Where did you go on vacations as a child?

Butch

We were lucky to go on a number of memorable vacations when we were kids. Top of the list was going to England 3 times before I went off to college. By 2019 I had been to England another three times.

I will describe our trips to England each in their own story.

Our other most frequent vacations involved the family of my mom’s childhood friend, Joyce Arbon Hassard. Joyce was born in Canada. Her father was born in England, moved his family to Canada after WWI, and moved his family back to England when Joyce was young. She became friends with Mom in Peterborough and they hung around together. During the war she met a Canadian, Lorne Hassard. They got married and she went with him back to Canada when he returned. Mom met an American, our dad, and came to Iowa after they were married. Joyce and Mom kept in touch over the years.

1955

We went to visit them in 1955. They lived in Bienfait, Saskatchewan, just over the border in Canada. It was quite a drive to get there. Bienfait is a coal mining town and seemed quite desolate to me. I remember the countryside as being very flat, with grassy plains. We went out for a drive in the country one time and saw a baby bunny. Lorne took off after it and amazingly, he caught it. He put it in his pocket and it settled right down. Then he came around and let us all see it and give its soft fur a rub.

My dad bought a “liberated” German Mauser rifle before he came home from WWII. The fellow he bought it from had cut the butt off the rifle so it could be used for “big game”, whatever that was supposed to mean. You can imagine that Dad didn’t have many opportunities to shoot a gun that had 7mm Magnum military ammunition. Since Saskatchewan had wide open spaces he decided to take the gun with him and shoot it out in the country. Being a machinist, Dad milled the interior surfaces of a piece of beautiful wood so it fit the metal parts perfectly. I think it was walnut. Then redesigned the rest of the stock so it was more graceful and a bit heavier to reduce the recoil. It hadn’t been fired in 10 years and my dad was a bit suspect of ammo that old. We took it out on the prairie and propped it up with sandbags or some such and fired it by pulling on a string from a safe distance away. It fired ok so the men each had a go at it. I don’t remember that they let us kids shoot it.

Mom bought presents for the kids. Dorian’s was a toy rifle. She got one for me too. Only problem, she got 2 different rifles. There was one I had my eye on but Mom said we had to give Dorian first pick. Of course he took the one I wanted. It was a flintlock, ala Davy Crockett. Mine was more of a standard Winchester. Years later, both of us remembered and had a good laugh about it.

We stopped in the Black Hills on the way out or way back and camped out. This picture pretty well summarizes what our camping experience was like. We were cold and miserable. This must have been about the first time I ever went camping. It’s hard to believe I had all that much enthusiasm for it after that but I went on to a long and happy association with the Boy Scouts.

We saw Mount Rushmore and as a special treat, had our picture taken with Chief Ben Black Elk.

Ben Black Elk made his living by having his picture taken with tourists. When we were done with him my dad went over and gave him some money. He looked at it and walked away disgusted. Not enough I suppose. What do you think the going rate was for a picture of him and the kids in 1955?

1957

On our next two vacations with Hassards, they came to us. First, when we still lived on Merle Hay Road in Des Moines. I don’t remember anything about this vacation but I do have a couple of nice photos. Here is one of us on a picnic. I think it is in our back yard because I’m pretty sure Dad made this picnic table.

And one of us in a group shot in front of the house.

1962

In the five years since they visited us on Merle Hay Road in Des Moines, we moved 4 times. The first time we moved about a mile north to 4111 52nd Street, a new house that my folks designed and built. Then we moved to Cedar Rapids where we lived in a series of rental houses; 809 15th Ave SW, 3023 Schaeffer Dr SW, and 398 28th Ave SW. This last one is where we were when they visited in 1962.

One interesting thing that happened during their visit was that Lorne left their car parked at the end of the driveway, way up by the house. We came out of the house and the car had vanished. We looked all around but did not see it anywhere. I think we were about ready to call the police. There must have been a little slope to the driveway and someone must have forgotten to put it in gear or it slipped out or something, because when we finally noticed it, it had rolled down into the back yard, done a 90 degree left turn, and rolled across the next two or three lots before it came to a stop. No one admitted to messing around in the car, but who knows.

Colorado

I don’t remember exactly when we went to Colorado. We visited my Aunt Louise, Uncle John and Cousin David. I think they lived in Engelwood at the time. There are a couple of memories about this trip that spring to mind.

One involves a cobbled up air conditioning contraption that my dad came up with. For years I thought it was for the trip to Canada in 1955, but the more think about it, it must have been when we took the trip to Colorado. I have a couple of photos of the car on the 1955 trip and nowhere is the device in evidence. A key part of the memory was how terrible the route smelled as we drove along. I’m pretty sure we drove west on Highway 30 and that all across Nebraska there were tons of farms that produced alfalfa. And along with them were the elevators and silos that held the harvested crop. Dad’s device was a unit that fit onto the top of the partially rolled down window and was trapped by the top of the door frame. I don’t remember exactly what it looked like but I think the Thermadore was his inspiration. It was basically a tube. Dad put a squirrel cage fan at the back, so when air was forced down the cylinder as we drove along, the fan gave it a sharp right turn and blew the wind into the interior to cool us off. There was a reservoir of water in the tube that cooled the air by evaporation. When I was talking to Mom about this one time, I complained how bad the alfalfa smelled as we crossed Nebraska. She started laughing and said that to get more surface area for the water, Dad put grass clippings in the tray. I suspect it was the fermenting grass, not the alfalfa that was stinking to high Heaven.

When we were at my aunt’s house, Judy and I and my cousin David used to walk to his elementary school. It was a multistory building and the fire escapes were 3 foot diameter tubes where the stairs usually were on other schools. We had a great time climbing up inside them, then sliding back down. The drawback to this activity was we had to walk down his alley to get to the school. The alley was “paved” with cinders and the clinkers cut your feet, or at least made it miserable walking. The alley also was the home for a bumper crop of sand burrs. I hated that.

We took a drive out to the country once, up into the mountains. I remember there was a dry, desertlike place and David found and caught a horned toad. That was a delight and at one point we found ourselves at the Big or Little Thompson River. I remember that because several years later, there was a flash flood and a number of people were killed.

Karen

In my head, my first response to this question was…nowhere. In general, traveling together away from Cedar Rapids on a vacation was not frequent. After some thought I came up with three times that we traveled together and all of them were to visit one of my parent’s siblings. And I had a trip when I was in high school.

When I was about three years old we traveled to Lathrop, Missouri to visit my dad’s older sister Edith Myers and her family. That would have been somewhere around 1952 or 1953. Since I was so young there isn’t much I remember. She and her family lived on a farm which I wouldn’t have had any experience with. I really don’t have any strong impression of her or her husband’s personality or temperament. The only thing I recall was rather horrifying. We were going to have chicken for dinner and I must have followed my aunt outside when she went to get one. She put the chicken’s neck on a stump and chopped off its head with an ax with one blow. The chicken got up and ran around the yard with no head and with blood spurting out of its neck. I remember being paralyzed with horror. It is a vivid image in my mind even today. I never saw anything like it since. I don’t believe I ever saw that aunt in person except for that one time. Apparently they didn’t travel much and neither did we.

The next two vacations with my family took place somewhere in the mid 50’s. I think I was somewhere between five and nine years old and don’t even remember which came first. Both vacations involved a trip to visit relatives. This time it was my mom’s family.

I will tell about our trip to Estherville, Iowa first. It is a small town in northwest Iowa near Spirit Lake and Lake Okoboji. My mom’s brother Ronnie (Ronald) and my Aunt Opal and their 4 kids lived there. My Uncle owned a small welding shop and worked on small jobs for farmers and others in the surrounding area. My Aunt and Uncle had just moved into a new built house when we visited. My cousin Wayne was close to my age and we hit it off immediately. I think we played outside together a lot and though I don’t remember specifically what we played I remember we had loads of fun. A whole bunch of us slept on the floor in one big room which was also an adventure. The big thing that happened while we were there was not so good. My uncle needed to continue to work on jobs in his shop while we were there. One day my dad took me, my cousin Wayne, and his younger brother Rick to see the shop. They warned us within an inch of our lives to stay far away from any work or equipment. My uncle had just finished working on some type of metal plates and had laid them on the cement floor to cool. My cousin Wayne, not knowing they were hot, stepped on them with his bare feet. Of course he was badly burned and had to be rushed to the hospital. Another horrifying and vivid memory for me.

The next trip was to visit my Aunt Martha in Friendship, WI. It is a very small town in the southern middle of the state. Aunt Martha was the oldest child in my mom’s family. Martha often took care of the younger kids in the family and my mom felt very close to her. By the time we visited, Martha had been a widow for some years. She had three kids still at home but all were much older than me. Martha was lots of fun and smiled and laughed all the time. She had a good friend, Ruth, who lived down the road and who was included in all of the family activities. Mostly, I remember eating good food outside and listening to stories about my mom’s big family and of all the trouble “the boys” caused. The highlight for us was a trip from Martha’s house to the Wisconsin Dells. It is a fabulously beautiful natural area which had been developed as a tourist spot with rides and lots of souvenir stores. My dad had given us each some small amount of money that we could spend as we wanted. I bought two cheesy little plastic dolls wrapped in a bit of beaded leather like they were papooses. I was thrilled. One of my cousins bought a whoopie cushion. It is a rubber balloon type thing. You blow it up and put it where someone will sit down. When someone sits on it, the air comes out of the small opening and it sounds like a loud fart! When we got back to the car, it was clear that he had put it in the driver’s seat under a rug that dad had covering the seat. It was not in any way subtle but dad was a good sport and pretended he didn’t see. It made a very satisfying and long-winded fart sound when he sat on it which was hilarious to all of us kids.

The last story is about a school trip I took with my high school Heritage class to Washington, DC. Heritage class was a combined class of English/language arts and History/social studies. I had been working at Bishop’s Cafeteria since I turned 16 so I assume I had saved up money of my own to pay for it. I don’t remember that my parents helped but it seems like they probably did. This trip took me farther away from home than I had ever been and I got to go there with a bunch of friends. We were expected to dress in school clothes as we visited sites in the Capitol and for girls in my school that meant skirts or dresses and no pants. I spent time sewing several new dresses and skirts prior to the trip. We traveled by bus straight through the night so that we arrived in DC the next day. The bus ride was great fun. My favorite part of the ride was traveling through Shenandoah National Park. I had never seen mountains before and I was bowled over by the beauty of the area.

While we were in the capital we visited the famous monuments like the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, the Washington monument, the Capitol Building, and some museums. It was very exciting because I had hardly been anywhere or seen anything like these sites before.

Years later Butch and I took a driving trip to Washington with our grand daughter, Rachel. I made sure we traveled through the park again so I could share that beautiful place with her and Butch. Luckily both liked it as much as I. We even played the song, “Shenandoah I Love Your Daughter” as we drove along. On top of that, we saw a small black bear on the side of the road!

I think that working class people did not generally travel much when I was a child. I didn’t feel particularly deprived because no one else I knew was traveling either. I’m sure travel, lodging, and restaurants were very expensive then as they are today. When our children were young we traveled several times but it was always long planned for and involved serious saving up. Traveling has been a great pleasure for us in retirement.

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 was your first boss like?

Butch

Well, I suppose my first boss was the head of the paperboys at the Gazette, Ed Alderman. He was more of a division overseer than an actual boss though.

I think my boss at the Public Library, a woman named Margaret, would be a better choice to talk about. I got a job as a page at the library when I was in high school. My duties included shelving returned books, retrieving seldom asked for items from the basement, getting old, bound volumes of newspapers and magazines, also from the basement, and “reading the shelves.” None of this work was too demanding.

The duty that was most interesting was “reading the shelves.” Every shift we worked, we were expected to “read” two bookcases of books. There was a reading journal kept. You would get it and see what the call number was for the last book that was reviewed, then go through the next two bookcases of books. The idea was to look at each book, one by one, and make sure it was shelved in the proper order according to the Dewey Decimal System for non-fiction or by author’s name for fiction. It was also the thing that got me into the most trouble. Not because I didn’t do a good job, but because I always violated one of the most vigorously enforced rules of “reading.” Library pages were not allowed to look at the books they were working with. If your job was to check the order of every book in the library that you came into contact with, you were bound to find some ones that were really, really interesting. Ones so interesting that you had to pull them out and have a quick look at what was inside them. I just couldn’t help myself. Every time I did this, I would look up at the end of the stacks and there would be Margaret, scowling and fuming. I’d get a stern warning. This must have been a pretty common occurrence for all pages considering that they hired the brightest and most literate students to do the work. Hence the rule. You would think that my interest in what I saw kept them from getting the full value of the 85 cents an hour that they paid me.

You were on probation for the first three months you worked at the library before you were taken on full time. At the end of my probationary period Margaret called me in and told me they were going to terminate my probation. It was a blow to be fired.

Karen

My first full time professional job was when I was hired as a teacher at Prairie View Elementary in the College Community School District. My principal and the man who hired me was Mr. Charles Swaney. I believe that I was a good candidate for a teaching job but have to admit that I was probably hired because I was acquainted with Mr. Swaney’s wife, Jan, and she had put in a good word for me. In 1976, there were a great many eager young teachers graduating from college and hoping to start their careers. Unless there was some way to distinguish yourself as a candidate, interviews and job offers were hard to come by. Never the less, I won an interview and was hired to teach a class containing a mixture of 25 second and third graders.

The job was unique. Prairie View was the newest school in the district and had recently adopted an individualized learning system developed by the Westinghouse Learning Company called PLAN. Mr. Swaney was instrumental in bringing this philosophy and specialized program to the district. I believe it was in its second or third year when I was hired but am not sure of that. There was a positive attitude toward making it work within the building but since it was imposed on other district schools, there was suspicion and distrust among teachers in other buildings, parents, and even the school board. On top of that, the building had been built as an open space learning environment with no walls surrounding each classroom. Classrooms were marked out with bookcases, chalkboards and cupboards and students and teachers could easily see and hear what was going on next door. Kids were meant to move among the team stations and complete learning tasks according to their needs. They were given short quizzes at intervals which were marked on computer cards and fed into a computer card reader. The results of the assessments would generate reports that would outline a individualized POS (plan of study) for each student. These were pretty advanced ideas and as a newcomer, I was surprised that Mr. Swaney was so close to the cutting edge. He was not a young man and seemed very traditional in his personality . I really don’t know how he became involved with it.

The teachers who had been in the building had received some training when the program was started. I had never heard of it until nearly my first day on the job and received absolutely no training or guidance about how to proceed. I had never used any type of computer nor did I know anything about the reports. Within a week I felt completely out of my depth and was scrambling to figure out how I could manage so many students who were all working on different concepts. I felt as if I never had any time to spend to directly teach students because all my time was spent managing their work. Luckily, teachers in the building were very willing to share ideas and coach the new teachers on their team and gradually I was able to get things under control. It was probably just that, under control, through my first year.

The community never did really get on board with PLAN and within several years, certain school board members were actively trying to get rid of it. Teachers were working very hard and the criticisms of the program began to feel like personal attacks on our work and professionalism. We had weekly staff meetings that often became so emotional that several teachers would leave crying. Thinking back, I’m sure this was a terrible time for Mr. Swaney and it is amazing to me that he was able to keep his job. Eventually, the whole thing was abandoned by the Board and we transitioned to more traditional ways of organizing learning with reading groups, science and social studies units, and organizing students into one-grade classes.

Through it all, I always felt that Mr. Swaney was much better at being a really good person than he was at being a good school administrator and principal. I always liked him personally but was not able to respect his professional ideas. Teaching seemed to be all made up of high ideals and moonbeams and not really related to practical ways to help kids learn and thrive. Certainly, there was no support for helping teachers use the expensive materials that were purchased from Westinghouse. Being a good principal is not easy. I think that many school principals at the time were trained to be managers of money, resources and employees without much emphasis on teaching and learning. Years later I got my Master’s degree in Educational Leadership which had by then switched focus to an understanding of curriculum, instruction, and the ways kids learn.

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.

How do you like to spend a lazy day?

Butch

This is an interesting question but the answer is not quite what you might expect. It implies that your day is normally busy and that you spend your time doing the bidding of others, that you would just like to kick back and do nothing. I have to say this was the case with me for many years, but now I look at things from a slightly different angle.

Since I have retired and after a year of self-imposed isolation due to the Corona Virus, a lazy day is the norm and not anything special. So much so that I try to think up something busy to do to make my time more exciting. Not that it is very easy. Even things that are intellectually stimulating are more often sedentary in nature than they are active.

My activities are pretty much the same, day after day without much variety. But that is not to say that I don’t find rewarding things to do. It’s just that they happen over and over and they don’t involve much exertion. In the last year we have stopped going to restaurants and movies. It’s seldom that anyone visits or that we visit someone else. Our groceries are delivered. We order things on line rather than going shopping for them. We stay at home.

So what is a normal day? I wake up around 6:00am, usually when Karen is getting up. That’s just too early for me so I try to get back to sleep. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn’t. On occasion, I have slept as late as 10:00am but usually I am up before 8:00. I get cleaned up for the day and have my morning coffee. We call it candy coffee, three rounded teaspoons of sugar and a quarter cup of half and half in a huge coffee mug. That’s it for coffee for me for the rest of the day.

I read the paper, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, on my laptop. I check my email. I look at FaceBook for the first of many times during the day. In case FaceBook is no longer around in the future, it’s a website where you can make a comment and it gets sent out to all the people you have identified as your friend. You, in turn, receive their messages and so keep in touch. Your messages can be plain text, pictures, videos, or links to other sites on the internet. People share things that are of interest to them, or things about their own lives. I post the occasional message and I respond to my friends’ messages sometimes. A few years back I went through many of my old photos and collected ones that picture our family or ones that I think have artistic merit on their own. I call those PICTORIALS. These photos are FaceBook submissions occasionally.

Last Christmas my daughter Wendy and her family bought me a subscription to a service called StoryWorth. Once a week Wendy picks a question from their list which they send to me. I write up my answer to the question and submit it to the StoryWorth site. That is what I am doing with this message right now. I also forward it to Karen who writes up her own answer. Then I copy the answers into a desktop publishing program which will eventually be turned into part of my autobiography. I bring those two answers together into one document that I publish on my blog, Butchieboy.info. StoryWorth has a clumsy mechanism for publishing my stories, which does not include Karen’s submissions. With my blog it is much easier to get our memories out to anyone who has interest in them and for them to make comments. Those comments are often one of the best parts of the process. I have one blog entry about my elementary school that I wrote in 2010 (it’s 2021 as I write this) that I have 47 comments on. Not only have friends and family posted to it but people who attended Riley Elementary who stumbled onto the blog. Some were long lost classmates, but one was a neighbor who lived two houses away from me till I was 10 years old.

I have also been cataloging my old photos. As the family genealogist people give me lots of old family photos. If they don’t want to let go of them, they are usually kind enough to let me copy them. As a result I have about 2000 historical photos and scads more that are negatives and slides and eventually digital photos. I try to identify all the people in the photos and the date they were taken. I also put in titles, subjects, comments, and tags to make finding particular photos easier. Doing this in an organized and consistent manner is a time consuming process and has taken a good share of my time recently. The effort should be worthwhile because once done, I can give copies to relatives so everyone who wants them can have them, all on something as small as a jump drive or SD card. I also try to submit the more important ones to the “Family Search” archive so they are preserved “forever”.

After I have been sitting at my computer for a few hours I start to get a little achy. I grab my cell phone and lounge out on the bed to play a video game, read a book, or watch a movie. This refreshing break gets me pretty close to supper time.

Karen and I have this sort of routine for dinner. I do most of the prep work for the ingredients. She puts the heat on the food. We share the mixing or other assembly somewhere in the middle. It’s just about ready when the PBS News Hour comes on and we embark on our evening viewing. We are children of the early days of television so regularly scheduled programming is still a part of our routine; Antiques Roadshow, Finding Your Roots, Masterpiece Theater, and even some of the cartoon mysteries on Thursday night; Father Brown and Death in Paradise to name a couple. More often these days we have started to adjust to modern viewing by watching streaming programs on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Britbox and other paid services. When I have had my fill of these I go to bed. Often before Karen.

Well that’s it. My lazy day. I hope yours is more exciting.

Karen

As I write this in April of 2021, we are just entering about the fourteenth month of the Covid 19 pandemic. Since Butch and I were in the age group that has been hit particularly hard by the virus, we have spent most of our time at home in isolation. There have been many lazy days in that time. We are also both retired so lazy days are the rule rather than an exception.

My main and preferred way of spending time without expending much effort is reading. I love diving into a good story and whiling away my time. My favorite books are mysteries or detective stories. I usually choose books in that genre that have a historical setting. I have developed an interest in World War I and have a couple of favorite authors who set their stories in that time period. It is amazing how much I have learned about war in the trenches, equipment, gas, generals, nursing and casualties. Of course I will read just about anything but stick with fiction most of the time except that I also enjoy biographies. My favorite place to read is on our shady deck, in a comfy chair, with a nice little breeze to keep the bugs away!

I also like puttering around in our yard with plants. Since our lot is wooded, we have been pretty much limited to shade gardening. I like to put plants in pots on the deck in order to enjoy flowers and color. This kind of gardening is something I can do at a leisurely pace. Once I get the plants into pots, it only takes a little maintenance from time to time to keep them in good shape. I love being outside feeling the sun, seeing critters, and smelling the dirt and things that are growing.

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 are your favorite musicians, bands or albums?

Butch

First and foremost, the Beatles. Before them I really wasn’t too interested in music. As a kid in the 1950’s there were a few songs I liked, but they were usually novelty songs; Beep Beep, the Witch Doctor, the Purple People Eater, that sort of thing. I didn’t care about the 50’s teen singers. In the early 60’s I started getting interested in the Four Seasons, but I got over that when the Beatles arrived.

    I wasn’t interested in the Beatles at first either. I was 15 when they hit. I was aware of them because they had about 6 or 8 songs in the top ten, all at once. That just seemed curious to me. My sister Judy liked them and kept me up to date about what they were up to, but in 1964 the film, “Hard Day’s Night” was released and I went to see it. I was blown away. That day was when I actually became a teenager. My interest in them was born and that followed through till the day they disbanded.

    In 1966 I went to England for the summer. The Beatles’ album “Revolver” was just released and my cousin gave me a copy of “Rubber Soul”. I also got “Hard Day’s Night” and “Help”. These were on the Parlophone label. “Revolver” and “Rubber Soul” were the same as their American counterparts but “Hard Day’s Night” and “Help” were different. The American albums were movie soundtracks and as such, had several junk tracks of instrumental background music. The English albums had all songs and in accordance with the Beatles’ album standards had 14 tracks. I gave all these albums to my granddaughter Rachel in 2020.

There were other rock and roll groups that I liked; The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and their offspring, Crosby, Stills, and Nash. On the heavier side there were Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and Iron Butterfly.

Around this time another unnamed kind of music started to appear. I called it orchestral rock. After a while it sorted itself out as New Age. It had roots in jazz, rock, and various other sources. The Moody Blues were among early rock musicians headed in that direction, but I really liked Mike Oldfield. His two albums “QE2” and “Five Miles Out” were my favorites.

    I liked folk music too. My favorite in that genre was Donovan, but I also liked Joan Baez. In a purer, more traditional type of folk music I like the English singer and guitarist, Martin Carthy and the Irish group, The Bothy Band.

    I had liked Classical music since I was in elementary school when I went to see a performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in a giant concert hall. Beethoven proved to be an ongoing favorite along with Bach, Gustav Holst’s the Planets, and Ferde Grofé’s various musical suites.

When I started buying albums, I would play them on our console record player at home. My dad had a number of old 78’s around. When he gave us a bad time about rock and roll, I would trot out such recordings as “All Those in Favor of Swing Say Aye” and “Wham, Rebop, Boom, Bam”. Overall, I liked his Swing and Dixieland music. I realized that the musicians were the best in their day. Notables were the Dorseys and Glenn Miller. A little later, I extended this interest back to the Ragtime of Jelly Roll Morton and others.

A couple of the 50’s musicians I did appreciate were Frank Ifield and the Everly Brothers.

Karen

Musical tastes are often formed in the teenage years. I am definitely not a musical person so my interests were in listening to bands on the radio and on albums. My high school and college years were from 1964 through 1968. Rock and roll started to become thrilling when Ed Sullivan began to feature musicians aimed at my age group on the Sunday night Ed Sullivan Show.

The most memorable group for me were the Beatles when they came to America. My whole family gathered to watch their tv performance in February of 1964. The television audience went wild as they played All My Lovin’, Til There Was You, and She Loves You. Over the years, everyone waited for new albums and appreciated the talents of Lennon and McCartney, Harrison, and Starr. I guess my favorite album was Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band which came out in 1967.

It was hailed as being particularly innovative and ground breaking. Even now, when I hear a Beatle’s song it makes me feel happy and takes me right back to my teenage self. I never saw the band live of course but did see Paul McCartney in concert twice. The first time, in July of 1990, our daughter Wendy bought us tickets to a concert with part of her high school graduation money. We had awesome seats on the grass right in front of the stage in Cyclone Stadium in Ames, Iowa. The second time my friend Kris Donnelly invited me to use a ticket that her husband didn’t want and go to his concert in Des Moines, Iowa. Again, we had fantastic seats close to the stage with a side view of his performance. Several times he turned to play and sing to us directly. Thrilling!

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I liked lots of other bands from the 60’s including The Mamas and Papas, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Who, Creedence Clearwater, Dylan, Donovan…you get the picture. Most of them were from the “summer of love” time period that was filled with fantastic musicians and songs with great lyrics. I know most of the words and can sing along with many of the songs. They were the soundtrack of our youth and bring back great memories of “when we was fab.”

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.

Cataract Surgery

I have been luckier than many people since I didn’t need any kind of glasses till I was 50 years old. But by then I started needing some low-powered reading glasses. The inexpensive ones you can get at the drug store worked perfectly well for me for two or three years, but finally there came a point when I needed to get some real, corrective glasses. My far vision was becoming increasingly fuzzy and it couldn’t be ignored any more. I realized it would be easier for me if I got bifocals than to continually switch between the distance glasses and the cheaters. By this time there was no point from far away to up close that was ever in focus. The doctor suggested that I might want to try some continuous bifocals and when I first got them they worked pretty well because the difference in the near/far prescriptions was not too great. As my eyes got worse, that difference grew. In the end I was better off having plain old bifocals. I could see far away with the top part of the lenses and could read with the bottom part, but there came a time when I could not see the computer screen with either of the two. Now I was faced with trifocals or two pairs of glasses. I chose the latter.

A few years ago my doctor, Todd Heying, said I was starting to get glaucoma. A drop of Tamilol Maleate in each eye once a day was enough to retard future deterioration, so we were good there. But when we were walking back to the examination room from another test he does, he said, “We’ll have to keep an eye on those cataracts.” What? There had never been any mention of cataracts before that. Also, around that time I started to get double vision of two different types. The first was an inability to converge both my eyes to get a unified 3D image and the second was a slight shadow to the lower left of whatever I was looking at with my right eye. This is often caused by astigmatism. Both of these seemed to be growing steadily worse. Finally, they became bad enough that I had Karen start to do all the driving.

I got some therapy to strengthen my eye muscles for the convergence problem, but the exercises required that I be able to accurately focus on distance objects. That wouldn’t work for me. It turned out that the cataracts made it so my eyes couldn’t be corrected with lenses. The doctor made an appointment for me with a specialist to look into the cataracts. This doctor’s diagnosis was dismal and it felt like I would be going blind any minute. Dr Heying said he disagreed with that conclusion completely and made another appointment with a different specialist, Dr Birchansky. His diagnosis was more in line with what Doctor Heying thought and we made an appointment to have my cataracts removed.

As the time grew closer I became more and more antsy. Everyone I knew that has had cataract surgery done has assured me that it is a piece of cake and that they were happy they had it done, but I was nervous about someone rooting around in my eyeball with a scalpel.

The day of the surgery on my right eye came, April 27, 2021. The whole business was complicated because of the universal fear of the Covid 19 virus and the added rigmarole that accompanied it. I arrived at the surgery and they started with completing 6 or 7 forms. Then the nurse put a drop of anesthetic in my eye followed by about 6 or 7 drops of a dilating solution. They took me back to a staging/recovery room which I mistook to be the operating room. They put a blood pressure cuff on my right forearm and started a drip of something in my left arm. I thought they would eventually put anesthetic in the drip line to knock me out so I wouldn’t be aware of all the digging in my right eyeball. They put a number of sensors on my chest, for heart monitoring I suppose. They said they were going to leave for a little bit to let the dilation solution work a little more. So they turned off the light, most welcome, and left me with the constant booping and dinging from the vital signs monitor. Underneath all that racket they had some very soft, soothing, new age instrumental music working its magic.

They came back after a while and took me to the operating room. Like most operating rooms it seemed a little cold. Then they spent a bunch of time laying me flat and putting booties, a cap, and another drapery that had an adhesive surface and covered me completely except for a hole that they centered right over my eye. The adhesive wasn’t working all that well with my beard, but they did get that sorted out. They also unobtrusively loosely strapped me down so I couldn’t flail out if I got panicky.
When the doctor came in he got right to business. It turns out they did not knock me out. That didn’t seem to matter however because while I was fully conscious, I couldn’t feel anything on my eye. My field of view was very bright and colorful and reminded me of a 60’s era light show. In the center of it all was a squished looking white hexagon. I could tell he was doing things but I had no idea what they were. After a really short period of time he said, “Well, there you go.” and he was off. The nurses wheeled me back to the recovery room, disentangled me from all the wires and tubes, and got me into a wheel chair to take me out to the car.

Karen got me home ok. My eye was extremely dilated. They had warned me to bring sun glasses, but the brightness was even beyond that. There were halos around everything and a misty kind of softness. They told me I should expect that and that my vision would get better every day.

After I started seeing properly in my right eye I didn’t need glasses for it at all for my distance vision and I could see better with it than the “corrected” left eye. None of my glasses helped me. The old glasses corrected the eye that wasn’t operated on but the new eye was made blurry from the old lenses. But if I didn’t use the glasses, my left eye was blurry. I still needed glasses to see my computer but did not have a new prescription for my right eye. That made my right eye blurry whenever I was typing and I had to keep it closed. An interesting thing happened with the reading prescription though. My left and right eye didn’t match for my near vision but there was only about two inches difference between where they focused. If I placed whatever I was reading halfway between the two focal distances, I could achieve acceptable focus in both eyes. As time went on, putting my distance glasses on worked pretty well for correcting the computer.

It was 2 weeks between my two operations. By this time it was getting a little tiresome because of the mismatch between the left and the right eyes. And I was really anticipating getting better vision in the second eye.

The procedure was almost exactly the same as the first time, but it took them a little longer to get started. They did say that they put something in the IV drip to help me relax. I suppose they also did that the first time, but I didn’t remember them saying anything then. My fault or theirs, your pick. The dilation seemed to hang on longer on this eye but it eventually did go away.

A week later I had a second followup appointment with Dr Heying. He said he didn’t want to prescribe any new glasses for several weeks to let my eyes heal and adjust as much as possible. We decided that I would get a couple of pairs of reading glasses at the drug store, one for my computer and one for my phone or up close reading. A day or two later I noticed that that was a fairly successful approach. He gave me a useful pointer into which power of glasses to get. He said if I divided the number “1” by the distance in meters from my eye to what I wanted to see clearly, it would tell me the diopter strength of the glasses I would need. So Karen got out the pull tape and came up with 2.25 diopters for my computer glasses and 3.00 diopters to see my phone or read a book. But when we got to the store I was presented with two problems; they were out of stock of both those powers and my eyes still needed a little fine tuning anyway. So by trying on stronger and weaker glasses for each of my calculated focal lengths, I found the right prescriptions eventually, the time honored way that people have always bought “cheaters”.

This post is part of the StoryWorth project that I am participating in.
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English Vacation – 1966

    For graduation from high school Mom and Dad gave us kids a trip to England, at least Judy and me. My year was 1966. I had become friends with John Scuffham in 10th grade. His mother Peggy was in the British Brides Club and his father worked at Square D with my dad. The Scuffhams and Thorpe’s were bound to become fast friends. Peggy was from London where her brother was a police officer. Ray was from Yorkshire. I think his father might have been a policeman too or something like that. This gave John and me lots of places to visit in the month we were going to be there. We both signed up for the United Airlines 12/21 which allowed us to fly standby at a very reduced rate. We got Eurail train passes which gave us 1500 miles of travel for $45. We also got youth hostel passes.

Eurail Pass

Grandad had bought me a bike so I could get around less expensively, but there was a catch with the Eurail Pass. If you had a bicycle, it cost half fare so we really only got about 1000 miles. We didn’t take our bikes when we went to Edinburgh, a fairly long journey so that helped out a bit.
We went our separate ways when we landed, agreeing to meet up after a few days. My Auntie Joan met me at the train station and we took the bus to Grandma and Granddad’s. The first thing my granddad said was, “Do you want a beer, boy?” He said there is a case of it out in the garage. I hurried out there to find a case of warm Guinness on the dirt floor. I grabbed one and came back in. Opening that, I discovered my lifelong dislike for the product.

I soon left for London to meet John. We stayed at his uncle’s and took in some of the sites. John seem to particularly like Marble Arch. I think his family came from that neighborhood. Then it was off to Maidstone to visit my Uncle John and Auntie Edith and family. From there I think we took the train to Leicester where my Auntie Barbara and Uncle Peter were living. We rode our bikes to Coventry to see the cathedral there. The medieval cathedral was bombed in World War II and only existed as a shell. They decided to build a whole new modern cathedral adjacent to the old one.

Auntie Barbara had packed us a sack lunch so we sought out an interesting pub to eat it in. The one we found was built in 1450 or thereabouts and was called The Old Windmill. We went into the bar to eat our sandwiches but the barman hustled over to us and told us we couldn’t eat in the bar. We asked where we could eat them and he said, “Oh, just go up to the lounge.” Now why can you eat in the lounge but not in the bar? We made our way up this teeny, steep, narrow stairway to find it. The surface of the floor was all wavy, the result of hand hewn beams and centuries of warping. We rode our bikes back to Leicester and then onto Peterborough.

In Yorkshire we stayed with John’s grandparents. His grandpa was a crusty old former bobbie. The thing I remember most about him was that he smoked plug tobacco in his pipe. He would shave off slivers with his penknife and stuff them into the bowl. Plug has much more moisture than regular tobacco so it creates a lot more icky juice. Juice that wicked up his pipestem and into his mouth. From there it flew from his mouth in a graceful arch into his coal fireplace that blazed brightly despite the fact that it was the middle of July. Can you imagine how bad tobacco spittle smells when it’s united with a glowing ember of anthracite?

The lounge at the Old Windmill Pub

After Yorkshire we took the train to Edinburgh. John and I spent a good deal of time on our train trips in the bar car. The drinking age in England was lower than in the USA. I think it was 18. Both of us were still only 17 but we were close enough and American so no one ever questioned us. Our beverage of choice – Bulmer’s Woodpecker Cider. We were pretty responsible but I think I got a bit of a buzz a time or two.

Bulmer’s Woodpecker Cider

After we got to Edinburgh we went to the castle for a look around. While a major Scottish tourist attraction the castle is also a military base, some of which the public is restricted from entering. As you walked around you noticed that some of the more interesting spots were in the restricted area. Not to be deterred, I just went and had a look at what I wanted. They invariably caught me at it and ran me off, but I played the dumb tourist so it never amounted to more than a friendly nudge in the right direction.

Edinburgh Castle

We also promenaded up and down Prince’s Street. After that, John got back on the train and went to Glasgow, that fair green place. He visited the railway museum there. I was scheduled to enter architecture school at Iowa State University in the fall so I went to Edinburgh University to visit their world-renowned architecture department. They told me I had to be at least a junior and have a “B” average. I did like the idea of going there but I never finished my sophomore year at Iowa State so graduating from Edinburgh was never a reality.

At the airport – Grandad, Me, and Lisa

While I was in England Mom, Bun, and Lisa visited too. We met them at the airport. I had been staying at Uncle John’s where they were going to stay, so to make room, I went back to Peterborough. At that time the Underground did not go all the way to Heathrow yet. I had to take a bus to the end of the subway line, then I could catch it into London.

Those Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines and The Blue Max

I had quite a bit of time to kill before my train left so I went to a movie, Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines. When that was over I still have a bunch of time so I went to another movie, The Blue Max. Two movies about early aviation. One of the things that impressed me the most was they allowed smoking in the theaters. It was really strange to sit watching a movie and seeing clouds of smoke billow up between the projector and the movie screen.

When I got home I was off to college.

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English Vacation – 1960

After 1950 we didn’t go to England again for 10 years. My Grandpa Thorpe died in 1959 and left Dad a little money. The folks decided to use some of it to take the whole family to England. By then, there were six of us; Mom, Dad, me, Judy, Bunny, and Lisa.

Granddad hired a bus and the whole English clan met us at the airport. When we arrived we stayed with my grandparents once again. My Auntie Joan and Uncle Jeff lived at 66 Scotney Street on the way to the downtown. Auntie Barbara and Uncle Peter lived that 561 Fulbridge Road in Werrington.

Our trips to and from England were on the last of the pre-jet airplanes. We flew from Des Moines to Chicago on a United Airlines DC-3. In these days of jets that flight takes less than an hour but back then I think it took us a couple of hours. The kids got to walk around the plane during the flight. At the back of the plane there was a semicircular couch so a small group of people could sit around and visit. They gave the boys junior pilot pins and the girls got junior stewardess ones.

The next leg of our journey was from Chicago to New York Idlewild. That flight was quite a bit longer, maybe five or six hours. It was on a United Airlines plane too. I kept my junior pilot pin in my pocket and managed to get a second one out of the deal. This was also the first flight were I experienced rough weather. Strapped into the seats we would hit air pockets and drop like a rock with that lurching roller coaster feeling.

From New York we traveled to Reykjavík on Icelandic Airlines (Loftleiðer). At the time they had never had an accident. The flight took something like 14 to 16 hours. The roar of the Rolls-Royce piston engines was deafening. They did give us the seats in the front, next to the partition which had tons of leg room. Space we used to let us kids lay down. When we arrived in Iceland which is just below the Arctic Circle, it must have been very near the solstice. There was a point about midnight when the sun dipped just below the horizon but it never got dark, there was always a glowing pink, low in the sky. In the cafeteria they served us dinner which they SAID was reindeer meat. I hope it was.

From Reykjavík we flew down to Prestwick in Scotland. I think that took six hours. We spent a little time in the gift shop and I got a pewter keychain with a Highland piper.

Then on to London and the bus ride to Peterborough.

Exploring the neighborhood I soon teamed up with a couple of boys who lived down the street. One was Donny Watkinson. The other was named Lynn but I don’t remember his last name. These could have been a couple of the kids I remember running up to the gates of the level crossing back in 1950. We roamed around the surrounding countryside which was mostly rural on the other side of the tracks. Once while tramping around Marholm Woods we found a derelict World War II pillbox and when arriving at the back of the crematorium we saw a suspicious pile of purply blue ashes. Hmmm.

While I was hanging out with the neighborhood gang, Bunny was out making friends with a road crew that was working at repairing the street out in front of Granddad and Grandma’s house. He hit it off with them big time and got to ride in the street roller with them.

Granddad’s pleasure was to take us up to the “Tuck Shop,” a candy store a few blocks away. On one trip there he pointed out the Scout hut where the English Boy Scouts met. I was eager to meet up with them. I had brought my Americans scout uniform with me for just such an occasion. On meeting day Granddad walked me over. He introduced me to the scoutmaster, a guy named Mick who was from Wales. I started attending meetings regularly.

I even went on a campout with them. I had to get a sleeping bag and a mess kit for the occasion. I still have the sleeping bag although I haven’t used it for 60 years. I had been trading patches and my Auntie Barbara sewed them onto the sleeping bag for me which the English scouts said was their tradition. On the campout the place we pitched our tents was less than ideal. It was a farm field and we had to be constantly vigilant not to tread in cow pies, but in the middle of the field was the most beautiful little stream you could ever want to see. It wasn’t too wide, maybe 15 or 20 feet and several feet deep. It was crystal clear. You could see all the way to a bottom that was covered with river plants. A far cry from the shallow, muddy and barren streams of Iowa. The banks had other greenery too, rushes and the like. The most memorable activity at the campout was a contest between the patrols. We had to build a small raft, 2 or 3 feet square, light a fire on it, and float it across the stream without putting the fire out.

We had a visit to the cathedral in Peterborough. One of its front towers was never completed. They had a painting that commemorated a gravedigger from centuries ago named Old Scarlet. We also took a tour of the crypt of the cathedral. The tour guide showed us a meeting table for use by the clergy that was carved by Robert (Mousey) Thompson. His trademark was a little mouse running up the leg.

I must’ve stayed at my Auntie Barbara’s house now and then. I remember going with her on bicycles to pick up fish and chips from the local shop on a rainy night. Another time I hid behind her garden gate and when she returned from shopping, I jumped out and roared at her. She hauled back and pasted me in the chops. I must’ve made some friends in her neighborhood too. One of them told me he had an old American coin, a half dime. I told them we called them nickels but he was insistent it was a half dime. He got it out and sure enough it was a half dime. It even said so right on it. It was from 1842, made of silver, and was about the size of your fingernail. He asked me if I wanted it and I gladly accepted it since I had recently started collecting coins. My other friend said he also had a US coin and would I like to have that. It turned out to be an 1896 Liberty Head nickel, one with the “V” on the reverse.

    I spent a little time at my Auntie Joan’s. Uncle Jeff had a garden allotment which he would go to after work. England is farther north than us so the sunsets were later near the solstice and they had a super sort of daylight savings time which they called Double Summer Time. That meant he could tend his vegetables late into the evening. He also raised show rabbits. When we were there they had the Peterborough Fair. We rode there on our bicycles and Uncle Jeff had his rabbit cages strapped precariously to his bike.

As we wandered around the fair, it began to rain and we ducked under the awnings of the booth tents. It rained hard for a while but then slackened off and finally stopped. The sky was still very dark. Then way off on the horizon we could see the tiniest little sliver of sunlight. As we watched the sliver got bigger and bigger and when the edge of the black clouds cleared the parade ground and the first rays of sunlight shone down, a band of Gurkha bagpipers entered the field. Pipes screaming and drums beating, it sent a shiver down your spine. It was one of the most thrilling things I have ever experienced. Uncle Jeff called the bagpipes Agony Bags.

Dad met Mom during WWII. He was stationed several places around Peterborough where Mom called home. One of the places was Alconbury Air Base. Since we were so close, the family traveled the short distance so we could see where Dad served.

We also went to the beach to swim in the English Channel at Skegness. English beaches take Americans some getting used to. Skegness had a long stretch running along the mainland before you got to the actual sand. It was made up of the most disgusting slurpy, sucky, black mud and gave you the creeps to walk through. But after that it was plain old sand which was just fine except a little cold. I made a sand castle with the buckets and spades we brought along. We also found some teeny crabs returning. About the size of a quarter

The others played on the beach while I was busy building my castle. Later in the day we went on a donkey ride. For some reason I have always thought that Happy Jack that the Who sang about was one of those seaside donkeys. Recently, my sister Lisa rediscovered this picture and had it enlarged to hang on her wall.

After spending some time in Peterborough we visited my Uncle John and his family in Lincoln. My relatives must have scouted out potential friends for us because we always seemed to meet someone to hang around with. On second thought maybe it was just me they found friends for. I was the oldest grandchild and didn’t have any boy cousins anywhere near my age. My younger siblings all had cousins their own age.

Lincoln also had a very nice cathedral. The boys they found for me to hang around with took me to it and we treated ourselves to the self-guided tour. I’m sure they wouldn’t allow anything like this nowadays, at least not in the USA. They let us through a door in the front corner of the nave. Behind it was a very narrow spiral staircase that led up to the second level which was very high above the cathedral floor. There was a narrow aisle from the staircase clear back to the bell tower at the center of the cathedral where the transepts intersected. Along the aisle there was only an arcade of delicate stonework between the outside wall and oblivion, no railing, nothing. What could they be thinking to allow a bunch of preteen boys to ram around in such a dangerous place. Once at the bell tower we found another spiral staircase that led up and back the way we had just come but at the next level higher. Then another staircase up to the third level. Each level got narrower and it was starting to give us heebie-jeebies.

When we were back at the tower for the second time we found yet another spiral staircase but this led up to the bells themselves. They were huge. They had told us not to be in the bell room at certain times because the tolling could be deafening. We made it back to the ground all without flattening ourselves in a seven-story fall or going deaf.

We went for a swim at a place called Woodhall Spa. It is a time-honored watering hole and I got a chance to demonstrate some fancy air mattress tricks.

In England in 1960 they had a series of activity books called “I Spy”. The idea was they were small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and had lists of things to find or spy. Many of them had to do with train serial numbers, but there were many others. One I had was “I Spy, The Unusual.” This book listed some of the hard-to-find things in England. One subject I found was Tattershall Castle. It’s the only brick castle in England I think, maybe one of two. I think I had a couple of other books but I don’t remember what they were. Here’s what they looked like…

An important part of the trip was to get pictures of the entire family. Grandad hired a photographer and had every conceivable combination of people taken. Here is a shot of everyone.

My cousin Andrew, seen just behind me in the above photo was having a hard time getting his picture taken. His dad held him and got him in the shot, but we could only get him in a couple of others, mostly with “grab” shots or when we told him we were taking a picture of someone else but included him too. One picture that was very important to everyone was all the grandchildren lined up in age order. We could not get him to be in that one in any way. Unintentionally, the photographer left a small space where Andrew should have stood. Years later I used Photoshop to reinsert him in his proper place.

I turned 12 they day we left. So, birthday and going away party.

    My granddad hired a bus for the return trip too and this time my neighborhood friend Donny Watkinson came with us.

On the way back to the US we retraced our route out. When we were between Reykjavík and New York we had to make a side trip to Goose Bay because of the weather and we had to spend the night in a hotel in New York. The rest of the trip was uneventful.

I had got a cricket bat when we were there and when we got to New York I put on my smart ass hat and said to the customs agent, “What would you say if I told you I had diamonds in the handle of this cricket bat?” His reply was, “What if I cut it apart to find out?” Enough said.

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English Vacation 1950

My first trip to England was in 1950. My mother was born in England and her parents, brother, and sisters lived there, so it was only natural that we visit them.

I was about two and my sister Judy was newly born. Mom told me we took the train to New York and departed for Southampton on the Queen Mary. We left New York on October 14, 1950 and arrived in Southampton 5 days later. There is a picture of us on board in the chapter, “What was your Mom like when you were a child?” We stayed for six months and I think we spent most of the time at my grandparents house on Lincoln Road in Peterborough. Most of the photos that survive were taken there. That section of town was called Walton.

A couple of blocks from the house there was a level crossing. This was an intersection of a train track and a road. At that time there were big gates that swung out and crossed the Marholm Road to prevent cars crossing. Most of the time they were swung back, blocking the tracks since the trains weren’t coming anyway. Perhaps they folded all the way around to lay flat against the railroad fence. I don’t remember perfectly. At this time I think the crossing guard had to open and close the gates by hand. In later years when we were there the process was all done automatically. The reason I described this is that my earliest memory comes from this time. I remember a number of other kids and I running to the crossing gates and climbing up on them to see the train better. See the chapter “What were your grandparents like?” to see a view of the level crossing.

My Auntie Barbara said she baby sat us a lot and that both Judy and I arrived with whooping cough, Judy having it a little worse than I did. I wonder how we got through Immigration. Auntie Barbara said she helped potty train me. I think that part of the enthusiasm to do that was because she slept with us and I was a bed wetter. Recently I had occasion to thank her for her efforts. I explained that it has come in handy over the years. A friend joked, “If you see a toilet in a dream, do NOT use it.” She also said she worked at Boots at the time. She used to bring things home to me. She said it didn’t matter what, a piece of paper, anything. I would always greet her with “What you gotta me, Auntie Barbara, what you gotta me?” I love getting presents.

There is also another story, perhaps a little confused at this late date and with no one but myself to confirm it. It seems that I locked myself in the ship’s state room and that there was an open porthole. Mom was frantic when she realized it. But she coaxed me over to the door and slowly walked me through how to unlock it. All was now right in the world. At least on the ocean liner.

Mom said we came home on the Queen Elizabeth and flew from New York to Iowa on the plane and that “Dad” paid for it. I thought that was a curious thing to say. It never occurred that she meant anything but my father. Of course, she meant her father paid for it. Can you imagine tending 2 wriggly toddlers and six pieces of luggage on a five day sea voyage and then however long it took to get from New York to Des Moines, Iowa, on the train? No wonder he paid the air fare for her.

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 makes you happy?

Butch

More than anything else what makes me happy is my family.

I’ve always had some interest in my family tree, but about 1985 I became much more interested. I started to try and find out who my ancestors were, but the information was a little thin. Since the family line included my kids of course, that also meant the Karen’s people were just as important as ancestors as were my own. Luckily, there were tons of them in the area and I found out a lot of stuff about them pretty quick.

The Thorpe side came a little slower. As I got better at the techniques of research and I talked to more people, especially on my side, resources started to open up. I visited my dad’s cousin, Emily Mumm, and wrote to my second cousin, Nettie Rose Caulfield Thomas. I got many old pictures and pedigree information. 

Early on, the research was difficult and expensive. Back then most of the phone calls you had to make were out of town and had long-distance charges. Even to write someone had a lot of postage expense. My wife Karen told me this might be too expensive a hobby for me to have. There were no internet, no email, no online resources. All the data collected had to be entered into a genealogy program if you wanted to keep track of what you found or organize it in any way. One example of the difficulty was census data. Many libraries had a microfilm collection of local censuses, but you had to have an idea of where your people lived in order to look at the reel where your information was. Then you had to scroll through every frame to see if it included your ancestors. In about five years I only had about five items of census information. Then the LDS church published a nationwide index of the 1880 census. Whamo! I had a whole slug of new stuff. They followed hard on that with the 1850 census. That got Ancestry interested and pretty soon there were indices for all the censuses. After that in just two months of looking I had nearly all the ancestors that got around to answering the census. They did the same thing for the English census, all my mom’s ancestors.

I now felt a part of the flow of history.

English reunion – 2019

I have been able to find and take many family gathering photos over the years. Here are a few:

Prior family reunion – 1939

Thorpe family reunion – c. 1890.
Rollie (3), Ned (1), Kenneth Fox (4), Gertrude Thorpe (5), Winfield (6) and Nettie Hinckley (7), Monroe Thorpe (8), Hattie Fox (2), and Uriah Thorpe (9).

Lance and Cherise’s Wedding reception – 1999

Paddy’s Christmas present – 2009

Karen

I would have to say that overall, my family is what makes me happy. I love our friends and get great joy from some of my interests in doing and making things but the close relationships with my family provides love, deep satisfaction, and happiness.

My relationship with my family as a child was the beginning. Of course as in every family there were squabbles but as we grew older my sisters and I formed a friendship that I treasure. I love my older brother but the age difference and living distance was too great for us to have a close friendship. I suppose “the girls” developed our bond because we lived together for a longer time and had common interests. Over the years we have gotten together for holidays, visited each other in our homes, and talked to each other on the phone. Every time there was lots of reminiscing, story telling and laughing. We can pretty much come up with at least 10 stories that have us laughing and snorting by mentioning only a few key words. Not only that we had all those Scrabble games, Boggle, and we can’t forget the cocktails that added to the fun.

Butch, Robert Archer John Thorpe, my husband, has been my partner in all things since our marriage in 1969. He is the brother of my best friend, Judy, so we have known each other since I was in 7th grade. We were married young and against a few odds, we have had a strong and loving marriage. We were lucky to live near our families on both sides who deserve some of the credit for our success. Both of us finished college and earned Master’s degrees after our marriage at great sacrifice in money and time. We each built careers on our talents and have made a comfortable life in our retirement. I think that having little money through most of our early marriage helped us to focus on our family and appreciate each other. We have had many adventures together traveling the world and our country. We have made many friends and enjoy being together with just each other as well. He is the person I want to laugh with and the one who shares all my troubles.

Lancelot Aubrey Duncan Thorpe was born on September 5th, 1969. We were very young parents and the awesome miracle and responsibility of a new baby consumed us. We had to learn what to do as we went along but thank goodness both sides of our family were as much in love with him as we were. He used to be placed in the center of every gathering while everyone sat nearby admiring him and delighting in every move he made. He was a bright and sunny boy who did everything on the run. Surrounded by adults, he talked early and had an interest in everything. He made friends everywhere including other kids, neighbors of all ages, and strangers. Our kids grew up as probably the last generation of “free range kids.” Lance took off on his bike and traveled our safe neighborhood without many restrictions. Later I found out that he once traveled so far afield on his bike that he got quite lost and spent a couple tense hours finding his way home. He has always loved the outdoors and nature and his experiences with family camping led him to the Boy Scouts and the accomplishment of an Eagle Scout award. His family enjoys camping in their travel trailer from spring through fall. He has grown into a responsible man who is very family oriented and works hard to take care of everyone, including us sometimes. He and his family live nearby in Iowa City and we see them often. We are very proud of the man, and friend, he has become.

Wendolyn Lorelei Thorpe was born on September 14, 1972. From the first she was our awesome princess. She was a girly girl who loved dolls, pretty clothes, crafty things, and reading books. She was born happy and easy going and captured the heart of everyone in the family. She also was an early talker and could actually talk the ears off pretty much everyone as a child. Wendy was a reader from an early age and loved books, school, and learning as much as I had when I was a kid. Unlike me, she was a born collector. Butch’s mom, Paddy, was a resident manager at K- Mart when our kids were little. She spoiled them with all the latest and greatest toys. For Wendy, one of her heart’s desires was Strawberry Shortcake dolls. These were small dolls with the gimmick of being scented with smells matching their names. Wendy was the luckiest child who received every single doll as soon as a new one came out! The amazing thing was that she carefully saved the boxes they came in, and all of the accessories and took care to keep them safe and in good shape. And, she still has them! Most of all, I admire Wendy’s independent nature and goal orientation. In high school she acted in plays, went out for the track team, and even performed a solo song. She decided that she wanted to attend a women’s college and gained entrance and scholarships to Mills College in Oakland, CA. After she graduated, she stayed in California and has made a life and career there. While I wish she lived closer, we have enjoyed many trips there to be with her beautiful family. She achieved her goal of writing 2 books. Wendy is a woman that I admire. She has a wonderful sense of humor and is very creative. We are very proud of her.

Our grandchildren are a delight. I loved them as soon as I knew they were on the way. Each one is completely unique in personality and even looks. Lance has a girl and a boy, Rachel born in 2000, and Ben born in 2005. Rachel and Ben live close by and have been the most accessible to us. That means we have had lots of sleepovers and opportunities for day to day contact.

Wendy has two boys, Wyatt, born in 2004 and August born in 2008. Wyatt and Augie live in California which has given us the chance for long term visits that include lots of adventures and excitement. Each time we go we have the chance to take advantage of the ocean, the beautiful scenery, and the interesting things to do there. I feel totally blessed to have such a wonderful family and the opportunity to see them grow and mature. That’s what makes me happy!

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.