Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you might die?

Butch

I have had a couple of incidents where I thought I might die. One was when I got injured playing soccer and the other was when I was in an automobile accident.

Soccer Injury

After my freshman year in college at Iowa State University I was home for the summer. Our family friend Ray Scuffham had just started a new soccer team, the Comets. I tried out for the goalie’s position and to my surprise, got it. We practiced at Roosevelt Junior High. There were quite a few foreign kids on the team and they had a tremendous advantage over the rest of us because they had been playing all their lives. The Americans were basically just starting to learn the game. One was a Danish kid who had great control over the ball. On one occasion he came dancing down the field acting like he was going to kick the ball into the right side of the net, but at the last minute he gently tapped the ball to the left. That was the kind of trick that usually allowed him to score a point on me. This time however I was more onto his tactics so when he kicked the ball to the left, I dove for it and flicked it out of the way with my fingertips. But in order to reach the ball I had to throw myself horizontally, completely stretched out. I did save the ball, but I landed hard, flat on my stomach.

After the game my friend, Keith Andrews, and I were walking home and stopped at the Dairy Queen. By this time I was having difficulty walking and my abdomen was really starting to hurt. Keith’s dad, Lennie, just happened to be making a delivery to the ice cream stand and gave me a ride home. The next morning I could hardly get out of bed. Mom took me to the doctor who discovered that I was bleeding internally and had me admitted to the hospital. The next morning I went under the knife.

As they were wheeling me down to the operating room I was quite scared, thinking I might die during the operation. But I realized that if I did, I would be unconscious and if I woke up, I probably wasn’t going to die. A great calm came over me.

That injury had a huge effect on me. I couldn’t work while I recovered, so I couldn’t earn the money to go back to school. This was the time of the draft and I would almost certainly be sent to die in Vietnam. That part turned out OK eventually and I never did get drafted.

The Auto Accident

The next spring I found myself back at school. I would often hitchhike home on weekends to do laundry and other odd activities. Sometimes I would try to get someone to give me a lift out to the highway but on this occasion I just walked down to the corner of the block where my apartment was. I lived on Lincolnway in Ames, which was highway 30. No sooner had I put my thumb out than a Volkswagen beetle pulled over. The driver was in the Air Force and had a 3 day pass. He was trying to get home to Indianapolis from Colorado Springs and back in those 3 days. As we got close to Cedar Rapids, where I lived, his car blew its right front tire. It started to veer left and right as the guy tried to control the wheel. We screeched left and right across the highway and back. Luckily there were no oncoming cars. As the tire got flatter the car got harder to handle and at one point the right front tire got onto the soft shoulder and pulled us into the ditch. When the bumper hit the ground we started to roll and eventually ended up, right-side-up next to the fence.

As we rolled, my head hit the ceiling of the car, then back into the seat as it revolved another 180 degrees. Three times. I didn’t get seriously hurt. As I sat there I noticed that the driver’s door was open and all I could think of was that I was going to have to get out and look at the squashed remains of the unfortunate air cadet. I heard a groan and turned to look in the back seat where the kid was ass-over-tea-kettle. He got a bunch more scratches than I did. Otherwise, he was OK too.

By then, all sorts of cars had pulled over to offer assistance. A guy came up and helped us into his car and took us on into Cedar Rapids. He dropped us at the Highway Patrol office that was just at the west edge of town. I never saw the cadet again. They let me call my folks who came and picked me up. That was pretty much the end of the story.

Except, years later we were at a bar with some friends who had some other friend there too. We were talking about auto accidents by some coincidence. Our friend’s friend said she had seen a car wreck one time and went on to describe our accident exactly. It turns out she was a little girl at the time of the accident and it was her father that gave us the ride into town.

Karen

The worst problem I ever had health-wise was a perforation in my intestine. I am generally a very healthy person and rarely get sick with even a cold as a rule. This was the sickest I had ever been and was the most seriously dangerous thing that ever happened to me.

The day started out with me waking up and feeling a bit out of sorts. I was not in any pain but just did not feel well in a general way. Our microwave had stopped working and we had decided we would go shopping for a new one that day. I really wanted to get this taken care of so even though I was feeling crummy we went to an appliance store. After only a few minutes of walking around, I started feeling worse and asked Butch to take me home. I went to bed and immediately fell asleep. By the time I woke up I felt really terrible and decided to go to an urgent care center to see a doctor since it was after regular office hours.

In the past I had had bladder infections that really made me sick and feverish and I suspected that might be the problem in this case. I had pain, felt hot, and was beginning to feel sick to my stomach. The urgent care center had a lot of patients in the waiting room and the longer I waited the worse I felt. By the time I was called into an examination room I was feeling very bad and had started to vomit. The doctor examined me and rather quickly made his diagnosis. He called Butch into the room with us and told him to take me directly to the hospital and to tell them that he suspected an intestinal perforation and to give me a CAT scan as soon as possible. He told us not to go home first but to go directly there.

When we got to the emergency room, it was a madhouse! I had to wait again. There was a big ruckus with a handcuffed guy and several policemen as well as a full waiting room of sick people. It seemed like it took forever for them to call my name but after that things went pretty quickly. They examined me, heard my story, and got me ready for the CAT scan. I remember them showing us the scan and a small pinhole allowing fluids to escape into my body. They admitted me right away so they could start administering antibiotics to heal the perforation. I ended up hospitalized for almost a full week. I was given antibiotics, pain medication, and fluids intravenously for that whole time. I was not allowed to have anything by mouth for the length of my stay. The doctors made it very clear that the perforation, though small, was very serious and could have led to infection and other bad consequences. Before I left the hospital I met with my family doctor and a surgeon who recommended a bowel resection to remove the section of my intestine that had perforated.

The surgery was scheduled for six weeks from then to make sure I was well healed. By this time I felt fine but they assured me it would be best to go ahead. On the surgery day, I was not so worried even though I knew it was the most serious health problem I had ever had. Poor Butch was the one who worried now. Apparently the surgery took much longer than expected and Butch had to wait it out while I was unconscious and didn’t even know. They told me I would have to stay another week in the hospital but I ended up doing very well and going home after only three days.

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

What is the best job you’ve ever had?

Butch

At Midwest Metal Products I still had a lot of freedom about the way I did things, but all the administrative nightmares were assumed by others. MMP was a “job shop”. That is, it did not manufacture a set product, but worked on projects that people brought in one at a time. So, every job I worked on was different than the last one.

The company had not had a draftsman for about 6 months until I was hired. Up until the time I was hired as a design draftsman the boss drew up plans for the work freehand on a legal pad. This left tremendous room for making errors. I got to organize the entire drafting department.

People came in and talked to us about what they needed. When I arrived, the boss pretty much handed them over to me. Later on, he hired two other draftsmen but they didn’t report to me. We all worked independently on our own projects. This job was in 1970 and 71.

One of the new draftsmen, Bob Peterson, became a very good friend and we are still friends to this day (2021). He worked on mechanical projects. The other draftsman was Joe Sudlek. I don’t exactly remember what he did.

During my time there I got to engineer the way to fabricate several sculptures designed by a professor at the University of Iowa, Julius Schmidt.

    We had a large number of projects for Cargill that included stainless steel tanks for making corn products, and a huge burner for drying out corn starch. But the most interesting job I did was for a repair to a gigantic centrifuge. Corn was processed to a flour-like consistency in a wet process and then loaded into the centrifuge. It spun around till the flour was almost dry, then a blade ran up against the inside of the drum and scraped the flour out. The flour tumbled down a drainage gutter and then on to the rest of the production process.

    It was this drainage gutter that broke. It couldn’t be repaired and since it was manufactured in the Netherlands, it would take months to be replaced. Cargill came to us to see if we could do better. They had all the blueprints of all the pieces of the machine and one of them was for the drainage gutter or “afvoergoot” as it is called in Dutch. That’s right, all the blueprints were in dutch and the measurements were metric. I could have converted them to English but I thought it would be better overall if I did the plans in millimeters. The configuration was very complex and had been cast into the shape it was. We couldn’t manufacture such complex curves but we could make the part out of carefully arranged, triangular pieces of stainless steel. We got the job done and it turned out great.

Since a lot of the work Cargill does is processing corn, a lot of the type of equipment they use is also used in Mexico. Therefore, a lot of people that design that type of equipment are Mexican engineers. They were transplanted here while we were manufacturing the equipment used in the new Cargill plant that was under construction. We called them Señor Juan or Engineer Juan. They introduced our boss, Ray Urban, to the joys of eating hot, Mexican food. Back then, hardly anyone in Cedar Rapids ate Mexican food except Mexicans themselves.

While I worked there, my mother decided to treat the whole family to a month long vacation to England. When I found out, I told the boss that I was going to be gone for a month and that I would like to have time without pay for anything over my vacation. He would never answer me and tell me if that was ok or not. The day before we left I said, “I’m going to England tomorrow. Is that ok?” He never did answer. So off I went to England not knowing if I would have job when I got back.

When I did get back I called him and asked if I could return to work. He said I could and I asked him what about my salary. I suspected he might cut my pay or something. He said, “Oh, I’ll give you a raise.” But the next day when I showed up he told me he couldn’t give me a raise because while I was on the flight home, Nixon froze all the wages and prices. Not a big deal overall, but just my luck.

I continued the fun stuff I had been doing before but I noticed that the boss was acting a little strangely. He was really getting into the hot Mexican food a lot. He bought a snowmobile which he kept at work. He would send us workers out on the snowmobile with a sack of corn and a sack of pea gravel to feed the pheasants that hung around in our edge of town location. Things just got stranger and stranger. Shortly after that I was planning my next vacation and I told him I would like to take it at such and such a time. He said that when I went to England I had officially quit and that after restarting I hadn’t put in enough time to have earned any vacation. Right. There was no policy to back this up nor any sort of national rule. He was just doing it out of meanness for whatever reason I don’t know. I left work that day vowing not to return. When I got home Karen called and told me she just wrecked the car and I said, “Great, I just quit my job!”

I found another job pretty quickly so all worked out there. A month or two later I ran into the vice president of Midwest Metal Products and was complaining a little that I thought I had been treated unfairly. He said, “Didn’t you know? Ray (the boss) was dying of Leukemia” and that’s why he was acting so goofy. I felt a little bad about that. I think I could have risen quite high in that company if I hadn’t quit, but live and learn.

Karen

My career as an educator actually gave me an opportunity to fill a variety of roles. Except for a brief period of subbing when I first graduated, and one year teaching half day kindergarten in Cedar Rapids, I worked in the College Community School District. I worked in the district for 36 years and in that time I was a classroom teacher for grades 1-3, a librarian, a gifted and talented teacher, a teacher leader, and finally a central office administrator.

I loved being a teacher and really liked getting to know elementary aged kids. They are mostly loving, kind, curious, and funny at that level. I also made life long friendships with other teachers who I consider some of the best, most dedicated people in the world. I truly always liked my job even when it was stressful and exhausting. There was always something new to learn and there were all those great kids to know. It was hard to pick a best job out of all the jobs I held because each one had been good. I finally settled on my time as the Prairie View Media Specialist as the best job of all.

This was a very rewarding role for me. The library in our building was small and had been poorly funded for many years. When the Ridge building was proposed as the first new elementary building to open in a long time, all of the other buildings were expanded and updated so that all students had the same access to resources. I had the exciting opportunity to work with the building architect who was designing the space and with other district media specialists to plan for the new media centers. I had always been a big reader and this was an opportunity to open a top notch library for our kids. I was not a certified librarian and relied on my teaching experience and love of books to see me through. I had a steep learning curve.

First, the average library budget for new books was about $2-3000 for a year at that time. To upgrade the new library in our school I was given a budget of around $40,000. It was an amazing amount of money but money would have to be carefully spent to get everything we would need. I worked on ordering a balance of fiction and nonfiction materials across the k-5 grade levels taking into account interests, content learning, sturdiness and appeal. I wanted to get books in the hands of students and wanted them to be excited about what they would find inside the new library. Previously, since budgets were so small, every book had to last forever. The books that had been purchased had sturdy library bindings with no pictures on the covers. I bought books that looked more like hard cover paperbacks. Every one of them were brightly colored and appealing. I focused on buying new titles that would reach student interests while relying on recommended book lists of all sorts. The media specialists worked together to buy many things in common but were also on the lookout for things to enrich the collections already in place. It was very hard work and we all spent hours pouring through book lists and finding the best deals possible.

At the same time we were switching to an automated library system with automated checkout and electronic inventory. We had to label and process every new book in a consistent manner, then load the information into our software. I had a library assistant for much of the work but it was important for me to learn how the system worked so that I could teach her how to do it. That also meant that for the first time, we would have computer stations for students to use to search for information and find what they needed…also my job. Also, each building would set up a computer lab for students and teachers to learn how to use new technology in our building. These labs would be supervised by technicians who were not certified teachers so each media specialist had to help set up these labs and support how they would be used. Finally, I also was in charge of the Extended Learning Program for the building and worked with fourth and fifth grade students who were identified as gifted and talented.

It was a big job to have all of these roles and it was a very busy time for me. The summer before the new library opened I read every new fiction book that I had ordered so that I would be familiar with everything kids would be reading. During those first years especially, kids were thrilled with all the new books and excited to learn about the new library. The parts of the job I liked the most were reading aloud to the little ones, helping kids find books that they wanted to read, being silly and dressing up like book characters, and making the library friendly and fun to visit.

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

Describe the homes you’ve lived in as an adult.

3020 Southland Street SW, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1969-1970)

Butch: I moved back home from college in 1969 and in March I got a job at Collins Radio in preparation for Karen’s and my upcoming wedding. When we were first married, I, now along with Karen, continued to live at 3020. Besides my room from high school, the rest of the basement was given over to us for an independent apartment. This is the home we brought our baby Lance to. We lived there till we could rent a house of our own.

Karen: We were so fortunate to have the support of our family when we married. We were very young and had very few resources. We turned the basement of Paddy and Raymond’s house into a home. It was really a large space and already had a small bathroom inside the laundry room. We set up another corner of the laundry room as a kitchen and cooked and ate separately from his family. The big main room became a living room and dining room which we furnished with odds and ends from our parents. I was grateful to have a place that was just ours. We lived there for less than a year but it was such a helpful start for becoming first a wife and then a mother.

125 Bowling Street SW, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1970-1971)

Butch: We leased this house for a year starting in the early spring of 1970. It was the first house of our own. We got a puppy for Lance which we named Bumpkin. It was a beagle mix. The house was small. They said it had two bedrooms but a 6’x6’ closet can hardly be considered a bedroom. The second floor was finished though and it was plenty big for Lance, Karen and me. Among our friends we were the only married couple with a house of our own so we had a party every Friday or Saturday night. About the time our lease was up, my mom said she wanted to take the whole family to England. We moved back into 3020 for a couple of months to get enough spending money together for the trip. When we got back we got another house of our own. Sometime after we moved out they remodeled the house. They added a full second story and built a huge garage in the front yard. The garage was bigger than the house itself.

Karen: This was a tiny little house with few conveniences but we didn’t need much. The yard was huge and had three apple trees near the house. I first thought this would be a big bonus, but the trees had never been cared for and only produced small wormy apples that fell from the tree and rotted on the ground to make a huge squishy mess. It also had a basement under part of the house with a scary dirt crawl space that absolutely terrified me. We were terribly poor when we lived here because Butch was working as an apprentice carpenter and could only work when he was sent out by the union. We barely had enough money for food each week and I budgeted just $7 per week for groceries!

High Top Corner, southern Linn County, Iowa (1971)

Butch: We moved here after our trip to England. It was an old farm house that had been moved to the site of an old school yard when the Corps of Engineers flooded the Coralville Reservoir some years before. The house was divided front and back so we and the other tenants, Chris and Marsha Miles, had a basement, first and second floor. We had the back half of the house. It was right next to the Crandic Railroad Line to Iowa City and right at the end of the runway of the Cedar Rapids Airport. We had to pay for our own propane gas and it was more than we could afford. The landlord, Farmer Frank Dolezal, tried to cheat us out of our deposit but we owed him so much for gas, we told him to apply the deposit to our gas bill and we ended up not getting cheated. This house has since been torn down.

Karen: This house was big and roomy and had some charming features that I really liked. Since the house had been moved it had a brand new, clean, dry basement of concrete block with a cement floor…nothing to be scared of there! The first floor had a large kitchen with plenty of room for a table, stove, and refrigerator. It also had a big walk-in pantry for storage. A large bathroom was off the kitchen and also a door leading to a small screened porch. The living room was also large and had a big bay window facing the train tracks. The train engineer would often blow his whistle in the middle of the night as he passed our house. Upstairs there were two bedroom and just off our room was a deck on the roof of the porch below. We often sat on that deck in the summer to watch planes taking off and landing and to do some star gazing.

941 21st Avenue SW, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1972-1976)

Butch: When we were first married I was an assistant and a scoutmaster for my old unit, Troop 2. One of the dads on the troop committee had a house to rent just at the time we were moving back into town from the country. Because he knew us we didn’t have to pay any deposit, something we were touchy about just then. This is where we lived when I started working for the City, when Wendy was born, when I graduated from Kirkwood, when our fathers died, and when Karen graduated from the University of Iowa and got her first job. The house was made from an old box car and had about 3 or 4 additions. There were two huge cottonwood trees in the front yard that the landlord wanted to cut down but we wouldn’t let him. In the back was a garage made of rusty, galvanized sheeting. The house and garage are still standing (2010) but the landlord has had his way and the trees are gone. Our neighbors on one side were Ron and Charlene Brooker.

Karen: This house was truly ugly from the outside. It had a dirt driveway and the ugly metal garage in back. The house itself was an odd shape because it started out as a boxcar and had odd additions built on over the years and it was sided with dingy white asbestos shingles. When we moved in, I painted every room and cleaned it very thoroughly. It actually had a fair amount of space but was awkwardly divided. Eventually we organized it into 2 bedrooms, living room, kitchen, dining room and utility/ storage room. I only realized the bathroom had no sink when we were moving in. It is really unhandy not to have one, and we lived there for over five years! It was economical to live there and though it saw us through some momentous events in our life, I couldn’t wait to move out.

3019 Mansfield Avenue SE, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1976 – 2003)

Butch: By 1976 I had a pretty good job and Karen was established as a teacher, even though she was subject to the yearly threat of “reductions in force.” We felt we could afford to buy a house of our own. We qualified for an FHA loan which meant that we only had to put 2% down ($500) and the seller had to pay 3% in points. We did have to pay off all our outstanding loans which hardly amounted to anything. They consisted mostly of Karen’s guaranteed student loans and one at the credit union. The asking price for the house was $24,500 which we offered. We had looked at about 20 or 30 houses and bid on three others only to be outmaneuvered by some other home buyer at the end of each offer. The realtor talked some people into selling this house to us. It wasn’t even on the market. I worked at the City of Cedar Rapids with our realtor’s son, who had been engaged to the seller’s daughter. And the realtor had sold the house to the Katchers five years before. Except for one year for Lance, our kids lived in this house the entire time they went to school. They left for college from here. I graduated from the University of Iowa, got laid off from the City and started my own business while we lived here. One problem with this house was it only had one bathroom. It did have a shower in the basement but only one toilet in the entire place. As our folks got older, our brothers and sisters started to stay at our house more often when they came for Christmas and other holidays. While we had plenty of places to sleep, there was always heavy traffic in the bathroom. We tried everything we could think of to remodel the place to get even a powder room, but we always came back to the conclusion that we just ought to buy a new house. Karen would look in the Sunday newspaper and we would drive by interesting houses. So when she saw an open house one weekend only 3 blocks away, we drove over to have a look. When we decided to sell, the buyer offered us the asking price and an additional $5000 with the stipulation that we return the $5000 after the sale. This was some sort of credit mumbo jumbo for her but it clinched the deal.

Karen: This was a great house for our kids to grow up in. We lived in a nice quiet neighborhood with nearby schools, Bever Park, and other kids to play with. Ours was the only house on our block that faced Mansfield Avenue which gave us added privacy. It had a nice yard with room to play and also for me to enjoy growing flowers. We eventually built a patio with pavers for more room outside. I loved having a screened in front porch like the one we had in my childhood home. I furnished it almost the same as that one with a daybed, some wicker chairs and plenty of houseplants. On summer nights when the kids got older they could sleep out there for an adventure. We had a bungalow style living space with 2 bedrooms downstairs with a bathroom between. We always used the back bedroom as a den. We also had a living room, dining room, and kitchen. The living room had a big fireplace that with the adjacent shelving took up most of one wall. There were 2 bedrooms upstairs for the kids. I have very warm feelings for this house. We had a lot of fun and happy times here and lived happily there for 27 years.

3247 Bever Circle SE, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (2003 – Present)

Butch: While looking at the house on Bever Circle, Karen pulled me aside and said, “Don’t you just love this house?” I did love it. There were a few small problems that we would have to take care of, but the price was right and we bought it. One of the first things I had to do was build a workshop. There was not one extra square inch anywhere in the house. The woman we bought the house from along with her recently departed husband had built the house new in 1959 and she lived in it till she sold it to us. A “mid-century modern” the house was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s usonian homes. It was designed by Crites and McConnell Architects and was built by the top developer in town. The problem she had when she sold it was nobody in Cedar Rapids wanted a contemporary house as they say. Her loss was our gain and we did quite well with our offer. Our realtor said she found the one couple in the city that wanted a house like that, but I know there was at least one other because they made an offer after ours had already been accepted.

Karen: Like Butch said above, I fell I love with this house at first sight. I loved the lot which was heavily wooded with huge old oak trees and a big catalpa among a mixture of smaller trees. The house had huge windows in every room that looked out into the trees. The master bedroom is on the second floor at the end of the house and we immediately named it the treehouse because of the floor to ceiling windows looking out into the tops of the trees outside. In our Mansfield Avenue house all the rooms were painted in nuetral colors but in this house I wanted a different pallet. I painted the rooms the colors of a fall day with a dark red kitchen, an orange living and dining room, and bedrooms in golds, green, and more orange. In 2021 as I write this, we have lived here for 18 years and I still get a rush of pleasure when I walk inside.

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

What qualities do you most value in your better half?

Butch

It’s early. 4:00 in the morning maybe. The sun is only starting to lighten up the midnight blackness. The increasing light only just gives the tiniest glow to the window shades. It will be a while yet before the dawn. I reach over and touch her shoulder that is sneaking out from under the covers. The night air has made her shoulder a little cold so I put my hand on it to give it a little warmth, then I pull the covers up and tuck them in around her neck. In a little while she starts to rustle. Sometimes we chat a bit but more often she gets out of bed and goes down to the kitchen to start the coffee and poach herself a couple of eggs. In my own good time I too, get up. In the dining room she is working her newspaper puzzles and I give her a good morning kiss on my way to the coffee pot. Back in my place at the table I start to read the newspaper on my computer. The day has begun.

More than anything else, I love how kind and generous she is with me. As I’ve got older she is always there to lend me a shoulder when I’m walking down a rocky path or over uneven ground. Sometimes when I get up in the morning I’ve found that she has cooked bacon or whipped up a batch of salmon spread for bagels or rye bread. A homemade batch of cookies or even a pie sometimes appears out of nowhere to make our lives that much nicer.

My Love has always been artistic but has hidden it under a bushel. With her starting to work in fused glass, her art has come into its own. Plates, dishes, and panels are just some of the things she has created. We have collaborated together in the production of sculptures, which I have really enjoyed. Her artistic tastes mirror my own.

Together we have produced two wonderful children and from them, 4 grandchildren. How can I ever thank her enough for that? They are our delights.

Karen

As I write this in June of 2021, Butch and I have been married for 52 years. We have lived our life together for a long time and have shared many good times and hard times along the way. It is somewhat difficult to separate individual qualities of a person who actually seems like half of me. I’ll give it a try.

One difference in the two of us is how outgoing we are. Don’t get me wrong. I love people and have many friends I feel close to but I have always been a bit shy and am reticent when meeting new people. Butch, on the other hand, “has never met a stranger”. He readily talks to people he doesn’t know and quickly finds some kind of connection with them. In our travels he strikes up conversations with other travelers, waitresses, ticket agents and the like that draw me in as well. We met an Australian couple on a train when we were traveling in Belgium and enjoyed a friendly conversation for the whole journey that we enjoyed a lot. These conversations make travel richer and probably wouldn’t happen if left to me.

Butch is also a meticulous planner. I am a doer and if things were totally left up to me, I would just plunge in and get started before I had looked very far ahead. I think this is an area where our two different approaches are very complimentary. It is another way that we are a good team. Our travels are a good example of how this works out. When we decide on a destination for one of our car trips, I immediately start looking at the possibilities of what we would enjoy doing at our end point and some potential places along the way. I get pretty specific by looking for special events that might be coming up. When we were planning our trip to Yellowstone, I discovered that there was an annual Buffalo round-up with cowboys and the whole works on one day in the fall. I got really excited about it and immediately wanted to go. Here’s where the planner comes in. Butch takes over and fills in the details about how long it would take to drive there, how much driving time is reasonable in a day, and what routes we could potentially take to get there. He sketches out mileage and timelines to make it practical and pleasant while I pick out more things we might enjoy. He comes up with a chart that guides our trip. We are not too rigid to take advantage of a nice surprise along the way but our plan keeps us from getting into trouble.

Butch can always make me laugh. I am the worrier in our family which, of course, never solves anything. When we are together there is always teasing and joking around. We have tons of shared memories that we can laugh about to lighten most situations. In 2020, during the pandemic, I often thought how lucky we were to be quarantined together. I have several friends who did not have a partner and felt very lucky that I did… even though some of his jokes are lame indeed!
Another quality I most value is harder to identify but for want of a better term I will call it our “connection.” It is hard to explain except to say that when I feel something strongly, there is no one I want to share it with more than Butch. A joy is doubled if I can share it with him and a sorrow is bearable if he is there. He has the hand I want to hold!

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 is the longest project you have ever worked on?

When this topic arrived I sent it to Karen to comment on too. She got Johnny-on-the-Spot and knocked out her story in record time. I put it off however. Her longest project and my longest are actually the same, putting new siding on our house at 3019 Mansfield Ave SE, so I had to come up with another topic for my account. You get two tales for the price of one.

Butch

The second longest project I ever worked on was building a stripper canoe with my son, Lance. Our friend John Hawn had already built several of these canoes and we were anxious to try one ourselves. The hull of these canoes is built of thin, narrow strips of light but durable wood, often western red cedar but in our case clear redwood. Then it is covered with clear fiberglass. The fiberglass is what the functional part of the boat actually is. The wood is merely to provide the basic shape and look beautiful.

John lent us his copy of a book, Canoecraft, by Ted Moores to help us decide which kind of canoe to build. There are about 20 different designs to choose from in the book. Eventually we got our own copy because it is invaluable in the construction of a project like this. Lance chose the Redbird.

Throughout the book the author has plans and tables to tell you how to make your canoe. Think of the canoe as being cut across every foot from front to back. Each cross section has a chart that tells how wide the canoe is starting at the bottom and then every inch up from there till you get to the highest point in the bow and stern.

You plot these points out on a set of plans. I set up my plans in a computer program called Corel Draw. What I discovered right off is that a chart of numbers can only come so close to actually making the curves of the canoe as they should be. Even a measurement of as little as 1/16” can make a big difference in the lines of the canoe. I corrected each little dip or flaw in the lines. This can cause the creation of a new defect to the adjoining lines, so you have to go back and correct that. Eventually by working back and forth between these measurements you can get the accuracy finer and finer till it is just perfect. Another problem I had with this was that the author was very concerned that things were smooth below the water line where it would affect the flow as the canoe cut through the lake or river. But above the widest part of the canoe he gave little attention to how those lines were drawn. I refined those as well so the final design was a thing of beauty.

I had the blueprints run out, one for every foot of canoe and the bow and stern pieces as well. We were using half inch plywood for our forms. We glued the blueprints on the wood and cut them out about a 1/16 inch bigger than the final size. Then we used the disk sander to grind in to the exact edge of each form. The total form was put together on a strongback, two sturdy 2×12’s that we very carefully picked out to make sure they were straight and true. I made some aluminum brackets that got screwed to the strongback. The brackets had slots in them so we could make fine adjustments to get the overall shape as perfect as possible. We screwed the cross-sectional forms to the brackets and adjusted them to perfection.

Most stripper canoes are made of Western Red Cedar. This is the strongest wood for the weight that you can buy. Redwood is almost just as good, only adding a pound or two to the entire canoe. While it was hard to come by at the time we built the canoe, you could still buy boards of clear, quartersawn redwood the entire length of the canoe. When we went to the lumberyard to buy it, the owner of the yard, Larry Parks, asked what we were going to use the wood for. We told him that we would use it for a hand built stripper canoe. His father had originally acquired the redwood and Larry got it when his father retired. It was very special to him and he didn’t want it used for something like a deck. Our use for it passed the test. He looked at our plans and the material list and told us before he would sell us the wood we had to go home and figure out just how many 18 foot boards, how many 16 foot ones, and so forth that we needed. The wood was so precious that he was not willing to sell us an 18 foot board that we would cut down to 14 feet. We saw the logic in that and complied with his request.

We were going to trim our strips out of the redwood boards using a band saw because it would make the minimum waste from the saw kerf. Initial attempts to do this taught us that the band saw doesn’t cut a true enough line and had a tendency to wiggle left and right, making a strip of unequal thickness. We decided to use a table saw instead. The waste of the saw dust was 3 or 4 times as much from this wider kerf, but overall it was a better way to do it. We cut the strips to a 5/16” thickness, which gave us 1/16” for planing it smooth. When all the various length pieces were cut and planed, we laid them out by length and arranged them by color. Lance’s friend Jim Groff helped us with cutting the boards.

The boards we bought were ¾” thick, so the strips were 5/16” thick by ¾” wide when cut. We planed these down to ¼” thick. If you just attached these to the form in this configuration, you would get V-shaped slots between the strips as they fanned around the form. The last step in preparing the strips was to give them a bead and cove, which was to cut a rounded edge on one side of the strip and a cove shaped edge on the other side. The rounded edge tucks neatly into the cove and prevents any unwanted light from being seen between the two strips.

Now we were ready to start putting the strips on the forms. The usual way to do this is to lay a strip onto the form and staple it in place. This makes for pretty fast assembly but leaves an unpleasant looking pin hole where the staple went through the strip. This doesn’t cause any functional problem because the whole canoe is eventually sealed in fiberglass. But when you portage between lakes, you carry the canoe above your head and every one of those pin holes shines like a beacon through your canoe. We didn’t want that so I designed some clips made from maple that you could use to press the strips to the frame with then tighten some screws that held the strips in the right spot till the glue dried. The down side of this was that you could only do two or three strips a day, making the whole process a lot longer. But, we were under no time limit and that extra time was worth it because of how much better our canoe looked.

You can start putting strips on the frame wherever you want but we chose to put our first strip at the very widest part of the canoe called the beam. We just used a regular strip, but if you were going to put in any decorative strips of wood in your canoe, this would be a particularly good place to do it. Since this first strip is the foundation and anchor for all the other strips, we decided to actually screw it onto the frame. This meant that there would be a series of holes along the whole length of the canoe, but when we were done putting the strips on we plugged the holes with contrasting dowel so it became a nice decorative touch. You put the first strip on with the cove side up. This provides a neat little channel for putting a line of glue in. We got a special glue syringe for that purpose and it worked great. We added glue to the main strip and put the next strip into it, clamping it down at each bulkhead with one of my special clamps. Then we did the same thing on the other side. We came back to the first strip. Taking off one clamp at a time we added a second strip to one side and then the other.

Work progressed like this day to day till we got to the horizontal, flat bottom of the canoe. By this time the strips had been subjected to all sorts of stress, not only wrapping around the frame but being bent the cross direction too. That is much more difficult on the wood. You arrive at a place called the football region where it is considerably harder to get the strips to bend properly. But we persisted slowly and carefully and finally got the strips on. Then you start at the beam strip again only this time you work downward which makes for a little complication applying the glue. We also put a strip of masking tape between the wooden strips and the frame. If a little glue leaked out, it wouldn’t attach the strips to the form forever.

The next step was sanding. With all the strips glued together the outside of the canoe has a faceted surface where the flat parts of the strips didn’t blend perfectly. We had to sand the whole surface smooth to get a perfectly rounded profile. We first used a belt sander perpendicular to the strips. After it was pretty well shaped, we continued with an orbital sander to give the canoe an ultra smooth, polished surface. We had to do this both on the outside and the inside.

Now that the canoe was pretty much in its final form, the fiberglass needed to be applied. This was a tricky and delicate process. The materials are fairly expensive and the application has to be done just so. The temperature had to be in just the right range, something that was a bit of a problem since we were heading into winter and had an unheated garage. We gathered up all the heaters we could find and stabilized the temperature as best we could. At the last minute when we were ready to begin I had to leave to attend a funeral for a family friend, Ray Scuffham. Lance had to go on with the intricate process all by himself. He did a great job.

Once the shell was taken off the form it really looked like a boat. Now the gunwales had to be added. These are what stiffen and stabilize the top edge of the canoe. Otherwise, the top edge would roll down and the boat would flatten out amidships. It was a tricky business to locate the gunwales up and down. Their location was clearly marked on the forms. I think we marked the spot with pencil lines while the two were still together. The gunwales were two squarish strips, one running on the outside edge of the canoe and the other running just opposite it on the inside. The two are the same except the inside one has the addition of scuppers. These are small rectangular slots that allow any water that the canoe has taken on during use to be drained out when the canoe is lifted up and tipped on its side. We made them out of clear mahogany. The center thwart and seat frames were also made of mahogany.

With the gunwales installed and stiffening up the canoe, there were just a few final steps to completing the work. Karen had been busy caning the seats. They were all done by hand by the traditional method of weaving individual bamboo strips into an octagonal pattern. The seats stabilize the the gunwales front and back and the middle is strengthened by a custom carved thwart. This included a cutout notch for nesting your neck in while portaging, The last touch was adding the decks fore and aft. This really strengthened the bow and stern.

The big day arrived. It was time to launch the canoe. We took it to a small backwater lake by Ellis Park. Putting the canoe in the water and having it float properly was the first test. We passed with flying colors. Lance christened it traditionally by pouring champagne on the bow. Then he and Cherise  pushed off and headed out into the lake. A few minutes of paddling showed them how stable the canoe really was.

Next stop, the Quetico, the Canadian equivalent of our Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

This account took me a long time to get recorded. I realized that it really needed pictures and that all the ones I had printed when we were building the canoe had been misplaced. I had to go find the original negatives which were in a strange format and not easy to get copies from nowadays. I had to learn how to process them myself. That was a time-consuming and difficult task. It took me almost a whole week to get them all processed for the few that appear in this account.

I think this story is one of my very favorites.

Karen

In 1976 Butch and I bought our first house which was a little bungalow at 3019 Mansfield Ave SE. Our realtor showed us many houses of all sorts and we actually bid on several of them. Finally he talked to the owners of this house and convinced them it was time for them to sell. When we bought it, we thought that we would probably live there for five or so years and then move on. Instead we lived there for twenty-seven years. Lance and Wendy grew up there, and fondly consider it their family home.

The house was sided with old fashioned brittle asbestos siding. While asbestos is dangerous in a powdered or fibrous form, these siding tiles were not and were a very sturdy siding material. However they were old and broken and the tiles were becoming unsightly. Butch and I decided to re-side the house in 1999. We did some checking around for prices and decided to do the work ourselves to save money. We mostly worked on vacation time and weekends through the whole process. Thus began the longest, and hardest, project I ever worked on!

We rented scaffolding and began the work. This scaffolding was the best decision we made. It was worth every penny and made our work much safer. The first step was removing the old siding which was back breaking work. There are special rules for handling and disposing of asbestos. We had to get a special permit, then as we took the tiles off we had to do it with the least amount of breakage possible. That meant prying out the nails one by one (usually Butch), stacking the tiles, and handing them down to someone on the ground (usually me). Small stacks had to be packed in two heavy grade plastic bags and sealed with the tie strings. The bags were very heavy and when we had a truck load, had to be taken to the city dump for disposal. The dump had a special area for these materials and an additional dumping fee for each load. By the time we were finished with this phase, Butch and the gal in the booth at the dump, Annette, were on a friendly first name basis. Once the asbestos siding, tar paper, and old wooden siding were removed we could see the thick horizontal wood cladding the house which was rather beautiful in is own way.

Since the house was bare, we decided to hire an insulation company to insulate the walls and attic of the house with blown in insulation. That was another great decision because along with a new furnace installed later, we were able to both heat and cool our house more economically. When that was finished, we wrapped the entire house in tar paper. This was very satisfying and nowhere near as hard as the tear off. By adding the tar paper in neat even strips over all sides it started to look better and was more consistent. This was a very good thing because the tar paper stayed visible for a very long time.

The next step was very time consuming because we decided to replace all of the white trim on the house with vinyl boards. Originally the house was built with wooden trim around all of the doors and windows and at the top of the first story as it met the roof. That meant another round of tear off and a lot of detail work to cut and apply the vinyl boards. Butch designed the trim to accent the look of a bungalow style which required wide trim boards with narrower pieces above and below to add character. All of the trim on the whole house had to be completed before any of the actual siding could be installed. This part took us the rest of the way through the fall of 1999 and into 2000. Many of the pictures from this phase were lost in a computer disc failure so are not documented. We worked so hard and were helped by many folks over the course of this project. Our nephew Seth, our friends Lynne and Doug, and my sister Linda and brother-in-law Dan were big contributors who volunteered all sorts of time.

The summer of 2000 was when we did the big push to put up the siding on the whole house and garage. Butch and I chose a 4 1/2” reveal tan siding for the first story and a 2” reveal in the same color for the second story. The two of us had to work as a team, measuring, cutting, and nailing each piece of siding onto the house which meant that sometimes I had to climb on the scaffolding to help. I am very uneasy with heights so this was especially challenging for me. My sister Linda, and brother-in-law Dan Knudsen came to spend a weekend and put up all of the siding on the highest peaks of the house and on the dormers. For those, a person had to crawl around on the roof and maneuver into tight spaces which, by this time, was pretty much beyond the two of us. I’m sure we were never able to thank them enough for going above and beyond like they did but we were so grateful. By then we were REALLY tired of the whole project since virtually all of our time away from our jobs during the warm part of the year was devoted to this work.

By the early summer of 2001 we were putting the finishing touches on the job. We put siding up on the inside of the porch and changed the double door on the front of the porch to a single. We also added a stylish half wall to the right of the front steps to accent the entrance. We painted the steps and the porch floor a dark maroon color then spruced up and reinstalled the porch windows.

We loved the way the house turned out and in the end were very proud of the work we had done. By doing it ourselves, I am sure we saved thousands of dollars and ended up with a higher quality of workmanship and care than we might have if we had hired someone else. But we never dreamed it would take so long to finish and it was very hard work. Butch swears that his knees were ruined by standing on ladders and climbing on scaffolding across more than two years. Not to mention dedicating so much of our free time to this project. The thought of doing something like this again is certainly not in the cards. And that is the longest project I have ever worked on!

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

What advice do you wish you had taken from your parents?

Butch

I don’t really think that I ignored any advice that my parents gave me. Mostly it was things like be a good person. Pay your bills first. Don’t waste your money. Don’t go into debt. I have taken loans for getting a car and my house. But I paid them off promptly and I’m free of any payments at the moment. With some luck we were able to pay off all our credit card debt once. Since then we pay off all our cards every month and avoid the interest that so quickly accumulates.

Karen

My parents were really not big into advice. They did pass on some rules to live by that I have actually taken to heart and have applied. These nuggets were passed along through their model of how they lived their lives and reinforced through general comments and observations in daily life. I can’t think of anything they advised that I ignored.

My dad always emphasized education. He was a very intelligent man who did not have many opportunities for formal education. His family was poor and his father died when he was pretty young. He and other members of the family went to work as soon as they were able. He did not finish high school as a boy but certainly earned an equivalency through his own efforts as a grown man. He always encouraged us to do well in school and all of us went on to some kind of college or training after high school. Three of us earned our degrees and two of us eventually got a Master’s degree.

The other thing my dad impressed upon us was care with money. A person who went through very hard times in his youth and through the Great Depression as an adult is frugal with money. He and mom both encouraged us to save the money earned from teenage jobs and all of us paid for our educations mostly from those savings. Along with that was an ethic to take care with spending, pay bills as soon as possible, and do without things you can’t afford. Overall, Butch and I have both adopted that approach.

My mom listened to all my trials and tribulations with playmates, teenage friendships, and boyfriend angst through my growing up years. She gave me the most direct piece of advice just before I got married. She sat me down to tell me that she and dad would stand behind me if I ever had serious trouble in my marriage. But she also said that Butch and I were undoubtedly going to have disagreements, irritations, and some big arguments over the years. She told me that I should NOT tell her about those but deal with them myself. She said that I would likely forgive and forget any disagreement in a day or two but she would remember for a lot longer and have a harder time forgiving. I took that advice to heart!

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

What were your favorite cartoons growing up?

Televisions were just becoming popular when I was about five years old (I’m 72 as I write this). One of the first families in the neighborhood to get a TV was Rex and Anne McCoy. Their daughter Cheryl was my age. Programming in the late afternoon, just before the evening news, was given over to cartoons. McCoy’s TV was a big hit among the neighborhood kids. We would all troop down to their house and watch.

The first cartoon I remember was “Felix the Cat”. I recall it as being a pretty simple cartoon, but hey, it was the first one I saw and so is important to me. I’ve noticed that when I see many of these cartoons nowadays, I’m not all that impressed. Most were cranked out at a breakneck pace. Some of them in the 1960’s even went so far at to film people saying their lines and splicing the mouths into the animation in order to avoid having to go to the trouble of matching the drawings to the sound.

By the early 50’s Jay Ward, who would go on to fame animating Rocky and Bullwinkle, created his first series, “Crusader Rabbit” another one of my favorites. Along with Crusader Rabbit himself, it also featured his sidekick, Rags the Tiger. I don’t know if they are related in any way but I have always associated Calvin and Hobbes with them.

Along with Rocky and Bullwinkle Jay Ward did such shows as “Fractured Fairy Tales”, “Peabody’s Improbable History”, and “Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties”.

Another cartoon company that was very popular around that time was Hanna-Barbera. Their most popular creations were “Yogi Bear”, “The Flintstones” and “Huckleberry Hound”. My personal favorite from them was “Augie Doggie and Doggy Daddy”. My dad would go nuts when I did an imitation of them getting a dog “biskit”.

I wasn’t particularly crazy about Warner Brothers cartoons. I far preferred Daffy Duck to Bugs Bunny and I also liked Tasmanian Devil and Yosemite Sam, but overall they weren’t my favorite.

Disney cartoons weren’t a big deal to me either. I did like Donald Duck, especially when he was up against Chip and Dale. Donald’s miniature train set with all its detailing with the building interiors was great. Even as a kid I realized that these were model props and not fully functional tiny abodes, but that was what was so great about them. My friend Bob Unzeitig could do a perfect Donald Duck imitation.

I always thought Mickey Mouse was a drip and I felt cheated when they had one of his cartoons on the Mickey Mouse Club and not Donald Duck. To our delight, Lance called him Duck Donald.

There are many other cartoons I could go on about but the last I will mention is “Underdog”. I always liked Wally Cox who gave him his voice.

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

Ear Blockage

A couple of days ago I was washing up in the morning, ready to start my day. I had combed my hair and taken my medicine like I do every day. Grabbing 2 Q-tips I started to clean my ears when I got the most awful pain in my left ear. I thought I must have pushed too hard, lesson learned. When I got back to the bedroom I put in my hearing aids. Right one first, but when I was putting the left one in, I noticed something strange. The little, soft rubber hood at the end of the wire that goes into my ear was missing, but the mounting ring that is an internal part of it was still on the hearing aid. I looked around for the hood but it wasn’t anywhere to be found. I put a new hood on the hearing aid (I have spares), and went about my business. From that point on my ear started to give me problems. I thought I had just injured my ear canal somehow and it would be OK after a day or two.

It didn’t get any better so after several days I made an appointment with my doctor, Kenneth Cearlock. Right off, I told him I wanted him to have a look inside my ear to see if the hearing aid hood was stuck in there. He said he didn’t see it in there and compared it to what the right ear looked like. Hmmm. He said there was something in the left ear but he couldn’t be sure what it was and he had the nurse come in and rinse out my ear, hoping whatever it was would either come out or be shifted enough that he could tell what it was. This turned out to be a project turning into 10 or 15 minutes. The nurse said to hang on while she got a microscope attachment that hooked up to here Iphone. While she was having a look she held the phone so I could see too. There, unmistakably, was the hearing aid hood pushed up against my ear drum. She told the doctor and for the next 20 minutes or so they tried all kinds of ways to grab it and get it out. More flushing was involved and attempts to grab it with tweezers. Finally the nurse AND the doctor tried using the microscope attachment and the tweezers to locate and grab that sucker.

It was pretty interesting watching this micro-surgery going on in the Iphone. He positioned the tweezers just right, pinched hard, and pulled it right out. It was still a little tender after the extraction and I’m supposed to use some ear drops for a couple of days, but it looks like I’m on the mend.

How did you choose your children’s names?

Since naming our children was a shared event for my wife Karen and I, I will tell the story of Lance’s name and Karen will talk about Wendy. Robert Thorpe starts…

Lancelot Aubrey Duncan Thorpe

Thorpe is an Anglo-Saxon surname meaning hamlet or village. In Dutch it is spelled Dorp and in German it is spelled Dorf, as in Dusseldorf. It also has variations in spelling in English. Thorp, without the “e” is the most common variation. Our family spelled it without the “e” as far back as I have been able to research, but all members of our branch of the family started using it with the “e” in my grandparents’ generation. Before that, no “e”, after that, with the “e”. I have heard that the version with the “e” was the historically preferred version, so perhaps my great aunt, Hattie Alvira Thorpe Fox, who was our family’s first known genealogist, persuaded her brothers and sisters to get with the “e”.

As Lance’s birth approached, we scrambled to find the names we liked best. I wanted something with a medieval sound to go with our surname. Lancelot of Arthurian legend seemed like a good pick, although a little suspect with its Frenchy roots. It also has some presence in Germanic languages too. Aubrey, while sliding towards being a feminine name nowadays, was still firmly recognized as a man’s name when Lance was born in 1969 and didn’t start its slide towards being a girl’s name till the 1970’s. I, Robert Archer John Thorpe, had 4 names total and I wanted Lance to have 4 names too. So we came up with Duncan as his third name.

Lancelot means spear bearer. Aubrey means king of the elves. Duncan means brown or dark-haired warrior or king. Thorpe means of the hamlet.

Karen continues…

Wendolyn Lorelei Thorpe

Butch and I obviously made such important decisions as our child’s name together. In those days it may have been possible to determine the gender of your child before birth but it was not common or available to us. I figured the gender of a child was one of life’s mysteries and was a matter to add to the wonder and excitement of awaiting a new addition to our family. I hoped our second child would be a girl since we already had a boy. We planned on only two children since we did not want to add to over population.

We considered several names over time. When we were expecting Lance, we considered Jennifer Megan for a girl but by the time Wendy was on the way, it seemed to be a common girl’s name so not so attractive anymore. We really struggled for a boy’s name because we had used them all up on Lance. Finally, we got right down to the wire to make a decision and ended up taking our name book with us to the hospital. We had loosely determined that we liked the idea of Wendy but wanted to name our girl a longer, more formal version of the name. Our book suggested “Gwendolyn” but I was not keen on chancing that some would shorten her name to “Gwen” which I did not care for. We decided on “Wendolyn” which is our own spelling. For a middle name we had wanted something like “Laura” or “Laurel” which I quite liked but neither seemed to flow with “Wendolyn.” The hospital wanted us to finalize her name before I was checked out, so the night before my discharge, I poured through our book again and landed on Lorelei. When Butch arrived in the morning he agreed that it was perfect. Wendolyn Lorelei Thorpe would be her name. We both loved it and it suited our beautiful girl to a tee.

Afterwards, it seemed that we had started a tradition. Our next door neighbor named their girl Sadie Lorelei, Judy named our niece Jessica Lorelei, Bunny named his first daughter Jennifer Lorelei, our grand daughter is named Rachel Lorelei, and Jessica named her daughter, our great niece, Lorelei Alexis!

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