July 2009 Archives

Judging from Mom's stories how she'd break off a twig or little branch and switch my legs on the way home, I was a bit like mercury, hard to grab, as this sequence of little photos shows.  Grandma Koftan lets loose of me, and I apparently took off running whenever I was loose.  Here, though, it is Mom's box camera covered with fake leather bright red cardboard I am headed for.  I loved red long before I'd ever heard of the Cornhuskers.  My first snowsuit was bright red.  The car looks like the one Mom drove to her schools.

The earliest picture of me and the station, I think, is this, the door open into the office.  Dad always kept a gum or nut machine on the glass counter, visible here.  And that counter was one of Center's prime gambling sites, always a card game going on, Grandpa Luckert (who took care of the pumps, oil checks, radiator water levels) with his cribbage board or euchre, Dad taking a break to play a hand or two of pitch or the other two.  It is just like Dad to have a thermometer up by the door too.  The trim, by the way, seen in other photos also, was dark green (on the doorframe).

Obviously I needed a back yard to play in but also to corral me.  An early photo shows the earliest fencing, which I clearly did not like.  Like Grandma Koftan's that sat on her porch, Mom's washing machine was outside.  We long used bottled gas for cooking (Dad became the local dealer), but that looks like a hot water heater(?) behind me.

 Another photo shows the back door.

I have to show one of the photos of me and my first dog, the first of several, a very affectionate female who "disappeared" suddenly.  She got sick, and Dad took her out north and shot her, though I didn't find that out for a while, and you can guess my later reaction when Mom told me.

The back yard was enlarged and fenced in with white lathing, usually with the green tops as seen in later pictures.  An excellent welder, Dad always made our clothesline of pipe, as in the left photo with Mom's clothespin bag hanging limply.

It isn't quite so neat when I posed in the little Army suit Grandma Koftan made for me.  (It was World War II, after all.)  On the lot behind the garage, Dad has the first of his many junk piles, often saving scrap metal to sell.  You can see the house where I was born and spent most of my young life in, where my sisters were also raised, across the street behind me in the left photo.  Toys during World War II were usually wood or, for the first time, plastic, so I remember playing with wooden boats Mom brought me from Wayne in a tub of water out here.  I also had a beautiful little metal train I loved with two- or three-inch cars, rare for the time because metals were for the war, that a bigger boy (I know who) deliberately wrecked.  I also generally had a sand pile. 

Here are cousin Denny Ellingson and I in the metal chairs Dad always favored, later versions on our front porch.  Many decades later I was able to find retro duplicates, making everybody happy with memories.  That's quite a tricycle at the left edge of the photo.  Besides the back of the garage, that's an outhouse at the right edge, one which lasted to my high school years. 

At the same time we got to hold baby cousin Micheal Ellingson, Dennis' new brother. ( I have a third photo, but it is a strange double exposure.)  That's the McGill house in the background.  A cob pile behind us is for stove use (for the station or garage?), and Dad evidently had a little shed.  Our stove in the living room used coal oil and had a mica front window through which I was hypnotized by the flames.  And Mom cooked with bottled gas, which is why I'm unsure about the cobs.  (Grandma Koftan used them in her cook stove.) 

Of course, Denny and I didn't stay in the yard.  Dad often had a really old car or two parked by the alley, and here we are with one.  I wish I had a picture of an old roofless Model-T he had once, the kind Mom learned to drive on the farm, that had a combination of a protractor-compass on the steering wheel to adjust the gas feed and had to be cranked to start.  I really loved playing in that. 

Sometimes to re-create a sight stuck in memory, you have to look around the edges of the photo.  I'll use our station as an instance.  Nothing remains of the original station, but it's at the back of the following photos.

That wooden garage was the one I grew up with, where I found the bullsnake under the welding stand, where Dad painted the outlines of all his tools and neatly kept them in place.  (That didn't last long.)  Decades later he put a Quonset building in the same spot, still used by my brother-in-law, Jim Rohrer.  The man even looks like Carl Eisenbeiss, from whom he bought the business.  That's Dad's own bike, and he took me riding regularly.  Two more photos show the two gas pumps, one the old-fashioned cylindrical kind with its fancy crown on top.  The first one shows Joe Ballard's house in the background, which had lilac bushes and shrubs later.  The second has the old town hall, originally a two-story hotel.  The view above is to the northeast, for the garage was set back from the double station unit; the two below are looking north.

I was born in our house, but, for some reason I don't remember, money, I'm sure, we soon moved back to the living quarters in the station for a few years.  The two parts are shown here.  The business/office portion is to the left/north.  We lived in the south section at the right, rather like a shotgun house:  front to back, living room, dining room with tiny kitchen, bedroom.  Later, after we had moved back into the home across the street, the front part became a parts room, the back sleeping quarters for a hired man.

The roof edges has glorious neon tubing, a magenta pink, a bright blue, and a small section of pale green.  The electrical feed to the neon tubing can be seen on the siding.  Dad had yellow roses planted across the entire front.  You can see how they spread from the early to later photos.  To this day yellow roses are special to me.  He was always a rose fancier, later planting a horseshow of 30 or so varied roses in our back yard behind our home across the street.

That's Uncle Larry Koftan holding me, with cousin Jimmy Vanness at the door.  The right photo shows our box for deliveries, milk, I presume (not mail:  that was at the post office).  The hat is undoubtedly Dad's.  He and I share a hard-to-find 7 5/8. 

Below is Jim Glover.  The shadow looks as if Mom's taking the picture.  When she went to summer school at Wayne for renewing her teaching certificate, my cast iron crib was put in the station part so Dad and Grandpa Luckert could keep track of me.  Certain high school kids like Jim would come and play with me.  Mom could do a good imitation of my begging out the window, "Jim, come play with me."

While Mom was teaching country school, I had a series of women/girls to babysit me and do light housekeeping, including Dolly Marvin [Frahm] below, Velda Rose [True]--who also did Dad's books--Shirley Sealer.  Curtain and roses means this is outside the living room.

 

 

 I have entries about Fort Atkinson before, its handsome restoration at Fort Calhoun just north of Omaha, the site of many firsts for Nebraska and the West, as well as the actual meeting place between Lewis & Clark and the Native Americans.  Our Fourth this year was gloomy and threatening, but Sunday was as beautiful as these photos tell, and I spent a happy three hours wandering around to see the re-enactors and the furnished areas.  The wide, narrow gunslit windows ruined my camera settings, so I deleted several pictures because I used Inside rather than Available Light setting--well, you'll understand.  The fort replaced a military campsite (actually the meeting area for L&C) on the Missouri River bank; the river is now about five miles to the east, but the fourth side of the fort square has never been completed, because the bank is still considered unstable.  Besides, the trees are more scenic.

At the left below is the cabin for the tinsmith and blacksmiths.  At the right is a long view in front of their cabin toward the garden and the L&C council cabin.

 

 

 Many of the residents make their own costumes, as the tinsmith did.  He said they had to be very careful because it was such a short period before major changes in military uniforms so they had to not look like the French and Indian War, the Mexican War, etc.  He also said their outfits were more comfortable than our store-bought clothes because they were tailored.  I asked him where he got his tin; he said Britain mainly, which surprised me, because that's why Rome conquered Britain, for its tin, and he agreed and said they were still mining it, though Mexico was a more common source now.  The photo of the blacksmith trio is one slightly confused by another light source, the forge fire.  I grew up with a blacksmith a block away, so they were nostalgia.

I'm very happy with the following set.  Once an anvil was set on another anvil and blown into the sky in an early version of noisy fireworks.  But that's too hazardous, and so this modern version the blacksmith called Boomer involves two hollow rings filled with gunpowder on which is set a 12# ball like a shotput.  A lady asked why, and he and I laughed (not meanly), because Boys Like Noise, of course, the point of many fireworks.  It was very loud.  If you look closely, above the smoke are the ball and one ring in mid-air. 

 

 

 

 A deer had spoiled some of the garden a few nights before. We plant many of the same, including  potatoes, tomatoes, rhubarb, onions, several herbs.  As shown in the one photo, the Council Cabin is the northernmost structure (and the Visitors Center is not far beyond it).  The ramp is not authentic but mandated by presentday law, I'd guess.

The woman at the left is making bobbin lace, a dizzying process of rolling several thread-wound bobbins back and forth to create delicately beautiful lace pinned in place.  The spinner showed us her soft wool socks she had just spun and made for hiking.

The following set illustrate the light problems for photography caused by the gunslit windows (which, otherwise, seem immensely practical).  At the left is the carpenter, holding a wooden compass he made.  While he's made several of his tools as well as saw horses and tables, he goes as far as the Southwest and Mexico to auctions and flea sales for his huge collection of tools.  The weavers were eating their lunch in another room.

Obviously, the small rugs were for sale, and the sutler's store was full of souvenirs, from candy to the quill pens in the foreground.

 I cannot imagine living in such cramped quarters.  Below are a family room and a soldiers' quarters.

Punishment must have been very harsh.  Seen through glass are, left, the main brig with my reflection, below, two solitary confinement cells which didn't allow standing up.  Also there were the stocks from Puritan New England days and a special kind of torture device at the right of the stocks, a slanted wooden box not allowing the offender to either crouch or stand.

They had a finale before the ice cream social, a complete reading of the Declaration of Independence, properly so, with two alternating units of muskets then firing volleys for each of the signatory 13 original states, punctuated by the firings of the two large cannons, the loudest booms of all.  Then a little parade off.

 

 A fine way to celebrate the Declaration of Independence and probably the world's most successful Revolution.  Aunt Myrtle would've loved it.

   

I started sending this set to people and decided just to make an entry, courtesy of Lauritzen Gardens this past week.  Celebrate our beginning!