way down its trunk and had to be removed. We also had huge limbs broken high up in our oldest oaks which were dangling dangerously over the house. People began to stop by the house offering to give us estimates for clearing the house and cutting down damaged trees. Prices ranged from 10,000-20,000 dollars. We drove over to our insurance agent to start a claim but it was weeks before an adjuster came to look at our house and there were still trees on the roof. Our neighbors, the Fishers, kindly let our tree trucks drive through their yard to get to the back of our lot. Otherwise the big extension trucks would not have been able to get through.

 The city said that homeowners should drag tree debris to the curb to be picked up by city crews. We had arranged for the same tree service that our neighbor used to take care of the trees in our yard. Since we had no holes in our house, we were far down their list which seemed only fair since so many people had many more and worse problems than us. I was able to clear out the trees from our steps and from our deck pretty much by myself. The rest of the yard was really daunting but my friends Linda Rutherford and Diana Tharp volunteered to help work on it. Among the three of us we dragged a ton of limbs down to the street on tarps and stacked them in a towering pile by the street. We also made a gigantic pile in the back to clear out some areas. We left those for our tree guys to move.

The city contracted with a Wisconsin company to begin clearing the piles of limbs off city streets. The trucks were the size of 2 semis attached end to end and had a huge claw for picking up the trees. We called them Jawa trucks because they were like the ones in Star Wars. They took the debris to 4 big lots around the city where everything was ground into mulch. It was an enormous undertaking but all streets were cleared in less than a year which was amazing.

I feel grateful that we made it through such a storm without injury or even devastating damage to our home. Most damage is now taken care of after about 15 months. Insurance took care of a big chunk of our costs but we added improvements which, of course, was out of our pockets. I know that others are still dealing with their own lack of resources, insurance problems, lack of materials, and unscrupulous contractors – so we feel lucky. I still mourn for the lost trees that made our city beautiful. People are replanting but we won’t see the results in our lifetime. There are still times that I come around a corner and see how bare a view appears and get tears in my eyes for what was lost.

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
At the ButchieBoy main page click the Storyworth category to see all the entries

What has your retirement been like?

Butch

My retirement came a lot earlier than Karen’s. About the time we moved into our house on Bever Circle my major client, Omnilingua, decided to restructure their work process. That resulted in all the small service suppliers like myself losing their accounts. This was not only graphic designers, but all the translators as well. Karen was making good money so it wasn’t that devastating. We had a new house that needed a hundred small jobs to get it how we wanted it and that would take up a lot of my now spare time.

One of the first jobs was replacing our address marker that Karen’s brother Dick slid into backing down our steep, snowy driveway. I had an idea for a sculpture and Karen liked the idea. I took a course in sculptural welding at Kirkwood Community College. With all the pieces for the sculpture cut out and a number of the small subassemblies fabricated I was ready to put the whole thing together in my newly finished work shop. I still had quite a bit of welding to do on it. I borrowed a small MIG welder but it just wasn’t doing the job, so I bought one of my own. It was just the ticket.

One problem was the workshop was intended to be for wood working. So a bunch of hot metallic sparks flying all over the place wasn’t the best thing to have. I solved this by doing all of the welding over an asbestos mat with some metal sheeting protecting the walls or other items in the immediate area. This was the beginning of a new hobby for me too, sculpture.

From then on I had something to do and even made a bit of money with some seriously expensive pieces that I designed and built. I also got selected a number of times to participate in putting my sculptures on display in various regional shows. This usually involved renting my sculpture to an arts group in a nearby town for a year and getting an honorarium for doing so.

A sculptor friend of mine, Steve Piper, told me he had been having fairly good luck selling less expensive yard art and with the cheaper prices and increased volume he actually made more money than with his more serious works. After a few years of doing this by myself, Karen and I decided to collaborate on joint projects where I built the metal framework of the sculptures and she made decorative fused glass panels that fit into them. I kept all this up for a number of years till my feet and legs started to give out on me and I couldn’t stand for the length of time it took me to complete a new item.

By this time I was collecting social security and could justify activities that are more commonly associated with retirement. I spent a lot of time organizing my photos which even to begin with were more organized than most people’s photos. I still have a ways to go with them by the way. I worked on my genealogical activities too which also have quite a ways to go. At 73 I’m beginning to worry that I have enough time left to get it all done before I kick the bucket.

Karen

I retired from College Community School District in June of 2011 after 35 years in the district. I got my first job when I was 16 years old and had worked at some sort of a job for at least part of every year since that time. I had many roles in my school district beginning as an elementary classroom teacher and ending my career as a district administrator in the central office. By the time I retired I was routinely working 60 hours per week. When I was offered an early retirement opportunity, I was ready to go.

For the first three years after I retired I worked on a consultant contract to supervise the district’s New Teacher Mentor and Induction Program. Each teacher who was new to the profession was assigned a trained teacher mentor to support their success and growth. My job was to meet regularly with mentors and help them meet obligations to their mentees and solve problems as they came up. I also worked with other district personnel to plan professional learning experiences for all new teachers in their first year of employment. The job was fun, and allowed me to ease out of my hectic schedule without being totally idle. I also had plenty of free time to enjoy my retirement in other ways.

Traveling has been the best part of retirement. We have really enjoyed the ability to plan extended vacations or to just take off to visit relatives or friends on the spur of the moment.

We have traveled to California many times to visit Wendy and her family. We have flown there of course which is the fastest way, but air travel has become less comfortable for us as we’ve gotten older. We rode the rails one time on the California Zephyr and have driven there as well. Each trip has given us the chance to be with our daughter, who we miss very much, as well as develop our relationship with Zach and our two wonderful grandsons, Wyatt and Augie. We have done so many fun things while we have been there but best of all has been spending time with our family.

We also took a fantastic trip to Belgium and the Netherlands. We saw magnificent art in the museums, visited historic sites from pre-history to modern times, and explored the beautiful cities of Amsterdam, Brussels, and Bruges. We stayed in a 500 year old house on a canal in Amsterdam, a quaint Droomhotel in Anderen, and a canal boat in Bruges. We had mussels and frites, crepes, pannakopen, delicious cheese, yummy chocolate, and lots of delicious brown beer. We even traveled into the northern Netherlands by car which was quite an adventure.

Other travels included taking Rachel on a trip to Washington D.C.; a trip to the Black Hills, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons; the Grand Canyon and Wyoming; Maine and Quebec; and the great Western driving trip to California and back again.

Besides travel there are other joys of retirement. I have loved the creative outlet of learning about glass fusing and attending classes at the Iowa Ceramic Center and Glass Studio. I have met lots of nice people who share my interests and inspire me with new ideas and techniques. It is a hobby I have brought into our home by creating fused glass windows that flank our entry doors, and by creating decorative pieces for display and table use.

I also love the relaxed pace of life. We can get up whenever we feel like, though I usually get up early anyway. I can read books as much as I want to, and work outside whenever it’s nice. I have reconnected with old friends from high school and also get together with friends from work. Butch and I get along great and haven’t run out of things to talk about even after being cooped up during a pandemic. We may have binge watched more tv than was good for us during that time. All in all it is too bad people have to wait so long to retire. It would be even more fun if we were young.

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
At the ButchieBoy main page click the Storyworth category to see all the entries

How did becoming a parent change you?

Butch

When I found out that Karen was pregnant with Lance, my whole world utterly and irrevocably changed. My easy going, somewhat irresponsible, and fairly uncommitted life came to a screeching halt. To add to the complexity of the situation, I had dropped out of college which blew my student draft deferment and meant I would probably be called up in a very short period of time. And since the Viet Nam War was at its height, there was a good chance that I would go into combat. Not a good situation for a new father-to-be to be in.

I started looking for a job and found one at Collins Radio as a draftsman. My folks let us make a little apartment in their basement so our most pressing needs were met. It was also removed enough from the rest of the household that we could have some privacy if we needed it. By about April of the year after we got married we thought we could rent a house of our own. We signed a year long lease on the house at 125 Bowling Street and set up shop as an independent family.

This is when the reality of existing as a family really set in. We, Karen and I, were responsible to pay for everything now. Not an easy task on a $2.75 hourly wage. I did get a raise to $2.87 ½ at my first performance review because they had classified me too low when I first started, but that was not enough to let us have lobster or anything.

Because I worked all day, Karen took on the major responsibility of doing the child rearing. I did change diapers and such, but I’m sure my part was way less than it should have been even in those times. The whole domestic division of labor was at a cusp around then. Men of my age were sensitized that they should assume a greater role in family responsibilities, but just what that percentage should be was an evolving process.

As I became more accustomed to family life, the requirements it demanded just seemed reasonable to me and I did what I needed to do to make things work for Karen, the kids, and myself. We got Karen through school first so she could earn the amount her efforts deserved. She ended up with a Masters. After that I went back to school and earned an Associates, a Bachelors, and a Masters degree. We bought a house and then later moved to another one and we proceeded with a pretty good life.

Karen

Becoming a parent was the difference between being a relative child and becoming an adult. I was only nineteen when I got pregnant and knew pretty much nothing about babies and young children. I had never had a babysitting job as a teen. Our parents did not have young friends who had little children and there were no young families in our neighborhood who were just starting families.

During my pregnancy, I was just getting used to being married and being a wife. I didn’t even think to read up on pregnancy and the birth process. I relied on my mom and Butch’s mom for any information about taking care of myself and what I could expect. As the time for birth drew nearer, I enjoyed receiving small gifts and preparing the things we would need. Butch built a cradle and I sewed little gowns and blankets to prepare.

When Lance was actually born everything suddenly became very real. On the day I was to come home from the hospital the nurse brought him into my room and told me to dress him to go home. It was the first time I was actually alone with him and I knew that I had no idea how to take care of him. I clumsily put on his diaper and the gown I had made for him. I realized just how tiny and helpless he was and I was very afraid. I felt tears fill my eyes and then, I decided that tears would do me no good. I dried my eyes and got him dressed. As I held him, a deep wave of love swept over me and I knew that it was my job to take care of him forever more. Of course we had those same feelings of love and responsibility when Wendy was born as well.

Being a parent meant that you have to put everything you do into the context of the needs of others. Butch and I often talked about how we grew up right along with our kids. I was so grateful that our parents were supportive and that we had two good examples of how to be a family and how to parent our kids. We also had to put many of our plans on hold. Finishing college and our career goals had to be delayed and our interactions with our friends changed too since we were the only ones with a family.

One thing about our approach that seems different than families today was that even though our kids were very important to us and we loved them dearly, they were not the most important members in our family. We as parents were most important. We needed to do what had to be done to create a stable family and take care of all our needs. We had to think of feeding our married relationship in order to be good leaders of our family. We had to feed our aspirations in order to support all of us and create stability and provide for everyone. Butch and I became a strong team.

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
At the ButchieBoy main page click the Storyworth catagory to see all the entries

What was your Dad like when you were a child?

Butch

My dad died when I was only 25 years old. Up until we got married and Karen and I started our own family, my father functioned as a parent. That is, he was in charge and we had a fairly routine father/son relationship. After I got married he still provided lots of parental support but he was no longer in charge. Karen and I had to make our own way in the world. When he died, I had not had a lot of occasions to interact with him in a relationship of equals. That was a shame because the more we saw each other as equals, the more I appreciated him.

As a child there were several things that impressed me about him. First, he had beautiful penmanship. I’m sure he must have learned it with the Palmer method. Every letter was beautifully shaped and proportioned. It was more like calligraphy than hand writing. His skill even extended as far as a great mastery of writing in Old English script. When I told him I had a serious interest in the Old English, he rooted around and found a copy of his old drafting textbook from college which had the whole Old English alphabet laid out and ready to be copied. I memorized each letter and could produce them at will. That was a skill that benefited me many times during the course of my life and led me into a profession that heavily involved typography.

Along those same lines, my father was artistic and very precise. Not in a pictorial or illustrative sense, but rather in a draftsmanship kind of way. He made technical illustrations that left no doubt about what he intended. A series of drawings he made, now sadly lost, were of a car he was going to alter to make it into a pickup truck. He also drew the plans for his and my mother’s new house at 3020 Southland St SW in Cedar Rapids. Interestingly enough, the plans for the house were drawn to be built on a lot at 3011 Schaeffer Drive SW, behind and a little to the north of where it finally ended up. Because of some unpleasantness we had with the neighbors on Schaeffer Dr we decided to build our house on the street behind the place it was originally going to be. The lot cost about half as much as the one we were going to build it on anyway. The only problem was on Schaeffer the lot was on the east side of the street. On Southland the lot was on the west side of the street, making the slope of the hill backwards of what the plans show. My dad just had the blueprints run out upside down.

In 1963 I expressed an interest in participating in the Soap Box Derby. Dad jumped right on that. The rules said that no one but the participant can build the racer, but I knew many competitors who had lots of help from their folks. My dad suggested lots of design tips. That was perfectly ok according to the rules. He did a couple of other things, but we made no attempt to hide them and those were ruled acceptable too. One was he machined a device that let the front axle be steered without drilling a hole in the center of it. We felt the hole seriously weakened the axle. Another was the skin we used to cover the car was made of Masonite. Dad knew some guy that could steam it and put a permanent curve in it. That was ok with the officials too, since I did all the fabrication on the car itself.

Race day came and I won my first heat, only to have the win declared invalid due to a false start. I lost the heat on the retry and was eliminated from the rest of the race. It was a big disappointment. I tried again the next year. I was in high school then. I made a mockup of the racer and took it to Alexander Lippisch, the famous German aviation engineer and the inventor of the flying wing. He happened to be working for Collins Radio at the time. He told me that it was a perfectly good design and what mattered the most was minimizing the frontal area. For all my concern about aerodynamics and the design decisions I made to maximize them, he told me they don’t really come into play until you reach about 70 miles per hour, a speed that no soap box racer comes anywhere near. Usually they can make about 35 miles per hour. As it turns out, I didn’t have time to work on it anyway. I did start the project but it got away from me and that year was the last time I could participate because I got too old after that.
After I went to college he did another nice thing for me. He hand made me a Bowie knife. He started with a piece of tool steel and machined the spine and cutting edge out of it. Then he shaped the tip to give it its final profile. However cool that was, it didn’t even compare to the skill that went making the handle. A tang extended out from the blade. I was about 5/8” wide and about ¼” thick. Along the length of the tang he cut a slot that was a little less than ¼”. He tapped threads down the slot. He cut about 30 or 40 pieces of phenolic resin to the cross sectional shape of the handle and milled a rectangular slot in each one. Then piece by piece had slid each section down the tang until he had built up the complete handle. At the end he machined an aluminum end cap that had a screw hole in it to attach the whole assembly to the tang. Once he had a nice solid handle he finished shaping it, then polished the blade with diamond polish so it shined like chrome. I was very proud of it. I cobbled up a sheath for it since it was razor sharp. The sheath was nowhere in the league of the knife. Quite the family heirloom. I showed it to my friends who were quite impressed. One of them, Mike Shahan, asked if he could borrow it one time. I said sure. That was the last time I ever saw it. He had become increasingly sinister about that time, I realize now. I suppose he sold it or threatened someone with it who took it away from him. At any rate he would never tell me what happened.

When I was young, the family would occasionally go camping but it was more of a way to avoid paying for a motel than it was as an activity in and of itself. Dad was never interested in playing catch or going fishing or any of the kinds of things other boys and their dads did together. I didn’t really notice. It was just the way our family did things. Later in life I realized that I felt a little left out about this. I wish I had had more one-on-one experiences with him.

Dad had the reputation for always saying no to a request before we even had a chance ask it. I made the following illustration to clarify just how I saw the situation. It was all done jokingly. Dad had a bit of a beer belly but he was not fat. You can get a sense of this by how I drew his arms and legs.

Karen

My dad, Lester Harold Spicer, was born in 1906 so he was 43 years old when I was born. That made him somewhat older than the fathers of most of my friends. He was a great dad and I loved him very much.

My dad was a very modest man, not at all showy in his manner and not very demonstrative in his affections. He was quiet. In a house full of 5 women he probably had a hard time getting a word in edgewise. He showed his love in lots of ways. Whenever he went on an errand, he always asked if someone wanted to go with him. I almost always said yes so I got to go to lots of hardware stores, lumber yards and other such places happily riding beside him in the front seat rather than squished into the middle in the back like when the whole family went somewhere. He also happily joined in on game nights when the family played Life or card games. He always knew my friends and talked to them when they came to the house. After he got to know them he joked with them too. Hugs were not frequent but were the more appreciated when they were given.

He was a hard worker and was very careful with money. He had lived a lot of his life without much money and had lived through the hard times of the depression. He told me that times were so hard for his young family that he had to chop wood to earn money to take care of them. That being said, when I was a kid, he always had money in the bank and in his wallet. Once, when we were first married, Butch and I found a car we wanted to buy. We looked at it on a Sunday and several people were interested in it. The guy said that the first one to give him a $100 in cash, a large sum in those days, would be the lucky buyer. We had the money in the bank but not in our pocket. I knew my dad would have the cash for us to borrow until we could get to the bank. We went to him and sure enough the car was ours!

My dad had a great sense of humor and loved to tell funny stories. In fact most of the stories he told ended up having a funny element that would often get him laughing so hard he could barely finish. Often his stories would be about the antics of guys he used to work with. The subject of the stories would always be called, “Old Gerhardt” or “Old Stepanick” or some such…always “Old.” He would also tell the stories with the appropriate German or Czech accent. He sense of humor extended to times the joke was on him. He was always willing to be teased and laugh along with us. Once, during an evening with aunts and uncles, he was teasing my Aunt Doty about something and to shut him up she picked up a paper bag from the counter and put it over his head. Unbeknownst to her, someone had recently emptied all of the ash trays into the bag. The cigarette butts and ashes trickled down onto his head and shoulders. After a horrified split second of silence everyone roared with laughter including my dad.

My dad had a saying for everything. Things leaned “toward Fisher’s Hill. My jeans were said to be so tight “you could crack a louse on them.” If you fell down you went “ass over teakettle.” Ice or other things were “slicker than snot.” A guy’s aim was so bad he “couldn’t hit a bushel of shit with a handful of blackberries.” I wish my memory was better so I could come up with more of his gems!

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
At the ButchieBoy main page click the Storyworth catagory to see all the entries

What were the first years of your marriage like?

Butch

When Karen and I decided to get married I was working at a low paying sign painter’s job that wouldn’t support the two of us. Karen was in college. I applied for a draftsman’s job at Collins Radio and was hired in the Test Equipment Support Unit. We drew up the plans that the engineers designed for electronic devices that tested the actual products that Collins sold. So most of these were “one-off” machines that verified whether the manufactured equipment performed as planned.

I started as a beginning draftsman for a whopping $2.75 per hour. This sounds worse today but it wasn’t even that great back then either. You could almost support a family on that, but it wasn’t an easy matter. My folks let us have a little apartment in their basement. We bought our own food and had an old Ford panel truck that we got from the seller because we were the first ones to show up with $100. It was a Sunday and Karen’s dad, Les just happened to have that much in his wallet. The truck only had a driver’s seat so we rigged up a lawn chair for Karen to sit in. This was incredibly dangerous and it’s a wonder she wasn’t badly hurt by a sharp turn or a sudden stop. It wasn’t bolted down of course. The windshield wipers hardly worked. They would swipe the rain away but stuck when they reached the end of their swing. We had a long, heavy string tied to the driver’s wiper and Karen had to give a tug to get it back to the beginning of the stroke. I was still working at Collins when the radiator blew up on the way to work so it couldn’t have been any later that December of 1969.

I had been putting off an operation to remove a pilonidal cyst, but I had to have it done which caused me to miss a couple of weeks of work. Something that worked to my disadvantage when Collins decided to lay off hundreds of workers. First they laid off all the goof offs, next came people like me who had missed a bunch of work (through no fault of their own in my case), but the most insidious was they laid off all the high paying workers who had a lot of time on the job.

In the middle of my time at Collins, Lance was born. He was definitely the star of the show. He was doted on by everyone. They used to put him in the middle of the dining room table and just stare at him.

Early in 1970 we moved to a little house at 125 Bowling Street SW. We leased it for a year and set up housekeeping on our own. I started carpenter apprentice school. It lasted two months and after graduating from that I started getting short term jobs out of the union hall. After several jobs I felt the work just wasn’t steady enough for me to count on. Money was tight and we had to be very careful when we bought groceries. We only had $7 a week to spend so Karen went around with a little tally clicker and for anything she needed after she hit the limit, she had to put something back. One of the advantages of the carpenter jobs was we could apply for food stamps in between. They felt that a family of three needed $15 a week to eat healthily so we got a 50% increase in groceries and that was all for food. It didn’t include things like dish soap or other non-edibles.

A friend of mine, Ray Baragary, suggested I try for a job at Midwest Metal Products. I got it and was the first draftsman they had had in a long time. I describe this job more fully in the story “What was the best job you ever had?”

While I was working there (1971), Mom decided to take the whole family to England for a month. I told my boss, asking for unpaid leave after my vacation leave ran out. As the day approached he would never tell me if it was ok or not. So when we left, I didn’t know if I would have a job when I got back. We had moved back into my parents’ house for the few months before we left in order to save up a little money to have for spending while we were in England.

We had a good time in England (see English Vacation – 1971). When we got home we got another house to ourselves. This one was out in the country at the end of the diagonal runway at the airport. It was called “High Top Corner” and was a house they moved to that location when they created the Coralville Reservoir. There was also an old schoolhouse on the same lot. Both buildings had been converted to be rental properties.

Karen

Butch and I were married on May 1, 1969 when he was 20 years old and I was just 19. I was pregnant when we married and unlike attitudes today, it was a big deal. Both of our families would have preferred that marriage would have come first. I had just finished my sophomore year of college but that came to a screeching halt and Butch had already dropped out and had not quite finished his sophomore year. It was an angst-y time in both of our lives since our families were disappointed. They were not mad at us but it was clear that the hopes they had for us did not include marriage and a child at such a young age. To top it all off, it was the middle of the Vietnam War and the threat of Butch being drafted was very real.

We married at the Linn County Courthouse in Cedar Rapids. Our family members sat in the courtroom jury box and Judge Harold Vietor married us in front of the judge’s bench. Butch’s sister, Judy, and our friend, Jim Cada stood up with us. We all went to my parents’ house for wedding cake and pictures.

We left that afternoon for a short honeymoon camping trip. Judy loaned us her Volkswagen bug and we borrowed a tent from a family friend, Judy’s old Girl Scout leader, Phyllis Brooks. We literally had nothing of our own.

I am sure that our marriage would not have survived without the unwavering support of our families. The two of us were in love which counted for a lot, but for countless young couples that was not enough. Both families surrounded us with love and were as committed as we were to make our marriage work. We had two great examples of what marriage should be and the idea that we would ever give up was not in our heads. First, Butch’s parents said that we could move into their basement so that we had a place to live. We used Butch’s childhood bedroom and turned the rest of the space into a living room, dining room and kitchen. Butch had a job at Collin’s Radio so we had an income. Our folks gave us cast off furniture and other household supplies to get us started. Our parents did not give us money because neither family had much extra but we knew they were there if things got desperate. We also had brothers and sisters who were very generous with gifts, time, and help. As soon as we had enough cash we bought a car which meant we could be somewhat independent. We were so lucky that our parents liked each other because we seemed to meld into one big family. For many years all of us spent major holidays together and got together for fun, and celebration. In my education career, I encountered many young parents who literally had no family to turn to for any support and I saw the impossible stresses that children, jobs, money, illness, and outside pressures put on a couple. I thank our parents everyday for being there for us.

In those early years, money was always a problem for us. We only had one income because Butch was the only one working. He has always had strong technical skills and has always had work. He got a job as a draftsman at Collins which provided a decent wage for the time. We had a chance to save money by living with his parents at first so that helped. Unfortunately, he was layed off from there just after Lance was born because he needed to have an operation that kept him out of work for a month or more. Of course we had very little money as a cushion to get by. He entered a carpenter apprentice program with the local union, hoping that it would grow into steady and well paid work. We moved out of his folks’ house after only a few months so we were on our own. We rented a small house on Bowling Street and were at the mercy of the carpenter’s union to be sent out on jobs. When he was working the pay was good, but often a job would only last for two weeks and then he’d have to wait again. I carried a plastic clicker with me to the grocery store. We had a weekly budget of $7 for groceries. I’d click in the prices and if I got to $7 before I had the necessities, I had to put things back on the shelves. I got a part time job at Sandy’s hamburgers and sisters Linda and Lisa stepped in to babysit for free for us while I worked. (Thank you dear sisters!) I only earned $.50/hr but it was just about enough to pay for a week of groceries. As time went on, Butch gave up on the carpentry because we needed a steady income. He had a couple of other drafting jobs but was finally hired at Midwest Metal Products for steady work. We had a bit of security and moved to a new rental property out by the airport.

During these first years, we had an interesting social life. On the one hand, we couldn’t go out with friends much because we had little money and a baby to take care of. On the other hand, we were an established couple and had our own place to live. Friends would gather at our house every weekend on either Friday or Saturday night for a party of some sort. Mostly it was music, a few beers and a half dozen friends. People sometimes brought snacks to share. Lance was a baby and just part of the party until his bedtime when things had to get quieter so he could sleep.

Around this time, Paddy and Raymond decided to take the whole family to England to visit Paddy’s family. They paid for our flights and general transportation while we were there but we needed to bring our own spending money. I had really never traveled before and this was a monumental adventure for me. It was the first time I flew on an airplane, the first time I saw an ocean, and the first time I visited a foreign country. Paddy’s family was very welcoming.

We had many memorable experiences including a visit to Stonehenge, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and sight seeing in London.

We had moved to a house by the airport when we returned from our trip but it was too far from town and too expensive to heat so we moved to the boxcar house on 21st Avenue SW. By this time Lance was a toddler, Butch had a steady job, and we decided that our best bet for getting somewhere was for me to go back to school and get my teaching degree. Tuition was manageable but money was tight and being a full time student and a mom was not easy. I remember this time of my life as being utterly exhausting. All the regular jobs of taking care of a family continued and time in class, commuting to Iowa City, and studying and completing course work was added on. Lance went to a daycare center that was a student cooperative. Each member family was expected to work at the center for twelve hours per week in lieu of full payment for child care, so that obligation was mine as well. My first year back I also got pregnant for Wendy and continued course work through the spring of 1972. Every break in the day when I didn’t have a class was spent studying, working at the daycare, or finding a place to lay down for a nap! After Wendy was born we switched childcare to our neighbor Marcia who took excellent care of our kids until I finished school. The two of us were determined to finish college and get our degrees. We were willing to do without any luxuries, new clothes, vacations etc. to accomplish that goal. We lived in a crummy house made from a boxcar for five years for heaven’s sake! I graduated in December of 1974. Butch graduated from Kirkwood Community College with an AA degree in 1973 and finished his bachelor’s degree at the University of Iowa in 1980 and his Master’s degree in 1982. During this time I had a teaching career spent mostly at College Community Schools at Prairie View Elementary.

We had a pretty family oriented life during these early years as most families with young children do. We were lucky to live in our hometown so our kids had a close relationship with both sets of grandparents and with their aunts and uncles. Most of our siblings were nearby and Lance and Wendy were loved and doted on by them too. Since we had little money, our family activities were often free or very inexpensive. Butch had been a Boy Scout and was an experienced camper so we spent a lot of time tent camping at nearby county parks. We started camping when our kids were infants and continued camping in some form through their high school years. Being in nature, exploring woods, rivers, plenty of dirt, and campfires made for a lot of kid fun. We often dragged our friends along and camped with John and Sherry Hawn, Linda and Lynn Rutherford, and Bob and Penny Unzeitig.

We did go on two family vacations. We traveled on a camping trip to Colorado when the kids were pretty small and visited my sister Diane in Florida and went to Disney World there.

These years were also a time of great sorrow. We lost both of our dear fathers in one year. Raymond had been a smoker his whole life and had a terrible cough and had trouble catching his breath for several years. He died in his sleep in January. The whole family was reeling with grief and Paddy was faced with providing for Bunny and Lisa who were still at home. Later that same year my dad was diagnosed with cancer and after a very painful illness died in June of that same year. Both of our mothers needed family support during this time and both of them found comfort and joy from Lance and Wendy.

I think that these early years of our marriage, though sometimes very difficult, helped us build an unbreakable relationship that has resulted in more than 50 happy years together.

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
At the ButchieBoy main page click the Storyworth catagory to see all the entries in the series.

What were your childhood Christmases like?

Butch

I remember my childhood Christmases quite fondly. They usually involved us kids getting up to open our presents, sitting around in our pajamas. Once we opened our presents we would play with them for a while. Sometime later we would get dressed and after that, we would have a big fancy meal, turkey usually. It was mostly a traditional American Christmas menu.

One year when we were older I talked Mom into having a more traditional English menu. Mom was from England but that side of Christmas dinner never showed itself very much. And she interpreted it to mean that we would have the English menu items AS WELL AS all the American fare we always had. I talked her into Yorkshire pudding, a roast goose, and plum pudding. Our oven was a side-by-side type, oven on the right and a rotisserie on the left. Mom was skeptical about the goose because she thought it would be too greasy. That’s why we cooked it in the rotisserie. With a pan underneath, it caught all the dripping grease. The breast was more like the dark meat of the turkey than the more delicately flavored white meat. Cooking it on the spit made the meat fairly dry however.

The plum pudding was great fun. It takes several days to make. And James Beard says it should be made a year before and aged. We took the necessary steps and when it was time to serve we poured brandy over the top. You light it at the last minute and bring it to the table. I had the honor of doing this but Mom was all over it too. We lit the thing at the kitchen counter to bring it to the dining room. None of us had any idea of how much brandy to use so I put what I thought was a reasonable amount on. You don’t want too little because it doesn’t put on much of a show. It can be a little dangerous if you put too much on. Unfortunately we tended toward putting too much on. So when I put the match to it there was a great big whoosh and being right next to it, Mom came away with curly little frizzled up eyebrows. We also put some prizes in the pudding. You guessed it, someone bit into one. No teeth were chipped or broken, thank goodness.

As I have said elsewhere in these memoirs my usual present was a set of toy soldiers, knights, dinosaurs, or cowboys. There were also many weapons, oftentimes a rifle or six-shooters. One of the pistols was a Mattel Fanner 50 with “shootin’ shells” and greenie stikMcaps, a public liability nightmare these days, but proudly proclaimed to be safe back in the 50’s. I would love to know how may law suits were brought against Mattel at the time.

As I got older I became interested in HO-scale slot car racers so I had several sets of those. I always wanted to incorporate one of those sets into a railroad layout but that was never to happen. My dad had been a model railroad enthusiast when I was young but he thought that HO was too small to work with easily. He was an O-gauge man. My brother Ray got the model trains when Dad died.

I don’t remember too many people having Christmas dinner with us. I’m sure they must have. I do know that my Uncle Jack had dinner with us twice. The first time was in the about 1954, when I was about 6. He was still married to his wife Sally at the time. Like my mom, Sally was a war bride and she married my uncle in England in 1947. Her real name was Sophia Emily Lewis. I don’t know if my uncle stayed on in England after the war or if he returned to marry her. When I went to college in 1966 I started corresponding with Uncle Jack. He must have been divorced by then. He was in the Veteran’s Hospital in Knoxville, Iowa. During the war he saw some pretty heavy action at Anzio. I’m pretty sure he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was an alcoholic and had had about half his stomach removed. When I suggested he should have  dinner with us at Christmas you could tell that my parents were hesitant. But the thought that it was the right thing to do won the day. I drove down to Knoxville and picked him up. I’m sure that he saw coming to our house as a chance to escape the hospital’s rigid control over his drinking. My folks must have got rid of everything to drink in the house. My dad said he would not get Jack anything to drink, so in defiance, Jack stomped off to find a bar. It was cold that Christmas and he only made it about two blocks before he couldn’t stand the cold anymore.  Home he came.

When we grew into our teens Judy and I had long since stopped believing in Santa and helped Mom and Dad get the presents ready for the Christmas morning opening. That was almost as much fun as opening the presents ourselves.

Karen

Our Christmas celebrations were happy times in my childhood. In the days and weeks leading up to Christmas Day, there were a few events that occurred every year and were very exciting for us kids.

My dad worked for Universal Engineering laying out blue prints on metal that would be fabricated into heavy rock crushing equipment. He was also a member of the local Machinists’ Union. Each year we looked forward to a Christmas party provided by each. I’m not sure I remember which part went with which organization but I guess it doesn’t really matter. I think it was the union party that was put on at the Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum in downtown Cedar Rapids on the island. The union showed several movies that were family oriented. I remember watching silent movies with Charlie Chaplain. One of my favorites was an amazing film with a big hook and ladder fire truck racing around a big city with lots of slapstick comedy.

After the movies, they would hand out huge bags of treats to each kid. We got 2 big white bags, one was filled with nuts in their shells like walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, and Brazil nuts. At the top of each bag was an enormous orange and a giant apple. The apple was always a Delicious which I did not care for. The second bag was filled with all kinds of hard Christmas candies in beautiful colors and shapes. My favorites were the ones filled with a kind of chewy jelly and the ones that looked like looped up ribbons.

The other party put on by Dad’s company was really cool. I think they served some kind of food like hot dogs or something and they gave each kid a very nice toy as a gift. They organized the toys by ages and kids were to line up to get their gift when their age range was called. The trick was you had to go up with your next older age group or you were likely to get a baby toy. The gifts were very high quality, not just a trinket so we looked forward to what we would get.

Another big event before Christmas was the school program. We would all dress up in our best clothes and each grade level would perform a song or two. It was held at night and our whole family would be in the audience so it was a big deal. On the day before Christmas vacation started each classroom would have a Christmas party, often with a gift exchange. Each girl was supposed to bring a girl’s gift and each boy brought a boy’s gift. Then just before school was out, we all sat in the hall outside our classroom. Each room sang one Christmas song for all the other classes. Taylor school was an old building with two stories and wooden floors. The songs would echo through the halls as each class had their turn. We all sat very quietly so we could hear the songs all around the building. It was lovely!

Our family celebration was just with our immediate family most years. We had a fresh pine tree decorated with all sorts of old fashioned ornaments topped by a beautiful angel with wavy blonde hair. One year Diane insisted on a foil tree with only blue ornaments and a revolving color wheel which shown on the tree. On Christmas Eve we ate special snacky foods and played board games or watched TV. We opened our gifts on Christmas morning. The littlest ones got one gift from Santa and another from Mom and Dad. Usually we got a toy and some clothes we might need.

Dinner was always a roasted turkey with all the trimmings that we all helped to prepare in some way.

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
At the ButchieBoy main page click the Storyworth catagory to see all the entries in the series.

What was Christmas like when your kids were young?

Butch

Karen started one Christmas tradition early and it was one of my very favorites. Sometime in November or December she would start getting the kids to draw a picture for each month of the year. The Winter picture might be a snowman. November could feature a Thanksgiving turkey. Karen would buy a small calendar about 2” x 3” with one page for each month. They would glue the calendar pages to the drawing and bind them into a calendar for the whole year. I guess it was quite a challenge for her.

I hadn’t remembered it before I ran into some pictures, but one year we celebrated Christmas with Karen’s Uncle Clint and Aunt Dotie Prior. Their daughter Becky had not married yet but they must have talked her husband-to-be, Mark O’Connell, into playing Santa. Here he is with our kids, Lance and Wendy.

One of my favorite presents when I was a kid was to get what I called a “set”. Usually toy soldiers of some sort. I started Lance out on these early on, but I don’t seem to remember them as as big a part of Lance’s life as they were for me. Here he is with his Uncle Bun getting ready for some heavy play.

I have one bittersweet Christmas memory. We were fairly poor in our early life with our kids. We never had a lot of money for presents. But I was convinced that they should have as good a quality as possible. Lance had wanted some real tools to play with so in the months before Christmas I went around buying one tool here and one tool there. These were the real thing. Saws could really cut. Hammers could pound nails. They were pricey but good. I bought a little tool box to store them in. We wrapped each tool individually and put them in the tool box. On Christmas morning Lance opened them and came over to me. I asked him what he found and he replied, “Not very many toys.” My heart broke into a million pieces for the mistake I had just made.

Karen

Butch and I both grew up in Cedar Rapids and stayed here all through our married life. All of our siblings moved away from Iowa and lived in other places. We had the unique and fortunate situation of our two families living in the same town as us and enjoying each other’s company. From the very first Christmas we had together, our two families celebrated in one big group. Even after we lost both of our dads, our mothers were here and family members came “home” to see them. When we moved to our house on Mansfield Avenue, my sisters and their families all came and stayed with us at Christmas, usually from Christmas Eve to a few days afterward. Our kids were surrounded by their extended family. They both developed close relationships with their loving aunts and uncles.

The days leading up to Christmas included getting the tree, from a local lot, putting it up and decorating it. When the kids were little, the whole family went on that outing together. In the kids’ teen years, Wendy and I took on those duties and had our own adventures. We had lots of hand-made as well as store-bought ornaments to put on the tree. Before our kids were old enough to help, Butch and I had made ornaments from colored paper, foil, popcorn and other materials. We made a set of 20 or 30 paper snowflakes that we still have to this day. Some were destroyed over the years but we just added more to put the finishing touch on the tree. Our topper was a peace symbol made of stiff paper, felt, and glitter until Butch carved me a special one for our 25th anniversary. The kids also made ornaments in school or in Brownies or Cub Scouts that we still have. When our granddaughter Rachel and I decorate our tree these days, there is a story for most of the ornaments that recall long ago students, souvenirs of trips, and old friends and new.

Another part of Christmas was cookies. We made lots of varieties because everyone had a different favorite. We had decorated sugar cookies, roll poly balls, cherry winks, snicker doodles, chocolate covered pretzels and a big batch of Chex mix. The kids picked out a selection of cookies for Santa and a pile of Chex mix for his reindeer and put them close to the fireplace. The stockings were hung up on the mantel for every kid who was sleeping over. My sister Linda’s boys brought theirs from Indiana almost every year.

We always had a large get together at our house on Christmas Eve. We had a meal, played games, talked and laughed, and tried to get the kids to bed at a reasonable hour. We had a rule that the kids could not come downstairs until 6:00 am or so. Then they could wake us up and see what Santa had brought. Lance and Wendy told us stories about the two of them sitting on the stairs and watching the clock so they could wake us up at exactly the earliest time. I have a suspicion that they may have peeked at their Santa gifts before they actually got us up. Santa filled their stockings and brought one nice toy each year that was left unwrapped under the tree. All other gifts were from Mom and Dad because how would it look or feel if they didn’t get any fun presents from their parents? We passed out all gifts when everyone was up and all adults had a cup of coffee in hand. When we were ready, everyone opened their gifts at the same time. It was lovely chaos with lots of happy raptures and thank-you’s around the room. The floor was covered with wrapping paper, toys, and boxes.

I often tried to make some kind of breakfast casserole to pop in the oven and we spent the rest of the day putting toys together, playing, and generally enjoying each other. In the early years, most times we had the big Christmas dinner at Grandma Paddy’s house. She had the most room and the most places to sit. Everyone helped to put the meal on the table by bringing food, cooking, or organizing the kids. This was also time for grandma presents. As our moms got older, we took over the hosting for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Our kids were older than their cousins and as they grew into their teens there was a lot of hero worship, joking around, and teasing for the little ones. I think Lance and Wendy had as much fun as the young cousins.

There were times when I was very busy with my job and ready for a break when Christmas vacation rolled around. Times when I wished for a quieter Christmas with less cooking to do, fewer messes to clean up, fewer towels to wash, and fewer people sleeping in my house on couches, air mattresses, and every bed. Then everyone would arrive, most people helped, and the fun would begin. I am very grateful we have a close family and I hope my kids understand what a treasure they were given when everyone got together

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
At the ButchieBoy main page click the Storyworth catagory to see all the entries in the series.