MEMORIES OF RAISING FOUR CHILDREN – PART I

Circa 1956 – 1984 – and beyond

 By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

After having read through many other pages of this set of memoir stories, our son John suggested that I write about the four children, their various childhood experiences and how all this had affected me. Parents, at least in theory, are not supposed to have favorites, and fortunately for me, all four of these people are equally blessed in talent, charm, personality, beauty, intelligence, and all other good things. Daughter Virginia would jokingly remark that they all have good posture too. This makes it much easier to write this essay. They all have very different special qualities, however, as will be shown in the following pages.

Virginia's arrival was auspicious in more than one way. There had been a prolonged cold winter in Minnesota l955-56, and everyone was more than ready for spring. At the end of April, one should be able to expect some promise of spring, but instead of the promise, we got some 22 inches of snow on the 26th of April; heavy, wet, discouraging stuff. Threatening weather continued for the next several days until the 10th of May. On that day God smiled on us, Ginny was born and glorious spring weather appeared.  

Other events of that spring were: l.) I quit smoking. This was fairly easy, as I had never smoked heavily, I didn't want my first child to have to breathe all my smoke, and the Surgeon General's first warnings of cigarettes causing lung cancer had appeared. 2.) Barbara and I had gone into debt for a new 1956 Plymouth. 3.) We had also acquired an impossibly cute cocker spaniel puppy. The puppy had to be shut up in the car while I was on some errand or other, while Barbara was in labor in Winona General Hospital. I was having a fit worrying about her, the coming baby, and the new car with the untrained puppy shut up inside it. I should never have had to divide my worrying capacity that much, with being concerned about the unimportant things. In those days, the fathers were never, absolutely never allowed near the delivery rooms. I should have acted like the other expectant fathers, pacing about in the hospital waiting room, smoking furiously, worrying only about news of the birth. Nope, I wasn't even smoking. As a 1950s first-time expectant father and worrier, I was a failure.  

So in spite of my failings Barbara gave birth to a beautiful child. She took pride too, in never having missed a Sunday singing in the church choir during the entire nine-month process. I must have been an awfully demanding choir director in those days. (When Daughter #2, Dorothy, was born, the birth took place on a Sunday afternoon, so Barbara was not able to repeat this remarkable feat.) 

Barbara and I made the somewhat rueful discovery that once you get home with the little one, it takes probably less than half an hour for the kid to wise up, and start demanding constant service. It became impossible to do anything at home, without somehow deferring to the wants of Her Majesty, the Baby.  

After some fifty years, there are some events in Ginny's early years that I remember quite well. Since she was the oldest grandchild, Barbara's mother and father bought her a lot of "stuff" including a sand-box with white sand. The sand had to be white. For all I know, they had to send to the French Riviera to get the sand. There was also a swing set with a slide. Virginia loved to be pushed on the swing, and I remember one late afternoon when I was pushing her, she seemed utterly fearless, swinging higher and higher.  

Next morning was the first day of teaching for me, at Jefferson Junior High School, and I was all excited, as usual, as I would be on any first day of teaching. But Barbara came rushing out of the kids' bedroom in a state of near-shock. "Ginny can't walk!" was all I could understand. We didn't know if she could not, or would not walk, and of course I was very disturbed. Dr. Boardman was consulted over the telephone, and he must have said something comforting, as I went to school, even in my agitated state of mind. Ginny did not seem to be in any pain. Polio was our first concern in those pre-vaccine days. I had had a cousin who was permanently crippled by it; also the son of my best teacher friend in Winona was affected by it enough so that he had a bad limp from then on.  

I seem to remember that Barbara gave Ginny lots of massage, and after a week or two, she began to improve gradually, eventually having no lasting effects from whatever it was she had. Barbara and I were sure that her mysterious ailment actually was a very light touch of that crippling disease. Perhaps the one lasting effect was that she was never again willing to swing high on the swing.  

Ginny and Dot both had to have tonsillectomies; they seemed never to be able to shake colds and sore throats. Dr. Rose recommended that their tonsils come out. Both of them had the operation at the Methodist hospital, stayed until they were discharged as OK, and Dot was indeed OK. Ginny was not, as she woke up one night and coughed up what looked like gallons of blood all over the bathroom. It was very cold that night in Green Bay, probably somewhere around a minus 10. The 1960 Rambler started all right, and I had time to warm it up a bit while Barbara was wrapping up the kids for a hasty trip to Dr. Rose's office. Ginny was wrapped up very warmly in blankets, the whole bundle enclosed by the warmest quilt we had, a slippery satin comforter.  

We quickly got into the car and roared off to Dr. Rose's office where he had agreed to meet us. As we got out of the car, I was carrying Ginny, blankets, quilt and all, Barbara and Dot following. Dr. Rose was there and as he was holding the door for me, I said in a kind of agitated voice that she was slipping. Well, she was slipping because of the dratted slippery quilt and I was afraid I was going to drop her, but Dr. Rose thought I meant she was dying. I had some quick explaining to do. But Dr. Rose recovered his composure in a hurry and did his magic with the bleeding. So this time she was back in the hospital for observation, but not the Methodist hospital. This was St. Vincent's, the Catholic hospital where Liz Morris was a nurse. After all this tonsil hassle was over, both kids had significantly greater resistance to colds and things. 

Dot was doomed to get an early start in school. Ginny should have been two grades ahead of her, but as soon as Ginny was taught something in first grade, she would come home and play school with Dot. Dot was taught everything that Ginny had learned. Ginny's teaching was largely responsible, I am sure, for Dot's getting through kindergarten and first grade in one school year.  

When Ginny was at Everett High School she had a friend named Eleanor. Eleanor was a telephone addict and could talk about anything or nothing for great lengths of time, needing only an occasional "yes" or "no", or "you can't mean it", or perhaps not even that. Ginny would sometimes actually lay the phone down and walk off to do something else. Coming back, she would find Eleanor still happily yakking away into thin air not knowing her audience was taking a break. 

This telephone time could be irritating to Ginny as it often interfered with her flute practice. Ginny was extremely organized in those high school days, her room was always in perfect order, clothes hung to perfection, and she even hated to walk into her room after doing a perfect job of vacuuming her shag carpeting. What if her footprints should show? Listening to her flute practice was a pleasure to me, as she was an excellent high school player and eventually wound up with a degree in music with emphasis on flute performance.  

Another rather silly thing to remember is that for a time, Ginny and Dot were both taking instrumental lessons at the University of Washington. Ginny was studying flute with Jerry Pritchard, a grad student, and Dot with his wife, Virginia Yorke, another grad student in piano. The Music Building was at the top of a steep hill, almost a cliff, with a parking lot halfway down the hill. Coming from our house in Everett, we would park there, and then take the escalator (a parking lot with an escalator?) to Padelford Hall, then walk across the street to the Music Building. Now and then all three of us would be feeling frisky and run up the down escalator, or down the up escalator. I think many people would like to do this at least once or twice in their lives, but are afraid to try it in a department store or other public place.

My life was very busy with teaching, the church choir, the Civic Choir, the "Kilowatt Choraliers" (power company employees) in Green Bay, and later I was just as busy with teaching at Skagit Valley College in Washington, church choir every Thursday night and Sunday morning. I had the Skagit Community Choir on Tuesday nights, now and then taught night school classes at the college, and took every chance I got to make an extra dollar. The house mortgage, payments for a car, for furniture, for remodeling the old house in Everett, all came due every month. This was typical, I think, of the 1950s-1960s young father and we all became participants in the "rat race", an expression which came into vogue about that time. I truly wanted to spend more time with the family, but we had to keep up with the rats in the rat race.   

Dot was born in 1958, not long after my 30th birthday. Since it was January in Minnesota, one could expect it to be cold and nasty outside. On the 19th, it was actually a nice day, temperatures well above freezing and a bit of sunlight off and on. Winona General Hospital still made expectant fathers wait and smoke somewhere distant from the delivery room; besides, Barbara was not willing to have me anywhere near the place. I finally gave up; feeling left out, and accepted an invitation to lunch with Dave and Nancy Wynne. Barbara was at the hospital and had missed singing in the choir; I directed it as usual, a difficult anthem that had required a lot of rehearsal. The choir was being "difficult" at this time as well; I wrote about this in "Church Choirs." 

About 2:30 in the afternoon the phone call came from the hospital saying that we had a little girl. I actually don't remember my first sight of her (through a glass window looking into the hospital nursery) but I do know that she had dark hair, dark eyes, and a kind of a worried look on her face. Several days after we brought her home, she caught a cold, and it seemed to me that she never completely got over it until after the tonsillectomy. Then, like Ginny, her health improved.  

Present-day thinking has it that breast-feeding a baby gives it immunity to disease that cow's milk, or baby formula cannot give. Barbara did not breast-feed either of our kids. It simply was not the thing to do in those days. It was considered low-class. I suppose that Barbara's mother, who thought herself to be high-class, would have been horribly mortified to have her daughter do such a "common" thing.  

Just before we moved to Green Bay from Winona, a terrible thing happened to Dot. We were just saying good-bye to some company that we had been entertaining when Ginny and Dot both came in crying really hard. They were both so young, Dot not really able to talk in sentences yet, and Ginny not very articulate either when she was so upset.  

From what we could figure out later, she must have caught her tiny little finger in a closing door somehow, and literally tore off the end of it without breaking the bone. You could actually see a tiny bit of the bone sticking up through the stump of the finger, but fortunately, there was still a small strip of skin holding the nearly-severed tip.            

We wrapped up her hand in clean towels to soak up the blood, called Dr. Wilson, and met him in his office in a hurry. I thought I was being brave, not losing my head and running around in circles, or fainting. But Dr. Wilson took his needle and plunged it right into the stump of her finger while I was watching. It was then that Dr. Wilson told me I had better leave the room. He had relieved the pain, and then took a few stitches to fix the finger. Ginny and Dot got some pleasure out of showing Dot's "ishy finger" to their friends. I believe there is still a faint scar from that injury some forty-plus years later. 

The result of Ginny's teaching of her young sister became apparent immediately upon her entry into kindergarten. It was not long before we heard that the Jackson School (Green Bay) teachers had taken her to visit some of the other grades including the fifth, to show off her reading ability. Since Ginny was such a good reader and a good teacher, Dot became a kind of phenomenon. I believe they kept her (nominally) in kindergarten for a semester, and then put her in first grade to finish the year.

             In Green Bay, Mrs. Seifert, who lived two doors away, occasionally babysat Dot when her daughter was not available. The first time this happened, we picked up Dot, and asked Mrs. Seifert how things had gone. Her reply, "Does she always concentrate so hard?"  

About 1938 or 1939, in the spring we had experienced a terrific wind, rain and hailstorm in South Dakota. My dad lost a horse and several cattle. We never were sure whether the poor horse had been struck by one of the monster hailstones, or simply drowned in air so full of rain that it was impossible to breathe. Dad and my grandfather attempted to bury the horse where she fell, but the ground was so rocky it was too hard to get the hole deep enough. So after a long time, horse bones began to appear in that remote corner of the pasture. 
 

How the girls, Dot, Ginny and their cousin Faye, knew the horse bones were there I don't know, but they carried a few of these big bones to the grove of small trees at the far end of the farmyard. This became their "laboratory." By the time any grown-ups found out about any of this, they had scrounged up more bones, chicken bones, crow bones, whatever they could find. It was quite a bone laboratory for seven or eight-year-olds. Of course Barbara and my mother were horrified. 

On one of these South Dakota trips, I made the serious mistake of giving the kids a ride in the back of my dad's 1937 Chevy pickup truck. It was foolish of me to do this, but I thought that on these country roads where you wait all day for a car to come past, if I drove slowly they would be safe enough. Nope. I must have gone too fast and probably swerved the truck in some way, so sure enough; Dot fell out on the road. She was not hurt, but scared. But not as scared as I was of reporting the accident to Barbara. Should I tell her, or should I keep quiet and swear the girls to secrecy? Would I have to take the well-deserved dressing-down that would surely come? At this much later date, I truly cannot remember if I did the honorable thing and told her, or had I been the craven coward I was tempted to be?  

Ken Heiret became my first son-in-law. My first meeting with him was when Dot invited him to come along for a Saturday afternoon sail. He was not dressed very well, his hair came down to there, and I thought that Dot had picked a genuine loser. How wrong I was! This guy was to become the father of my first (brilliant) grandson, and was to work his way up from menial custodial work to a position of responsibility in a high tech job at Microsoft. At the time, I could not tell what Dot possibly could have seen in him. And he is a fine golf-player plus being a genius at the Rubik’s Cube.

Meanwhile, I was still trying to keep up with house, boat, car and furniture payments, feeling caught in the rat race. When Barbara returned to working full time, and especially after we left Green Bay for Washington, I was able to relax a bit more and enjoy the music I was always working on.

*** Stay tuned to this blog for Part II of “Memories of Raising Four Children.”

Photos in this section scanned from

the files of Jean E. Straatmeyer

MEMORIES OF CHANCELLOR, SOUTH DAKOTA

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker 

            The first thing that enters my head about Chancellor some seventy-five years ago was the fact that hitching rails for horses were still in place along the outside of the concrete sidewalks. In the 1930’s, one could expect now and then to see a team of horses and a farm wagon hitched to the rail. It may be that the reason I was so impressed with them is because kids could play on them, hanging by their knees, or doing turnovers, or whatever kids think up. These rails were removed, probably for some scrap metal drive during World War II.

            The city of Chancellor is located in Turner County in south-eastern South Dakota. It has a fast-growing population now, but was down to about 300 in those early years. It was settled in the late 19^th century largely by German farmers who streamed in, not directly from New York, but many of these stayed for a brief time in Illinois or Iowa, moving to South Dakota possibly because of homestead possibilities. My great-grandparents Plucker were examples of this; their homestead farm is located on a creek some tow and a half miles north and one mile east from town. Turner County is divided up into townships, chancellor being located in Germantown Township.

            The story goes that the settlers wanted to name their town “Bismarck” after Germany’s “Iron Chancellor,” just like Bismarck, the capitol of North Dakota. That would have been confusing enough, but there were other objections to naming the place after this German war-maker. The railroad folks thought “Calumet” would be a good substitute. “Nope,” said the citizens, “We’ll call it ‘Chancellor’ and still honor the tough old German.

            Some of the great old businesses and stores stand out in my memory. First would be Rabenberg’s blacksmith shop. Rabenberg probably started the business with shoeing horses, his original main work. I remember him at his hand-turned forge, whipping up a fiercely hot charcoal fire to heat plowshares red hot; I believe this heating had something to do with tempering the cutting edge of the plowshare. Farmers could still bring in their horses for shoes, but that was not the main part of his business now.

            After I got a bit older I began to be aware of a funny old car, covered with dust, parked back in the dark innermost parts of this barn-like building. Since the forge with all its excitement was practically in the barn door entrance, I had scarcely noticed it before. My dad said it was a 1921 Studebaker, and he thought it probably had fewer than 15,000 miles on it. He had no idea why old Rabenberg had preserved it for twenty or more years. It was sold to some collector or perhaps a museum when the blacksmith shop closed down, some time probably in the early 1950’s.

            Across the highway was Enno’s gas station, part of the Farmer’s Coop which owned the station and the grain elevator standing behind and a bit to the side. Enno Johnson was my dad’s cousin and sang in the Johnson Quartet, the group that influenced me into singing. The Haines “Men of Note” have their earliest roots in this quartet.

            The Gas station itself was ordinary enough, with several pumps out in front, an office and store where you could buy antifreeze, quarts of oil, tire patches and the like. Beside the office/store were three stalls, big enough for cars and small trucks. There was a hoist, where repairs could take place, oil changes, tires repaired, but during the war, almost no new tires were sold. Tires were strictly rationed, but that meant nothing, if there were no new tires to be had. Tubes, patches, boots, all were used until you could nearly see the air through the fabric of the pitifully thin tire.

            The most interesting part was the continuous camaraderie that took place in the office. There were a few regular participants who were always there, gossiping away, in Low German, of course. My dad said that these fellows would do their farming from the breakfast table, telling the older sons, and sometimes the daughters, too, what had to be done that day in the fields and around the farmyard. Then they would jump into their Model A’s, and Chevy’s and spend the morning at the station. Home for noon dinner, and then they could spend the afternoons pottering about the farm, or napping, or another visit to the gas station. Saturday nights were important because then more men, not regulars, who could natter together in Low German, or not, would come in.

            Low German is claimed to be a language of its own, not just a dialect or corruption of High German, the German of Martin Luther. I think the Low German spoken in Germantown was adulterated by a few English words. There was a Low German newspaper printed somewhere in Iowa that I got to see once or twice, and the written language looked to me like a strange mixture of German, Dutch and English. It had/has a word order similar to High German, but was not understood by Germans or Americans.

            For the whole town, Saturday night was the highlight of the week, when Tjaden’s General Store, Felix’s barber shop, the drug store, nearly every business in town would be open for customers. There were benches in front of many of these places, and in good weather you could count on them being filled with husbands, waiting for their wives, who were in the stores shopping and gossiping. Since this was before the day of the supermarket where you load your cart yourself and pay at the check stand, you had to wait for a store employee to get what you wanted, then pay that same clerk at the hand-operated cash register. An important part of the equipment was the big roll of stiff wrapping paper, and the huge ball of string. In a general store like Tjaden’s where you could buy groceries, men’s overalls, shoes, women’s clothing, denim “chores jackets,” thimbles, thread, “material” to sew anything, whatever, the paper and string had to wrap up many different kinds of purchases. (No plastic grocery bags or paper grocery sacks available.) This took a lot of time, and people like my parents, who had no phone, were able to keep up with the local news.

When the weather was bad, a good gathering place, for the men at least, was Felix’s barber shop. There were two chairs, but seldom was there any barber but Felix. There was usually about a half-dozen or so men waiting, but not all were waiting for the barber’s services. They simply came to talk and socialize primarily about farming and “How much rain did you get at your place?”

            The haircuts were not all that interesting to watch, but the shaves were. Not many of these gruff old German farmers wanted a lot of fuss on their faces, but two or three shaves on a Saturday night could happen. Felix used very hot towels on the face, lather mixed up in a big cup-like container and a straight razor. Felix would make a big production out of stropping the razor on a wide leather strap that he had hanging from the back of the barber chair. I have never known what made the four-inch blade get so sharp, rubbing it against leather. He would then shave off the lather and the beard with great flourishes like the barber in the movie, “The Great Dictator.” No one applauded, but I suspect some felt like it. After the shave or a haircut, there would be a deluge of perfumed lotions with more hot towels applied to the face and neck, finally a spectacular brushing of the hair off the shoulders. The anointed person would get up, pay his sixty cents (yes, 25 for a haircut, 35 for a shave) and leave, or maybe stay and gossip. Felix would holler “Next!” I don’t think Felix ever learned to speak Low German, but I’ll bet he understood 90% of it.

            Kortemeyer’s Hardware store was a largish (by 1930’s standards) building. Freddie Kortemeyer sold every kind of hardware including Case farm implements in a lot behind the store. Very probably you could have equipped yourself, even as late as 1940, with all you would ever need for horse farming. Harnesses, wagons, horse-drawn plows, discs, drags, cultivators, all of it. Antique hunters these days would go bonkers.

            The drug store, with its wrought-iron ice-cream parlor chairs and tables was more of an attraction for younger folks. In spite of the ice cream and soft drinks, the drug store was not the hang-out that the gas station or the barber shop were. Of course, I was not very interested in the collection of Bayer aspirin, Ipana tooth-paste, and different cough medicines, so I can only guess at the old-fashioned remedies that were on sale.

            The ball park, used mostly for softball, was the centerpiece of the Chancellor city park. Other than the ball diamond, there was not much beyond a few swings and maybe a children’s slide. For me, the amazing and memorable part was the public address system. In the days when radios were still rare, a gadget that could make your voice sound over most of the town was astounding, and as a small boy, I was easily astounded. Rupert Fowler was the voice that described and commented on the playing. Rupert Fowler? What kind of a name was that? Not German, for sure.

            For a “churchy” kind of town, Chancellor had only the Baptist and Dutch Reformed churches. No Lutherans, surprisingly enough. [Editor’s note: First Reformed Church of Lennox was originally located east of town with its own cemetery alongside. When another Reformed Church was started in Lennox, as Second Reformed Church, First Reformed moved to Chancellor, becoming the First Reformed Church of Chancellor.]

The Presbyterians were out in the country on land donated by my great-grandfather Plucker. One of my other “greats,” one Philip Witte, became the first pastor. Previous to any of my memories, the Baptists had been out in the country, too, next to the cemetery which is still in the same place. You could see signs of where the church had been when I was a boy. The Reformed Church struggled on with few members until after World War II when a number of new people moved into town, and a wonderful new building was built. The Catholic people, if there were any, (I didn’t know of any) would have had to attend in Lennox or Parker.

 Oh yes, and there was a saloon. We kids always walked fast past it, and thought it was quite daring to glance in the door which might have been open on a summer Saturday evening. It is strange to think, that if I had looked, more than glanced, I might have seen my very own great uncle, my Sunday School teacher, Uncle Folkert Poppens, having a beer. I shall never forget that once he stated in Sunday School, that he thought it was all right for a hard-working man to have a beer on a Saturday night.

HOME-MADE BREAD

            Barbara and I were married in 1953. She had been quick to inform me that her mother, though a good cook in a 1950’s way, had not been inclined to allow her only daughter to mess around much in the kitchen. So Barbara, who believed that anybody who could read could cook, relied on recipes. After several successful years, she began to experiment with baking, including baking bread.

            In the 50’s and 60’s, I believe baking bread was considered a lost art, especially by the young home-makers. Baking bread was something that was done by mothers and grandmothers. Barbara’s generation relied heavily on white wonder Bread. But her essays in baking were quite successful and we had bread from the grocery store less and less often.

            In about 1964 we had moved to the house on Loch Drive in Green Bay, which had a completely open kitchen-dining-living room. I was sitting in my comfortable chair reading something when I heard this short cry of pain and then sounds of strong annoyance. Barbara had somehow cut her finger while kneading bread dough. How she could cut her finger in dough I have never understood, but she was bleeding a fair amount. The annoyance was that if she continued with the bread, it would be ruined with her blood. She could not just throw out what she had, so the only logical solution was to call on me to finish the kneading, forming loaves, and putting them into pans. She said it could be fun. “Take out all your stress and frustrations on the bread,” she said. “Punch it hard. Take that, Richard Nixon, take that, John Mitchell, and here’s a punch for you (fill in the blanks)!” So I took over the kneading and had a jolly time of it, subduing all the bad guys.

            I don’t remember what impelled me to ask her to show me how to do the whole job, but having once proved that I could, bread making began to fall more and more into my hands. It turned out to be fun for me, and gave me the opportunity to make raisin bread whenever I wanted to, putting in lots more raisins than Barbara ever did.

            So there was plain white bread, whole wheat bread, cracked wheat bread and raisin bread using white and/or whole wheat flour. A friend of ours gave me a huge crockery bowl, big enough to make eight standard loaves, so that became the accepted quantity. Why not? We had a deep freeze, and the bread could keep for a while.

            So we moved to Ridge Road, then to Washington and the University housing, then to Everett and north Seattle. Even later there were different places in Stanwood and Camano Island. Every single one of these moves required learning about the idiosyncrasies of each oven. I am now positive that every home oven had a hot spot.

            During the short while we lived in north Seattle, Barbara left me to live on her own. I was not at all happy that she left, and a small part of the reason for that was that I had invited the Seattle chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) to have their next meeting at our largish condominium. I had thought it to be an honor to be accepted as a member of this NATS chapter, and had actually served as a board member for a couple of years. I figured it was about time for me to host the meeting. But with Barbara gone, I did not see how I could handle this, especially the after-meeting coffee and goodies. Probably there would be at least twenty people there, made up mainly of fussy women (how could it be otherwise, as teaching singing requires fussiness?).

            My first thought, of course, was to dis-invite the group. They would still have about two weeks to find another place, but I did not want to back out, and it became a kind of matter of honor with me, to be able to function without Barbara.

            There is a wonderful Grimm brother’s fairy tale called “The Valliant Little Tailor.” At the beginning, the tailor has bought some fine jam from a passing peddler, takes a loan of bread, cuts it lengthwise and spreads a lot of jam on the big long slice of bread. This always seemed to me to be a daring thing to do, something that my mother or Barbara would never have allowed. So as a kid, this turned out to be one of my life’s dreams, to cut a loaf longitudinally, instead of slicing off the end.

            I knew my home-made bread was good; I had some years of experience making it. The smell of bread in the oven, or just coming out would be enough to bring tears to the eyes of anyone whose mother or grandmother had baked bread. That was the happy solution. I would serve absolutely fresh-baked bread for the NATS meeting.

            Now the rules and conditions for the bread party, as I made them up, were to have some loaves of white bread finished and an equal number of whole wheat still in the oven. These should be taken out at exactly the time the business meeting was over. I would then ceremoniously, in the presence of the guests, take the bread out, and against all rules, cut into it immediately. Bread is supposed to stand cooling for a time before slicing, but of course, I cut into it anyway – the long way – and the guests could then break it into pieces if they wanted, but only the long slices would come off the loaf. Plenty of real butter and jam would be on hand, and each could take, or leave what they wanted. I told them the “Little Tailor” source; all entered into the spirit of it, and the bread party was a success. Lest I take too much credit, I had the help of a couple of my voice students to make and pour the coffee and tea. Of late, bread making seems to have become much more common, and the bread machine does a pretty good job too, one loaf at a time. This party scheme turned out well enough so that I did the same thing for other small groups of my friends.

            But making bread turned out to be something much more significant in my life than mere party food. As I have written in others of these essays, in spite of my resolution to live out my life as a bachelor, Margaret changed all that. Our “association” was proceeding well, with her riding to choir rehearsal with me, going out in the sailboat, and having tea and cookies after choir at her house. I thought I could make some good points with her by bringing her an unusual present, a loaf of bread, of course. So I did that, but was taken somewhat aback when I learned that she baked bread, too. But her daughter, Holly, came to my rescue. At age three and a half, she told her mother that she should take me, “because he brings us bread.” Thank you, Holly!

            I mentioned the bread machine a paragraph back. When Margaret and I had been living on the boat, Greta, At LaConner for a couple of years, I discovered a good sale on bread machines at a local store. On the boat it is possible to bake bread, two loaves in the oven at one time, but the oven is hard to regulate and the success rate varies. There was electric power at the dock, so a bread machine seemed like a good solution. It virtually guaranteed success with every loaf.

            Actually, I was a bit disappointed with the result. I kept on trying to get better bread with the machine, so one day when Margaret was at work ashore, I decided to try again. I had a new recipe, special bread machine flour, and high hopes. Now, on a boat it is necessary to store things in containers other than the bulky box or bags they come in. I looked in the usual places for the flour, years, powdered milk, oil, honey and so on, put it in the machine, turned it on, and waited for the effortless miracle of automatic machine bread.

            When the time was up, I peered in to see a dispirited lump on grayish hard clay about the size of a tennis ball. I was shocked! Margaret came home after work; I told her about my dismal failure; I showed her the ingredients I had used. When she was able to stop laughing, she explained to me that the white stuff I had used as powdered milk was laundry detergent. Next time we would clearly label whatever was in a plastic container. But this episode with the machine was the final discouragement for me, and the machine was given away. I didn’t like the cylindrical shaped loaf anyway.

            My good friend, Wally, had been an arm chair sailor for years, and finally bought a sailboat of his own, a Cal 34. This was a beautiful boat, shipped straight from the builder, not a blemish on it. He invited me aboard for his second trip away from the dock. To contribute something for the occasion, I brought along a loaf of bread, still hot from the oven.

            When some time had passed and I had been sufficiently impressed with the boat under power, I brought out the bread and a bread-knife. Super-fussy and proud new boat owner, Wally, said, “Would you hold that over the side when you cut it so you won’t get crumbs all over the deck?” Was he serious, you ask? Yes, he was.

            One last comment (brag) about my bread. I have two little grandsons, Mark and Luke, ages five and two and a half, who love Grandpa’s bread. No butter, peanut butter, jam or anything. Just plain bread that Grandpa made.

Life on Memory Court

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

Circa 1960

Bob and Ginny (1st daughter)
Photo by Jean E. Straatmeyer

Memory Court is an arch-shaped street in Allouez, a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin, which as every one knows, is Packer Football Country.  Former wife Barbara and our two pre-school daughters lived at 401 Memory Court for only four years, 1960 to 1964.  Those were very good years.  “401” is at the top of the arch, and we had neighbors mostly of our own age and financial condition.  Every house was mortgaged (I think).  Directly across the street from us in the inside of the arch lived Doug and Carol Small.  Next door to them and on their right was the house of Bob and Patsy Weich.  Across the street from them, and outside the arch lived Stu and Liz Morris.  All the people on Memory Court were wonderful people, but these were the people I was most drawn to.  There were young children of various ages on the Court, except for Stu and Liz.  Their youngest was very young indeed, and the rest weren't even born yet.

These families were not near-clones of each other, but there were some strong similarities.  Morrises and Smalls were Catholic; Weichs were Methodist, as we were.  This split was close to being the same all over the Green Bay area, but the Catholics outnumbered the Protestants just enough so that they kept us on our toes.  We may have gone to different churches, but we were all united in being Packer fans.  Barbara and I acquired this Packer lust very soon after we moved in, and were able to talk "red dog" , "blitz", "keeper play", "audible" and "shotgun formation" about as well as the next one.  Sunday afternoons when the Packers were on television was the time for partying.  The gang rotated houses from game to game.  Packer home games were blacked out of TV for the most part, and so we felt disconnected.  Why not simply go to the home games?  Tickets to a single game? Unthinkable except from scalpers.  Season tickets?  Only if you had some kind of influence with someone.  These were the beginning of the Lombardi years!

The Packer parties were great fun; beer was served (after all, this is Wisconsin) and snacks went along with the beer, usually a chip-and-dip tray. One party at Doug and Carol's was noteworthy because of the dip for the chips. None of us could figure out what went into the peculiar reddish stuff that resembled no dip we had ever seen or tasted before.  After adroit questioning, Carol told us it was equal parts of peanut butter and ketchup.  I don't remember if the Packers won or lost that day.

Doug and Carol drove a 1961 Ford sedan.  When Doug drove it, it seemed to start OK, but Carol had a difficult time getting it going even when the weather was not severely cold.  She called a towing service one day when she was required to go somewhere.  The guy came out, got in the car, turned the switch and started the car.  No hesitation.  Carol asked him why she couldn't start it like that.  "It's your attitude", said the guy, "you have to get in with the idea that you are the boss over this mere machine and that it is unthinkable that it shouldn't start."  An unusual kind of advice, but it worked after a fashion until Doug traded it for a new 1964 Ford station wagon.  (Possibly she was releasing the starter before the engine had had a chance to catch?)

The Memory Court neighborhood was quite close, and everybody there probably knew within a day of the purchase, how much was the asking price, how much the agreed-upon price, the amount given in trade for the old car, and how much was owed on the new one.  The Memory Court residents somehow knew how to draw out this sort of information with the speed of a Packer running back.

Doug belonged to the National Guard and sometimes had to endure some gentle razzing from Barbara and me as he drove out of the driveway on his way to a drill.  We would stand on either side of the road with raised broomsticks or shovels and proclaim the current Guard slogan, "Sleep well, your National Guard is awake!"

Bob and Patsy Weich, on the inside of the arch and next-door to Doug and Carol, had children about the same age as the Smalls.  They liked to spend time outdoors and would arrange elaborate outings and picnics for the children together in the summer.  It seemed to take them a long, long time to get everything loaded in the cars, children all accounted for (including their shoes), and the dashes back into the house to get forgotten items.  Barbara and I used to marvel at their patience and determination to have "jolly family parties."  They would come back all sunburned, dead tired, but their efforts were surely worth whatever trouble they were. This was truly an example of the “Togetherness" that at least one of the women's magazines was promoting in those years.

Bob and Patsy were among the few people of my generation that knew how to play "500", a card game that resembles bridge.  Barbara and I would play with them occasionally, Patsy and I would be partners facing Bob and Barbara.  Bob and Barbara always played the conservative game, not often winning the bid, but when they did, they were reasonably sure of taking the required tricks.  Patsy and I were the diametric opposite, sometimes taking huge losses, but coming back by making very large bids.  If you know 500, you know about "10 no-trump" and "double nula."

I was amused the first time I was in their house to see some of the furniture that Patsy prized as "antique".  One piece was a spring seat like the ones we used on the farm some years ago on farm wagons.  Normally the farm wagon of my day, pulled by two horses, had wooden spoke wheels and iron tires.  There was no springing, and so if you had to go over rough ground you could set this wide wooden seat on the box and get some relief from the jouncing.  There were leaf springs at the sides that would absorb some of the shock.  For me, this was no antique; I had gone out many times with my Grandpa to fix fence with horses and wagon, spring seat in place.  Sitting alongside my Grandpa on that wide seat made me proud as could be.

Patsy also had an old-fashioned kitchen sink and a matching hand pump for water.  It was only a "decoration" in her house, but when I was a kid, this was what we had in one corner of our huge kitchen on the farm.  I must protest! Antique?

And then we come to Stew and Liz Morris directly across the street from Bob and Patsy.  I don't really remember if Jane, their oldest daughter was born by the time we moved onto the Court, but what impressed me soon after was that Stew, who had the finest lawn in Wisconsin, would push his hand lawn-mower through his lush grass carrying Janey in one arm.  He had endurance to spare, apparently, because I had the impression that he spent a lot of time mowing and cross-mowing that incredible grass, and that as hard as it must have been to push, he never put Janey down.  He just kept at it.

Stew was/is a physical type, as he was/is one of the most knowledgeable and respected physical therapists in the country.  He was the chief organizer of the Memory Court softball games; ice skating, picnics and so on.  Barbara and I were invited to play in one of the softball games before we even moved into 401.  I don't know how he got our names or how he got in touch with us.

I had been envious of Stew for a while because he had nerve enough to own a very bright red Ford convertible car.  Barbara and I had an uninteresting green Rambler station wagon.  Useful, but dull.  Stew's example made it possible for old Stick-in-the-Mud me to think about following suit.  I figured if he could drive a flashy red car with a cloth top in cold Wisconsin weather, so could I.  I shopped around for a small Falcon convertible, but Barbara was not enthusiastic.  We wound up with a super-flashy red Ford Galaxie convertible, bought right off the showroom floor.  As I mentioned in another of these essays, this car made me the hero of West High School faculty as far as the students were concerned.

When I first arrived in Green Bay I had been limping around with some painful plantar warts on the bottom of my right foot.  The biggest of these warts was especially painful because a Winona doctor had tried to burn it off with X-ray.  Something burned all right, but the wart itself seemed to be untouchable.  The wart hurt, and now the burn hurt too.  After Stew had noticed the limping he asked me if I would be a kind of guinea pig in a new treatment he was thinking about.  I figured he couldn't make it any worse, and so Stew had me in for three sessions of rubbing the warts with an ultra-sound generator.  The notion of ultra-sound was still fairly new in l960, I guess, and after the third treatment Stew thought it would be good to call a halt.  But the wart began to feel much better right away with the first treatment, and evidently continued to heal after the end of the third one.  It was not long before the wart was just an unpleasant painful memory.  Thanks again, Stew!!

Liz, who was a nurse at St. Vincent's hospital, was often busy; I believe she worked at several different shifts, and I don't remember seeing her very much except at the great pot-luck dinners we had with Weichs, Smalls, and Davises. The dinners were all terrific, with the wives in a friendly (?) competition of course, and we had a great time eating. But the best times for me were the discussions after dinner.  We talked Packers, of course, and sometimes about the Braves who had not yet moved to Atlanta, and politics.  This gave me the chance to argue that we should never have been in the Viet-Nam conflict, it was their business, not ours, and the "domino theory" was a lot of bunk.  After all, we had already suffered one stalemate in Korea, fighting an Asian war that was not supported by the public and was too costly in lives and money to attempt to win.   Now, of course we have the same problem in Iraq.

About a year before we left Memory Court I bought a bicycle.  The bike I had ridden as a kid was a (shudder) girl's bike, a hand-me-down from our rich cousins.  Now I was going to have the bicycle of my boyhood dreams.  It turned out to be a shiny black Schwinn, with big tires and shiny chrome fenders, just the bike I had wanted when I was about ten or twelve.  But this bike even had a Bendix two-speed rear hub.  The modern system of throwing the chain from different sized sprockets was not yet widely on the market.  I mention this because Stew may have been the only guy on the Court who did not laugh at this "little bald guy riding a bicycle".  I suppose I could have been the only person over thirty in Green Bay who rode one.  Kids would point and laugh, dogs chased me.  The bike served me well until the move to Seattle where the hills took their toll on the "back-pedal" brake on the rear wheel, and the Bendix two-speed system fell apart at about the same time.  It was finally replaced with a Gitane ten-speed.

No account of Memory Court can omit the fellow who built many of the houses on the Court.  Francis Rentmeester, probably of Belgian extraction, was a kind of round-looking guy of medium height who rarely wore a shirt in summer, but never seemed to sun-burn.  He had settled on three or four house designs, all of which he carried in his head, and somehow was able to build them faster than anyone else, and with a smaller crew.  I worked for him for about ten days until I smashed my thumb with a hammer, and it never occurred to me that he pushed his employees to move faster.  He put up these three or four bedroom split-level houses with blinding speed; he promised George Seifert that he would have his house finished in a month.  Sure enough, he broke ground (next to Stew and Liz) on the 23rd of May, and the Seiferts were able to move in on the 23rd of June.   I am convinced that the houses were well-built and that no corners were cut that affected the quality of the houses.  And still the prices were exceptionally low.

Now and then some of the neighbors to the right of us would have a driveway beer party, a “kegger.”  I don't believe anyone was excluded from these events but the real hard-line participators all wound up playing a card game called Schafskopf.  In English: sheep's head.  Sometimes I would watch these games for a short time, but it seemed to me that the most important rules of the game were lots of very loud talk, shouting and laughter, with violent slamming of cards down on the table.  Fortunately, the game was usually played on a picnic table outside in the summer.  A regular card table would never have held up under slams of that weight and frequency.

Beer, again - this is Wisconsin, was a part of life on Memory Court.  I remember coming home from a choir rehearsal at First Methodist Church (I was the choir director there) with Barbara and discovering five or six of the neighbors sitting on the curb in front of our house drinking beer.  They weren't particularly loud or rowdy, but they were right under our bedroom window and I didn't see much possibility of sleep, even though I was plenty tired after a day of teaching at West High School, and a night of church choir.  Well, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em, as the saying goes.  So we did, and were not really any worse off the next morning.

This was certainly a jolly, good-hearted and helpful bunch of people on the Court.  When I made the mistake of praising Milt Nero's house on Loch Drive (Milt was an architect and had designed the house) and also mentioning that Milt wanted to sell it, Barbara glommed onto the notion of buying it.  No power on earth could dissuade her, it seemed, least of all me.  So in a short time we sold 401 Memory Court and moved to 1129 Loch Drive.  When we moved, we had the loan of the Davis' VW van, many pairs of strong hands, and lots of good will. All the move cost us was some pizza and beer.

One thing I discovered in that move was that a convertible car (remember the Ford Galaxie) with the top down is almost as good as a truck for a short-distance move.  You can pile all sorts of things, one on top the other with no restricting roof.  On a later subsequent move, I also found out that in sub-zero weather, you may be able to stand the cold for a mile or two with the top down, but your wife's house plants can't.

401 Memory Court was still under construction when we bought it, and of course it was a mess, as all construction sites are.   There is mud, no trees or grass, bits and pieces of wood, a raw look to everything.  I remember the incredible plague of crickets we had in the garage before the door was hung, or anytime afterward when the door was left open.  The floor would be black with them, and you would not be able to step without crushing a cricket.

Of course we had to landscape the place.  We planted a nice lawn, we planted fast-growing poplar trees at the edges of the lot except directly in front, and we had a couple of maples in the back yard and a mountain ash in front.  There were lots of flowers too.  The lawn, though not anywhere near as nice as Stew's, turned out well, as did the trees, in part because we watered them a lot.  But after we moved to Loch Drive, it seemed to take only weeks before the trees at 401 Memory Court began to die, the lawn turned brown and patchy, and there were abandoned kid's toys all over the place.  Several years later when I returned to Green Bay for a visit, the house was barely recognizable to me.  By that time the Smalls, Weichs, Morrises and Pluckers had all moved away.  The Davises may still be there for all I know.  I hope new generations of folks are having the same fun and fellowship that Barbara and I were lucky enough to experience there in the early 60s.

Convertible from:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/sis.html?_nkw=1965+1968+FORD+GALAXIE+CONVERTIBLE+AUTOMATIC+CARPET+
Other illustrations from Microsoft Word ClipArt.

The Mount Baker Ordeal

by

Dorothy Heiret (Bob's daughter)

in response to

"The Stuff of Which Nightmares are Made"

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

Dear Dad,

            It was a beautiful summer day, when I was about 14. We were hosting a foreign exchange student, Aileen, for a few weeks, and decided to take her sight-seeing.  After a long ride in the car I was anxious to do something active.  Mom, Ginny, and Aileen were content to walk the asphalt paths, but you were more adventurous and wanted to get into the snow.  I decided to go with you. I was wearing jeans, presumably a T-shirt, tennis shoes, and a ¾ length red jacket which I had not zipped up.

            You started off ahead of me.  I don’t recall walking side by side.  I think we were just ambling around in an uphill direction.  At one point we came across a snow bank on a steep slope.  The snow was compacted and had been there a while, and it was probably fairly slick on top because the sun was shining.

             I remember trying to walk across the snow, but after a few steps I slipped.  I was face down in the snow with my arms and legs spread-eagled, trying to get a grip of something as I was sliding downhill.  I remember sliding for what felt like a long time, but I don’t think I was especially scared at the time because I couldn’t actually see how high up we were.  It was more like a sledding experience.  I could feel the snow on my bare skin since my open coat was splayed out on either side of me.

            Suddenly, I landed on my feet in a little piece of land that jutted out beyond the snow bank.  It was then that I realized how close I had come to falling off the side of the mountain.  I looked down and then I looked up, and saw you watching in horror from above the snow bank.  I had no idea how I was going to get down, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go on the snow bank again.

            Somehow, you made it down to my ledge without sliding off yourself, and you held my hand.  I don’t remember what you did to convince me that the only way back would be to climb up that snow bank, but you succeeded.  I don’t remember a thing about the trip back up or the way home.

            I do remember you hugging me like there was no tomorrow later that evening.

            I have never been back to Mount Baker.

                    

Love, Dot

The Stuff of Which Nightmares are Made

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

     Northwest Washingtonians are perhaps more aware of 12,000 foot Mt. Baker than of 14,000 foot Mt. Rainier, which is far away and less visible.  Mt. Baker is volcanic, as is Rainier, and both have the amenities that visitors have come to expect.  Some skiing facilities, parking places at a fairly high altitude, a visitor center or two with souvenirs, hikes, and serious climbs to the summit.  As it happened, my wife and two daughters had a guest, a girl from England staying with us for a few days, and we thought it would be a good idea to take her to see the scenery at Mt. Baker, especially since we had never driven up there (from Everett) ourselves.  The mountain was only about 50 miles to the north and east of us.

     When we arrived, it appeared that my wife and older daughter were more interested in seeing the great views and other attractions of the Visitor Center, so they stayed in that area with the visiting English girl.  Younger daughter Dot and I took off to do a bit of hiking on an easy slope that had the attraction of some left-over granular snow from the previous winter.  After all, this was mid-summer and you didn't see snow every day at that time of the year.  Fortunately the hiking paths were bare of snow; we were wearing street shoes and were not ready for any adventures.

     So off we went, mostly on the path but now and then leaving it to walk over a small snow-patch.  We had a good time walking and looking down from time to time at the parked cars and people strolling about.  We crossed a kind of ridge, out of sight.  We were alone in the silence of mountain serenity.  I made my way to the other side of the ridge, found there was a snow-field there, and started to walk across and downhill.  Suddenly my feet slipped from under me and I found myself sliding a bit too fast toward the far edge of the snow-field which began to look more and more like the edge of a high cliff.  I dug in my fingers, knees, toes, and perhaps even my chin to stop myself from going over the edge.  I came to a halt with a few feet to spare.

     Just as I started to recover from my fright, Dot called from the top of the ridge, "Should I slide down the way you did?"

     Shocked, I yelled back, "NO!   NO!", but she had already lost her footing and was sliding down.  I tried desperately to reach her and catch her before she plunged over the cliff, but I could not move fast enough over the slippery snow.  Over she went, and I did not see her again.

Thanks to Wikipedia for this shot.

     It is hard to imagine how horrified I felt, as I knew, beyond a doubt, that she had fallen hundreds of feet, had hit rocks several times on the way down and would be not only dead but horribly mangled by the time she hit bottom.  I am ashamed to say that one of my secondary thoughts was of myself; "How am I ever going to explain this to my wife? 

     But not hearing any screaming after going over the edge, the way it always happens in the movies, I began to have a thread of hope that maybe she was at least alive, but probably terribly hurt and unable to make a sound.  With great care, slowly I made my way to the crumbling edge of the snow field and found that she had landed on a kind of narrow ledge, perhaps five or six feet below the edge of the drop-off.

     She did not appear to be hurt.  The only way I could think of to rescue her, other than hiking back to the Visitor Center to get help, was to go close, drop the sleeve of my jacket down to her, she could hang on to it, and I could pull her up.  On the other hand, the crumbling edge of the cliff could give way and we could both go down.  So I anchored myself in the snow as carefully as I could, lying prone on the snow.  I dropped my jacket sleeve down so she could reach it.  Then, very gently, I began to pull, all this time trying to stay calm and to speak calming and comforting words to her.  I sometimes think I needed the calm and comfort more than she did, as she was amazingly calm.

     We got her up out of danger and carefully walked back to the Visitor Center.  I was working hard on keeping my composure, not letting on to Dot that I had been sure she was dead, and was trying to come to terms with the fact that the whole misadventure was my fault.  All this happened about thirty-five years ago (or more), and I have only recently stopped having nightmares about it.