I thought I had forgotten it

A few days ago a simple question turned into a couple of hectic days. Back and forth e-mailing with another ex-GI about do you remember this guy and that, and what was his name. Or experiencing seriously dead intervals of who could that possibly be.

I started my first day in the U. S. Army on the day after my 21st birthday. The government has a funny way of directing your life. I went to Chicago and reported in at the AFEES (Armed Forces Examination and Entrance Station) building near the Post Office building that went across the 

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Eisenhower Expressway near downtown.  From there we were taken to a train station to board a train to Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo. Once the train arrived about 10 hours later, we were ordered off of the train and proceeded to the Reception area of "Little Korea".

That is where I met two guys that I would know for the next forty plus years. We went through Basic Training, Typing School, Drill Corporal School, then to Fort Benjamin Harrison for Finance School, all the while never thinking we were headed for the same post in Germany. We thought for sure that we would split up before arriving at the 63rd Finance Section in Zweibrucken, Germany.
Only after we had been stationed there for a while did we go our separate ways.  Or should I say they went and left the finance section and ended up in Kaiserslautern attached to the 45th Finance Section.  We still got together husbands and wives and enjoyed different things together.

The best looking street light design.

A winter scene of the street light in my front yard; it is an Evanston Street Light designed by Thomas Tallmadge a Chicago based architect. I purchased it new and has been there for over 15 years. It comes in six pieces, all of them in cast steel except for the light head which is aluminum. I look at it all of the time and am glad it is there adding to the architecture of the house. I was very fortunate to find it. Now I have another that is an original from Evanston, Il., that will go in the back yard.

The dumbest moments

A story related to me by a fellow rider; The person who this story is about, owned a pickup that broke down . His employer told him to use a company pickup to get back and forth to work until his own truck was fixed. Pretty generous of them. It seems the company pickup had a snow plow on it and his driveway needed to be plowed. Being that he was good employee and they let him take the pickup home it was probably all right to plow his drive out. The pickup has a camera mounted to the windshield to record an accident. It sees out in front and also the driver in the cab. Once he started plowing his drive he tripped the camera about 15 times because the camera thinks there were 15 accidents, but they were actually the plow hitting hard spots in the snow that tripped the camera.)

The upper management did not see the humor in his using the snow plow. Using the pickup was ok though. Needless to say he received a reprimand.

It is finally here.

Thursday, the 7th of June at 6:30 pm I received delivery of our 2009 Ultra Classic. It hit the pocket book hard. I believe it is worth it for I was feeling pretty low without a ride for the month. The month that had some beautiful weather to ride in. Now we are getting it ready to ride to the HOG Rally in Springfield, Il. So here it is waiting outside of the Party Room.

Interesting people

Today when we finished fixing a fault on this man's electric service we had to inform him of a momentary outage to switch him off of the 1:1 to his own full service.  He was an elderly gentleman, tall, thin and active physically and mentally, his name was Orville Olson.  I engaged him in some conversation about how his farm was being surrounded by subdivisions and the richest soil in the world was being paved over by land hungry people, who someday will wonder where their food will come from after we have paved all of the good farm ground over.   He said his grandfather came from Sweden in 1880 and worked enough so that he could purchase a farm when the land cost $25.00 an acre.  That was 1889, the farm was just north of Cortland, Il.,  no more than a mile.  

He then told me how his grandfather decided to come to America.  It seems the grandfather, let's call him Carl, was a 19 year old who had a buddy, lets call him Swen. It seems Swen had gotten a girl in a family way and did not want to marry her.  The answer seemed to be to leave Sweden and come to America where Swen's sister worked in a bakery in Sycamore.  As fate would play it, Swen decided to leave one night to go to America, he wanted to tell someone. That someone was Carl.   Carl said he would like to go.  But he had no money and his father said he had none to give him.   His dad left the house and came back a while later with enough money to get him to America via a 3 week boat across the Atlantic trip which most like was a sailing vessel of some kind.  Once here in this country they took a train all the way to Cortland and Carl got off, but Swen didn't, until he detrained in Clinton, Ia., and speaking no english someone got him turned around the next day and got him to DeKalb.  There is where that story ended but another started about the marshes around northern Illinois.  In 1889 when he bought the farm there was a 50 acre lake that he had to farm around.  In 1905, Carl along with thirteen other farmers hired a firm to dig a union tile line from south of rte 38 north to Sycamore.  It was an 18" diameter clay tile that was used until 2005 when the town of Cortland replaced it with a 36" one.  A union tile is like a union drainage ditch where farmers could lay their own field drainage system to drain into the union tile which would drain into a natural creek or river.  This made the land tillable.

As I looked out at the now drained field it looked like the rest of the farm land around and you would not suspect that it was full of water before.  Carl lived to be 96 years old dying in 1957.  Then Orville Olson asked me how old I thought he was.  I figured probably in his 70's, no, I was off a few years, he is 92 and pretty darn good shape.  He must have his grandfather's longevity genes.  A footnote to this tale is that he has been offered $50,000 an acre from the developers and has no intention to sell.

Museum trip to Harley Davidson

Yesterday, Bev and I took a club trip to Milwaukee.  It was more than I thought it would be.  Enjoyed it.  The real issue is after owning  three Harley's I still cannot figure out why there are so many Americans that will sell this country out to Japan or any other country.  Buying a Japanese bike that is a copy of the Harley is beyond comprehension.  Price?  HD starts out at less then 9,000 dollars.  Quality? No difference.  Un-American?  You bet.  If you think a HD rider looks at the Jap bike rider with thumbs up, they are kidding themselves.  

Old timer

Today we were transferring all of the wire over to a new pole and if you work around a small town people will stop and talk to you.   Today it happened not once but twice, first a lineman/foreman that retired  stopped and talked for awhile.  After he left another guy stopped who none of us knew.  He was a lineman about 75  that worked for the contractors.  He gets out and starts with small talk and by the end of a half  hour he was our best friend.  Knew he was a  lineman because he knew the job and the tool names.  And, of course, a lot of stories were told.  Something to be said of small towns.