February 2008 Archives

I am woefully late in acknowledging and thanking cousin Linda for her sleuthing on the Radjah Shelduck, as informative as I could wish.  I was delighted to know all about this elegant black-and-white fowl, having always a fondness for birds, those airy fragile-steel creatures of hollow bones and hidden air sacs that let them master the air.  (The PBS Nature series just had a documentary on engineers trying to duplicate the best raptors' flight wings, the peregrine falcons especially, the fastest, timed between 124 and 168 mph when they're diving after prey.)  So I decided to put together some of my bird photos as a belated thank you, and I suspect she already understands the pun on her name, linda being the Spanish adjective (feminine) for "cute, sweet, lovely," as in "Es una persona tan linda!"  [She's such a lovely person.]

Not lawn ornaments but the amazing flamingoes balanced on single stilt legs, with strange shovel beaks.

 

And this is one of the world's noisiest, the largest parrot, the blue hyacinth.  What colors!

 

 

 

 

Get that camera outta here!

The March 2008 Smithsonian in its "This Month in History" page has for "75 Years Ago:  It's Off to Work We Go:  On March 31, 1933, President Roosevelt signs the Civilian Conservation Corps into being.  The CCC hires some three million unemployed men (ages 17 to 28) over nine years for public works.  They plant 3 billion trees, lay 97,0000 miles of road and drain 84 million acres of farmland before World War II ends the job shortage."  (Page 18)

After a very early photo of Uncle Earl as a little boy, we have several of his CCC pictures.  But, first, the boy, to which my cousins can compare themselves.  Next to it is a photo of Earl with his dad, Ole, next to Ole's house in Center, behind the present-day post office.  Back then the post office site was a large general store, run first by Ole and Loova Ellingson, then by Clyde and Marietta Holmes.

Earl Clarence Ellingson was born 28 November 1916 at Center, his mother Fern Peed Ellingson, Ole's first wife.  He died 28 May 1966 at Gilbert, Iowa.  He married Audria Margurite Koftan, as Mom has Aunt Audree's name on that family page, 21 July 1938.  After he and Audree were divorced, he married Marilyn Mullen Ahman on 28 October 1961.

 

This seems a fairly early picture of Center, the house and shed in the background unfamiliar to me, the schoolhouse clearly visible on its hillside.  At the time this was the road to Bloomfield.  The photo is clearly in front of Ole's house.

 

 

This is the small series of CCC camp photos, some with Grandma Koftan's writing visible, my labels identifying where Earl is.

 

 

 

And I'm presuming this photo of Audree and him was during his CCC days because of the uniform.

 

 

 

 

 

Uncle Glen's second wife was from a prominent Randolph (NE) family, very sweetly genteel, kind, sentimental.  I would call her manner gushing but not in a negative sense, simply the way her goodness poured out of her.  She embodied niceness.  A devout Roman Catholic, she was the sort no one can envision having an enemy, a very gracious, proper hostess, socially involved, a soft foil for Uncle Glen's argumentative chin jutting forth.  One didn't even dream of swearing around her or behaving badly.  One might feel smothered in her mothering arms, but it was not unpleasant or cloying, just that sweetness sweeping one up.  And she was pretty.  She collected salt-and-pepper shakers and had hundreds in various china closets, on shelves, the largest collection of them I've ever seen, the variety fascinating a little boy.  Aunt Paula was born 19 September 1921 and died 20 August 1969 while I was in Europe.

She was, however, unable to conceive; so, while she had motherless Darrell to rear, they also adopted a little redhead they named Patricia.  I think adoption was rather rare then, but this was all well before my time.  Patricia's dates from Mom's records are her marriage to Thomas Guilfoyle 5 May 1951, her death 2 March 1986.

Darrell and his new carrot-top sister.

I suspect this might be Pat's senior photo.  It's certainly how I remember her.  Imagine the hair very orange-red.  She was like her mother, Paula.  She moved to the East with her husband, first a wealthy suburb and then New York City itself, where she had several children and developed Parkinson's disease, I think, which crippled her before it killed her.  Some fatal illness without a cure.  I know her last years were in a wheelchair and the children posted the letters.  We got regular Christmas family photos from the Guilfoyles, ended by her death.  If I run across any, I will post it.  The last address for them in Mom's address book is for an apartment on Fifth Avenue, New York City and one for her son, Bill, also in NYC. 

Uncle Glen first married a Bruner from Bloomfield, an old family name there, only disappearing recently.  Here is what I think must be their wedding picture, a very large one.  It was usual in those days for the man to sit and the wife to stand in family photos.

I included the following for its label, "Mabel and Socrates," the cat's name definitely indicating the family education.

That's a genuine cafe chair, but I've never seen another sized for an infant.  That's the kind of chair Mary's Cafe had in Center and the Corner Drug had in Bloomfield when I was growing up.  

Note those high-topped shoes.

[Great] Uncle Glen tended to dominate conversations and not just because he was a doctor.  The Peters family was an informal debating society, very literate and literary, and their red hair stereotypically warned that they would have something to say, especially Uncle Glen.  He was born 8 July 1884, living until 4 December 1970.  I am tempted to call him cantankerous, but that makes him seem sour, when he simply loved to argue and would even play the devil's advocate for the game. Verbally aggressive. persuasively so.  He favored politics; the Peters family were Democrats, which meant they didn't lack opposition in Nebraska.

I have no idea how old he was in this, but it is our oldest photo of him. He never changed, though that same hairdo grew white.  He had the same sharp cheekbones prized by Hollywood and modeling studios when I stayed with him briefly in late 1969, the year before he died, in Randolph, where he was Dr. Peters forever.  I had come home from Europe with kidney stones and had to find a job, for I had planned on finding work over there.  The high school English teacher was gone for some reason I don't remember; the superintendent happened to be a jock I'd graduated from Wayne State (NE) with; we had mutual emergencies:  he needed a substitute, and I needed a job; being Dr. Peter's great nephew helped; and so I had the most unhappy teaching job ever for three weeks.  But I didn't stay locked in all day as the students and other faculty did, because Uncle Glen interceded and wanted to have his meals with me.  Or something like that.  His name and influence definitely helped, as well as the lodging, though he tended to talk endlessly at me.

He looks around the same age in this one, with "Glen to Mother" written on the back, which means that Fern got several of her mother's collection.

He was a teacher before he was a doctor.  Apparently contemporaneously with the above photo is this postcard with probably Great Grandmother Peters' spidery handwriting on the end:  "School, Where Glen Was Princibal (sic) in 1906 & 1907."   The sign below the bell tower says "ORCHARD SCHOOL," doubtlessly meaning Orchard, Nebraska.  We have his Creighton University Medical School Commencement Program from 1911, a bit worse for the wear, one corner's pages chewed away, though otherwise a fine historical document.  Creighton lies on the north edge of downtown Omaha, a powerhouse locally in law and medicine--and sports,  the same family name given to the first town south of Center, my hometown, in northeast Nebraska.

Here he is, next to his mother, Mary Jane Maher Peters.

Just for the interest in how much he looked a paternal Peters, here is his father's brother, John, born 16 March 1873.  (Edward Leroy, Glen's father, was born 9 October 1857, as a reminder.)  On the back his mother wrote, "My old bachelor son John."  Actually, according to Mom's records, John married a Gladys Spidle and died 17 June 1949, as much as she has about him.

And here is "Dr. G. E.," Fern's writing, as I've noted, in his Army Medical Corps uniform.

I will leave the faded photo of the Koftan children below alone, the boys marked clearly enough, L.J. in the upper right corner with his distinctive eye.  The girls in front are, left to right, completely faded Babe (Margaret), Bess (Bozena), and Ella.

No one is identified in this photograph but Ella, at the far right.

Here she is with her first husband, Ott Adel, and their three children, Raymond and the twins, Lorraine and Lloyd.  The rest of the photos are clearly identified, the last two from our 1948 trip to see her in South Dakota and Uncle Forrest up in Montana, as well as the Black Hills and Yellowstone, as recounted earlier.

As I mentioned in the 1948 trip sequence, she ran a motel with a hugely obese, coarse man, Jack something.  I think Raymond, the taller son, was the extra in the Passion Play and the one to get us tickets.  Though I have Spearfish on the caption and I know the sons worked there, I think the motel was in Belle Fourche.  We kept track of the family through annual Christmas cards from Lorraine, who married a rancher and lived in north central South Dakota.  The last address in Mom's address book is Harold & Lorraine Meyer, [deleted], Isabel, S.D. 57633.  As I recall, both her brothers were in the Twin Cities.

LATER NOTE:  [Great] Aunt Margaret/Babe Langhammer wrote down her "Memories" in 1988 with some extra information I didn't know, so I take the liberty to add that she says, "Ella stayed in South Dakota with Bess [Bozena] and Lee [Chapin] . . . . Ella was twelve years older, and never around, so we were never close at that time."    She adds that "Ella married Otto Adel at Witten, South Dakota [a small town northwest of Winner]."  Shell-shocked in World War I, Otto farmed but ultimately became helpless and died.  Babe actually went up and helped Ella with the three children.  Witten was near the Rosebud Indian Reservation.  At the time Otto was "in and out of the hospital . . . . Bess [Bozena, their sister] and the kids were living in Witten and Lee [Chapin, Bess's husband] was running a barber shop."  "After Ott died, Ella moved up in to the Black Hills.  She married twice, but divorced both times.  Later she moved to Isabel to be near Lorraine.  Lloyd died.  On January 1, 1981, we received word that Ella had died.  She had a pacemaker, but it didn't work."  She's buried at Witten.  And I am so grateful Aunt Babe made the effort to leave her "Memories" for the family.  The older relatives should always be encouraged to either tape-record or write about their families.  (Well, hey, I'm trying.) 

This must be L. J., at the left, in his courting days.  I don't know whose place it is in the background, but I would like to think it is the Koftan ranch, as [Great] Aunt Babe called it, north of Bassett.  Though the photo isn't as clear as I would wish, he's the one holding the reins.  He always seemed to have horses.  The next photo is labeled by Fern as simply "The grays," the little barn in the background identifying it as on the Peters homestead, Up West, in other words.

In the next picture, I can't say where the corncrib in the background is or whether that's Grandpa Koftan, L.J., on the side of the wagon, though it looks like him.  It's his writing at the bottom:  "My load in front.  The horses just looked around."  It's next to a photo of the Old Brick House, but that's hardly definite proof.  Dad talked about husking corn with the team and wagon when he worked for Grampa, hard labor with the special gloves that had hooks built in for speedy cutting. 

This is an early one of Velma and Audree, obviously.

I know that he also had mules at the Old Brick House, and here's the proof in the background.  It's labeled, "A pair to draw to."   

That's Larry Dale on Peggy Ann at the Old Brick House, though it could be his son, David, by the strong resemblance; and here's one of L.J. again with his team at the Bloomfield farm in the hard winter of 1948-49, the same team pictured with Larry in an earlier entry on the Bloomfield farm.

I have since found some more but will go on with other entries from a recent session with the scrapbook.  

Like my sea dragon so much I can't resist showing off his close-up.  "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!"

Now for a song we always sang at church camp and Pilgrim Fellowship rallies, a round like "Frere Jacques" or "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," out of a little blue international song collection, Aussie, in this case:

"Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,/ Merry, merry king of the bush is he./ Laugh, kookaburra, laugh, kookaburra,/ Gay your life must be."  You can listen to it on the Internet or at YouTube, happy noise on a winter night.  And here's a trio of kookaburras from our Desert Dome to sing it for you:

Ever since I saw this solitary bird in the large outdoor aviary, I've been impressed by its penguin-elegant black-and-white but can't identify it despite Internet searches and wading through my several bird books.  I initially described its elegance as looking as if a black cape had been thrown over its back and tied at the front.  I was surprised to see it moved indoors for the winter in the South American jungle section below the brilliant macaws (for contrast?).  If anyone knows what it is, please tell me.

The very social, brilliant macaws I was squawking about?

Doesn't that warm up the 8 F. outside?! 

This is Grandpa Koftan's earliest photo, by a Tyndall, South Dakota, photographer.  On the back is "1891," for he was born 27 April 1891.

The next chronologically is a family photograph of Joseph and Frances (Fannie) Hlinovsky Koftan [originally Kaftan] with their surviving children.  Joseph was born 27 October 1861 near Prague, Bohemia, to Frank and Josefa Kaftan.  He had five brothers--Charles, Frank, Vince, Robert, John--another infant brother buried at sea, and two sisters, Barbara and Josephine.  Coming over in steerage took four months.  The daughter of Martin and Rosa Hlinovsky, Frances was born 19 October 1866 near Prague.  She had five sisters--Mary, Josephine, Emma, Katherine, and (?) and a brother who died in Bohemia.   Joseph was from a poor village, Fannie was middle class, according to Aunt Babe, and both came through Ellis Island, the Kaftans to the Tyndall area, the Hlinovskys originally to Pawnee City, Nebraska.  They married 15 April 1886, at Springfield, Bonhomme County, in the Territory of Dakota.  According to [Great] Aunt Babe, he stopped sowing oats to get married, which is close to the story of how Jack and Velma, Joe and Ella, married on a day too windy to pick corn.  Their three earliest children--Eva, b. 6 March 1887; Clara, b. 9 June 1888; Edith, b. 27 February 1890--died of diphtheria in 1898, the year marked on the back of the family photo by L.J., with "Dad," "Mom," and the surviving children's names at the time:  Laurence John, b. 27 April 1891; LeRoy Elmo, b. 21 December 1892; Bozena (Bess) M., b. 20 September 1894; Ella Augustine, b. 5 August 1896; and Frank Edward, b. 28 April 1898.  Another daughter, Annie Lora, b. 8 August 1904, died 4 August 1909 from infection after accidentally ramming a stick in her throat (while running, I think??). Later came George Frederick, b. 3 March 1901; Joseph Albert, b. 2 December 1903; Margarette Josephine, b. 5 July 1908, hence known as [Aunt] Babe.  The family moved to a Rock County ranch eight miles from Bassett at some point because of family friction in South Dakota.  The name changed because of a spelling error on homestead documents, but Aunt Babe doesn't say when.  I do know both Koftans and Kaftans are in the Tyndall cemeteries, and Grampa K's cousin, Emil, and his family we've stayed in touch with are Kaftans.  

L. J. is the little boy with his arm on the table with the potted plant.  He had a strabismus--I think it's called--a misalignment of the eyes, as is more evident in the next two photos.

On the back of the above picture is "Laurence J. Koftan Tyndall, So. Dak., June 3rd, 1908."  The photo below simply has the year, "1919."

I left Robert Duvall doing his 2002 Assassination Tango.  When I want to see the tango, I'll watch Carlos Saura's flamenco versions or one of the best dance films available, Sally Potter's 1997 The Tango Lesson, which I love as much for the soundtrack as for the many tangos--one magnificently with her and three male partners--and the romantic plot.  I have to give Duvall credit, though, for doing the film in Argentina, speaking Spanish as much as English, and appearing as a white-haired ponytailed thickset lover as well as hit man.

The best film I saw last week was the first Belgian film I've ever seen, so good I stayed up past 3:00 a.m.  It's set in Antwerp and also involves a hit man, fatter and certainly homelier than Duvall, and suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's so that he has to use his arm as a notepad.  The American title of the 2003 Dutch De Zaak Alzheimer (The Alzheimer Case) is Memory of a Killer, misleading even if that's the problem for the assassin.  Dutch is the closest to English of European languages, so I was interested in the language.  Otherwise, it was a tense police procedural in which the dumpy old killer managed to stay just ahead of the good-looking (how American is that?) young homicide detectives.  The plot is hardly American, with no chain of explosions nor many car chases and a relatively low body count, though it involves upper-class corruption and apparently a real-life Belgian predicament of battling police divisions, in the movie the state police protecting a corrupt baron and interfering with the city homicide detectives and their investigation.  During an assignment to kill a child prostitute he cannot carry out, the tired old assassin discovers that his employers are involved in child pornography and sexual abuse and so starts killing them despite all kinds of official odds against him.  (We find out late in the film that his father sexually abused him and his brother in childhood.)  It helps that he looks like someone's overweight, grumpy old grandfather, harmlessly homely and bumbling, when he's a ferociously methodical killer.  From my court experience and other sources, I know that the best criminals appear as plain, everyday people, especially true of child molesters, who, contrary to stereotypes, are generally nondescript married men. 

Last night I watched one of my favorite foreign films, the 1981 Diva, an object lesson in why I or anyone else favors foreign films.  I like French films anyway, to try to recapture the fragments I have left of college French and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning French I still go back to between the Spanish and Italian volumes.  Besides, it's fun to see how many ways the subtitles translate the commonest swearword, merde (pronounced "maird," meaning "shit").  What American film would star a skinny young postal worker, Jules, obsessed with an American black opera singer--he makes the distinction that he loves opera, not classical music--who also ends up chased by freaky killers and ominous Orientals in mirrored sunglasses?  The movie takes off immediately into its always stylish photography with one of the singer's rare song recitals.  She is a real diva, as that word properly is used, in line with other opera prima donnas, Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, Renata Tebaldi, not some bitchy female rock star/actress, a purist who refuses to be recorded.  Jules secretly does just that, which two Taiwanese with the mirrored sunglasses seated behind him note.  (The movie is full of relections in mirrors, glass, water, chrome.)  He steals her dress when he goes backstage for her autograph and later, returning it, has a long romantic but platonic interlude with her, a kind of lovely-Paris-by-rainy-night travelogue, another reason we watch foreign films.

In the meantime  a pair of hired killers, one oily haired like a would-be Valentino, the other a short freaky little psycho fond of throwing ice picks, are tracking a drugged prostitute who drops a damning tape into Jules' moped saddlebag before she is killed.  That plot has the head of homicide detectives secretly running a white slavery and prostitution ring, drugs also involved, blamed on a West Indian, so that this crime lord knows whatever his detectives find out in a murderous subplot and can send the pair on other hits.  The second subplot involves the Taiwanese, who want the secret recital tape to pirate and profit from, threatening Jules and attempting to blackmail the diva.  Obviously, the film is one of those about an unknowing innocent (Jules, the opera freak) thrown into menacing danger he doesn't initially understand, his life very much at risk.

The movie is as stylish as they come, especially in its saturated color sequences (a kind of finale is in the red, blue, and white of the French flag), barring the rainy nighttime Paris travelogue.  It has two lofts that would make any New York Soho dweller jealous.  Jules' is over a garage with wrecked cars, including a Rolls Royce Corniche, in his anteroom and huge car-theme murals with a large nude on the floor and the very latest sound equipment in his loft far too expensive for a mere mail delivery clerk, though it's soon trashed by the bad guys looking for the tell-all cassette.  His major helpmate is a rich eccentric, Gorodish, whose loft is largely bare--he's into Zen--with an old-fashioned bathtub on clawed feet, a sleek kitchen galley, the largest jigsaw puzzle I've ever seen on the floor (looks to be 7' X 4' of a blue-and-white seascape).  He chops onions wearing a scuba mask, which has to be some wildly symbolic connection between salty tears and our evolution out of the sea; considers spreading butter on a split baguette his Zen moment; comes up with not one but two wonderful twin white old Citroens (1920s?).  His girlfriend, Alba, is a sly, highly sophisticated, well-dressed little Vietnamese shoplifter looking very young, who rollerskates around the loft and who likes Jules and enlists her middle-aged lover's help.

Besides that, there are constant wonderful quirks.  A woman in the same kind of pleated dress does the Marilyn Monroe bit from the 1955 Seven Year Itch over the sidewalk grate, air blasting her skirt up to reveal transparent bikini panties.  It is not entirely gratutitous, for the killers are in a passageway under that very grate.  A long chase sequence has Jules bumping up and down staircases into and out of the Metro (subway) on his moped as the little psycho chases him on foot.  A hapless cab driver, conked and dragged out of his cab for merely transporting Jules, has a Molotov cocktail stuck in his pocket which explodes as the killers steal the cab and Jules.  A double cross turns into a triple cross as the menacing Taiwanese are blown up in the first classic white Citroen as the intended victim, the rich eccentric, then drives off in the second.  The movie ends as it began with the same La Wally aria as Jules returns the recording and the diva hears herself for the first time.  No wonder I've seen it at least 15 times. 

I've had definite problems with the computer and this site recently, so that I had to rewrite lost sections of the last entry twice, but I never know whom to blame, which is the technological loophole now.  Nobody seems to know what goes on in our magic circuitry.  We need those World War II gremlins back to blame--or perhaps they never left.  Last fall, when I seemed to disappear from here in October, I couldn't get anything done for nearly a week after having started a very deep scan.  When I couldn't even pull up e-mail, I knew that ominously signalled a greater depression, as matters piled up like the chairs in a Cirque du Soleil balancing act.  At the time Cox Cable was sending letters apologizing for any service disruption while I was unable to get several favorite channels--and still can't get the National Geographic channel--yet paying for them and not getting an answer to my written complaint, as the front page of the newspaper daily kept a running tale of typical political shenenigans about a proposed new baseball stadium affecting our College World Series contract, each day another revelation of what we hadn't been and weren't being told.  The mayor apparently learned something from the Bush administration.  Biblically, in such trying times one girds his loins, but I'm not even sure what that means, and it sounds entirely too obscene for a cold winter night.  Something of the same sort of technological mystery occurred weekend before last when the spirit of the computer started wandering around the ether like a wayward child, so I played too much Cradle of Rome and other games, wasting what little is left of my life while supposedly preventing Alzheimer's and paranoia.  I've decided I need to simply slog through and add some color to the winter landscape. 

Other aquarium delights make one wonder about colors and why they are what they are, the fascination of natural design and camouflage, including the deceptive eye spot at the rear.

And here is the unanimous winner of the Father of the Year award, one of my favorites.  I knew the male seahorse was the one who got pregnant and took care of his babies, though I hadn't known he flaunts his pouch to attract the egg-bearing female.  (No relation to the kangaroo and other marsupials:  the seahorse is a 40-million-year-old fish, albeit a strangely beautiful one that looks anything but a fish.)  Anyway, after a three-week pregnancy and 72-hour labor, he can birth as many as 200, and so it's no wonder he exhausts himself into a washed-out whiteness.  And then turns around and repeats it all over again.  Here is the usual version of Hippocampus.  Right, the biological name is the same as our part of the brain dealing with long-term memory and spatial navigation, named for the Greek "curved horse."

And here is an evolutionary beauty I find utterly stunning.  The leafy sea dragon is a seahorse cousin, headed downward in this view.  The female lays her eggs on his tail instead of in a pouch, so the male doesn't have the fine fatherhood capabilities of the seahorse.  But he's certainly spectacular in good looks.  

I've run across some incidental photos to add to re-creating the Bloomfield farm.  The oldest of these are from 1938, my birth year, when [Great] Aunt Nellie and [Great] Uncle John Feddersen with their younger son, Donley, were clearly visiting Nellie's baby sister, Fern, and Laurence.  Most cousins are more familiar with Mervin, Nellie and John's older son, because his second wife, Charlotte, and their two children live close to the Iowa cousins decades later.  My middle name is for Velma's favorite cousin in those days.

Gram's writing across the bottom of the photo is duplicated in my caption.  This large garden was north of the house and provided many of the foodstuffs for canning and everyday meals.  It also had large bleeding heart and love-lies-bleeding (amaranthus cauditis) plants I always associated with Gramma and, much later, peony plants along the front. The view is toward the corncrib-hog shed.  Below are the pictures next to it.

I couldn't get the smaller photos cropped well enough, so we have the trio, featuring an optical illusion, as the much taller Nellie is standing farther back and then by Fern.  It's a good shot of the big barn, and there is no chicken house by the windmill.

We liked playing in the musty, dusty barn with all its climbing areas and overhead haymow.  Milking was a daily chore.  Grampa would squirt us with the sticky milk and bark a laugh.  Mom could milk, of course, and often helped with chores beyond the planting and harvesting.  I never learned how to sit on the one-legged milk stool nor how to squeeze and pull on the udder simultaneously to squirt the milk noisily into the pail, a sound I can still hear, though Mike and Denny did.  The milk was warm and not at all like the town store milk I was accustomed to, nor was the rich cream and the almost white butter produced by the separator and churn, two simple machines easier to master.  I think Gram even made cottage cheese.  The milk and eggs were taken to town weekly on Saturdays, the busiest day for all the towns, the sidewalks full of people shopping and socializing, the only day the stores were open late, usually 9:30 or 10:00 p.m. 

Then there is this photo.  Audree is in the dress, but I haven't identified the others.  The view is east northeast.  At the left is the front gate, the barn in the background.  Here is the hill I mentioned.  Red with white trim like the other outbuildings, the shed in the middle had a row of nests, but the main chicken coop for egg gathering was at the right.  The underground cellar with its slanted door is either obscured or not dug yet.  The photo is early, for the trees aren't grown, and the yard is full of ground ivy/Creeping Charlie, found in medicinal herbals for home remedies and a rich vitamin C source but a pungent and invasive enemy weed.

What I call the Bloomfield farm was about two and a half, three miles northwest of Bloomfield on the gravel road we used between Center and Bloomfield, also the mail route (State 84).  Today the asphalt is a mile south, so it's easier to go to the Bloomfield cemetery west of town, drive a mile north, turn left and drive west approximately a mile or a bit more.  The third Koftan home was where the country road met the state highway, on the north side. Trees ran along both the south and west edges of the farmstead.  They didn't line the lane in, but there was an apple orchard to the west of the lane, between the house and the highway.  Catty-cornered from the Koftans was the Gerhard (and Lizzie) Clausen place on the south side of the highway.  West of the Koftans on the highway was a little but steep hill, and the farm north of it was the Fisks, so it was Fisk Hill.

The house, the one I remember the most fondly, looked like this.  Grandma's date is 1949.

The view is looking straight west, the orchard to the left or south out of sight, the house surrounded by trees.  That's a lilac by the front gate.  The separator and washing machine sat on the front porch. To the left in the front yard were large ash trees (box elders), one with a tire swing for us.  Back of the house were several black walnut trees.  To the right is the red outhouse where old catalogs and farm magazines went for ecological reuse.

The unheated upstairs was all bedrooms, the master bedroom, Gramma and Grampa's, to the far left, with the nicest furniture, where we were not supposed to be most of the time.  (Actually, there were little-very little--registers that let warm downstairs air rise, but the cookstove and living room stove were off at night.)  The two small bedrooms in the middle had a door in the closets, so we generally messed up the clothes going from one to the other while hiding.  The bedroom above the dining room was the "guest" bedroom.  We could go out the windows on to the top of the porch, but that made Grampa cuss and Gramma yell at us.  A large oval portrait of Mom at three hung on the landing, the stairwell at the right rear.  The window above the lilac is to the dining room, the central location.  Its door, unseen because of being at a right angle at the right-hand end of the front porch, was the main door.  The table where everyone gathered was at the northeast corner of the room and house, to the front right here.  The door at the left, to the living room, was ordinarily kept closed, seldom used to the extent that sometimes it was locked.  At the back of the dining room to the right was the little galley kitchen where Gram made all kinds of food daily with her big range and small sink, and there was a little back porch down two steps, with more steps down to the back on the way to the outdoor toilet.

Taken during the 1948-1949 winter I've mentioned as the worst in my memory, with colossal drifts, when Center had no traffic in or out for two weeks, these photos show the same set of buildings in the northwest corner, as well as Larry Dale, Grandpa K. and Grandma K. at the time.  Back of Larry, beyond the row of trees, is the Fisk farm across the county/country road.  In those days the countryside supported many farm families and farms were actually very close in "neighborhoods," all gone today in merged properties and corporate farming.

Here are some more reminders of the favorite Koftan family house, six miles east and two miles south of Center, a large two-story brick house (with an attic story or room, evidenced by the dormer windows) being relatively rare, I think, in the early part of the 20th century in northeast Nebraska.

As the photo below illustrates, it's where Velma grew up and Larry and Audree were born.  It's where Jack lay in a second-floor bedroom with his spinal injury from the job in the Omaha stockyards.  The doctor had to puncture Jack's spinal cord regularly to release the pressure, the fluid squirting up to the ceiling.  Jack also contended the injury made his hearing so acute that he could hear a fly walking across that ceiling.  It's also where Velma and Jack lived after they were married.  Dad (Jack) was, of course, Grampa Koftan's hired man, and Mom said Gramma did everything she could to manipulate the couple into marriage, Velma only 18 and out of high school, Jack nine years older.

As one can see, it had front and back porches.  The front lane was lined by rows of cedars, very distinctive from a distance.  Velma loved it so much, she tried to buy it back from a later owner, who not only refused to sell it but had it condemned, which angered and frustrated the family.  Lightning had struck and fissured a crack in the masonry, which Mom always considered minor damage.  But that crack was used as an excuse to condemn and raze the house ultimately, which broke Mom's heart.  She refused to speak to the perpetrator after that.  As with what I call the Bloomfield farm, nothing is left to even indicate a farmstead was once there.

I have another photo of Mom and Audree by the brick house I'll have to show later, one of my very favorites.  Seated, a bare corner of the brick house visible in the background, Velma (Mom) is holding a puppy, Audree a toddler by her side.  I'm happy that Mom always had a dog the way I did.