Down on the Farm:

I was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa to Perry Warren and Cathryn Caughell Eblen in 1941.  I had two older sisters named Jane and Joan.  We lived on our family farm approximately 10 muddy miles from the small town of Oakland, Iowa.  It was a few months prior to the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor and our entry into the Second World War.

My Dad was a building contractor and had a neighbor do most of the farming.  During the War all of his men were called to duty but dad was older, with a family so he was not drafted.

Mother raised a large garden and always had chickens.  My duties included gathering the eggs daily.   Sometimes I would fail to find a nest and shortly we would have a hen with a batch of chicks following after her.  The hen would often times cackle at me for not finding her nest which I found irritating.

One of my favorite hobbies was digging holes in the orchard with a hand-held posthole digger.  It would take me days to dig a nice round hole then I would move on to a new location.  Weeks, or months, later dad would step into one of these fine holes and I would be told what he thought of my work and the digger would disappear.

I would build roads in the dust and use small boxes for houses.  Then to contribute to the war effort I would build replicas of a B24 Bomber from two boards nailed together (it required some imagination) and bomb my chicken dust town.  I nailed several chewing tobacco cans on my plane, fill them with gravel and then fly over my town and bomb them.

Our house wasn’t poorly insulated, it didn’t have any insulation.  Our water was from a well in the front yard that had to be carried into the house.  The necessary house was in the backyard.  In the summer the house was so hot I would take my naps in the front yard with my dog Snowball guarding me.  In the winter we would jump out of bed and rush to the kitchen where Mom would have the oven going with the door open.  We all huddled around to get warmed up.

Saturday nights we would usually drive to town to get store bought items and socialize.  I spent most of my time during the week alone since my two older sisters were in school.  I enjoyed these visits to the ‘city’ and I, along with several others, would roam the 2 block Main Street of town.

When I turned 5 it was time to get educated.  Our school was a 1-room country school about 1 1/2 miles (I always rounded it off to 2 miles because it sounds a little better).   My son likes to tease me about it being “uphill both ways”!  Perhaps I’ve told this story before…

Both of my older sisters attended this school with me.  Joan had a Shetland pony named Patsy that she was allowed to ride to school occasionally.  Mother didn’t allow her to take me in fear that I would fall off.  She was allowed to take Jane however, apparently it didn’t matter if Jane fell off.  There was one wood bridge on the way and Patsy would refuse to cross it.  I usually got to school before my sisters because I didn’t have to struggle with Patsy.

This school included students from K-8th grade.  The first year I was the youngest and the only student in my class. It wasn’t easy for me to keep my attention during these days.   I had a difficult time not speaking out-load when I had something important to say – which was frequently.  For punishment the teacher would stick me under her desk where her legs went when sitting down.  Somebody before me had drilled a hole through the front of the desk and when you put your eye up to it you could see the other students, I found this entertaining so the punishment went by quickly.

The teacher would group several grades together and select a corner of the room to teach that group at an appropriate level.  Since I was the youngest I was grouped with older kids.

When I started first-grade we had a new teacher.  She was my mother’s aunt by marriage and she stayed with us.  She was a wonderful person, her name was Mary Smith and she had been married to my mother’s uncle.  I quickly adapted to staying late after school so I could walk home with Aunt Mary, she made the trip so enjoyable for me.  We would hunt rocks and plants together and occasionally we would play hide-and-seek.

The oldest boy in the school was a talented person – he could make pocket knives!  These were really fine knives hand-crafted in his father’s farm work shop and made with the very best of scrap metal.  He made dozens of these knives and never gave me one!  He did teach me how to play mumble peg however.  For those that don’t know what that is, its a game of sticking the  knife in the ground starting at various points on your body.  For example, if you start at your shoulder and manage to flip the knife off of your shoulder and stick it in the ground – you get to advance to your elbow.  I really enjoyed this game until I stuck the knife into the top of my hand.  I still have the scar to this day.

This same boy also gave me my first ride on a bicycle.  He gave me instructions and warned me multiple times to not stick my feet in the spokes of the wheel.  We managed to get started with me on the handlebars of the bike and we reached phenomenal speeds as we circled the school and then it happened, I got my foot in the front wheel spokes and down we went.  The spokes were bent and broken and so was our friendship.  He never played mumble peg with me again. It was devastating to a six year old.

This modern school had a “outhouse”,  I could not find a pleasant smell within twenty feet of this structure.  I was young and could usually go all day without the need to visit the stink house.  On the few occasions I needed to I would search out a nice tree and hide from the others while relieving myself.

This country school also featured a “storm cave”, designed and regulated by Homeland Security Agency.  Well, actually not.   This storm cave was actually designed to give us a place to shelter in the advent of a tornado and just think, our parents came up with this all on their own, no government involved…amazing!  People having the intelligence and responsibility to think on their own!  We would practice orderly and quiet evacuation from the school to the cave.  This cave featured snakes and spiders and the girls didn’t like going into it. 

My folks made the move to a small town in SW Iowa in 1948.  Dad’s construction business was doing well due to all of the soldiers returning from the War.

My folks wanted Joan to go to High School and there were no school buses yet.  They rented a room from the parents of another girl her age and Joan would stay with them during the week so she could attend HS.  Joan would have been 14 when she started this.

I went to this same public school until I graduated from HS in 1959.  I was active in sports and enjoyed hunting and fishing.

I was required to mow the yard (50,000 sq ft) with a non-powered push mower and clear the snow off of the the sidewalks and driveway.  My sisters had household duties such as washing dishes and sweeping the floors that I never participated in – it was “girls work”.

As I got older I had a few other jobs in addition to my duties at home.

Blackberry Business

The people that owned our house previously had planted hybrid blackberries but as the people grew old they neglected the bushes and it was now a briar patch. 

The blackberries were wonderful and my mother decided I should sell them in the neighborhood.  Like most business ventures we had start-up issues, I was too short to reach the better berries.  Mothers solution was to enlist my sister Jane who was taller.  Of course this wasn’t  popular with Jane and there were difficult negotiations to determine the sharing of the money.  My mother acted as my ‘agent’ and we started picking.  We could fill my Radio Flyer Little Red Wagon (forerunner to UPS) in no time at all with quart boxes of berries that I sold for 50 cents each.

   After a few days the word got around the neighborhood that I had the best blackberries at a very attractive price.  People started calling, our number was 184 and as long as the operator was awake and our hotshot battery had a charge our phone would ring. 

Dad would give me these “hotshot” batteries from the phone when they were nearly depleted and I would wrap wire around a 16d nail and make a electro magnet.  I would play with these until the battery was done.

I didn’t report any of this money to the IRS because they didn’t pick any berries.

Saw Dust Business

My father owned a millwork shop, he made all kinds of wood trim (casing, etc) for construction and sold to lumberyards in the area.  This business created a lot of sawdust which he handled with a 5′ diameter fan that sucked the dust out of the shop into a building in the back the size of a two-car garage.

Dad sent me around town to sell the sawdust to butchers to put on their floors behind the counters where they dressed the meat.   Butchers would spread it around and after a few days would clean it up and put fresh down.  I would sack the sawdust up in gunny sacks and deliver it right to the butchers door with my Radio Flyer Little Red Wagon. Why didn’t I think of UPS.  I can’t remember what I charged for a sack of sawdust.  I should have charged dad for getting rid of his sawdust for him and charged the butchers for the delivery.  I didn’t gain this astute business insight until much later in life.

I didn’t share any of this money with Jane, nor did I report it to the IRS because again they didn’t sack a single gunny.

High Risk Storm Window Service

We had two elderly widows (maybe old maids) that lived a few doors from our house in a large two-story house.  Each spring and fall I had to climb ladders to the second floor and remove/install the seasonally appropriate window covering.

I didn’t want this job, I didn’t ask for it and I hated it.  My mother insisted and when my mother insisted on something, well you already know, she always won.

I used their extension ladder that was probably older than they were.   By the time I reached their second floor carrying a heavy storm window it was wobbling so much I was in great fear.  These windows had hooks at the top that  required you to angle the window out from the side of the house at about a 45 degree angle to engage the hooks.  You can’t hang on to anything but the window to reach this angle and the last thing I wanted to do was let loose of my death grip I had on the ladder.  What on earth was mother doing to me?   I grew to the point I hated the thought of the season change. 

You gotta be kidding, of course I didn’t report this dollar to the IRS.

Grade School:

Starting school was a harrowing experience for me.  I had spent much of my early years entertaining myself on a farm and attending a one-room school and now I had to go to this huge school that my class alone had 45 students!

We would bring a quarter to school once a week to purchase a stamp for our “war bonds”.  These were government bonds issued to pay off the war debt.  A look at the National debt today indicates we should have brought more than a quarter! 

We had one teacher for our class of 45 and she taught all subjects.   It was difficult for me to concentrate on these subjects after having so much freedom in country school.  This school had discipline.  After school I was allowed to burn off a little energy at home and it was nice to have neighbor kids to play with.  I lived within a few blocks of the school so I walked each day.

After the play time my mother would work with me on my assignments.  Each week we had a spelling test, I think around 25 words.  Spelling didn’t come natural to me – I had to work at it.  Which meant my mother would test me over and over again until I got most of them.  Mother was a wonderful person but she was the most determined person I’ve ever known.  When she said I had to learn to spell these words everything else was put aside until I could spell the words.  My mother always said her brother was an very intelligent man, well read but he had a difficult time spelling the simplest words.  Why couldn’t she say that I’m intelligent and let the spelling go?

When it came to math I had to deal with Dad.  I loved my Dad but he wasn’t a very good teacher.  As a contractor he was use to working with numbers and was really good at it – but he had his own method which didn’t resemble the way they taught it at school.  He would get the right answer his way and then I had to get it the way the book taught it.  At times it was a little frustrating.

I played baseball in the summer which is a game my father loved.  At first it was called the “Pee Wee” league and then as we got older it was called the “Midgets”.  I enjoyed playing baseball and was fairly good at it.  I mostly pitched but also played other positions at times.  On occasion Dad would show up and usually refereed some.  I could throw the ball fast but I lacked any degree of accuracy.  My method was to intimidate the hitter with my speed.  I grew faster than a lot of my teammates so I was a force to deal with on the mound – I just made that up because it sounds pretty good – “a force to deal with”.

Junior High:

In Junior High (7th & 8th) grade we started playing football and basketball.  I enjoyed football but not basketball so much.

About this time I also discovered girls – there was something about them I found interesting.  I had several favorites, often at the same time.  We would meet at the ‘movie house’ where we would watch a “picture show” on Saturday afternoon in Oakland.  Sometimes with some favorites I would hold their hand.  The movies were great, remember this is before we had television.  Some of my favorite movies were “Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis”,  Abbot and Costello” and of course all kinds of cowboy and Indian movies. There was always at least one cartoon strip prior to showing the movie – Donald Duck,  Bugs Bunny, The Roadrunner (my favorite), Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, Mr Magoo and many more.  It cost a dime to get in and a nickel for a bag of popcorn so you could hardly say this was a cheap date.

I had a friend in the neighborhood that I took to his first movie.  He was an only child and they had considerable money – including the first dollar they ever made.  I paid for him to get into the movie and afterwords I asked him how he liked it and he didn’t remember a thing about the movie.  He was so fascinated with the pictures and sound that the plot (and they had some deep plots) had completely escaped him.

In the winter when we had snow the town would cordon off a couple of blocks on a good hill for sledding.  This was another great opportunity to be with my favorite girl of the moment.  It was in a neighborhood where a lot of my classmates lived and one of the mothers would usually have us in for hot chocolate to warm up.  We would do this for hours and it was great fun. 

Each Fall there was the Oakland Fall Festival.  This was a wonderful time as the town would block-off the entire ‘downtown’ area (all two blocks of it) and a traveling carnival company would set up rides and stands.   Local merchants would also have stands where you could shoot darts, pop balloons and all kinds of wonderful games.  Of course the goal was to win a prize for the favorite girl.

High School:

Summer Farm Work:

My older sister and her husband lived on my folk’s farm.  They were both 8 years older than me and had married young.

The summers I was 13, 14 and 15 I lived with them on the farm and worked.  The farm was 10 miles from town so we would only go to town once or twice a week.

My dad and brother-in-law raised a lot of livestock (cattle, cows, pigs and chickens) in addition to farming.  Livestock are a lot of work but most farms in that time had them.

To feed the cows and cattle (cows are for milking, cattle are raised for their meat – this story is getting very educational) in the winter months we had to work hard in the summer preparing and storing crops for the winter.

The first summer when I was 13 I was not strong enough to help much with the heavy work.  I did learn to drive a tractor and spent hours in the fields at various task.

My sister raised hundreds of chickens called “fryers”.  We would get them early in the spring from the hatchery in Oakland in cardboard boxes perhaps 2 foot square with holes for air inlets.  My dad, during the war, had built a “brooder house” for housing these young chicks.  This building was smaller than a one car garage and had a large metal hover with several brooder lamps in it to concentrate the heat under the hood.  The chicks were so small the temperature had to be very warm.  This lamp was mounted to the ceiling with a rope and pulley so as the chicks grew we would raise the lamp.  The floor was covered with oyster shells to keep it dry.   Like all birds, they grew rapidly and soon would be out of the brooder house.

We kept these chickens for the summer and in early fall my mother and sister would can many of them.   It was my duty to perform the unpleasant job of executing the birds.  During the summer we would have fried chicken several times a week and it is still one of my favorite meals.  The process of canning was time consuming and mom and my sister would work for several weeks to accomplish it.  It provided us with chicken throughout the winter months.

We also had a very large garden where we had carrots, onions, lettuce, strawberries, beans, peas, potatoes, sweet corn, cabbage and watermelon.  Gardens are cursed with weeds and they needed to be removed frequently by hoeing.  This was of course what they call ‘organic farming’ today since we did not use pesticides or insecticides – didn’t exist.  Most of our meals were prepared from produce we raised ourselves.

Both my brother-in-law and I love raw potatoes and oftentimes early in the morning on our way to the fields we would stop at the potato patch and dig up a couple of potatoes.  We each had a pocket knife and we would peel our potato and eat it raw.  It is still my favorite way of eating potatoes, something my wife cannot understand.  I will snitch a potato from her bowl before she fixes them, add a little salt and I’m a happy man.

I slept in the upstairs of my sister’s house and in the summer in Iowa it was very hot.  There was no air conditioning yet and these homes had very little, if any, insulation.  I can remember many a night having difficulty falling asleep due to the high temperatures.

The sound of rain early in the morning was a wonderful sound to me.  I would wake up and hear the rain on the roof just above me and knew that it was either going to be a great day or a really bad day.  On a good rainy day my brother-in-law would take me to town and play pool.  I could never beat him but it was still a great day.  On a bad rainy day he would tell me to clean out the manure and straw in the chicken house.  I really hated this job.  

A lot of our time was spent working in the fields.   Fields were ‘rotated’ in those years from one crop to another.  Commercial fertilizer was just starting to be used so we would plow under the hay crops to add nutrients to the soil for a row crop the following year.

Controlling the weeds would be done by cultivating.  When the row crop was young the speed of the tractor was as slow as you could walk so it took days to cultivate a large field.  A few weeks later it would need to be done again but by then the crop had grown to a height that you could move rapidly through the field.  Southwestern Iowa where we lived is very hilly and so we planted the crops in contour with the hills thus making following the rows a little more difficult.

Later in the summer when the crops were too tall to drive a tractor through without damaging the crop we walked through the corn to cut weeds by hand.  There are few places in the World hotter than the middle of a Iowa cornfield in August with the high humidity.  We would get up at 4 am to beat the heat (yeh, sure), each of us had a 2.5 gallon jug of ice water.  We wore long sleeve shirts, scarfs around our necks and hats because the leaves would make small cuts on any exposed skin.   As the years went by I must say he eliminated most of the weeds.  We would sometimes walk entire fields and not find a weed.

I kind of laugh to myself when I hear some of these people today glorify organic farming (have any of these people ever been on a farm).  Do they really think farmers are going to go back to farming like what I have just described?  I wish these people would go to Iowa in August and spend some time cutting weeds out in the corn fields.  Using modern farm methods these same fields today produce 2 to 3 times the yields that they did in the fifties.  The world enjoys an abundance of food thanks to modern farming.  I’m all for good conservation practices but you need to give it a little more thought.

In addition to chickens and field work we also raised pigs.  It would take about 6 months from birth to market to produce a 220# hog.  We would use our homegrown oats and corn to feed the animals.

The sows (female pig) would give birth in a hog house that my dad had built.  Each animal was housed in her own pen separated from others by wood planks.  The floor was covered with straw to absorb moisture and provide a warmer environment from the concrete floors.  This straw was again bailed from our oat fields.  The straw would get wet and so every few days it had to be removed and replaced with fresh dry straw.  The sows are very large animals and would often roll over and crush a baby pig.  They would have litters sometimes having 10 or more piglets.  Of course the goal was to save as many as possible so my brother-in-law and I would stay in the hog house overnight to help with any birthing needs the sow might have.

Speaking of fatalities, my first summers wage (3 months) was agreed to be a litter of pigs.  I knew nothing about pigs so I picked out the largest sow in the pen hoping she would have dozens of piglets.  A pound of pork at the market was worth about 11 cents in the fifties so each pig at market was worth about $24.  Multiply this times dozens of piglets and I’m going to be rich, however my sow didn’t cooperate, she had 6 piglets and killed 4 of them the first week.  Two pigs at $24.00 each means my summer work would earn me $48.00!!!  This was a disaster.  My brother-in-law came through with a smile on his face and said he would pay me 6 pigs.  So I earned $145.00 for my 3 months work. 

When we didn’t work late we would oftentimes ‘go down to the creek’ on our farm and fish in the evening.  We had a small pond where we would catch bullheads (a small catfish).  I loved eating these fried fish – still do today.  What’s offered today are farm raised and they just don’t have the flavor or texture of the wild ones.

You might gather from these memories that I really like food.  Its true and I think some of it had to do with these wonderful times with all of the homegrown fruits and vegetables plus our own meat prepared the way we wanted it.

My sister was a very good cook, she had learned from my mother.  In these summer months we worked hard and could eat whatever and as much as we wanted.   She would make a large chocolate sheet cake almost daily for us.  Oftentimes she would bring a whole meal out to the fields for lunch so we wouldn’t have to stop for long.

This reminds me of another eating story.  We sometimes traded work with neighbors for jobs requiring more men.  I loved going over to one of our neighbors.  He was a German and they ate the old German farm way – 5 meals a day!  Now that is my kind of farm.  My brother-in-law didn’t even want to stop for lunch and this farmer stopped FIVE times a day to eat.  I’m working for the wrong farmer.

As is the case with most teenage boys I was constantly hungry.  Add to that burning thousand of calories from the hard work and I never wanted to leave the table.

For a time we had milk cows.  Never enough to warrant machine milking so it was all done by hand.  There’s a skill to milking a cow that I never acquired.  The theory is to ‘pull’, not ‘squeeze’.  My mother could milk several cows in the time I milked one.  I always used the excuse that my hands were too big to which my mother would scoff.  The cows had to be milked each morning and evening.  The barn cats had built in timers and knew exactly when we milked and would all line up waiting for their treat from the teat.  I’d aim a teat at a cat and cover its face with fresh milk which it would then lick off.

After milking the cows the milk had to be separated into cream and milk.  This was another job that was passed off on to me.  I can’t believe I did sooo much work for sooo little pay.   A machine, appropriately called a ‘separator’,  with a electric motor was used to spin the fresh milk and by centrifugal force separated the heavier cream from the milk.  It had two spouts, one for the cream and one for the milk.  The machine was fast and it didn’t take too long but cleaning it was another story.  I had to take it all apart and wash all of the parts and then reassembly.

Neither my sister or brother-in-law liked milk but I drank a lot of milk.  She would take some of the milk and add back some cream to enrich it and save it for me.  She would pasteurize it but not homogenize it so after a period of time it would start to separate on its own.

My sister collected the cream and every so many days would take it to town and sell it to the appropriately named business “The Creamery”.  This was her ‘spending money’ to do with as she pleased.

The milk was far too much for me to drink so I would carry it down to the hog house where I would mix it with oats in a 50 gallon barrel and then let it sour for several days.  After this I would dip the gruel out with 5 gal buckets and ‘slop’ the hogs with it in troughs.  The hogs would squeal and fight to get to this mixture.  You really had to be fast to keep ahead of the hogs or they would knock the bucket out of your hands with their rush to get to it.

By my second and third summers I had grown enough to handle the bails of hay.  We were raising a lot of cattle in those years.  My dad would go out to Wyoming or Montana and buy calves by the hundreds and truck them back to Iowa.  The calves would be fed the crops from our fields and then marketed in Omaha at the stockyards.  The young calves needed a lot of hay so in the summer we worked hard to bail and store this feed.  

One summer we handled 10,000 bails of hay each weighing 80 to 100 pounds.  We handled each bail 3 times – picked up from the field, unload it from the wagon onto a elevator and then place it in a stack.  No wonder I have back trouble today.  The bed of the wagon was about 3 ft off of the ground and we would stack the bails 3 high on top of this.  Lifting a bail of hay and stacking it on the wagon required some practice.  I would lift the bail off of the ground, then put my knee under it and with my leg and arms heave the bail onto the wagon in a stack.  We went through several pairs of leather gloves and multiple patches on the knees of our jeans each summer.  My sister would always have freshly mended jeans for us. 

Sometimes I would hire out to a neighbor to bail hay at $1.00 per hour.

Our farm was 10 miles from Oakland and my dad really wanted me to play baseball.  My brother-in-law wasn’t a baseball fan so it presented a challenge for me to get to practice in the evening.  My solution was for dad to buy me a motor scooter like my friend Bob had.  I was only 14 and you had to be 16 to drive in Iowa.  My dad relinquished and agreed to a scooter as long as I promised to only drive between the farm and our backyard.  I agreed to these terms but didn’t fully comply.

I got a Cushman Eagle scooter, they have an 8 hp engine and a top speed of around 60 mph.  Of course I took the muffler off so it would sound like a Harley…well, sort of.

It was tricky driving on gravel roads with it but I managed not to take a spill.  My friend Bob wasn’t so lucky and came to school one day with all of the skin off of his face after taking a tumble on a country bridge.

It was a great machine and I loved it.  I eventually got picked up by the police (we just had one policeman – his name was Art) with it for not having a license.  He fined me $7.00, which dad paid and then grounded me with the scooter for awhile.

I have great memories of these summers on the farm with my sister and brother-in-law.  He became my big brother and we had some really serious, life altering talks…sometimes about sex.

On a livestock farm it seemed like everything was breeding.  Grasshoppers would land on the hood of my tractor as they were mating and I’d have to concentrate on not plowing the corn out while witnessing this affair of the grasshoppers.  The hogs were mating, the chickens were doing it, flies were mating, birds were having sex and rabbits were always having sex.  At fifteen I had far too many hormones and too many visuals.

I bought my first car when I was fifteen, a 1952 Mercury.  Dad wouldn’t let me drive it since I had been picked up but he did let me park it in his shop and enhance it!  It became a meeting place for all the teenage expert auto mechanics and occasionally a party.

We changed the carburetor, put a air scoop in the hood with a fiberglass kit, put louder mufflers on, new upholstery and speakers and lowered the rear end as was the style at the time.  Took the latch off of the trunk and filled in the holes with a compound and then ran a wire from the latch up to the drivers area.  It was really cool, wish I had a picture.

I finally got my drivers license when I was sixteen and within a few weeks I drove my enhanced car to Killeen, TX to visit my sister Jane whose husband was in the Army and stationed at Ft Hood.  It was a rather eventful trip and after getting totally lost in Kansas City and having a flat tire in Oklahoma.  I had changed a lot of tires by this time as it was common in those days to have a flat tire.   My enhancement of lowering the read-end of the car proved to be somewhat ill advised.  My jack would not lift the car high enough to let be get the tire off!  I was really out in ‘boonies’ without a house in site.  Finally a trucker came along and stopped, with the two of us we got the tire changed.

My sister was pregnant with her only child at the time and they lived in a trailer house.  Her husband took me with him several times as he was test firing mounted 8″ cannons.  Of course at that age anything about the Army was exciting to me.  I lost this fascination later after I had served three years in the Army

On the way home, not far from our house, my enhanced car blew its engine.  Dad blamed me for the enhancements I had made but agreed to purchase a new rebuilt engine on the condition I keep my hands off of it.

The summer I turned sixteen I started working with my dad’s construction crews.  Dad was a ‘general contractor’ which meant we had lots of different projects to work on.  In good years we were building new homes and churches and in bad years it was a variety of things including repairing old farm buildings.  The fact that dad would take-on about any kind of project kept his crew working and he had very little turnover.  In fact, his main crew consisted of the same men through all the years he worked.

I wanted to work my summer months with dad because it paid better than my farm summer job and it paid in Dollars instead of pigs!  At times the work was just as difficult as bailing hay was on the farm.  My ‘skills’ demanded that I start at the bottom, which was digging ditches and pouring concrete.  I think even if I had any skills dad would have assigned me to these jobs – his philosophy was start at the bottom and work your way up.

Dad had a good reputation and built most of the new homes in the area.  In the fifties he built several churches and earned a good reputation there also.  We built all denominations but the Lutherans liked his work and tried to hire him to travel around the country supervising their new churches which he declined. 

I enjoyed most of the men, they were middle aged and all had been in the Pacific Theatre of war.  We carried our lunches and would set on the lawn to eat them.  Occasionally I could get them talking about their experiences which I found really fascinating.   Some of the men would talk a little and others wouldn’t.  One had been on the infamous “Bataan Death March” and he would not participate.

In bad years we remodeled old farm buildings.  Usually we would lift them off of their foundations and then pour new concrete foundations under them.  To accomplish this my dad had his dad’s ‘railroad jacks’.  These were really heavy mechanical jacks that grandpa would lift houses with and move a house to a new location with a team of mules.  This was really heavy, dirty and dangerous work.  Working under a old chicken house convinced me that I didn’t want this for a future.

My interest in flying started with hunting Fox in Southwest Iowa when I was a early teenager.  We had a small airport with a grass runway that several men in the area used.  Most of these pilots had come back from the second World War and wanted to continue their flying experiences.

One of these pilots owned a Piper J3 Cub that he sometimes used for spotting Fox for hunters.  The hunters would follow in their cars and when the pilot spotted a Fox he would put the plane in a steep climb over the Fox’s location allowing the hunters to spot him.  This was a great adventure for me when I was 14 and 15 years old.  We would plan our attack strategies and go after the Fox.  When the Fox would spot us he would take off running and the bullets would start flying.  I used my dad’s High Standard 22 caliber handgun and dad used his 22 caliber hornet rifle.  I can’t remember a time when anyone hit the Fox but the shooting was great fun.  Using a handgun to Fox hunt was similar to sailing to Europe with a row boat.  I would aim 50 feet over and 50 feet in front of the animal and let loose with all 10 rounds – never phased him.

This experience of watching the plane skim over the ground was the most exciting thing I had ever seen and I had to learn how to fly.  My Dad wasn’t to keen on the idea and my Mother went somewhat white-faced, did not speak and stared at my Dad in a not so friendly manner.  It was quite obvious I had my work cut for me.

My father grew up very poor and at the age of thirteen had to leave school and work.  This experience perhaps made him think that at sixteen I was a ‘mature’ young man – I never told him otherwise.

After many conversation Dad finally weakened and agreed to flying lessons as long as he could get a local farmer, Johnny Bane, into giving me the lessons.  Mr Bane had been a test pilot for the Martin Bomber Company during the war.  One of his sons was in my class and we were good friends.

Johnny agreed, perhaps because he also wanted to teach his son, to giving me lessons.  At the time Mr Bane didn’t have a plane so he rented the same Piper Cub that was used for hunting and we were ready.  Mr Bane told Dad that he would charge $6.00/hr for dual (lessons) and $5.00/hour for solo.  Dad agreed.

My first lesson was in the summer of 1957 just after I turned 16.  It was exhilarating, it was scary, it was stimulating, it was FUN – I loved it!

At the end of Sept in 1957 I made my first solo flight after 7 hours of lessons.  I remember it so well. I flew right over our house at 600 ft elevation looking down at all the familiar buildings and trees.  I was scared but it was so exciting to know that I had to do this.  I did it, I landed without bending or breaking anything.

The Cub had a 65 horsepower engine manufactured by Continental.  Its instrument panel was very basic.  Altimeter, air-speed indicator, RPM, magnetic compass, oil pressure and temperature gauge and that was it.  If you look closely you can see a wire in the middle of the front windshield sticking out of the hood.  This was the fuel gauge which was a cork floating in the fuel tank attached to a wire sticking out of the hood.

Starting the Cub was exciting, it didn’t have a battery or starter.  You started by setting the proper controls in the cockpit then spinning the propeller by hand. I remember Mr Bane teaching me to stand with my feet close to the propeller and leaning back away from the plane before turning the propeller.  In case you lost your footing you would fall backwards rather than into the prop.   

Just after I made my solo flight in the J3 Mr Bane decided he enjoyed this so he purchased his own plane – a Luscombe 8A.  The Luscombe had the same engine as the Cub and was also a two-seater.  The difference being that the seats were side-by-side rather than in tandem.  Also, the Luscombe had a metal covering rather than the fabric the Cub had.

The winters in southwest Iowa could be very brutal.   Like the Cub the Luscombe didn’t have a starter and you had to “prop” it to start the engine.  The oil in the engine would get stiff with the cold and it was difficult to rotate the propeller.  The solution was to drain the oil into a pan and put it on top of the furnace in the little office.  The next morning pour the warm oil into the engine and off I would go.

That winter I tried to go Fox hunting with just my brother-in-law and my  hunting buddy Harry in tow.  Since I didn’t have a license I couldn’t take anyone with me and flying the plane and looking for Fox was way beyond my skill level.  I did manage not to bend the plane and we didn’t do any damage to the Fox population – but I was living my dream!

The next spring I would fly down to our farm and show off to my brother-in-law.  One day he was planting corn.  It is a farmer’s pride to have straight corn rows – concentrating on driving the tractor as straight as possible.  This day as I was nearing the farm I spotted him down on the bottom near the creek planting corn in a nice straight line.  I reduced the power and glided in behind him and then gave it full-power flying over his head a few feet.  This was such great fun!  All summer long I laughed whenever I flew down to the farm and saw these rows with a great bend in them at the spot I had buzzed him.  He was a pretty good sport about it as I recall…after some time had passed.

One time I hit a tree with the Luscombe.  Mr Bane’s landing strip (he started flying from his farm rather than our little airfield) at his farm was a cow pasture with a very old terrace running across it.  When you took off the plane would pick up speed a little ways then it hit this terrace and fly a ways but not having sufficient airspeed yet it would land again until you reached take-off speed. 

On hot days the air is thinner and has less lift, meaning your take-off distance is longer than on a cool day.  This day was very hot and due to the wind direction I had to take off toward Mr Bane’s house.  I hit the terrace and lifted off briefly and then continued.  Finally getting enough airspeed to take-off (at this point I’m committed) and I realize that I’m not going to clear his house.  I gradually turned towards the shortest trees and almost clearing them I clipped the top branches with my left wing strut.  Mr Bane saw all of this from the ground so I was petrified to go back and land.  I flew around, with foliage flapping from the strut, as long as my fuel held out, both from fear of landing and the confrontation with Mr. Bane.  Finally I had to return, I landed and taxied up to the hanger…Mr Bane was waiting.  He removed the dangling foliage, looked at me and said you did the right thing by keeping your airspeed up and not stalling the plane.  He never mentioned it again – Mr Bane was a fine man.

In order to get your license you had to make several cross-country solo flights of various lengths.  Without anything more than a map and magnetic compass this could be rather challenging.  You plotted your route,  read the compass direction from your map with a plotter, then correct for magnetic deviation then factor in the wind direction and speed.   This resembled school work and so I discovered a much faster method.  Every Iowa town/village had a water tower with its name printed on it, I simply buzzed the water towers and new exactly where I was.  Pure genius if I say so myself.

On my longest cross country flight I chose Joplin, Missouri as my destination and took off on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.  Upon my arrival the airport was crowded with cars and people.   My plane didn’t have a radio so there was no way of communicating with the ground.  I landed and taxied to the hangers only to be greeted with some very angry men.  Before I could even get out of the plane they started yelling at me, asking me didn’t I see the large X marking on the runway.  I knew this meant the airport was closed and I told them I hadn’t seen it.  The airport was closed due to parachute jumping!  Wow, makes the foliage dangling from my strut somewhat minor compared to a parachute.  I meekly got out of the plane feeling pretty stupid.  A few minutes later several of the men came over to me and said they had checked and the chalk they had used to mark the closing had blown away.  Never forgot that, I still felt pretty stupid and lucky at the same time.  Mr Bane probably wouldn’t have been so tolerant of a parachute dangling from a strut.

I loved flying, the knowledge that you are in control and the little bit of danger adds to the thrill.  I really enjoyed a nice day in Iowa when there were cumulus clouds in the sky.  If the clouds are broken I would fly up above them and they would appear to be a fluffy floor stretching out in front of you.

I’ve never been too keen on carnival rides but I loved doing maneuvers in a plane such as stalls and spins.  I think the difference is it is me doing them and not some stranger.

I really enjoyed flying 720’s.  720 is two complete circles (360 degrees each).  You tilt the plane over on one side and fly at the same altitude in a circle, then the second 360 you encounter the airstream from the first circle and this drives the plane into a tighter turn, pressing you down into the seat from the centrifugal force.  I enjoyed this feeling a lot.

I never got my fill of flying.  Years later after I hadn’t flown for a long time my son Alexander bought some time for me at a local flying club.  He was living in New York City and made the arrangements from there.  It was a surprise for my birthday and he and his future wife came along.  He said all of his siblings had flown with me and since he is the youngest never got the opportunity.  We had to have an instructor along since my license wasn’t current but he let me fly it, like riding a bicycle you apparently don’t forget too much.

The Piper Cub J3

University of Colorado:

At the age of 18 I enrolled in college at the University of Colorado in Boulder.  During the summer when I turned 19 I met a student nurse in Omaha and made the decision to transfer to the University of Nebraska.  A couple of years later my romance ended and I decided to go save the Free World from the Communist menace …I joined the US Army!

University of Nebraska:

In the summer of 1960 while on break from the University of Colorado I met a young student nurse.  She was a year older than me and I knew her from high-school.  I enjoyed her company and as the summer wore on I enjoyed it even more.  I decided why go back to Colorado when she is in Nebraska, so I applied to and was accepted to the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Nebraska didn’t have the advantage of nearby ski slopes but when I compare my experience in skiing to my new found girlfriend, skiing quickly lost out.  In addition I was close to home and I could hunt and fish in my favorite locations.  I could also continue my flying experience which I enjoyed a lot.

My sister Jane moved from her current apartment to a much nicer and larger one so I moved into her old one.  It was a one bedroom basement unit in a single family house.  It was rather depressing not having much light or room so I spent as little time there as I could.  Dirty dishes seemed to grow everywhere and at a rate I just couldn’t keep up with.  Same with laundry.  Almost every weekend I took my laundry back home and mom would return it to me nicely washed and ironed…I really have good memories of Mom.

I met a male student at school that had recently been discharged from the Navy and we enjoyed time together.  He was from a Polish family and was very religious.  I invited him to Oakland one weekend so we could go hunting and he would only come along it there was a Catholic Church he could attend Sunday morning.  I asked around and found one in a nearby town and agreed to forsake hunting so I could take him there.

I took several courses of Architectural Drafting and really enjoyed it.  Drawing always fascinated me, although I have little talent at it.  I love the political cartoonist that can draw a recognizable face from only a few lines.

I spent a year and a half in Omaha until my romance fell apart.  I loved the flying, I hated the basement apartment so I decided to get my service to the country over with.  During this period every young man had an obligation to serve the nation for 6 years.  The Russians were in the process of closing Berlin down and the Communist were causing problems in Laos, a forerunner to the Vietnam War.  So I would go defend the Nation and fly airplanes/helicopters for the next 3 years…or so I thought.

Enlistment:

In 1962 all young men had to register for the draft at the age of 18.  We all had 6 years obligation to the military if called upon to serve.

In the early 60’s the Russians were trying to force the western countries out of Berlin and the communist were causing trouble in Laos – a forerunner to Vietnam.

In the early part of 1962 my romance with a student nurse came to an end and I decided I would get my service over with.  I volunteered and was told I would go to flight school, which is what I wanted to do.  Well that didn’t work out.  I passed my test well and they offered to send me to Officer’s  Candidate School (OCS) but not flight school since I didn’t have 20-20 vision.  Seems I had been lied to!  I declined the OCS offer since most of these guys ended up in the Infantry – I’ll take my chances.  I ended up going to Medical Corpsmen school in San Antonio, TX and became a Medic.  I didn’t want to be a Medic but that was the way it was.

Basic Training:

Basic Training was in Ft.Leonard Wood, Missouri. Shortly after arrival we walked through a line where they threw our uniforms at us based on what the supple clerk thought was your size.  The barracks hadn’t been occupied since WWII and the one I was assigned to the grates from the one coal fired furnace in the middle of the room were burnt out.  The winter was exceptionally cold so we slept with most of our clothes on.

Wake-up call was at 4:30am where we had 30min to get ready for ‘Roll Call’.  We stood in bitterly cold temperature while the Sergeant would try to pronounce our names and you would shout out “here Sergeant!.  This seemed rather foolish since anyone could call out “here Sergeant” and the Sergeant would never know the difference but but I kept my thoughts to myself.

The air was full of coal dust from all of the barracks (ours didn’t add any) and your spit was black.  There were 5,000 cases of walking pneumonia that winter. The training was, let’s say vigorous.  I turned 21 while there.  It’s an experience not to be repeated.

I got a two week leave after finishing basic and went home where my mother was somewhat shocked at my 190lbs versus 205lbs when I went in.  This is the last time I would see my family for the next couple of years.

Medical Training:

On to Ft Sam Houston in San Antonio, TX where they would turn me into a Medic! In the summer of 1962 San Antonio had an unusually hot summer where the temperature went over 100 F for 54 days in a row.  Our green fatigue uniforms turned almost white from the salt in our sweat.  The barracks, from WWII era, were simply stud walls with clap-siding nailed to them – no insulation.

Deployment:

After graduation (a proud moment indeed) we immediately boarded piston engined Constellations to fly to Ft Dix, NY – no leave to visit home.  After one night, no sleep, we boarded the luxury troop carrier USNS Patch to begin some of the worse days-nights of my young life.

When I boarded I was given guard duty – 4 hours on, 4 hours off, 24 hours a day for the duration.  I had the very important duty to guard a steel stairway – one going up and the other going down.

The first day out of New York Harbor we ran into violent storms that continued for over a week until we reached the White Cliffs of Dover.  Even the Merchant Marines that manned the ship were sick.  The North Atlantic can get very rough.

With several thousand troops on board, the majority sea sick, the smell was overpowering.  It was particular bad as we snaked out way to the bottom deck where the mess hall was located.  Several decks before you reached this area the food smell would hit you and this would result in a lot of upchucking.  It also suppressed our appetites.

No one had been allowed outside because the waves were breaking over the ship.  When we finally reached the White Cliffs in England they shut the engines down and we were allowed some fresh air – how wonderful.

We then continued on to the Port of Bremerhaven in Northern Germany where we would board troop transport trains to our destinations.  We didn’t board until nightfall and arrived in Frankfurt at dawn the next day somewhat weary.

Duty Station:

So my “career” starts with 317th Combat Engineer Battalion, part of the V Corps stationed in Höchst near Frankfurt.  This battalion built bridges, roads, airfields and could also act as infantry.  Since this was fairly dangerous work with the heavy equipment they had a medical contingent assigned to them.  Most of these guys were off of construction crews in the US so it was a rather rough bunch.

The Cold War was pretty warm at the time and our training was somewhat vigorous and serious.  At all times we had to be ready to have all of our belongings on a truck within 2 hours and we had frequent ‘Alerts’ to practice this.  Sometimes we would go to the border in Fulda (the so called Fulda Gap, the mostly likely Russian invasion route) and camp for a period of time and other times we would go out in some area near Frankfurt, spread all of our gear out for inspection, have a warm breakfast of fried egg sandwiches (I still enjoy today), then pack up and go home.

Bundeswehr: 

“The powers to be” decided it would be a good idea to exchange a soldier for a period of time.  The Germans chose a Medic from a Panzer (mechanized) battalion so the Americans had to choose a Medic also.  I had signed up for a conversational course taught by a young German lady.  She came to our barracks for an hour each day for a period of two weeks and never spoke a word in English.

The Army, in its great intelligence, thought that that would make me a good candidate to spend time in the Budeswehr!   By this time I could order a beer in a german tavern without difficulty. 

It was a unique experience and I enjoyed most of it.  Their barracks were brand new and well equipped with coolers in each locker – yes, we could drink beer right in our own room, so adult like.

Some of the Germans could speak English and the language problem was difficult at times but we managed.  Many of the troops there came from the French and English sectors of West Germany so an American was someone to stare at…and they did.

My Feldweber (Sergeant) name was Tisch which is the word for table in German.  A nice guy and he had me over to house several times for a homemade meal by his wife Elsey.

Introduction to Jobs:

In viewing the following I might leave you with the impression that I’m unstable and undependable – I’ve had a lot of jobs!  But I’ve never been fired from a job nor have I ever looked for a job.  One thing just seemed to lead to another.  Perhaps “Jack of all trades, master of none” applies to me.  With limited education, training and difficult to define skills I’ve managed to earn a living and educate our children free of debt.

I owe much of my limited success to my wife who has stood by me and encouraged me when the future was not so clear or bright.  We moved five times in the first seven years of our marriage.  We developed few friends (on the road a lot) so she was alone, couldn’t drive the first years, was thousands of miles from her family so at times it was a little difficult for her.  Her dad was a research chemist, one brother-in-law was a journalist with national political connections and the other one was a highly degreed civil engineer.  Her husband was a highly trained ditch digger!

Karin was working on her immigration in Germany in 1965 and I went to work with my father’s construction company after my enlistment was up. I was very restless with the change from such a structured life with the Army.

I bought a brand new Chevrolet Super Sport convertible for $2,300.  This was full size car with a v8 engine.  It was an impractical decision, trying to hold on to my youth I guess.

I worked with the crews during the day and at night and weekends I drafted plans with dad’s direction.  I had taken drafting at the University of Nebraska.  I learned quite a bit during this period about construction.  I worked primarily on the rough jobs such as pouring concrete since I really had no skills at carpenter work.

Dad would design and contract for jobs around western Iowa and northern Missouri.  I can’t claim I designed anything but I was descent at drafting.

The Vietnam War was in high gear and my two best friends from the Army were both there. At times I envied their excitement and experiences.  My friends both came home and one came to live with us for a few months and worked for dad.  His legs were scarred all over from the leaches in Vietnam.  We stayed in touch for years but he is sadly gone now along with my other friend.

We were building many churches of all faiths in these days.  The Lutherans really liked dad and wanted him to supervise the construction on their churches around the country.   Dad had had enough of traveling while he was a young man and declined the offer.

In my spare time I spent hunting and fishing.  I enjoyed the solitude and nature.

Cousins:

I drafted the plans for a second cousins new home, Frank Eblen, in Atlantic, Iowa and got to know him and his brother Tom for the first time.  These were a couple of exciting guys that had accomplished a lot and had fun doing it!  If just a few of their stories were true they had had exciting lives…far more than digging foundations!

Their father had a large construction company that did dirt work.  He had graded Hwy #6 from Oakland to Council Bluffs, Iowa with teams of mules while his wife prepared meals in a tent alongside the work.   The story is told that at times he was a millionaire and at other times he had to pay cash for a $10 part.

During the Second World War he contracted a stretch of the Alcan Highway and moved everything to Fairbanks, Alaska.  My two new found relatives, Tom and Frank, were young and drove the heavy equipment used to complete the road.

I loved hearing their stories and even if only a few were true they had had a far more exciting life than I was having.  They both went into the Army Air Corps and completed their flight training just when the War ended.  Both kept up with their flying throughout most of their lives.  They owned a small plane (Piper Tri-Pacer) that they would let me fly out of Atlantic.

When their father died suddenly he was a wealthy man for the times so Tom and Frank had a good inheritance.  Another second cousin from another Eblen family took over the construction business and Tom and Frank went into several agri-business’s that proved to be quite successful.

The other cousin, that took over the dirt business, I didn’t get to know.  He was a big gambler, which you have to be to work in the dirt business, he owned dozens of racing horses and ran them in some of the large tracks back East plus Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha.

One afternoon he came to our house from Omaha and wanted dad to do some work for him in Atlantic.  He had a large brown grocery bag he brought in with him and set it on our kitchen table.  They concluded their business and then he stated that he had had a good day at the track – the grocery bag was full of cash!

Grain Belt Storage Co., Inc.

Tom, Frank, Dad and I formed a corporation to be a dealer for a new silo/grain bin company out of Cederberg, Wisconsin.  Dad was president and I was vice-president.   Wow, all the way from a one-man high-tech foundation expert to vice-president!

I had never sold anything before.  Didn’t know much about silo’s and grain storage systems.  After several weeks of this I was feeling somewhat down then  Frank went with me several times and he was just a natural at it.  Finally I got the presentation down and started making some sales. 

With sales went the need to build them and of course, even though I was Vice President, the task of construction went to me.  All my partners were not about to go out and dig 4’ deep round foundations – let the young guy do it.  So I’m back to digging foundations again and constructing grain bins.  They were not manufactured very accurately and few of the holes lined up where they bolted together.  I complained to the manufacture that this was costing us much time and therefore our profit on them.  Instead of fixing the problem they made me “Dealer of the Year” and gave me a wall plaque!  Okay, now I’m beginning to see how this is done.

I had a service call on one of my bins about an hour from home.  He said the sweep auger that sat on top of the grain was not  working.  These structures limited the amount of oxygen inside the bin to reduce spoilage.  I told the owner to open the roof hatch to allow some air in or otherwise I wouldn’t be to enter it to work on the auger.   The hatch had eccentrics around it to put pressure on the door and keep the air from entering.  I’m a pretty big guy and I could barely get through it but managed to do so.  

The owner climbed the ladder behind me to be there in case anything went wrong.  Well, it went wrong.  I tied a heavy rope to one of the eccentrics and dropped the other end to the bin.  I then climbed down the rope to the top of the grain where the auger was located.  Everything seemed fine but just to be sure I pulled my Zippo lighter (I was a smoker then) and tried to light it…it wouldn’t light and I knew I was in trouble.  The sides of the bin are fiberglass and with grain dust coating it it was as slick as ice.  My only hope was to climb the rope before I pass out.  As I got closer to the hatch where the son was looking in I could feel myself getting light-headed and losing my strength. I got to the hatch just as I was losing consciousness.  The son crab me and looped my pants belt over a eccentric and then I was out.  I dangled from my belt as the son held my head up for some air.  All the belt loops on my pants except for two broke from my weight and I lost a shoe.  As I got more air I came to a little and I could hold my head up through the hatch.  The owner ran to the house to call for help and then came back.  I was in and out of consciousness.  I could hear the rescue truck coming from a nearby town but it seemed like it took for ever.

Finally the ambulance and rescue squad arrived but there was only enough room for a couple of guys to get around the hatch and they couldn’t lift me out.  They called in a telephone companies boom truck.  I was still more out that awake but I do remember the events.  The truck arrived and put their boom up over my head and lowered a rope which they tied around my chest and gently pulled me out.  All my weight was of course supported by the rope and it removed all the skin and hair under my arms – didn’t bother me a bit at the time.  They placed me on a stretcher and gave me oxygen to.

The bin was full of carbon dioxide and once that gets into your blood stream its difficult to replace it with oxygen.  Both of my hands were cramped together with my fingers clinched straight out.  I could not move them and I remember looking at them and thinking that was very strange.  They kept me at the hospital for several hours until the oxygen level was back up where it belonged and treated my underarms from the rope.  The owner of the farm had me lie down in the backseat of his Cadillac and the son drove my car home.

I was lucky in so many ways.  Had I not been a smoker I wouldn’t have had a Zippo.  Had I not been strong enough to climb a rope I would have fallen back in the bin.  Had the son not been there and do all the things he did I wouldn’t have survived.

The experience did leave its mark.  For many years if I watched a war movie where the GI’s were climbing ropes it brought back bad memories.  Over the years I became more and more claustrophobic and it continues getting worse.  In 1992 Karin and I went to Egypt and while we were at the Valley of the Kings we went down into one of the tombs.  As we went deeper and deeper I became more concerned.  The oxygen level in the tomb was sufficient but reduced from normal levels due to all of the people going down into it.  It gave me the same feeling that I had had in the bin.  I could breath normally but I could sense I wasn’t getting enough oxygen.  I told Karin I couldn’t go on and she went ahead and I returned to the outside.

Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t!

Anyway my day of servicing grain bins was over, no way was I going back into one of things.

California Dreaming:

The Fall of 1966 came and my hand-dug fine foundation work was coming to an end for the year.  A.O. Smith, the manufacturer of the blue “Havestor” silos,  had a major problem on their hands.  Their silos in California, due to the extended periods of high temperatures, were killing some of the most expensive dairy herds in the World.  Frank took a contract with them to erect a small structure next to the existing silos to house the expanding air from the large silo.  At night when it cooled off this same air, with limited oxygen,  was then brought back into the silo rather than outside air to reduce the spoilage.  Frank came to me and asked me to sub-contract the foundations for these sub-structures.  Digging shallow foundation in California sounded much more exciting than 4 foot deep foundations in Iowa!

I was running around some with a guy from my high school named Jim.  He was several years younger than I and had just got out of the Navy.  I asked him if he wanted to go with me and we would split all of the profits!  He was a little restless like me and agreed to go immediately.  We built a tool box with a good padlock to house our high-tech equipment – spades and shovels!  We were on the road to great adventures…we thought.

There was no speed limits in those days (“reasonable and proper”) and we were making fantastic progress across the western plains until a large mule deer came out of the median and hit us head on.  The engine compartment of Jim’s new pickup looked like it was fur lined.  We were very lucky that Jim was driving a moderate speed of around 95 or that buck could of came over the hood and through the windshield, but as it turned out he was glued to the front end.  The police came and then a tow truck.  We were half-way between Laramie and Rock Springs, Wyoming so we decided to go to Rock Springs since it was in our destination direction.  This was a really bad decision.  Mark Rock Springs off your bullet list.

It would take a week to fix the pickup and by then we would be out of travel money so we talked the body shop owner into hiring us and we tore the pickup apart.  The repairs on the truck came within a few hundred dollars of what Jim had paid for it new.  The body shop owner was happy with the job and had us to his place for several dinners.

Back on the road, we looked forward to Nevada and their unique laws.  What cash we had left was nearly gone.  We spent Thanksgiving at Lake Tahoe and it was on to the Modesto Valley where our work began.

Our first foundation was a shocking discovery.  California soil is nothing like Iowa soil.  Since it doesn’t freeze the soil doesn’t loosen up with freeze-thaw sequence.  The soil was as hard as my driveway.  Spades and shovels, our high-tech tools, were not going to work.  We purchased pick-axes and after a couple of days got our first foundation done.  The blisters on our hands were too numerous to count.  We were really disappointed and realized our pay per foundation would not bring us up to even the minimum wages.  Actually the minimum wages didn’t start until 1967 and was initially $1.00/hour.

After several weeks of this we realized this was not a good idea.  I got a call from a manufacturers representative and he told me he was leaving his Company for another job and wondered if I would be interested in his current job.  He sold livestock equipment through dealers and my dad was a dealer of his.  The previous Christmas he had helped me repair a silo unloader that I had sold.  We climbed up the outside of this 60’ silo to get to the unloader and while there he pulled a whiskey bottle out which we proceeded to consume while we fixed the unloader.  A little Christmas cheer at 60 feet!

I called my folks and we discussed the offer and decided I should go for it.  I called Frank and told him I wanted out of our deal because of this offer and he readily agreed that that was the better offer.  He quickly found local workers to put in the foundations and they didn’t have to pay for hotels.  Jim agreed, he was more than ready to go home, the blisters were still forming.

So, it was back to Iowa by Christmas.  It had been an adventure for sure, but not one that we had fond memories of.

Sales Representative for Agri Equipment:

I interviewed with the Sales Manager of a Chicago based manufacturer after getting back to Iowa and he offered me a territory, the same one that the salesman that contacted me had had.  It covered southwestern Iowa and southern Nebraska.  The salary was $350 ($760 in 2023 Dollars) per month plus $90 per month for the use of my car.  Wasn’t a very good job even for the times.

They gave me a stack of cards containing sales information on 5,000 dealers in my territory.  The Company had been in business for many years and had a good reputation.  They manufactured a complete line of livestock and barn equipment in addition to their best known product, electric and hand sprayers.

There was a lot of paper work with this job.  I had to plot my sales trips 2 weeks in advance, naming the dealers that I would be calling on.  I then had to write up a report on each call I made in addition to detailing all of my expenses that I expected to be reimbursed for.

Their product line included everything from bug sprayers to chicken feeders, neither of which I knew anything about and didn’t much care to learn.  I managed to sell a full semi truck of stock tanks (for watering cattle and/or cows) to one dealer and it turned out to be the largest stock tank order in the companies history.  I got a letter from one of my managers in Chicago congratulating me for the nice sale but complained that my bug sprayer sales were not good.

The Company had two divisions, the one I worked for sold to small retailers and the manufacturing division sold to large organization like hardware chains.  That division offered a  40% discount and I could only offer a 25% discount on the same product.  Seemed pretty logical to me not to waste my time on selling bug sprayers.

I quickly learned that selling these small items was not going to make my sales goals.  Dad had built several hog buildings, one of which was on our farm.  Dad knew a lot about hogs since he had raised purebred Poland China breeding stock during the War.

I hit it off with a dealer in a small town in Iowa that I talked into building hog buildings for me when I sold one.  His total sales with my company the following year had been less than $10 – bug sprayer parts.  He owned a lumber yard and sold farm buildings and grain bins so we had a lot in common.  With me selling the buildings full of my equipment and he building them we both did well.  Within a year he became the largest dealer nationwide and my territory became the second largest for the company nationwide.  He rewarded himself financially and I got nothing but some praise.  But the praise didn’t last too long, the company did like the way I was making my sales…I wasn’t following their plan of calling on 5,000 dealers selling bug sprayers, although my territory had never had this kind of volume sold before.

Irrigation Sales in Kansas:

In the fall of 1967 I had an offer to sell irrigation systems in Dodge City, KS.  I didn’t know a thing about irrigation but it sounded like a better opportunity than what I was doing.

We loaded up a U-Haul and made our way to Kansas.   The job was challenging and the area was quite different from what either of us were use to.  It was hot, dry and windy…and windy!

The irrigation systems were expensive and few farmers took the time to talk to me.  I spent some of my day shooting at Prairie Dogs while I ate my sack lunch that Karin had fixed for me in the car.

Karin couldn’t drive yet so she spent much of her day at home.  We had a nice duplex but even so the wind would find ways to blow dust in and you could write your name on the furniture.  We were still newlyweds so we managed okay.

Then we found out we were pregnant.  Karin wanted us to have a family as soon as possible.  From a financial standpoint I was less excited than she was.  The baby arrived early and died the next day.  We named her Kathleen and I had a very sad wife.

My pay was a “draw” against future commissions – in other words a loan that I was expected to paid back if my commissions did not cover my debt.  As the months went by I got farther and farther in debt.

A farmer bought two systems from me which was a rare occurrence.  It didn’t get me out of debt but it put a nice dent in it.  After the systems were erected a tornado came through and demolished both of them.  The insurance company replaced them and I got a second commission which did make me even with the employer and I wished him well, called about a U-Haul and headed back to Iowa.

Sales Representative for Agri Equipment #2

I went back to my job with the equipment manufacturer but this time in northern Iowa in Spencer.

He was an engineer for the nations largest farm building company and was being transferred to the home office in central Illinois.  We would get together for coffee and some good German cake.  Of course they would speak in German and I would catch a word or two.  I would smile, or not, depending on how I thought the conversation was trending and kept busy with another piece of tort!

My new territory was northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota, northern Nebraska and the Dakotas.  I found a rental in Spencer, Iowa.  Spencer is a nice town, our rental was not.  We paid $90/month for the downstairs portion of a old house.  The landlord called it her “deluxe” rental – she must have laughed each time she said that.

My brother-in law Carol and I rented a uHaul and drove to Dodge City to get our furniture.  The duplex in Dodge came with a refrigerator so we had put ours in the basement.  The stairs to the downstairs had a dogleg (90 degree turn) in it and we got the refrigerator stuck in this turn.  We pulled and yanked and finally got it out but I had ruptured myself on both sides.  I didn’t really feel much at the time but it wasn’t long before I did.

The upstairs was rented by a young nurse that had irregular hours.  The stairs to get upstairs went right over our bed.  She apparently was a popular nurse since in the middle of the night some guy would use the stairs over our head and shake us out of our sleep.

The porch was a ice rink since the roof leaked in this area.  Karin worked very hard to clean the kitchen cupboards of years of crusted dirt, this didn’t go far in improving her mood.

Shortly after moving our stuff in I got really sick.  I had an infection, perhaps something to do with the rupture, and my temperature would go up to 105 degrees.  Then I would start sweating like crazy and the temp would come down, I felt a great relief for an hour or two.  Then I would start getting the chills and no matter what I couldn’t get warm.  Karin would pile the blankets on and I would shake the entire bed with chills.  Then my temperature would go up again and the sequence started all over again, 24 hours per day.

Karin decided I needed to see a doctor and picked one out of the phone book.  She described my symptoms and he decided he would come check me out.  His name was Dr Frink and a really good man he was.  He said I needed to be in the hospital and I told him we didn’t have any insurance or money.  I always knew that my folks would help but my pride had already been destroyed with this job change and I didn’t want to ask.  Dr Frink said he would treat me at home for a couple of days and see if he could get the fever down.  When the fever broke I would sweat so much that the sheets were soaked, this occurred about every 6 or 7 hours.  Karin spent a lot of her day just washing pajamas and sheets.  The antibiotics finally did their job and I got better.  I didn’t have any weight issues at that time but I would like to know how much I lost throughout this ordeal.  At least we gained a family doctor.  I still have the bills from this and future health issues that Dr Frink took care of.  I paid him $10/month on my account and it was over a year before I got him paid off.

Of course we knew no one, Karin could not drive and I would often leave for the workweek to service my rather large territory.  She spent her time cleaning the cupboards.  She was very down with the lost of our daughter slowly lost weight to the point I think she weighed less than 100 pounds.  When she came over she weighed 110 pounds.  Her father was a research chemist, her one brother-in-law was a government official that was a close personal friend of the future Chancellor Helmut Kohl and her other brother-in-law is a Diplomaed Dr of Engineering with many years of schooling.  Karin certainly didn’t marry up, we had trouble paying our bills.  But I have to say never once did I feel she had any regrets in marrying me.  The life style and the country was a lot rougher place than what she was use to.  People in her family worked normal hours and had lots of vacation time.  I didn’t work anything like normal hours and we couldn’t afford a vacation even if we wanted to.

The winter of 68/69 in Spencer was a record breaking snow period.  In Spencer we had 85 inches of snow, that’s 7 feet!  North of Sioux Falls, SD where my best dealer was had 120 inches of snow.  It seemed like every Friday we would have a major snow event and get between 6 to 12 more inches of snow.  This is in the dead of winter so it was cold and very little of this snow would melt before spring.  I went for weeks and couldn’t travel my territory.  One day it was  bright and sunny and I tried to go west on hwy 18 only to be forced back.  When I looked up it was beautiful sunny days but when I looked down the road it looked like a blizzard.  The state had brought in Air Force snow plows that could blow the snow up and away from the road creating a cave like appearance to the road.  Any little breeze and the road would start filling in again.  In the spring you could barely travel due to the flooding caused by the melting snow.

That spring of 1969 Karin’s parents bought her a ticket to return to Germany for 6 weeks.  I was happy for her and she needed the TLC that only a mother can give you.  It was lonely for me, I didn’t have any friends to speak of and Karin was my only companion.  I spent my days working hard to try and make up for the many days that I couldn’t travel due to the snow.

I finally got to meet some of my hundreds of dealers.  One requested me to go out to a farmers place and try to pacify him.  The former Hudson Representative had sold him a large motorized livestock sprayer and he had complaints.  I drove out to the farm believing I can solve this problem and complaint.  The farmer greeted me with hostility and proceeded to tell how my company was not to be trusted and he and his neighbors were never going to buy anything from me again.  I reminded him he didn’t buy it from me and I was here to try and help the situation.  The problem was that the salesman had put the sprayer inside his hog house and then had left.  The sprayer worked great he admitted but it was a portable sprayer, meaning you can move it but he couldn’t get it out the door.  Thats kind of strange.  I measured the door and the sprayer and he was right, no way that machine was going through the door.  There was a door at both ends of the building and they were the same size.  The sprayer was not a break-down style and you simply couldn’t take it apart.  I was stumped and couldn’t figure out how to get the darned thing out.  Then he started calling me names again when he realized I was having no more luck than he had had.  I think about this situation and after more than fifty years I still can’t figure out how he got that sprayer into that building.  The thought that that fine Hudson Livestock Sprayer is still in that building is rather humorous to me now.

I would travel across northern Nebraska occasionally to see some dealers.  This is Winnebago Indian territory and it was always a little sad to see the condition they were in.  By mid-morning there would be men in brightly colored shirts sitting on the curb of the street drinking alcohol from a paper bag covered bottle.  They simply couldn’t make the transition from their was of life to the white mans.

I kept getting request from a dealer way-out in western South Dakota that had bought next to nothing from us.  He kept insisting that I drive out to see him.  The drive took most of the day but I went because I didn’t want him to complain to Chicago.  When I got there he turned out to be a nice guy and I think he just wanted someone to visit with.  Looking around there was nothing to see.  No other farms for miles and no livestock.  I convinced him that to sell something you had to have it in stock!  So I fixed him up with lots of stock thinking this way I won’t have to drive back out here again.  I wouldn’t be surprised there are still brand-new Hudson feeders and watering equipment slowly rusting away in western South Dakato.

Karin came back from Germany in much better spirits and Mutti had even put a little weight on her.  It  was nice to have her home.  During the previous winter when we had had so much snow she had contacted a local Realtor to look for a better rental unit.  She was not to happy with the “Deluxe”.  She worked with a Realtor and he found a nice ranch style single unit house for rent at a price of $135/month.  She reasoned it was only $45 more and wanted to get it.  When you are only being paid $400 a month $45 is quite a bit but we took it.

I was responsible for mowing the grass and it was a sizable yard.  I didn’t have a mower and couldn’t afford one.  I checked mower dealers in the area for a used one and one said I could take it home and try it.  Now that’s a great idea!  I mowed it down to golf green height and took his mower back.  Several weeks later when the grass had grown up to knee height I went to another dealer and “tried out” one of his mowers.  I managed to get through the summer without spending the money for a mower!

I tried to teach Karin how to drive a car but she did not like my methods.  We would be driving along and I would yell for her to stop!  She really hated this because it scared her half to death when I yelled thinking that there was truly a emergency.  So when I left for the week she called the school and hired the driving instructor to teach her how to drive.  No more of this yelling at her!  She got her license eventually and she was very proud.  We didn’t have another car and couldn’t afford another but she had her license.  She had met several women and our socializing picked up.  It was important to her, not so much for me.  After dealing with dealers and farmers all week I just wanted peace and quiet.  We compromised and did it her way.

One of the women she had met was from Germany and her husband was as well.  We would get together on a weekend and one of the women would make a fine German tort and have coffee.  They would mostly speak in German and I think I had lost a lot of my German Language skills since returning to the States.  They would talk away in German and I would have another piece of Tort and think about how the hell he got that sprayer in the hog house!

My hard work and long hours started to pay off.  Out of the 26 territories that Hudson had mine had the lowest revenue the year before I started.  At the end of 2 years I was shipping more product per month than had shipped the previous year for the total year.  My territory was now #2, the #1 territory was my first one in Omaha and the dealer I set up was the main reason.

The summer of 1969 we learned that we were pregnant again with a due date of January 1970.  We went to our friend Dr Frink and he sent us to Omaha to a Dr Rumbolz (whom he knew) that was a OB doctor.  Between them they decided that we had lost Kathleen because Karin would abort when the baby reached a certain weight and that this would be true with our new baby.  A somewhat new procedure was available that reinforced the womb with a sort of suture after so many months that would help support the baby to normal birth.

This created a little extra stress but we wanted to do everything we could to save this baby.  My financial situation hadn’t improved much and the two doctors wanted Dr Rumbolz to fly to Spencer to perform the procedure when the time came.  Dr Frink arranged everything and when it was time Dr Rumbolz rented a small plane and flew from Omaha to Spencer, did the procedure and had the plane wait while he and Dr Frink went golfing.  I lived in fear wondering what on earth is this going to cost me, I hadn’t paid Dr Frink off yet for what he had done for me.  We got the invoice a few days later and for Dr Rumbolz services including the flight we were charged $50.  There are some really good people in this World.

The Company put out a memo that anyone that did something (I don’t remember the details of the incentive) would get a $50/month raise.  Four or five months later (before the end of the first incentive) they put out another memo with another incentive and another $50/month raise.  I made both of them but they wouldn’t pay me.  I stewed about it because a $100 raise with a child on the way would really help.  I had worked really hard to make both of those incentives and now they only wanted to pay me one of them.  There was not a question about whether I made both or not, they simply said they didn’t think anyone could make both of them and so they would only pay one.  I told them they couldn’t be serious, it was clearly spelled out in the incentive memos and your own sales records show that I made both of them.  Yes, that’s true but we will only pay one – so I quit.

Division Manager, National Farm Building Company:

Karin was somewhat in shock and looked at me as if I had lost my mind and perhaps I had.  The new baby was due within days and I just quit our only means of support. 

We had coffee and cake with our German friends and he was being transferred to the home office in Illinois with a good advancement.  A few days later he called me and said the Owner/President of the company, Henry, would like to meet me and wanted me to drive to the home office.  I wasn’t very busy having quit my job so I agreed and made the trip to Morton, Il near Peoria.  Henry was a very successful man and perhaps one of the richest in Central Illinois.  He was also rather difficult to impress.  I made my appointment with him and with almost no chit-chat he started telling me why my buildings were no good and that you couldn’t make a profit with them.  He had hired two different degreed engineers from his alma-mater University of Illinois to run a new department of livestock confinement buildings which he thought was the future.  Both had lost several hundreds of thousands of dollars in their very short careers with Henry.  He went on and on about how it couldn’t be done and I was thinking what the hell did he have me drive all the way down here for?  So I interrupted him to get my 2 cents worth and he cut me off with “are you going to interrupt me now?”  I took my 2 cents worth back!  This went on for awhile then he offered me a job to do what he had just said couldn’t be done.  He had made me so mad and defensive that I said I will do it.  I was now a one-man department in the countries largest farm building company that employed 2,000 men.

He offered me a car plus $700/month, health insurance (first time) and the normal benefits of the time.  I wish I could tell Hudson this but of course they weren’t to keen on hearing from me.  I was to design my own buildings, draw the plans for them, sell them, do the material list, purchase all of the livestock equipment, see to the construction of them and make a profit comparable to their regular buildings which were much simpler and usually could be built in a matter of a few days.  He wished me luck, said it couldn’t be done one more time, and more or less showed me the door.  He was a tough cookie.  As my temper subsided I began to wonder how on earth can I do this, my doubts were taking hold.  This was nearly a national firm with several large manufacturing facilities and over a hundred sales and construction offices in States from Colorado to New York and I was suppose to handle any and all request for confined livestock buildings.  There had not been talk of moving anywhere so I was working out of Spencer, Iowa which was a good thing for Karin – she wan’t in the mood to move again already.

We had a healthy baby girl on Jan 21, 1970 in Spencer, Iowa.  It was a chilly day.  I went to the office before the sun rose and the temperature was 32 degrees below, actual temperature not windchill.  I hadn’t been at the office for more than an hour when Karin called to tell me she was in labor.  I hurried across town and found her sweeping the kitchen floor.  My mother was going to come up to help us after we had the baby and she wanted the house to look good!

I took her to the hospital where we met Dr Frink again and a few hours later we were introduced to Anya Marie.  Everyone was healthy and normal and a great amount of stress was over for the moment.  Dr Frink charged us $125 for the delivery since she was a girl, a boy cost $150 because of the normal circumcision.  Anya Marie was really cute and I had a very happy wife!  I was happy also but could feel a little more weight of responsibility for another person – my financial life had not been an roaring success.

At the time I took the job with Morton they had 150 sales people.  Each month a standings list was published and all salesman got it.  My first one put me at the 150th standing.  This list was based on “completed work” and of course I had none and I wouldn’t have any until mid to late summer.  “My” buildings took months to build whereas there normal buildings only took a couple of days and could be built year round – no concrete involved with them.  I stayed in last place for months and I thought I could feel people smirking at me.  I was the odd guy out since I was the manager of a one man department that seemed to have a lot more privileges than others had.  I didn’t have to answer to anyone except Henry and he pretty much ignored me.  I wasn’t included in lots of meetings or events.

I went to some of the buildings that the engineers Henry had hired sold and designed and they seemed very well built and designed.  The reason they had lost so much money was because the crews did not know how to build them – they had never seen a building like this.  The engineers went on selling buildings and never checked on the construction process.  When spring arrived and work could start I stopped selling and went into the construction business.  Financially and success speaking it wasn’t the smart thing to do.  The more I could sell the better for me, however I knew if I couldn’t build them at a profit I was gone and Henry would say “told you so”.

I worked all summer with the crews and in Sept when I completed my first building we had made a tremendous profit, even a better margin than they made on their regular buildings.  The next one completed was equally as good.  The farmers were really happy with me since I had spent most of the summer with them and we had got to know each other.  I asked one of them if I could have an open house to show his building and he readily agreed.  Henry and Bill (the general manager whom I was destined to fight with) flew out to attend the open house.  Henry was happy, first time I had seen him that way.  It is of interest, at least to me, that I had been in this business for several years but it was Henry that saw the future for this type of structure.  He had lost 100’s thousands of dollars on them and still saw the future but I hadn’t – it had been a job for me.  I locked horns with Henry over several issues in the coming years and I must say, in every case he was right and I was wrong.  He was the better business man with money and foresight.  However he couldn’t sell a close relative a new building the story was told, on the other hand I had become a pretty good salesman.  By the way, that fall I was now the number 2 salesman in the company – I had moved off of the last place position I had held for months.

The company had a big get together in the fall for fun at a resort in northern Illinois.  Our wives attended with us.  My mother came up to babysit Anya so Karin could come along.  There were dances and golfing and some pretty serious drinking.  I missed out on all of it.  Henry came to me shortly after I arrived and told me there one of the salesman that had come across a potential huge complex of buildings nearby that he wanted me to go look into.  He told the salesman to back off and I went instead.  Didn’t settle very well with the other salesman and we were not close friends thereafter.  Of course, it didn’t bother Henry any because he was not the most tactful man I ever met.

It turned out to be a really big job, corrected for inflation in 2020 dollars it would be just under $5 million.

A local insurance agency had been contacted by the John Hancock Insurance company to put together a large confinement unit.  I met with them and got some details and then went back to the party where my wife and Henry waited.  Henry was anxious to hear the details and Karin was anxious to have a husband back.  We knew almost no one there so she was not a happy wife.

I told Henry about the scope of the project and what they wanted.  They wanted a company to completely turn key the project, supervising the construction and financing it until completed.  Henry didn’t bat an eye and asked me if I could do it, I told him I could if he wanted to finance it during construction, he hesitated only a moment and told me to go for it.  What the hell was I thinking when I said I could do it.  I just didn’t want him to think less of me so I said I could.  I’d never done anything even close to this.  Divide it by 10 and I still had never done anything this big.  A few months prior to this I was selling bug sprayers!  I had my neck stuck out.

Henry decided I was okay and asked me to move to Illinois.  If nothing else Karin and I were getting to see the US.  We ended up in Washington primarily because several told me not to locate in Morton because the general manager, Bill, would harass me.  He had not warmed up to me, not sure he did to anyone except for the ‘Yes’ men he surrounded himself with, and as time went on viewed me as a competitor since Henry had hired me.  He was a force to deal with because he had Henry’s complete confidence.  He was also a very hard drinker, along with his great skill in growing the company.  But I was separate from everyone else and not so much under his control.

I had more meetings with the “Big One”  before we started home.  Karin spent her time in our room, perhaps thinking bad thoughts about me.

I worked most of the coming months on the “Big One”, drawing plans and getting bids from sub-contractors.  I tried to sell my normal size buildings also so that if I lost the Big One I wouldn’t be back in last place again.

The contract date came and I picked our Secretary-Treasure up to be on hand for questions about the financing that we were providing until the job was complete – approximately a year from now.  He was a really nice gentleman and I liked him a lot.  He had given me good advice on how to maneuver around the politics at Morton Buildings.  He was a highly religious man and had a very calm demeanor,  something rarely found in this man’s world of construction work. 

We got to the negotiating table in Northern Illinois where John Hancock had brought in their people.  All went smooth and we got the contract signed.  When we arrived back at the Companies offices Henry was waiting in the reception area, not to greet us but find out what happened.  He ask if I had got it or not, I said we had, he looked at me and then without saying a word turned and went to his office.  Was I in trouble, you never knew with Henry.

That Christmas Henry gave me a $30,000 Christmas bonus (corrected for inflation).  The Secretary Treasury told me that Henry came to him and told him to cut me a check for a nice bonus.  Henry said he didn’t know where this guy (me) was going to take us but I was giving it my all and working very hard.  Before he left the office Henry told him to raise it another 25%.  You know, my bonus was more than I made at Hudson for a year!

The “Big One” was big.  There was no way I could do it all and still keep up with the other jobs I had going.  Henry employed over 20 graduate engineers and he let me ask them for help in drawing the plans.  I hired another guy to help at the site with day to day details.

My one-man department grew in the coming months and eventually I had 3 engineers, 3 secretaries, a sales force of 4 from Colorado to Pennsylvania and several construction foreman that traveled from job to job.  It was pretty exhilarating for a 32 year old guy without an education and that just a few years ago was pretty unhappy because of my perceived failures. 

I was also wearing a new car out every year from the many hours I spent on the road.  Henry decided I needed a plane since I just got another “Big One” job in Colorado.  That sounded great but he wouldn’t let me fly it because I didn’t have an instrument license.  I got along great with my pilot and he always let me fly it.  One day we were going to Holland, Michigan for a meeting with a manufacturer of farm equipment and when we got over Lake Michigan it started snowing…hard.  I expected the pilot to take over but instead he told me not to lose sight of the water and keep going lower until you see the water.  I kept going lower and lower and soon I was right on top of the waves.  I didn’t have a very good feeling about this but soon the skies cleared and the snow quit.  It had just been a snow squall.  This pilot was killed several years later in Indiana when he landed at night and another plane was crossing his runway.  He had been grounded for a period a few years earlier for flying under the I-80 bridge crossing the Mississippi River.

I got to know a Professor at the University of Illinois in the agricultural department of engineering.  He invited me to talk to the students several times and showed me what they were working on.  It was interesting to see the differences between the academic schooling and the real world I was working in.  We enjoyed each other and I had him speak at several of the large sales events I held.

This was kind of a tough time to keep up with the job and my family.  Karin was happy with Anya and enrolled her in all the childhood lessons such as dance and piano.  She had met a lot of women, many of whom came from Europe, and she enjoyed that.  But I was absent a lot and she was not so happy about that.  We bought our first house around this time.  We had set a budget of $30k and of course found a house we really liked for $39k.  We bought it and I wondered how I would ever pay the mortgage off.  It was our first home and by far the best place we had ever lived.  The neighborhood consisted of mostly people older than us.  Most worked for Caterpillar in Peoria as engineers or sales people.  Several of the women took to Karin and Anya.  All Karin had to do was go outside and she almost immediately had company.  One lady gave Karin her schedule for the week letting her know she was available to watch Anya on this or that day for so many hours.  Another retired older man lived behind us and would listen to classical music many hours a day.  He got to know what Karin liked and when he saw her in the back yard he would open a window and play a piece.  Thanks to the company car provided Karin had our car for the first time and was able to go to appointments and shopping.  I sometimes would be gone for several days at a time and fortunately she tolerated this better than when she couldn’t drive and knew very few people, and of course Anya helped also.

At the end of 1973 we found out that our family was going to grow again.  Karin was pregnant with a due date in May of ’74.  She got really big, I mean really big!  She is a little person and looks really pregnant when she is pregnant but this time she really looked pregnant.  She went to a doctor in Peoria that was very well known and liked in the area and he never could detect more than one heart beat so we didn’t think we had twins, but agreed, she is really big!

Karin’s friend called me at the office and told me the doctor was sending her to the hospital from her office appointment.  This friend, a Swiss lady (wonderful person) had taken her to the appointment so she knew what was going on.  She asked me to pick Anya up at her pre-school and bring her to her house and she would watch her for as long as necessary.  I remember quickly leaving the office and they asked where I was going and I told them “my son was being born!”  This was before sonograms so we had no idea what sex it was, we just knew it was going to be a whopper!

I dropped Anya off at our friends place and rushed to the hospital and arrived just in time.  Karin was already in the delivery room so I waited out in the waiting room.  Shortly the doctor came out and said “what did you want to have Mr Eblen?”.  I said I would like to have a boy since I have a girl and he said “congratulations, you have a boy” and just as the news registered with me he continued “and by the way, you also have a another daughter”.  I can’t explain the feeling I had, we really did not know we were having twins! the bedroom was prepared for only one, we were prepared for only one!  I caught up with Karin as they wheeled her from the delivery room and she was crying.  I held her hand and asked what was the matter?  Her best friend, that was also form Germany, had had identical twin boys and after a couple of years had divorced her husband and moved back East leaving the twins with her husband.  Karin feared that having twins would result in our divorce – it didn’t!

Since no one in the family was expecting twins it was a lot of fun calling everyone.  Perhaps one my most proud moments.  They were both over 5 pounds so they looked complete, just small.  The large hospital in Peoria had a modern premie ward financed by the State as a test ward for handling premies.  The twins were not premies but Karin is RH negative and they wanted to watch the twins for that.  Later they developed shots to counteract this but it was not used in these times and Karin carried  the antibody that would react with a positive child.

We named the boy Eric and the girl Jennifer.  Each time I would arrived at the hospital I went to this ward to check on them.  Every time Eric was jerking his arms and legs around but Jenny would barely move and I would watch for a sign of life from her.  They were both fine and got to come home after a few days.  Jenny’s head was so small that the nurses fashioned a bonnet out of bandage material.  No point in putting Eric in one, he would have torn it off immediately.

The following year Henry had me build a new warehouse and manufacturing plant near Morton for my department.  I located the land and met with the cities officials to get a permit.  I flew to Germany and purchased a new machine for casting concrete that cost over $500k in todays dollars.  I had worked with Henry and had his permission to purchase it but something of this expense he was suppose to inform the board, and they pressed him on it.  The company had originated with Henry’s dad and was now in the hands of his brother and two sisters.  The sisters husbands were on the board along with the brother.  Usually Henry had a free hand in these matters but for some reason they used their power on this one.  Henry then asked me to sell them on the idea at the next board meeting.  I did my best and they let the purchase go through but I felt a lot less support than I was use to.

The next problem was with my new plant.  I had talked to a well driller about the availability of water at the site because we were going to pre-cast concrete and we needed water.  He assured me there was no problem but when he started drilling he well he hit a pocket of natural gas and he couldn’t punch through it.  Another try in another location and it blew his drilling pipe right out of the ground.  He told me he couldn’t drill through it and left.  Ever have one of those moments when every muscle in your body tightens up?  No water, no products, no job!   Some on the board seemed to just be waiting for something like this and I knew I was in major trouble.  I talked to a large well driller that drilled deep commercial wells and he assured me he could get through it.  Central Illinois has a lot of natural gas in the ground.  He indeed drilled through it and we got a very good water well and enough natural gas to heat the building for the foreseeable years.  I breathed a little easier.

My “Big One” in Colorado had a tragedy.  I had become a friend to the father and his son who was about my age.  He had his own plane and so we had flying in common.  The tragedy was that the son gave a boy a ride in his plane and as the two fathers watched he nosedived into a field killing both of them.  The father was devastated as I would learn only too well in a few years how that felt.  We were almost done with the job and I dreaded going there since the father had completely lost interest in it.

As we went into the summer things started going down hill at Morton Buildings.  The General Manager apparently decided I was a real threat to his position and started tearing my department apart.  I had my own engineers, my own salesman, my own construction foreman, and now my own manufacturing plant.  This was too much for him to allow.

That fall we all attended a large farm show in Indiana for three days.  I had my own display so I had my salesman there and invited my engineers and two of my secretaries to come over for a day and see the show.  That night Bill hosted a party where there was a lot of drinking and Bill got really smashed.  My secretaries were both young, single and pretty so they stayed to party while the rest of us went to bed.  Several hours earlier I decided they were not in shape to drive back to Illinois so I arranged for the engineers to bunk with the salesman as I did also.  The secretaries could have my room.  After midnight the girls called me and they were crying.  Bill was holding them in the ladies restroom and they were afraid to come out with him and his ‘yes’ men outside.  I got dressed and went to escort them to their room  The girls were peeking out of the restroom door, Bill and his gang were waiting for them to come out.  I went up to Bill and told him to back off that they wanted to get some sleep.  I’ll be dam if he didn’t swing at me and just as a reaction I hit him and he laid out on the floor.  To be totally honest here I was much larger and younger than Bill and he could barely standup without someone hitting him.

Laying on his back he told me I was fired and not to drive my company car home and not to show up at the show tomorrow.  I pulled the car keys out of my pocket and told him I came here in this car and that I was going home in it.  He told his ‘yes’ men to take the keys away from me but none of them had a good feeling about doing that.  I escorted the girls to their room, then returned to the room I was staying in.  I told the two salesman that I had been fired and I was going home in the morning, they both tried to talk me out of it but couldn’t.

As soon as I arrived home I got a call from Henry.  He had already heard the details and wanted me to stay.  I told him it would be impossible because Bill would make it hell for me going forward.  He said if he got Bill to apologize would I stay and I said I would knowing that Bill would never do that.

Karin was a little distraught, she wasn’t expecting me to get fired and we had three little kids at home. 

Next I got a call from Bill and he apologized!  Never thought it would happen.  So I stayed but I was correct, it was going down hill.  Instead of going directly at me he tried to work with me.  I didn’t want to work with him, he had nothing to add to my department.  He wanted me to use a new product for insulating the buildings – foam insulation.  I didn’t like it.  It was easy to install but had low insulation values compared to the fiberglass insulation I used.  Plus you have to wash livestock buildings, a sprayer would cut right through this foam leaving you looking at the metal roof from the inside.  He wouldn’t take no for an answer and arranged for us to fly to Tampa, FL to tour the factory and be impressed with their big shots.  I have to admit they put on quite a show but I knew their product would not hold up in this application.  They had a 110’ yacht that we went fishing on the next day.  Bill loved to fish.  I talked to the companies sales rep in between his vomiting from sea sickness.  I thought you should have been on the USNS Patch fellow.  By the end of the trip he was no longer talking, instead he was hanging over the edge of the ship dry heaving – poor guy.  Bill didn’t catch any fish so he wanted to go ashore and have some drinks. 

At dinner time the company brought in their really big guns and took us to dinner where the table probably had a dozen men.  We dressed in our finest, this was a really nice place, and had a wonderful meal.  Bill was super drunk.  The tables around us were all glaring at him since his language was not the best.  I felt like crawling under the table. 

I used the product on a small building and a few months later the farmer called saying his ceiling was moving.  I had to see this so upon inspection the material was alive with some kind of a bug – there were thousands of them.  We replaced it with my original material and Bill never again tried to tell me how to build my buildings.

One payday I started getting calls from my salesmen that their pay had been cut.  I looked at mine and it hadn’t been.  I thought it must have been a mistake so I went to the pay-clerk and asked her what was going on.  She looked at me rather sheepishly and said Bill had walked past her desk and told her to cut my salesman’s pay.  What a cowardly act.

I went directly into Henry’s office and told him what had happened.  I said that is no way to treat someone.  Not letting them know it was gong to happen and not discussing the reasons behind it.  Henry totally agree and shook his head.  He said he didn’t agree with a lot of things Bill did but he said you know “the profits go up every year”.  Their were few men I had more respect for as a businessman than Henry but this was too much.  I thanked him for the opportunity, wished him well and told him I couldn’t work here anymore.

My nerves were in high gear as I drove home and told Karin that I had just quit the best job we have ever had, or likely to have and she was a little upset.  For me it wasn’t just the act of cutting the pay, I had watched it over the months as Bill had exerted more and more pressure on my department to control it. 

I suppose I could have stayed and tried to work it out but I didn’t see a final result that would be acceptable to me.  I had gained a lot of knowledge, my confidence in my ability to win was high and I had met and impressed a lot of people in good positions to help me. 

I was going to start my own business!

Agri-Building Design, Manufacturing, Marketing and Construction:

Shortly after the twins, Eric and Jennifer, were born in 1974 I quit the job and took some of the division’s key people with me and started my own company.  After a very shaky start and fears of not making it I got a contract for a set of buildings worth over 3 million dollars in todays dollars and we survived.  

From this contract one of the world’s richest men that owned 376,000 acres in eastern North Carolina had his associates check me out and after several trips to and from his farm (he lived in NYC) they gave me a contract to design the largest set of livestock buildings in the US.  These structures would be worth approximately $45 million dollars in todays dollars.  Although they wouldn’t give me the contract to construct them (I was too small a company) they did promote me in the national farm mags and our business boomed.

Just as we were having our best year our plant caught on fire and destroyed all of its contents.  Thinking I was well insured I learned that all that fine print in a policy is meaningful and I lost thousands of dollars nearly destroying the company and our jobs.  

We survived and by the end of the 70’s we were running 150 men full-time and had contracts that would keep us busy for over a year.

In 1980 it was pretty obvious that with interest rates this high the building business was going to get hit and hit hard.  I had a very good offer to sell the company and I took it.  My wife and parents thought I was crazy to give it up after all that I had put into it but it turned out to be the right decision.  

So at the age of 39 with 4 little kids at home I’m unemployed, but I’d rather call it retirement!  The new owner declared bankruptcy within a couple of years, times got really hard.

Helicopter Leasing:

I learned to fly a helicopter to check on the jobs around Illinois and loved the experience.  This would lead to another company where I and my instructor purchased several helicopters and leased them to crop dusters.  These were mostly Hughes 500 Turbo Jet powered helicopters and cost around $500,000 (used) in todays dollars.  

Our business plan had us furnishing the aircraft and in return we got half of the proceeds of their business.  It was going along really well until one of them crashed!  Found out more about Loyds of London than I cared to know.  One of the underwriters in England went broke and it took us a year, with international lawyers, to get our money.  This was at a time the interest rates reached 21%!  

According to our lease we had to replace the copter and found one near Norfolk, VA that we purchased.  I flew it back to Illinois, a 8 hour flight.  A helicopter is not like a plane, you have to stay on top of it all the time or it will get nasty with you – no auto-pilot then.  Flying over the Appalachian mountains I got a little desperate to find a fueling station but luckily found one.  I really loved the excitement of flying helicopters but I was exhausted by the time I got home.

Bull Sperm:

This was more of an investment than a job.  I had done a lot of work, several millions of dollars, for a farm corp of three brothers.  The youngest brother was the best livestock man I ever worked with and I worked for some of the best.  He was a couple years younger than I am.  We traveled together looking at different dairy and swine production units.  He had started out in the dairy artificial insemination business.  These brothers owned thousands of acres and were very wealthy…but you would never know it.  Later I heard they had added over 30,000 acres in Brazil.  

I built a dairy barn for his best cows that held 50 cows.  This barn included a living quarters for his herdsman that lived there 24/7.  He sold most of these cows to the Japanese and he wanted this building to be a show place.  He had cows there that he sold for a million dollars each in todays value.

It was a challenging building to build.  I had to imbed one and half inch rubber mats in their stalls so they wouldn’t scrape their knees.  Each cow had its own watering and feeding cups.  Manure was collected with a automatic system installed in a concrete trough.

He was able to collect their eggs, fertilize them in a petri tube with a chosen bull’s sperm, then fly the egg to Wisconsin and place the egg in a lesser cows womb to birth it.  Using this method he could get many more calfs from the expensive cow.

He would hire specialist that he knew, often from California to fly in and look at a cow, then suggest which bull sperm to purchase that had the proper characteristics that would produce a better calf with this particular cow. 

I found this completely fascinating.  Then he told me about a bull in Colorado name ‘Ferdinand‘ that had died many years ago but they were still selling his sperm for outragious amounts because his offspring were superior producers.  The owners of Ferdinand had made millions over the years.  He then told me how he belonged to ~ 20 different consortium hoping to find a new Ferdinand.  He explained that a new born bull calf from a high-producing cow would be picked for the purpose of selling his sperm.  Problem is it would take years to prove his worth and in the meantime his out in the pasture eating away producing nothing but manure.  So they would form a consortium of investors to finance his leisure life style.

I had had some good years and our government decided they deserved 70% of my earnings – for the record I didn’t agree with that.  I may as well invest in the bull sperm program as give it to the politicians that had enough of their own BS!

So I joined two groups looking for the next Ferdinand.  One of my bulls was named Dunwoody Countdown and the was Jacoby Super Star – there has to be a winner in the group!  I can just see it now, a grandchild will ask me “grandpa, how did you make so much money” and I will tell them from selling Holstein Bull Sperm (I guess I could leave the ‘Bull’ out, not really necessary is it)

Well, years later neither of my bulls came close to Ferdinand and instead were purchased by McDonald’s and I lost my $50k.  Now my grandchildren will join my wife and ask me “grandpa how could you have been so dumb?”

Travel Agency Business:

By 1985 my wife thought I needed more to do (I think I was around the house too much) so I started a travel agency in Omaha with my sister managing it.  I was not to interested in travel so I never learned how to book arrangements for the customer.  I concentrated on the marketing and accounting of the business which allowed me to play with my computer.  After a couple years of this I decided if I was going to be in the business I might as well make it worth while so I started another office in Peoria.  Eventually I had five offices.  We concentrated on vacations more than airline tickets and we became the 20th largest agency for one of the major cruise lines in the country.  We were invited to all of the ship inaugurations which both my wife and I enjoyed.

The other major cruise line wanted our business and invited Karin and I to enjoy a weeks cruise in the Owner’s Suite.  This suite was fantastic and extended across half of the ship.  It was never rented out and didn’t appear on the ship’s map.  The bed came from Finland and was very nice however I could never understand all of the control knobs that were mounted alongside of it.  Wanted to try them but was concerned it would launch me overboard!  This was a fun cruise since we were treated extremely well – no waiting in line!  Cruising will never be the same for us again!

Transitioning from 150 construction men to dozens of women in the travel business was not easy for me.  I learned quickly to have a little more patience than I had used with the men.  Karin would tell you I don’t have any patience.    Many of the “Agents” were well educated and married to professionals and worked, to some degree, for the benefits the travel industry offered.

Karin and I plus my sales manager and her husband (a geologist with Caterpillar) traveled to Egypt for an International Convention for travel professionals.  It was a wonderful experience that we enjoyed fully.  The convention put on a reception on the desert floor next to the famous Pyramids.  As we arrived by bus in the evening we drove between lines of Egyptian soldiers on Camel back holding torches.  They had laid 3,000 Persian rugs on the ground and had food tents to sample all of the big hotels and restaurant specialities.  Singers and dancers went from one stage to another to entertain us.  Then Omar Sharif gave a speech on the history of Egypt while a laser light show went on against the sides of the pyramids.  A very magically moment.  After the convention we cruised down the Nile to Aswan and visited many of the famous sites of Egypt.

I sold the agencies in 2003 and retired for a second time.  After 9/11 the travel business changed dramatically and I was at an age I didn’t want to invest more to keep up with the changing times.

Rental Property:

My secretary at the travel business was the wife a dentist.  Because we knew each other so well we often talked what our families were doing and from this we discovered that both of us were bidding on the same 22 unit apartment building.

We got together and decided to form a company and we purchased the complex together.

He was interested in giving his practice up and concentrating on real estate.  He wanted to manage the units (and I didn’t) so I would do the accounting.

He did give up his dental practice and invested in real estate both here and in California.

After a few years we both agreed to sell the complex and we terminated our relationship.  I invested the money in Chicago and Ohio real estate.  My son rented from me until he moved to NYC.