Midnight Sun

Lots of “firsts” in LaCrosse. I went to my first concert; Herman’s Hermits. I fell in love, or something similar, for the first two or three times. I made my first efforts to dance. It was square dancing and since they were telling me what to do, I did OK. I went to the emergency room yearly for one thing or another. I tried really crappy beer — Old Style — that almost put me off from ever drinking beer.

One emergency room visit sticks in my mind. The three musketeers were riding our bicycles home for lunch from school and I was riding my “beater” bike a 24-inch J.C. Higgins coaster. I slammed on the brakes to skid around the sidewalk corner and aim me toward the front door of the house and the front wheel of the bicycle kept going and I went over handle bars meeting with the sidewalk with the left forehead above my eye. Tim rode on hollering he would stop after lunch to pick me up. I stood up, put my hand to my head and realized I was touching the bone and had a pretty wet and red hand. I walked in, Mom saw the issue grabbed a towel and told me to hold it against my forehead and said we were going to the hospital. At that time we only had one car and Dad had it at work. Clarice Jacobs, Dads, bosses wife and big buddies with Mom had a two door T-bird with electric windows. She came over and gave us a ride to the hospital while worrying that I might get blood on the seats. No worries, I was holding the towel on it pretty hard and was distracted by opening and closing the little back window with the window switch. After picking gravel out of my forehead and pulling it back together with about eight stitches, I went back to school against Mom Hagar’s wishes but I had to go since it was very studly.

Other things that stick in my mind. Steve Johnson’s family had a big color TV so he would have us over to watch Star Trek in living color – that was living. There was a large city playground adjacent to one of the Trane Air Conditioning plants where there was a summer program. Leaving out all of the preamble; Jeff Hunt was on a swing and Bill Johnson (Steve’s cousin) had a board and went to swat Jeff in the butt as he swung back. Jeff put his head way back and got a pretty solid wallop to the back of his head. The end result was that for whatever reason his left eye sort of popped out of the socket, an ambulance came and they wrapped his eye in a warm cloth and were off. Jeff was back in action the next day. From that day on he was known as One-Eye.

During our stay in LaCrosse, Mom Hagar’s brother George returned from serving in Vietnam. He had returned via San Francisco and since his efforts to buy a new Rambler American for the sole reason that it had reclining bucket seats that he could sleep in overnight had not been fruitful, he ended up with a Jaguar Sedan. He drove across country stopping to visit us which was pretty memorable. The whole local kid gang gathered for a back yard barbecue and wanted to know how many bad guys he had offed.

One Christmas, I got a record player which immediately put me into a 45-rpm record buying spree. With my increased responsibility of mowing and shoveling while continuing not to belch or fart at the table while eating I had gotten an allowance increase to a whopping $1.00 /week. Every Saturday I would hop on my bike, ride over to the K-Mart where the latest hits could be had for the princely sum of $0.79 and made my record purchase of the week. Now and then, I would save up or take on an additional job around the house and pop for an album which I was always surprised that I did not wear out. Remembering back, the oddest album I had was a collection of songs by David McCallum who at the time was playing a Man from Uncle on TV and would eventually go on to be Ducky on NCIS.

So many things… Joe Tikle had a paper route and I would help him by folding, riding and tossing. I fell in love with the idea of getting my sailplane license which many years later, I did.

For whatever reason, I do not remember our departure from LaCrosse much except that it was mid-summer and I was severely bummed out leaving the gang. We were off to Newburgh, NY. Dad Hagar had requested the job assignment there so that I could have four years for high school in one place. I think that there was also the draw of most of his family lived in that area and we were only a couple hour drive from Hazleton, Pa., Mom Hagar’s home. I do remember that we went through Canada on the way to Newburgh going through the iron ore and nickel districts and stopped at Niagara Falls to see it because in 1969 they stopped the flow over the falls for studies on how to keep it from eating itself up. Yet another geologic influence on my young mind.

LaCrosse, Wisconsin was an idyllic place for a kid in 1966. The Mississippi River on the west side of town; Grandads Bluff on the east side of town; parks everywhere that they would flood for ice skating in winter and lots of kids, bicycles and of course G. Heileman and Sons brewing company. The town was a cultural melting pot. There are so many memories of that three year period, it is hard to know where to begin.

Mom Hagar put me in St. Thomas More Catholic school, a scant 4 blocks from our house. I went from 6^th through 8^th grade. I was an altar boy, in the choir and Father Schultz taught me how to box since I occasionally had to spend time in gym class having my attitude “adjusted”. Joe Tikle and I got thrown out of Spanish class one day because we couldn’t stop laughing about some now forgotten phrase that probably reminded us of school boy anatomy issues. That was worth several gym classes with Father Schultz and Mom and Dad Hagar had to visit with Sister Hildegarde, the principal. I did get to be a pretty decent boxer – at least at ducking and on occasion when my hormones would surge (translation: really PO’d) I could score a decent 12 year old jab or upper cut now and then. But the school was good and the learning was better and the friends were incredible.

We had our neighborhood “gang”. Tim Sciborski lived three houses down. Carl Newcomb and his 8 brothers and sisters lived one block over. There were a lot of other kids, but the three of us were pretty much inseparable. We rode our bikes far and wide across the city pretty much all day, up to bed time. From the banks of the river where there was a requisite rope swing, fishing and a lot of attempts at putting together rafts, to the trails and top of Grandad Bluff where we would take our BB pistols and have fun running on the trails and trying to shoot each other. It is a miracle that at the end of our stay in LaCrosse there were still six eyes between the three of us.

Of course at that age the whole concept of young ladies was pretty much front and center (no pun intended) on our minds. Tim had older sisters who were very attractive with lots of interested boy friends. If the boy friends got past the gauntlet of the three of us and Tim’s dad they earned a date. There was always a lot of speculation on what actually happened on those dates.

Carl spent a lot of time at our house. Mom Hagar would joke that she had twin sons that did not look at all like brothers. The competition for food and attention at our house was much less than at his. Carl just came and went pretty much as family. One of my favorite memories is still the day I said something that fired of Mom Hagar and she grabbed her famous wooden spoon and made a lunge for me. I saw in her eyes that it was a feet don’t fail me now moment and bee lined it out the door at a high rate of speed as Carl was coming up the front steps. I almost avoided knocking him backwards just as Mom was taking a swing. She missed and Carl was not hurt — much.

LaCrosse was a great bonding period with Dad and I. We had a basement that was sort of a man cave. We continued to develop film, enlarge photos, splice 8 mm movies, build model planes (his favorite) and ships, did woodworking and worked on radio equipment. We barbecued in the backyard with Mom furnishing ingredients and he and I burning a lot of charcoal. I was finally entrusted to mow the lawn – but it was one of those push mowers. I also had the job of shoveling the sidewalk. We had a hammock in the backyard which I utilized and Mom and Dad had a table and chair setup that was their martini spot.

Next: More memories (Chapter 3)

In mid-1966, there were about 3 months between the end of the North Dakota job and my Dad’s next assignment near LaCrosse Wisconsin. We traveled east and visited all of the relatives until I am pretty sure they were ready for us to head back west. The most lasting of all of the memories on that trip was the time we spent at Aunt Ellie’s. Ellie (Helen Kosco) was one of my maternal great aunt’s having been born in 1903. She was a lifelong spinster who was particularly hard of hearing, did not have many teeth at the time we visited and lived in Baba’s (my maternal great grandmother) house at 894 James St. where as far as I know where she had lived for a significant time.  As I understand it, my Uncle Bart built both the 887 and the 894 James St. houses. Ellie’s house was a testament to the ’20s, ’30’s and ’40s. She had an old Philco radio that at the time was almost as tall as I was. It had a couple of shortwave bands plus AM radio. All of the beds had feather ticks on them that you could get lost in, the furniture was all Baba’s furniture from when the house was built, electrical lighting was sparse and the basement was sort of a nightmare on James Street that I certainly was not going to go and explore. Then there was Ellie.

It was never clear to me why Ellie was hard of hearing. My Mom would always say that she stuck an egg beater end in her ear and broke her eardrum so don’t stick stuff in your ear. I don’t think that was altogether true. In retrospect, I think that she and the rest of the family management had some sort of tacit agreement to tell all the kids that. So without thinking about it they elevated Ellie in all of our minds as a disabled success, while giving us the reason that she was just a tad bit eccentric. She wore glasses that were always bent and did not fit well on her face because she would fall asleep at her chair, her head would mash up against the recliner side and they would bend. Ellie had “the gouch”. She would talk about it all the time because her foot was always swollen, it hurt most of the time and doctor’s were idiots etc etc. She had an old recliner with a 30’s floral print that was pretty worn and an ottoman with a pillow covered with a white pillow case with embroidered flowers on the edges that she would put her foot on. I guess gout is genetic or Slovak eating and drinking habits are so ingrained it might as well be. I wish I had been as interested in Family History back then as I am now. I remember her talking about people from the past non-stop with Mom Hagar; and she had an opinion on each and every one of them. So in the end, I never really knew Aunt Ellie but the time I spent in her home and listening to her left me with an intriguing curiosity and way more questions than answers.

During the summer of ’66, we camped at relatives, camped at campgrounds, camped at the ocean, camped in the Pocono’s. We were gypsies in the truest sense of the word for those three months. Dad loved it… I loved it…. Mom … not so much. At some point, as school approached, we packed up the trunk of the car (per Dad’s drawing of where all the suitcases went) and headed off to LaCrosse, Wisconsin where we rented a small but comfortable 2 bedroom house with attic and basement at 1637 Travis Street a couple of doors down from Tim Sciborski’s house and a half block from Carl Newcomb’s place – the three musketeers ride again!!

Our time in Idaho was cut short when somewhere in government a bureaucrat realized that nuclear rocket engines had at least one major drawback. We were off to North Dakota in mid-1963 for three + years to build a mine mouth lignite (brown coal) fired power plant on the Missouri River. Originally, we stayed in Hazen, ND while Mom and Dad made some decisions on where to live. We were in a motel in Hazen that was on a property that included a ranch owned by some nice folks with a young boy my age and they had horses. This was my first encounter with riding horses. I got to ride Old Tom since I was a neophyte. We had BB guns with us and there were metal plate targets set up on trees all over the ranch. It was fun riding around their ranch. Very western feeling!

Mom and Dad decided to live in Mandan, which although it was a 55-mile drive one way for Dad, it offered more of a urban lifestyle with choices in schools, housing and commerce. Dad bought a 10-year-old Rambler with a head bolt heater of course for the commute. We rented one side of a duplex from Fred and Tillie Stuhldreher at 209 Division St on top of the hill in Mandan. Great neighborhood – lots of kids; Terry Barnhardt, Mike Finz, Tommie Bear, Jeff Huber (and all of his brothers which apparently arrived on a yearly schedule). I was promptly enrolled in St. Joseph’s Catholic School and then my Uncle Johnny passed away which is chronicled elsewhere.

Once ensconced in third grade at SJS, I met Tommie Tooley who ended up being a longtime friend and Jerome Kostelecky who was famous for smearing ear wax on book covers and apparently had trouble wiping his butt. Jerome’s hygiene problems aside, Mandan was a pretty idyllic life for a kid. Bicycles, 4th of July fireworks, houses being built providing both bicycling nirvana as well as great places to play army (Mike Finz was something of a WW2 nutcase simulating battles against the Hun), cub and then boy scouts, fishin’ huntin’ and campin’ along the Missouri River, living at the top of the greatest downhill bicycle and skating run of all time. I learned to swim in the Mandan public pool and I had my first, and only, fight during the fourth grade school year. Dad Hagar had always worked on boxing with me and it came in handy. Robert Burns was bullying Jerome about being something of a slob. Although I did not disagree with his assessment, I felt that he was getting a little aggressive and said something about it to Robert. He turned and rushed me and took a swing at me which I automatically blocked and apparently, based on my recollection and family lore I took a Cassius Clay swing back at him and decked him. That was good for a lot of calls and meetings with the principal and the pastor and me acting contrite with feigned, but well-acted, apologies to Robert and his mom and dad. Nobody liked Robert Burns because he was always a pompous PITA and bully. I never had another fight after that. It was something Dad Hagar said about being a good at boxing and self-defense and not abusing it.

Mom and Dad sent me to summer camp at Camp Dominic Savio on the banks of Lake Sakakawea for summer camp. It was run by Jesuit priests who really appreciated my boxing skills; as Jesuits are pretty big on boxing for stress relief. Tommie Tooley and I were there for about 2 weeks and had a blast. My first trip away from home! I wrote letters everyday professing how much I missed M&D and home. Those Jesuits, teaching kids how to lie at such a young age.

The Mandan movie theater on main street had $0.50 double feature western and war movies on Saturday’s. For about a buck and a half, you could get 3 or 4 hours of movies some popcorn, candy and a drink. North Dakota was cold in the winter. I learned to ice skate – probably in October. We went tobogganing on the golf course hills and I had my first ski lessons courtesy of the boy scouts. We had a lot of -36 degree mornings and several -40 degree mornings. There was a famous 3 day blizzard in the winter of 1964 that left houses and underpasses covered. Mom Hagar was down to cooking cans of corned beef hash. I spent a day or so in the hospital due to a case of snow blindness and possible appendicitis — Darn that corned beef hash! I also took up baseball in Mandan. I was not a gifted baseball player so I played right field and was as surprised as anybody when i would get a hit or make a catch.

Vacations from a NoDak home base were epic. A week in the Black Hills of South Dakota, trips to the Badlands National Monuments in both North and South Dakota, my first foreign travel to exotic Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada. Lots of long weekends camping and fishing. It was also during this period that Dad Hagar would take me to work on weekends and sometimes during the week. I had my own hard hat and little ear protection equipment. I was paid $0.10 for each drawing that I would tape the edges of with a cool little machine (there were no computers so there was no AutoCAD in 1964-1965). I learned how to use the mechanical Frieden calculator on my Dad’s desk which when you hit calculate made the whole desk shake as the carriage return happened. I also began to learn about slide rules. I walked the site with Dad all the time and saw the power plant being built. Possibly, more important to my future, I watched the construction of the Big Beulah excavator on the lignite property which began mining about a year and a half into power plant construction so that they could stockpile coal. The lignite here was pretty interesting because it was not unusual to fossilized and partially fossilized ferns, wood pieces and other biologics in the coal.

We got a dog that was half border collie and half terrier. She became Flipper and was a great companion, cementing another of my future activities. As unhappy as our border collie was about riding, Flipper was a car dog. Head out the window, ears flapping but for some reasons she barked at mailboxes as we drove past them. Took years to break her of that. Our neighbors had a visually and hearing impaired little girl and they had a black lab that was her protector and helper that was about the same size as the granddog Jax. Even when Flipper was just a pup she would go over and steal butcher bones from the lab. She had to drag them home they were so big. I always worried that the Lab would bite her in half or something equally nasty. But the lab would just watch knowing that there was always another bone.

Finally, North Dakota cemented a lot of my other interests. The electrical engineer at the power plant was a gentleman named George Scragg. George was a ham radio operator and we would go over to his house and my eyes would glaze over looking at all the radios and the smell of hot electronics. One Christmas, M&D bought me my first Heathkit, a regenerative receiver kit that I built and that worked. We also had a large basement in our house and Dad built his first darkroom with a small enlarger and we would go down there and sniff chemicals while we learned how to develop and make photo prints. He would also splice the super 8 movies together. We also had a model building area where we would put together model airplanes, ships and cars, painting them with accurate color schemes and I learned to glue, carefully trimming excess while under the influence of Testor’s glue. Then we got onto building balsa airplanes and flying them and I became hooked on the whole flying thing. All of the kids rode our bikes constantly until there was too much snow on the streets and since it was always uphill going home (10 minutes to school, 30 back) we all had legs of steel. Skate boards had started to become popular for some reason in about 1965 and we all found an old pair of steel skates that we attached to a piece of wood stolen from a home construction site and learned how to fall while hauling down the hill. Surprised none of us ended up in the hospital. I should add the skate boarding was not my forte.

Next Up: Becky and Tom had nothing on us – The Wisconsin Years.