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.

Rimsky-Korsakov

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

                In another of these essays I mention a 1936 Oldsmobile that I owned during the time between hitches in the Army.  That would have been 1947-1950. This was the first car I had ever owned that had more than one hundred thousand miles on the odometer by the time I traded it in for a new car.  It had served me well for thirty thousand of those miles.  It had few amenities compared to cars of today, but it had a fine built-in radio (very rare in 1936) with a large speaker mounted on the headliner just above and to the rear of the windshield.

                When I was discharged from Army active duty in the spring of 1947 I was rather out of step with what had been going on at home while I had been occupying Japan.  My former girl friends seemed to have distanced themselves from me, mostly because they had become involved with some fellow who was much closer than Japan.  But I did know some of the younger girls who had been a couple of classes behind me in high school, and one especially who seemed rather exotic to me because of a deformity, strangely enough.  She was about my height, a Norwegian-type blond, pretty face, slim elegant figure, a quick sense of humor and brainy.  The deformity?  She had been born with no right hand.  She was never seen without wearing a long-sleeved garment which covered the missing hand, and so I never did see the extent of the problem.  She had an intact and shapely arm all the way to the wrist.

                I happened to see her in a cafe in Lennox with a couple of friends one night; I stopped to talk to her and found that I liked her a lot.  I had lots of times with her after that - mostly double movie dates with her cousin Lowane and my good friend Alvin.

                When I returned to Brookings, and South Dakota State College I found that the ratio of men to women was nearly seven to one.  Every time I worked up the nerve to ask one of the college women for a date, it seemed there were at least six or seven guys ahead of me, so I was glad that I had my old 1936 Oldsmobile to drive the 80 miles back to Lennox to see my girl friend there.  I met her parents, I met several of her sisters (she was the youngest of six girls), and she met my parents.  Our friendship seemed to be well on the road to a serious commitment, but then we had a spat one evening.  She wanted to drive to Sioux Falls to a late movie with Alvin and Lowane, but I didn't want to go all the way to the big town, stay out late, and then drive back to Brookings to be ready for church choir the next morning.  So they went to Sioux Falls, the three of them, with girl friend Lois in a huff.

                We made up several weeks later, which was fun, but then came a Sunday afternoon drive with Lois.  It was summer, a truly fine day, the Olds was running well, the sun was shining, the fields were green, and there was glorious music on the radio.  I know now, that it was Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Sheherezade Suite".  I had never heard it before, and was completely under the spell of this great piece with its great tunes, wonderful orchestration, and the exotic mood it set for me. 

Portrait of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1898
 by Valentin Serov
Thanks to Wikipedia for the photo

                Lois reached over and turned off the radio, "Do we have to listen to that?" 

                I tried not to show shock and amazement that she could nonchalantly turn off beauty like that.  I had been thinking thoughts of what life would be like, married to this pretty girl, but to turn off Sheherezade!  And then to say the unthinkable thing about having to listen to THAT.

                We had some dates after that, I think, but I had lost heart and was dragging my feet and wondering what I should do with this "friendship".  My mother spoke to me about Lois one morning.  She told me in no uncertain terms that I was not to string Lois along any longer.  She said I was being terribly unfair and I would either have to ask her to marry me or to drop her entirely. 

                It was not easy to break up with her, and yet, I could not imagine spending my life with someone who not only was not interested in classical music, but actively disliked it.  So although I had known she was not a lover of serious classical music, this simple act of turning off the radio was a turning point in my life.

Motor Vehicles Loved and Unloved

by

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

                The state of South Dakota was quite late in requiring people to have licenses to drive. As late as the early 50s, if you could see over, or through the steering wheel, and if your feet could reach the pedals, you could drive. I suppose that I must have been ten or eleven years old when my dad let me drive his Model T Ford truck, but only in the field, and in low gear. This was a big deal for me even though I had put in significant time driving the big Rock Island tractor.

                In this decadent age of Hummers and other SUVs, there is hardly anyone left who remembers the Model T and its intricacies. Those farmer's Model Ts that I remember were mostly closed sedans, usually with only one functioning door on the passenger side. The driver's side was blocked pretty well with the parking brake lever, and I can't remember whether there was a door actually cut in the driver's side. The colors were always black, but the cars I remember were usually covered with dust and mud anyhow, so who cared?  The ride was stiff, with a transverse leaf spring placed over the front axle and another over the rear. If there had been any smooth roads, the ride could have been half decent, but no one ever knew, as the gravel roads were usually of the washboard type. The dirt roads could be unspeakable.

                Dad's Model T truck had a high, square, roomy cab made of wood. There were side doors but no side windows, only side curtains. The windshield was in three horizontal parallel segments, the middle one could be folded down. The hood over the engine was ridiculously small and short, the box was fairly large, holding about l20 bushels of grain, made of wood, of course, and painted green. I am under the impression that most of the T trucks were green but I am not sure about this.

                The T had the usual steering wheel on the left with the "oogah" horn button located in its hub. Below the wheel, mounted in the place where you would expect to find the turn-signal stalk, and the windshield wiper stalk, were the "spark" on the left, and the "gas" on the right. The spark would slightly delay the electrical impulse to the spark plug so that it would fire after the piston had reached top dead center. This was so the engine would be sure to run forward, not backward when cranking it. When the engine was running, the spark could be advanced to its more efficient position. This is all automatic in the modern car. The "gas" was what served for an accelerator, as there was no pedal on the floor. Up was slow, down was fast.

                On the floor were three pedals. The right one was the brake. This was connected mechanically with the brake drums on the rear wheels only, and was not a good system. Luckily, eastern South Dakota is quite flat, and great brakes were not quite so imperative. The middle pedal was reverse. Step on it hard, and you would move backward, slowly. Dad said that if there were an emergency and you had to stop quickly, you could step on both the brake and the reverse pedal and get fairly good results. The left pedal controlled a planetary gear system that gave you two speeds ahead. Step hard on the pedal and you went ahead slowly in "low." Release the pedal all the way and you were in "high," just like that. Planetary gears are hard to explain, but the principle is that when you stop one part of the gearing, the other part has to rotate twice as fast, thus two speeds. Half-way to the floor was neutral. To the far left was mounted the parking brake lever. Pull this lever all the way back, and it would engage a cam that operated the same brake system as the pedal brake. Half way forward on this lever released the brake, there was a kind of neutral area in the middle and when the lever went all the way forward another cam allowed it to engage the clutch but only in "high" gear. The correct way to start out was to bring the brake/clutch lever forward and step on the "low" pedal at the same time. Then you would be able to start without killing the engine. Release the pedal and you were in "high." Are you with me on all this?

                If you killed the engine and wanted to restart, you would have to hand-crank it. There were some electric starters available as add-on equipment in some of the later model cars and trucks but they were rare. To hand-crank, you turned on the switch to battery, if you had a battery installed. Otherwise you would go directly to magneto by turning the switch to the left. You retarded the spark all the way with the lever on the steering column, set the gas at about half to two-thirds open, then got out and went around to the front of the car. There you would see the crank, hanging out below the radiator and you would push it into place at the leading end of the crankshaft, and being absolutely sure you had retarded the spark. If the engine needed choking, there was a little ring you could pull, handy to your left hand, connected to the carburetor. So you pulled, and cranked with the right hand, spinning it as fast as you could if the engine was cold. If the engine was hot it would probably start after one or two compressions and of course would not need the choke. Once the engine caught, you sprinted to the cab and advanced the spark to make it run smoothly, and shut down the throttle so as not to over rev the engine. Then you could gradually release the choke, just as you do with your lawn-mower engine today, and when the engine was hot, you had the option of fiddling with the mixture of gas and air. This was done with a knob on the end of a stiff wire that led to the carburetor. This was also a choke control, but the mixture control was by rotating the knob, and it was a way of fine-tuning the gas/air mixture.

                There were headlights. On the pre-twenties models I suppose they must have used carbide lights, but Dad's truck and every other Model T that I was acquainted with, had electric lights. They were dim, and the joke went around that you had to light a match to see if they were actually on. Dad rarely used a battery in the truck, but every April the license came due, and South Dakota law required that correctly aimed functioning headlights and tail lights be inspected. So Dad would have to buy a six-volt dry "hotshot" battery, connect the light switch to it and have the inspector do his thing. Sometimes he would be able to borrow a battery, as he would never use the truck at night anyhow.

                Dad's truck, and for all I know, all Model T trucks, had an additional complication. There was another more or less conventional transmission with a stick shifter placed behind the regular planetary gear system. This meant that when the stick transmission was in low gear, you still had the pedal "low" and "high" before the power ever got to the extra tranny. So "low" and "high" in "low", "second", and "high" with the extra transmission gave you six available forward speeds. Double "low" was extremely slow and powerful. Dad's stick transmission did not have a reverse, but he said that some trucks did have that. If you put these in double reverse, they would creep slowly ahead. Amazing.

1924 Ford Model T Truck

                There was no water pump on these Ts. They ran hot, and sometimes boiled over, but the system worked most of the time, with the radiator fluid slowly circulating by itself. Modern antifreeze fluid either was not available, or my dad refused to buy it, I don't know which. We used plain water in the radiator. In winter, you had to start the engine first, and while it was running and before it got too hot, fill the radiator with water. When you were through using the vehicle, you drained the water out of it with the handy little valve at the bottom of the radiator. Modern cars do not have this convenient feature. If you forgot to drain and if the weather was cold enough the freezing water would crack the head or block or both of the engine and you might be stuck for a new engine. My dad said he thought our truck had a 1924 chassis and a 1922 engine. He didn't really know, as by the time he got it, it was already a kind of patchwork of parts.

This photo was taken on June 17, 2012 in Galveston, TX
This Model T is still in service! Has to be a FORD!!!

                My scariest experience with this truck came when I was in high school. I was to take a load of oats to town to the grain elevator to sell it. Ordinarily this was not a big deal.  You drive up a rather steeply inclined ramp to an alleyway that runs right through the building. You stop in the alleyway with the front wheels on a platform that is actually a hydraulic lift. This lift raises up the front of the truck high enough so that the grain will spill from the back of the truck down into a pit below the alley, and from there it is elevated (this is where the term "elevator" comes from) to a high storage bin. The only tricky part is to be sure you have a good enough start up the ramp so you don't stall before you hit the level alley. If Dad's truck stalled on the ramp there would be no holding it with the brake no matter how many pedals you stomped on, and there would be zero chance of restarting the engine with a hand crank. So the truck would roll back down the incline virtually out of control. My problem was that there were three elevators in town at that time, and I unwittingly went to the only one that was temporarily closed, even though the big sliding door was open.

The elevator

                So I got up a respectable head of steam with my heavy load of oats, drove right up the ramp, placed the front wheels squarely on the lift, and then was told by a flunky who came running over, that this elevator was closed and that I would have to go to one of the others. He then disappeared. What should have happened was to go straight through the alley, come down on the other side of the building and drive to where I wanted to be. But the other door was closed, I did not know how to get it open, the flunky was gone, and I was too proud and foolish to go to someone for help. I thought there was no choice but to back down the ramp the way I had come, heavy load and all, hoping against hope that I could keep some control over the speed and direction of the truck as it came down the rather narrow, steep ramp. After all, there were three pedals to push, surely I could hold the speed down to something that I could handle.

                So carefully I started backward, throttle way closed, foot on the brake pedal. The rear wheels hit the start of the slant of the ramp and I felt an immediate leap of speed. More pedal, both feet on brake and reverse. No help at all. Faster and faster backward down the ramp with the full heavy load. The steering wheel started to wobble, and the weight of the oats and the considerable overhang of the box over the rear wheels caused the front wheels to have only a casual acquaintance with the ground. I was totally out of control and moving at what seemed to me a terrific speed. Just before the whole thing was about to end with a sickening crash, amid fountains of oats, the truck reached the end of the ramp, weight was restored to the front wheels, and I was able to bring things to a stop on the level street. With all the slewing from side to side, and the inability to steer with the front wheels, I was unbelievably grateful to have escaped without wrecking anything. After I recovered from shaking enough to drive the truck up a similar ramp into the correct open elevator I unloaded the oats, got the check, drove out the far side of the elevator and went home. I never told my dad that I had almost wrecked the truck.

                Driving the T was fun, even in the 40s, this old truck was considered an antique. I was allowed to drive it to school a few times. Most of the farm kids drove a car to school, as there was no school bus then. I got to drive the truck in the Lennox High homecoming parade. But perhaps the most fun was when I was a little kid, with my dad driving, roaring down the road with the doors open, windshield folded down, and the wind whipping around. My dad would yank down the "gas" lever and yell at me, “There’s only one way to drive these things, and that's wide open!"

                I thought we were flying, but I have since read that the top speed of a Model T Ford was about 40 MPH. I suppose that this old truck could perhaps do 35. Still, with the doors open..... There was no speedometer on this truck. There were no instruments at all, unless you count the dipstick that was kept with the gas tank under the seat. It seems to me that the oiling of the engine was a kind of splash system that did not need a pump for oil pressure. And of course, if the engine overheated, you would see the radiator cap start to steam and finally erupt with boiling water. No need for an ammeter or voltmeter if there were no battery or alternator.

                After a careful count, it appears that some 26 cars and a truck have passed through my hands since the Model T truck. I had intended to write about all of them, but I see now that it is impossible. Instead, here's a sentence or two (or more) about some of the more interesting ones.

                1929 Essex Super Six four-door sedan. My sister and I shared this as our driving-to-high school car. We bought it for $45, and could have had any of three Model A Fords for the same price. We thought the Model A was too common, and chose the Essex.

                1931 Chevrolet two-door sedan. It had a radio, a Crosley "Roamio", bolted under the dash just to the left of the steering column. Not many cars had a radio then, and this one even had an antenna with four three-foot telescoping sections.

                l936 Oldsmobile four-door sedan. The body and upholstery were in perfect shape when I bought it. The engine ran so quietly, I was sure this was a wonderful car. Ultimately I became filled with wonder at how much oil, gas, and other items it took to keep it running. I never understood how a car could look so good and be so bad.

                1950 Nash Statesman four-door sedan.  It was my first new car after the long succession of used or used-up cars. It had the best heating/ventilation system in the history of the automobile. It was very easy on gasoline, used no oil, and was a very pleasant change for me.

                1963 Ford Galaxie convertible. It was a bright Chinese red with a blinding white (bleached) top. It had to have been one of the sportiest cars in Green Bay, and was the talk of West High School, where I was teaching at that time.

                1973 Audi Fox two-door sedan.  An inferior car. Delivered with the wrong (metric) speedometer, it had a blown head gasket before it had gone 1000 miles. The muffler fell off, the electrical system had to be replaced, and the hideously bad carburetor froze intermittently. There was so much wrong with this car (all the repairs were warranty) that University Porsche-Audi finally allowed me the full purchase price of this 1973 car on a new l974 four-door, a much better car.

                1976 Fiat X-l/9. What a fun little car! Engine right behind the two bucket seats, it stuck to the road like glue. It was not very fast, but it was quick. This car was part of my self-prescribed therapy after my former wife left me. Perhaps a woman in this position would have been satisfied just buying a few new clothes, but not me. No sir, I had to have a new car, and a new sailboat, "Echappee II".

                1984 Renault Alliance four-door sedan. It was very economical to drive, 40 MPG on one trip to South Dakota from Washington. It was a joy to drive, as it handled almost as well as the Fiat did. But there were many faults. The worst of them was that the clutch cable kept breaking. I finally got to the point where I could install a new clutch cable myself, without even having to use pliers. I had to carry a spare with me at all times, and at about $20 per cable, I was irked, and inconvenienced.

                1985 Toyota diesel pickup truck. This is a wonderful truck; it has about 260,000 miles on it, and runs just fine. I only wish it had four-wheel drive. This truck was bought originally to be Margaret's ice cream truck, and it served that purpose for two summers. She sold home-made ice cream from the truck until it became evident that the profit was too small, and the amount of work to get the ice cream ready was too much. So after this labor-intensive and low-to-no-profit enterprise, the vehicle became my commuter car.

                It was also fun for me to use on several long trips, to Phoenix, to Green Bay, to Los Angeles and others. When we moved to Haines, Alaska, our furniture was sent up on a barge from Seattle, but what was left over was put in the truck along with our beloved piano. This created an overload that almost caused me a heart attack, I could not see how we could possibly get all the left-over’s aboard, and of course the day we moved was the day of one of the worst blizzards for years in western Washington. But with the help of one of my wonderful neighbors we got loaded up and drove to Bellingham to get on the ferry to Alaska. We had sold our car, Mom's old 1978 Oldsmobile, and so when we got to our new home in Haines we had only the truck. Since we could walk to nearly every important place, we got along with the truck alone until the following spring. I felt as if I had betrayed the truck when we bought the Subaru station wagon. It has all-wheel drive, which is really an unfair advantage to have over this noble 4X2 truck.

Truck photo by: http://www.motortrend.com/features/auto_news
Other photos from the collection of Jean E. Straatmeyer

Getting Lost with Hansel

By

Dr. Robert E. Plucker 

     I left the Army for good in November of 1951.  In my two short tours of duty I had never been shot at, nor had to shoot at some other person.  I thank God for that!  In 1984, some thirty-five years later, I had a different kind of blessing, a baby son, born to Margaret and me after some seven years of marriage.  I had had serious misgivings about taking on fatherhood again at age 56, but Margaret used persuasion, I was counseled by an Episcopal priest who was a good friend of mine, and finally convinced by the words of a wonderful old lady of the Lutheran church where I was choir director.  They all agreed that my fears had no rear grounds, and that another child would be a blessing to me.  Margaret had little Holly when we got married, I had Ginny and Dot, but now we were to have another child together.

             To our delight, we got a boy, the first of his gender in the family for some time.  Far be it from me, or Margaret either, to admit that we catered to his every whimper, but he did get a lot of attention.  After some back and forth discussion about names, we agreed that John was a good choice, and Marnin was the name that seemed right after some research in name meanings.  For the first couple of years we used to call him Hansel.  There was a kind of legitimacy to that nickname; from the English "John" comes the German "Johan", then "Johannes", shortened to "Hannes", then "Hans" and finally "Hansel" which comes out to "Little Hans".

            Living on North Camano Island at that time, I was fond of walking some of the back roads, and much of the time I would have Hansel in a front pack, and later, a back pack.  Since he was born on the 10th of April, there would be lots of new growth coming up, leaves on the trees, flowers, birds, some insects, lots of interesting things.  As young as he was, I would take Hansel along on my walks, down to the Utsalady Beach Store, up the hill from there to Buena Vista, and down one of the other roads leading back to North Camano Drive and our apartment.  I was convinced that little two-or-three-month-old Hansel especially enjoyed smelling the flowers.

            As everyone knows, it rains a lot in western Washington.  So it happened that on one of my walks with precious little Hansel, I got caught in a light rain.  No self-respecting Washingtonian at that time ever carried an umbrella, so I was in an awkward position again.  How would I explain to my wife the lamentable sopping wet condition of our baby when I finally returned home?

            What to do?  I took a short cut through the woods, striking off to my left, crashing through the underbrush, avoiding the thorns on the blackberry bushes, and hoped to soon cross the next road that would lead directly down the hill to the apartment house.  The rain was increasing to more than a mere drizzle; I struggled on and on, hoping that Hansel was not too uncomfortable getting wet and cold.  I know I was getting wet, cold, and uncomfortable.  There were a few cries coming from the back pack, but nothing serious, yet.  And still no cross-road.  I finally gave up on finding a road and decided to just crash on downhill, abandoning any thought of a short cut, back to North Camano Drive which I KNEW was at the bottom of the hill, parallel to the beach.  Hansel and I made it back to the apartment soon, and with no bad effects.  I can't tell for sure, but it seemed to me that Hansel enjoyed getting lost.

Circa 1984

Photo slide by Jean E. Straatmeyer