Tuples and Attributes

Kate: My grandfather wrote these notes in the months after my grandmother had fallen ill. The Mom he mentions is his wife, my grandmother. They called each other Mom and Pop:

Sabbath, April 12, 1975; To our Loving Children:

Mom is near the end of her life. I kissed her and she responded some, but it was weak. She will probably be past the cares and perplexities of life soon.

We have our burial lots in the cemetery north of Loma Linda. Let me hear immediately if you want to be present. Myrna will be with me so I will have to have no other support. She will be with me. If you want to come to Mom’s funeral let me know immediately.

I prefer only a graveside ceremony. The pastor to make a few remarks and say a short prayer. If the above is not satisfactory let me know immediately. (soon)

I have gotten many condolence wishes [about her illness] but will answer them only with a general letter to be delivered to our friends.

May 31, 1975

Mom seems to be stronger and recognized me. She hated to have me leave her this morning to eat my breakfast. Prospects are that she may live several days. No one of course knows.

Sunday, p.m.

Mom seems to be more alert. She knew me and apparently was glad for me to kiss her.

I will notify you if there is any liability of her passing away.

Pop

Kate: My grandmother died on July 14, 1975. She was 87.

Kate: My grandfather handwrote some further memoirs after my grandmother had died. After her death, my grandfather began to have some memory problems, but he still told entertaining stories:

I shall begin my memoirs by saying that the first part is as I remember my mother and maternal Grandfather telling me. My Grandfather was a small man, not quite as tall as I am, 5’6”. He and Grandmother both came from Leipsig [sic], Germany. All males were required to take military training. Grandpa was too small to be in the army so he was required to take marching. As soon as his term of service was over, he struck off for the land called America. He came to Omaha on the train, and walked up along the foothills to a settlement called Decatur. He got a job and earned money. As soon as he got enough money, he sent it to his wife and baby (the baby was later known as Anna, my aunt) to come to America.

He soon had money enough to make a down payment on the property later known as the Hennig home. They finally had a family of twelve children, eight girls and four boys. Each one had his work to do to help keep food enough for the large family. They never had white flour, but were happy if they had enough to satisfy the hungry mouths. Probably sometimes as pounded up wheat.

Then they had the scourge of grasshoppers. I heard my grandfather say many times: “Mine conscience. They were terrible.” They would come in droves so thick they would darken the sun and eat every thing that was green or growing. Then they had a hard time to get enough to eat that was digestible.

Grandpa finally built a log house for shelter. The house was a one room living quarters. The children went up in the attic to their pad on a ladder through an opening in the floor of the attic. After they were able to afford a better house, the old one was used as a chicken coop. It was still standing as the coop when I was old enough to remember it.

I never heard Grandpa complain about it. It was so much better than the sod house.

My memory of Grandma is very limited. She was quite a “heavy set” woman. I remember the funeral was in the Baptist church. I sat up near the front and the casket was in the front of the church. We all passed around, at the close of the service to view the “Remains”, as it was called. She looked very peaceful.

After Grandma was buried, Grandpa had me come over and help him with his work. I think he wanted me to get acquainted with him. I never lacked for work to keep me busy. I think he wanted us to get acquainted more than his need for me to work. At least I got good exercise.

Now I will turn to the other side of the house and visit my Grandpa Blue’s home. My grandfather was a “heavy set” man. He joined the Baptist church. I think the reason was more for jealousy than wanting to be a “Baptist”. At the best I saw very little of him.

Kate: At this point my grandfather wrote the following parenthetical:

 (Here I went over and opened the drawers to look at Mom’s things. I picked up two of them and laid them back down. I began to cry. I went for a walk down to the Park to get a drink and fresh air. Now I am back to my writing.)

We were out in the barnyard at work when I saw him, grandpa, coming from back of the house. Irvin and I were about to run until we saw tears streaming from his eyes. He said, “I have been a big fool.” He asked us to forgive him for being such a fool.

He was a very likeable friendly man. We were glad to have him visit us. He had a hernia on one side and wanted to go to Omaha for the operation. After he got so he could move about, he sent us word that he would be home the next morning on the train. We were to meet him at the depot. Before father started to town, he was notified that grandpa had died in his sleep. We had a funeral instead of a happy meeting. So I never got to know my Grandfather Blue as a friendly man. Just another disappointment in our youthful days.

Kate: At this point, my grandfather wrote about the dog and skunk incident he had related in his earlier memoirs. He also again recounted the story about the cow jumping into the wire fence and having to be put down. He then continues:

A rap just came to my door. A woman came into my room with a large pot of beautiful red roses. I sure wish Mom were here to enjoy them. Also it was from our daughter, Aleta, that had caused us so much grief in our younger days. Since she has gotten older she has made up for all the grief she caused us. That is one reason for me wishing mom was back with us.

Now to go back to the story of my life. As soon as my father saw that we would be better than any two men he could hire, he turned us loose to do the farm work. He seldom came to the field to work unless he needs to show us how to do certain parts of the work. Irvin was older than I was, so he led out in the work. My feet always hurt me when I walked in a plowed field. I would often take off my shoes and walk in my bare feet. My feet would hurt me so badly that after the chores were done I would take off my shoes and lie in the yard and ball [sic].

I want to digress here and give some family history that I think will be of interest. Irvin was older than I was, so always lead out in the work and such like. For some reason father always took a trip to his old home in Indiana quite frequently. This time, I do not know why, he took me with him. He lived east of Michigan City, Indiana. He took me far east of the city to his father’s burial ground. The burial lot had a marble slot stone to match the graves of his grandfather and grandmother. The stones were of marble and were falling apart. We patched them as much as we could and cleaned the ground about them. It was quite a thrill to me to see the graves of my great grandfather and grandmother. I suppose today they are either grown up to sassafras brush or are a plowed field. At least they were on a gentle western slope of the hill. At least I have a picture in my mind of where they were buried. That means much to me.

Now we will go to some of the more recent happenings of my boyhood.

Kate: Here he relates the skunk story again. Obviously that really made an impression on him. Those pages are the last things that I know of that he wrote. He died December 12, 1976, just a few days short of his 90^th birthday.

Not much I feel inspired to write about right now. Hope you all are doing well.

Here are Mom and Brindy:

And here’s my current puzzle:

These are the last two episodes that I will share from my Grandpa’s typed memoirs. He mentions a few other incidents involving some car accidents and fender benders, but those all took place in the 1950s and 1960s. I am still deciphering some of his handwritten materials.

Nothing worthy of mentioning in the way of accidents until the spring of 1927. This may not be worth mentioning, but I am still puzzled as to what was supposed to have happened. I was teaching at Broadview College at this time. I also had the responsibility of supervising the dairy. The two students that had done the milking for the school year had gone home for the summer. I had no one readily available for the job, so took on the job of milking the 22 cows then being milked until I could locate some one to do it. I had to get up at 3:00 A.M. to get the milk cared for at the proper time. This certain morning when I went to call the cows into the barn to shut them into their stations, the bull was standing near the barn door. He was a young Holstein and he was so gentle that we regarded him as a pet. I threw my arm around his neck and started to walk across the yard with him to drive the cows to the barn. He reached down with his head and before I could realize what was happening he threw me up on top of his head and started to run down the hill with me. Each time I tried to get off of his head, he would balance me back squarely on the crown of his head. I finally decided that he had me hopelessly balanced on his head. I reached for his eye, and as soon as I had it well located, I jammed my thumb into it as hard as I could. He shook his head to dislodge my thumb and shook me off his head. I ran to the barn as fast as I could, and he after me. I got there first and grabbed a pitchfork that stood beside the door and jammed it into his head as hard as I could. He would back off and then come at me attain. This went on for some ten minutes when he finally gave up, and I never heard a bull bellow as he did. I have no idea as to what his intentions were, but did not risk finding out. Needless to say we kept him penned up after that. As soon as it was day, I learned that a farmer nearby had been gored to death by his bull getting him cornered in a manger that morning.

When I was on the farm, I had a hen with about 30 small chickens running loose in the back yard. A thunderstorm was brewing, and I went out to get her and the chickens into a coop. The hen ran with her chicks up into a grove of willows. She ran under a tree and I was trying to get her out, when a flash of lightening nearly blinded me. When I recovered enough to know what had happened, I saw that the lightening had struck the tree and knocked it to pieces. The hen and chickens were all lying on their backs with nearly all the feathers picked off of them. I hastened away and left them lie till after the rain was over. I had not felt the shock as I was wearing my father’s rubber boots. If it had not been for the rubber boots, I well realized that I would have been lying with the hen and chicks.

In today’s stories my Grandpa has just graduated college and taken on adult responsibilities.

I finished college in the spring of 1914, at the age of 27. I well knew that the responsibility of a man that could support a wife was to get married. Since I was 21 before I had a chance to get much schooling, I knew that I had to occupy every minute diligently, if I were to get through college before I became an old man. Naturally I felt that I had to be too busy with my education to waste time courting a girl. I suppose there were many wonderful girls in college with me, but I was too busy.

Two weeks after I graduated from college, I married Mabel J. McConnell. She says that she knew me much better than I knew her. I can hardly imagine why. I found that married life was more relaxing than the strenuous life that I had felt I was forced to follow. Life began to take on a semblance of happiness, and I finally consented that life was not meant to be all drudgery. It was a bit difficult to adjust to a new way of thinking, but I finally decided it was not necessary to take life so seriously as I had in the past. I was elected to be principal of the Nebraska Academy. All seemed to go well with my new found freedom.

If you, like me when I first read this, wonder how on earth he managed to marry someone two weeks after graduation when he didn’t date in college, it’s because he didn’t meet her at college. My grandma taught school in Nebraska and she boarded with my grandpa’s parents. So he saw her on the occasions he was home from school.

After this I seemed to be freed from any serious threats of accidents. Possibly this was decreed by fate, as my family and responsibility increased greatly. I began to arise with “might and main” to my responsibility.

In the summer of 1920 an incident happened that might have been serious. I was heavily engaged in farming. I had bought a boar to head my herd of profitable hogs. I have never known of a hog being so intelligent as he was. He seemed to thoroughly understand the orders that I gave him. He would come from far away at his given call. If I wanted to move him from one pen to another, he seemed to know exactly what I wished him to do. If I wanted to lend him to a neighbor, I would call him, open the gate, and he would follow me wherever I led the way. When I got to the desired place, I would remove the staples in the fence, raise the fence and call to him and he would crawl under the wire. When the neighbor was through with him, I would call him in the pasture, raise the fence, and lead him home.

One rainy day, he took a notion to go to the neighbors on his own choosing. I do not know how he got out of the pen, but I spied him going up the hill to the west. I shouted at him to come home. He turned and shook his head and started on. I shouted at him again and gave orders for him to come home. Again he recognized me with a shake of his head. After that he paid no attention to my shouts, but went on his way. I grabbed a pitchfork and started after him. He stayed at the side of the road and went over the top of the hill outside of a deep cut. I went through the cut and came out ahead of him on the opposite side of the hill. He reluctantly turned and started home. To be sure, he was chonking violently and frothing at the mouth, but I took no warning from it. We crossed the top of the hill and well down the other side, when he slowed up a bit. I was tickeling [sic] his tail a bit with the pitchfork, but was not hurting him at all. Soon he turned on me and came after me with his mouth open. I well knew what that meant. I slammed the pitchfork into his head below the eyes, clear to the skull. I could hear the tines of the fork grate back and forth on his skull. I was unable to hold him back, but each time he gave a lunge I would jump backwards enough to keep erect. He finally gave up, and turned and started for home. He kept frothing and chonking more violently than ever, but did not attack me again. I got him in the yard, and called the hired men, and we roped him and cut off his tusks clear down the jaw bone. If I had fallen down, I do not think I would be here to tell the story on him. I have seen a boar hit a dog in the leg with his tusk, and see the dog’s leg hang loosely, so the dog would have to be killed. After that if I met him alone in the yard and did not have a club, I would beat him to the fence. Any club seemed to be the same to him as a pitchfork. Of course he was more or less harmless without his tusks, but I did not fancy having him knock me down and froth over me. We always kept his tusks well trimmed. He seemed to never pay and attention to the hired men, but I was marked as his enemy.

Like many of you have probably been doing, my mom and I have pulled out several jigsaw puzzles to entertain us. Mom hasn’t worked with them much before and I have been trying to give her pointers on what to look for: color, shape, comparison to picture, etc.

I found myself telling her, for instance, that she needed to be looking for a piece with two “outies” next to each other. Or in another case, we needed a piece with at least three “innies”. Sure that the internet would provide me with better terms, I “Binged” it.

Perhaps you can imagine my surprise and horror to discover that there are no agreed upon names for the various parts of a puzzle piece. I was stunned to find out that “innies and outies” were, indeed, two of the possible terms. Others are “knobs and holes”, “loops and sockets”, “tabs and slots”, “mortices and tenons”, and “keys and locks”.

Not only are there no standard terms for the parts of the pieces, there are apparently not names for the types of pieces either. For those of you not familiar with standard jigsaws, there are six basic kinds of configurations (not counting the edge pieces).

I hereby propose that since the world has not come to a previous agreement, we all decide to use the following:

First, let’s settle on “knobs and sockets”. (“Innies and outies” just reminds me too much of belly buttons.)

Second, here are the six shapes and my proposed names:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Third, let’s all agree that areas on either side of the knob or socket are “shoulders”.

Now I can tell my mom I’m looking for a “3-socket piece with a long shoulder on the left side of the knob”.

I hope this post gave you all just a little chuckle in these trying times (although I wouldn’t mind at all if you decide you like my nomenclature).

Every morning here seems to be picture worthy. Here are some from the last few days:

I’ve always known it was best to wash my hands with warm water, but, really, as a person who has spent many of her years in arid climates, the idea of watching water run down the tap for five minutes while waiting for the warm water to show up was too much to contemplate.

However, the place we moved to here in Henderson has a recirculating hot water system. And once we had the plumber out to fine tune it, it has been providing us with near instantaneous hot water from every faucet. It’s wonderful!

Given the current situation, I’m thrilled I can wash up in warm water and not waste gallons of water. I am completely and thoroughly spoiled by this.

Here’s a brief paragraph from Grandpa about his non-existent social life as a young man and then a story about his escapades with a motorcycle:

Father and mother both took a very protective hand in looking after us, and directing us in what was proper to do. This was so evident that at 21 when I went away to college, I had a severe struggle to adjust myself to make my own decisions as to what was proper to do. When we became young men, and other young men of the community had a buggy and team to go riding with their best girl friend, father did not believe such privileges should be granted to young people. If we went any place without our parents, we either walked or rode a lumbering farm horse. Of course such a mode of travel was no invitation acceptable to a girl. Father said that he did not believe that we should be allowed to use riding tools on the farm; because if we walked all day in the field, we would stay home at night, and not be out after dark like other young men were. Especially in the plowed field, my feet would ache so badly that after I would get the chores done, I would lie down in the front yard and bawl with aching feet. Only once my brother Irvin was permitted to take the double seated buggy and take a girl cousin of ours to a gathering. It was such an unusual occasion that I watched every detail of the proceedings even as to how Elsie was dressed.

My next escapade involving an accident was with a motorcycle in the summer of 1912. The Omaha Daily Bee advertised that they would give away a motorcycle to the one getting the greatest number of subscriptions in a given time. I had no way to travel, so I went and bought the motorcycle, with the agreement that they would give me my money back if I won the contest. I was a bit late in entering the contest, so had to make use of every day to get subscriptions. I crossed and crisscrossed the county getting subscriptions. I rode the thing until I got so sore that I counted it a favor if I was allowed to stand while eating.

I was nearing the close of the contest, and since the sun was getting low, I decided to strike out for home 25 miles to the east. I was riding down a country road that paralleled a railroad track. I had up pretty good speed when I spied a spur track coming off from the main track. It was a very bad crossing, and the rails were some inches above the bed of the road. When I hit the rails, it threw my motorcycle flat on the side. I remembered riding astride until it bounced the third time, and then I felt the stubs of weeds beside the road scratching my face. When I regained consciousness, I had the motorcycle up in the road trying to spring the wheels in line so I could push it. It was dusk and I saw a whole string of car lights coming up the road toward me. A train had passed me while I was lying in the ditch and had reported that a man had been killed up along the track. A doctor, and an undertaker, and a lot of town people had come out to get me. As soon as it was evident that I was not hurt, the doctor, undertaker, and town people all left. Two claim agents from the railroad company stayed with me and helped me push my wheel the three miles into town. When they questioned me as to what liability there was to the railroad company, I was so peeved at myself for being so foolish as to have been driving so fast on a strange road, that I would not ask for a cent. I had been warned that a motorcycle was a dangerous means of travel but I was not going to admit it under any condition, but said it was just my carelessness. I pushed the wheel into a garage and went to a hotel for the night. When I wakened the next morning, I could not imagine why I was so sore and stiff. I finally remembered the accident of the night before.

Instead of going home that day, I decided to go stay over Sabbath with a family 40 miles to the south. I had known the daughter in college. It was a very bad sandy dusty road to this family, and I became smeared with dust and grime. As I was passing a farmhouse on the way, a dog came out to meet me. I eyed him closely to see if I should speed up and go down along the road. I decided he was harmless, so I slowed up and made a left hand turn in the road. As I was making the turn, the dog jumped on behind me, and grabbed a chunk of my coat tail and jumped off with it. I stopped at the house to register a complaint, but they insisted that the dog was harmless and would not do such a thing. I could not prove it, as I and the dog were the only ones that saw it. I had to go on without the back of my coat.

I think that dirty and all as I was, and without a proper coat-tail, I did not make a very good impression to the co-ed, and they did not invite me to stay. I struck out for home, another 40 miles away, but was 12 miles from home when darkness overtook me. I tried to make it without lights. On the way I heard some rattling and was aware that I was passing a wagon in the other lane. I got as far as my grandfather’s place, pushed the wheel beside the road and crawled up in the haymow for the night.

When the report was made on the contest, I was notified that I had one third more subscriptions than I needed to win the contest. I only rode the wheel once after the accident. I sold it to a neighbor boy, for $299.00. I had enough money from it and my savings to put me through college the next year.

While going out to places and doing things was still an option, I visited the Neon Museum here in Vegas. In addition to the usual signs, Tim Burton has had a show going on there as well. Great fun and hope to do it again someday!