THE MORNING AFTER THE LAST NIGHT OF THE KOREAN WAR.

PLEASE EXCUSE THE USE OF ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ON THIS SITE BUT I HAVE MACULAR DEGENERATION AND CAPITAL LETTERS ARE MUCH EASIER FOR ME TO SEE AND WORK WITH.

THE NAMES IN THE LINES FROM HERE BACK IN TIME ARE MARKED WITH A (P) INSERTED IN THEIR NAMES IF I HAVE PROOF.

IN THOSE CASES, I HAVE EITHER OBTAINED A BIRTH OR DEATH CERTIFICATE FOR THIS PERSON, THIS PERSON IS LISTED ON AN APPLICATION THAT WAS APPROVED BY THE MAYFLOWER SOCIETY, OR I LIST SOME OTHER SUBSTANTIAL PROOF

THE PAGE NOTATIONS, IDENTIFIED BY THE WORD (NOTES) INSERTED IN THE NAMES, MAY EXPLAIN THOSE PROOFS OR GIVE OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION SHOWING WHY THIS PERSON IS SHOWN IN THIS PARTICULAR PLACE IN THE LINES BACK FROM ME (FROM THIS PAGE).

ALTHOUGH I HAVE USED THE BEST EVIDENCE AVAILABLE TO ME, ALL OF THE NAMES LISTED ON THIS SITE, OTHER THAN THOSE WITH (P) INSERTED IN THEM, ARE SPECULATIVE.

THEY ARE SPECULATIVE AS TO NAME, TIME AND PLACE.

SO, SOME MIGHT SAY, THIS ROOTSWEB SITE IS A COMBINATION OF HISTORY AND MYTH.

EVEN IF THE PEOPLE I SHOW HERE ACTUALLY LIVED. THEY MAY NOT HAVE HAD THE EXACT NAME, LIVED AT THE TIME OR IN THE POSITION OR LINE I SHOW THEM IN HERE.

IF I KNOW OF A POSSIBLE CONFLICT WITH OTHER RECORDS, I HAVE INCLUDED (NOTES) IN THE PERSON’S NAME AND EXPLAIN IT.

HOWEVER, IF THE NAME IS MARKED (L) IT DOES INDICATE THAT THE FACTS AVAILABLE TO ME AT THIS TIME SEEM TO SHOW THAT THIS INDIVIDUAL IS IN MY DIRECT "BLOOD LINE". (AS I SAID ABOVE, A (P) SHOWS I HAVE PROOF).

IN MOST CASES, THOSE NAMES WITH A (P) INSERTED IN THEM ARE ALSO IN MY DIRECT "BLOOD LINE" AS CAN BE SEEN BY THE (L)s IN THE NAMES ABOVE AND BELOW THEM IN THE LINE.

THE (L) INSERTED IN THE NAME MEANS THEN, THAT WHILE I DON'T HAVE PROOF, I’M STILL "PRETTY SURE" IT'S RIGHT AS I'M SHOWING IT FOR THE LINE IS SHOWN THIS WAY BY TWO OR MORE, MOSTLY ROOTSWEB, SOURCES.

IF YOU FOLLOW UP OR DOWN THE LINES WHERE THESE (P)s OR (L)s, INCLUDED IN THE NAMES IN MY DIRECT LINES, APPEAR, YOU'LL FIND THEY GO BACK AND FORTH IN TIME THROUGH MANY FAMOUS, WELL KNOWN AND INTERESTING PEOPLE.

SEVERAL OF THESE LINES GO ALL THE WAY BACK IN TIME, AS FAR BACK AS YOU CAN GO IN ANY GENEALOGY BASED ON NAMES, AND, ASSUMING THE BIBLE IS A GOOD GENEALOGICAL SOURCE, TO ADAM AND EVE IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN.

I ALSO HAVE ANCIENT GENEALOGY INFORMATION (31,000 TO 79,000 YEARS OLD) BASED ON MY DNA CONTRIBUTION TO THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/IBM GENOGRAPHIC PROJECT. THAT INFORMATON FOLLOWS LATER IN THESE NOTES. I ALSO SUBMITTED A DNA SAMPLE TO FAMILYTREEDNA AND HOST A PUSCH, BUSCH, PUSH OR BUSH FAMILY PAGE THERE AT

:http://www.familytreedna.com/(cxp5jqiabifpdn45ri5fl345)/public/pusch/index.aspx

IN SUMMARY, IF YOU LOOK UP ANY NAME, FAMOUS OR NOT, IN THE INDEX AND FIND THAT NAME INCLUDES A (P) OR AN (L), YOU CAN FOLLOW THESE (P)s OR (L)s FORWARD IN TIME, DOWN THROUGH THAT PERSON'S DESCENDANTS, ALL THE WAY BACK DOWN TO ME HERE ON THIS PAGE.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW NOW THAT YOU’RE RELATED TO ME, BUT FIND IN SEARCHING THIS SITE THAT SOME OF YOUR ANCESTORS APPEAR HERE WITH A (P) OR (L) IN THEIR NAMES, PERHAPS FOLLOWING THAT LINE BACK WILL SHOW IT IS ONE OF THE MANY HERE THAT LEAD TO ADAM AND EVE AND THAT THEREFORE THEY ARE YOUR ANCESTORS TOO.

OR, EVEN IF THAT LINE DOESN’T LEAD TO ADAM AND EVE. YOU CAN FOLLOW THE NAMES INCLUDING A (P) OR (L) ALL THE WAY BACK IN TIME AS FAR AS I'VE BEEN ABLE TO TRACE THAT PARTICULAR LINE BY INDIVIDUAL NAME.

WHAT OF OUR CLAIM OF DESCENT FROM ADAM AND EVE?

Whether Adam and Eve and the all other persons mentioned in the Bible existed as real persons or did not is more a religious than a genealogical question but many genealogies claim descent from Adam and Eve by following Biblical genealogies back from supposed descendants from one, or another, of Noah's sons.

For examples of these genealogies running back from Queen Elizabeth of England and, with some, the connections leading back to Adam and Eve see:

http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page1.asp

http://c.webring.com/hub?ring=royalgenealogieshttp://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page10.asp

And

http://www.biblestudy.org/bibleref/queenadm.html

As I share other ancestors with Queen Elizabeth, I have used her genealogy to include Adam and Eve as my ancestors here too.

WHAT IS THE POSSIBLE INFLUENCE OF OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS ON US TODAY?

One thing that’s important to keep in mind when going back down a family tree is that each generation doubles the number of your ancestors.

What you are dealing here with are exponential numbers.

As you double the number of grandparents with each generation, you quickly see how fast the numbers are getting very large:

For example, when you get to the 64th generation, with my ancestors like Odin Woden or Woutan of Saxony King of Scandinavia born in 215 and Clodomir IV King of the Franks born in 251 you have had 9,230,372,036,854,775,808 grandparents at the various generational levels between each of them and me.

This number spelled out is: 9 quintillion, 223 quadrillion, 372 trillion, 36 billion, 854 million, 775 thousand, 8 hundred and 8.

Just to give you an idea of how big this number is:

If you had 9,23,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice, it would be enough rice to cover all of India knee deep.

If you had that many pennies, those pennies would fill about 4,800,000 Empire State buildings.

You can see that there would probably be little bloodline influence on what any of us might be like today because of our relationship to any one ancestor that lived that far back in time. It's difficult to imagine that any talents or faults that existed in one ancestor living far back in time could, so diluted, could influence us in any meaningful way today.

In other words, I don’t think I share many attributes with my distant ancestors Odin Woden or Woutan of Saxony King of Scandinavia born in 215 and Clodomir IV King of the Franks born in 251.

If you go back many generations more than the 64 discussed above, the numbers of our ancestors approach the numbers of stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach.

Another view of these huge numbers of ancestors, is that some research would probably show the total number of people who ever lived is probably less than a trillion,

If that is so, the answer to this dilemma is that everybody's tree eventually stops forking at various places (i.e., at some point, cousins married cousins, thus reducing the number of potential grandparents).

I myself am descended from two Cooley siblings

Nevertheless, no matter the exact huge number of our ancestors, a million, a trillion or a quintillion, it’s interesting to explore back through time, discover these ancestors, think about them and learn history through them.

For example, a, to me, very interesting ancestor from my own ancestral searches, is Queen Medb

According to the “Cooley Genealogy”, “One of the earliest references to the name Cooley is spelled Cualnge and appears in the 7th century when the great Celtic epic, “Tain Bo Cualnge, or “The Cattle Raid of Cooley” (County Louth) was first committed to writing. The name Cualnge may, of course, have been a place-name, not a patronymic, but many family names are derived from place names. This great epic is described as the chief and lengthiest romance of the Ulster cycle of literature, and has to do with heroes who Irish annalists and synchronists agree in placing about the beginning of the Christian era. During this primitive Celtic civilization no native coins were in circulation. The land in a pastoral country belonged to the tribe. A man’s property consisted of cattle and cattle-raids were frequent. Hence the greatest Irish epic is of a cattle-raid, the object being for Queen Medb to gain possession of an extraordinary animal known as the Brown Bull of Cualnge.”

The poem is written in Gaelic and even the English translation is difficult to follow but there is a synopsis that gives you a good idea of the story.

MEDB OR QUEEN MEAV (NOTES) (CTROFC) OF CONNAUGHT

Medb is on my RootsWeb site and you can get to her page, and more on this poem, through the Index on any of my RootsWeb pages.

Medb is the main character in this famous Irish Epic poem based on the great Irish legend called the Tain Bo Chuailgne or the Cattle Raid of Cooley.

This very old tale of the time soon after the birth of Christ was kept alive through the ages by Irish minstrels.

The notes from MEDB's page on my RootsWeb site read:

(CTROFC) IN MEADB'S NAME MEANS I BELIEVE THIS IS MEDB OR QUEEN MEAV OF CONNAUGHT THE WIFE IN THE IRISH EPIC POEM "THE CATTLE RAID OF COOLEY"

THIS LINE LEADS BACK THROUGH NOAH TO ADAM AND EVE AND FORWARD, DOWN TO ME, THROUGH MEDB'S SISTER CLOTHRU (NOTES) OR (L) CLOATHRA (FOR MEDB HAD NO DESCENDANTS).


TO READ THE POEM,

http://adminstaff.vassar.edu/sttaylor/Cooley/Pillow-talk.html

AND

http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=marshall&book=literature&story=raid

FOR BOTH THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION AND THE IRISH ORIGINAL AND A SYNOPSIS OR STORY OF "THE CATTLE RAID OF COOLEY".

I've found many other interesting ancestors through written records many based on ancient poems or minstrel's songs.

In addition to those ancestors found in books or on the computer in genealogical records, there is work now being done that can give us an idea of what those of our ancestors, who lived even back before recorded history, might have been like and where and how they lived.

DNA CONNECTIONS TO UNKNOW LIVING RELATIVES AND TO OUR MORE ANCIENT ANCESTORS

The majority of our, so huge as to be almost unimaginable number of, ancestors will always remain unknown to us. Most of them are so lost in the mists of time; we'll never be able to know who those individuals were.

Even the ancestors I do list for myself here are almost all the ancestors of only one of my Grandparents, Edward Cooley.

I've only found a few generations back for my other three Grandparents Thus I don't even know much then about three-fourths of those of my ancestors who lived in recorded time let alone the nothing I know about the ancestors who lived before any history was written or ancestors were remembered by name or in any other way.

There is work now being done however, that can give us an idea of what all those ancestors, even those who lived before recorded time, might have been like and where and how they lived.

Our own DNA can be compared to known past, or even to very ancient DNA samples of unknown individuals and we can therefore be connected to specific individuals in the distant past.

We can know these ancestors, even if not by name, but at least by where and about when they lived.

Where and approximately when these ancient individuals lived is known for we know where their bones were found and various scientific methods can be used to at least approximately date those bones.

In addition, DNA analysis, by mapping the appearance and frequency of genetic markers in our DNA sample, can estimate when certain features of our DNA originated often many thousands of years ago.

These DNA markers can also be compared to other individuals living today to determine migration patterns and other information,

Such connections can tell us much about the lives of these unknown ancestors and then the different location and time differences between the connections can tell of our line's journeys through geography and time.

COPIED BELOW IS A MAP SHOWING MY EARLY ANCESTOR MIGRATIONS.




For more modern possible relatives, we can match DNA samples.

As the Y chromosome is passed from father to son, unchanged, except for a mutation about every 500 generations, two matching samples denote we descended from a common male ancestor, are relatives and that this new relative's male ancestors are our ancestors too.

Two groups making such DNA connections are the National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project for the distant past and FamilyTreeDNA for more recent ancestors or connections with other living, now unknown, relatives,

For ancient ancestors, the National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project explains: “When humans first ventured out of Africa some 60,000 years ago, they left genetic footprints still visible today.

"By mapping the appearance and frequency of genetic markers, we create a picture of when and where humans moved around the world. These great migrations eventually led the descendants of a small group of Africans to occupy even the furthest reaches of the earth."

In an attempt to find out at least something about our own specific family's unknown earliest forbearers, I submitted a DNA sample to this National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project and received some information, some of which is shown below

As this Genographic Project is to continue for five more years, we will perhaps learn even more in those future years.

The National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's report on my DNA sample said:

GENOGRAPHIC Certificate of Y-chromosome DMA testing In recognition of your participation in the Genographic Project, we hereby certify that

BRUCE COOLEY PUSCH

Belongs to:Haplogroup Rla (M17). The designations for all twelve loci examined for this purpose are listed here, along with the Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) outcome for each.

Your STRs

DYS393: 14DYS439: 10 DYS388: 12 DYS385a: 11 DYS19: 16 DYS389-1: 13DYS389-2: 18 DYS390: 25 DYS385b: 14 DYS391: 11 DYS426: 12 DYS392: 11

(I later found that for DYS389-2 either 18 or 31 is the correct answer. 31 is the total of DYS389-1 and DYS389-2 and that total of 31 is sometimes reported as the DYS 389-2 number)

These are the results from the laboratory analysis of your Y-chromosome.
Your DNA was analyzed for Short Tandem Repeats (STRs), which are repeating segments of your genome that have a high mutation rate.

The location on the Y chromosome of each of these markers is depicted in the image, with the number of repeats for each of your STRs presented to the right of the marker.

For example, DYS19 is a repeat of TAGA, so if your DNA repeated that sequence 12 times at that location, it would appear: DYS19 12.

Studying the combination of these STR lengths in your Y Chromosome allows researchers to place you in a haplogroup, which reveals the complex migratory journeys of your ancestors. Y-SNP:

In the event that the analysis of your STRs was inconclusive, your Y chromosome was also tested for the presence of an informative Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP). These are mutational changes in a single nucleotide base, and allow researchers to definitively place you in a genetic haplogroup.

OUR ANCIENT GENETIC HISTORY AND THE GENETIC MARKERS THAT DEFINE IT.

I sent in two DNA samples for analysis. I received a 12 loci analysis from the National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's report as stated above and then I sent in another DNA sample to FamilyTreeDNA, at the University of Arizona, for first another 12 loci and then later a 37 loci analysis. All the tests agreed.

FIRST IS THE STORY, ACCORDING TO THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/IBM PROJECT, OF OUR FAMILY'S DNA ANCESTOR'S JOURNEY OUT OF AFRICA AND THROUGH AISIA AND EUROPE AND THEN SOME ANCESTORS WE KNOW OF THAT LIVED ALONG THAT JOURNEY ROUTE, THEN WE’LL GET INTO A DISCUSSION OF THE SEARCH FOR MORE RECENT, SPEICIFICALLY NAMED, BUT NOW UNKNOWN TO US, ANCESTORS OR COUSINS.
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/IBM PROJECT’S REPORT TO ME SAID:

"Your Y chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup R1a, a lineage defined by a genetic marker called M17."

"This haplogroup is the final destination of a genetic journey that began some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y chromosome marker called M168."

"The Journey of Man, A Genetic Odyssey" by Spencer Wells adds: “The order of these markers allows us to trace the journey taken by my ancestors (mine too!) to the British Isles over the past 50.000 years."

The National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's report continues: again, “The very widely dispersed M168 marker can be traced to a single individual—"Eurasian Adam."

"This African man, who lived some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago, is the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendants migrated out of Africa and became the only lineage to survive away from humanity's home continent."

"Population growth during the Upper Paleolithic era may have spurred the M168 lineage to seek new hunting grounds for the plains animals crucial to their survival. A period of moist and favorable climate had expanded the ranges of such animals at this time, so these nomadic peoples may have simply followed their food source."

"Improved tools and rudimentary art appeared during this same epoch, suggesting significant mental and behavioral changes. These shifts may have been spurred by a genetic mutation that gave "Eurasian Adam's" descendants a cognitive advantage over other contemporary, but now extinct, human lineages."

To the discussion of marker M168 above, "The Journey of Man, A Genetic Odyssey" by Spencer Wells ads, "M168 Adam was paired with an Eve. She is called L3 and her daughters accompanied the sons of M168 on their journey to populate the world."

"Based on the distribution of the descendants of M168 and L3 in Africa today, it is likely that the both lived in northeast Africa, in the region of present-day Ethiopia and Sudan."

"Some 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans are descendants of the second great human migration out of Africa, which is now further defined by a new marker M89."

"M89 first appeared 45,000 years ago in Northern Africa or the Middle East. It arose on the original lineage (M168) of "Eurasian Adam," and defines a large inland migration of hunters who followed expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East."

"The Journey of Man, A Genetic Odyssey" by Spencer Wells adds, “M89, the marker that occurred immediately after M168 on our main line into Eurasia has been dated, due to possible errors, in a range from 30.000 to 50,000 years ago.”

“Many people of this M89 lineage remained in the Middle East, but others continued their movement and followed the grasslands through Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia. Herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game probably enticed them to explore new grasslands.”

“With much of Earth's water frozen in massive ice sheets, the era's vast steppes stretched from eastern France to Korea. The grassland hunters of the M89 lineage traveled both east and west along this steppe "superhighway" and eventually peopled much of the continent.”

“A group of M89 descendants moved north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country. Though their numbers were likely small, genetic traces of their journey are still found today.”

“Some 40,000 years ago a man in Iran or southern Central Asia was born with a unique genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage diverging from the M89 group. His descendants spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet. Most residents of the Northern Hemisphere trace their roots to this unique individual, and carry his defining marker.”

“Nearly all North Americans and East Asians have the M9 marker, as do most Europeans and many Indians. The haplogroup defined by M9, K, is known as the Eurasian Clan. This large lineage dispersed gradually.”

“Seasoned hunters followed the herds ever eastward, along a vast belt of Eurasian steppe, until the massive mountain ranges of south central Asia blocked their path. The Hindu Kush, Tian Shan, and Himalaya, even more formidable during the era's ice age, divided eastward migrations.”

“These migrations through the "Pamir Knot" region would subsequently become defined by additional genetic markers. The marker M45 first appeared about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago in a man who became the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native Americans.”

“This unique individual was part of the M9 lineage, which was moving to the north of the mountainous Hindu Kush and onto the game-rich steppes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Siberia”

"The Journey of Man, A Genetic Odyssey" by Spencer Wells adds, “ M45 is found only in central Asians and those who trace their ancestry to this region. – thus it defines a central Asian clan.”

The National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's report continues: again, “The M45 lineage survived on these northern steppes even in the frigid Ice Age climate. While big game was plentiful, these resourceful hunters had to adapt their behavior to an increasingly hostile environment.”

“They erected animal skin shelters and sewed weather tight clothing. They also refined the flintheads on their weapons to compensate for the scarcity of obsidian and other materials.”

“The intelligence that allowed this lineage to adapt and thrive in harsh conditions was critical to human survival in a region where no other hominids are known to have survived.”

“Members of haplogroup R are descendents of Europe's first large-scale human settlers. The lineage is defined by Y chromosome marker M173, which shows a westward journey of M45-carrying Central Asian steppe hunters.”

"The Journey of Man, A Genetic Odyssey" by Spencer Wells adds, “The lineage is defined by Y chromosome marker M173 means that at some point in the past a man – one person – had a change from an A to a C in a particular position in the nucleotide sequence of his Y – chromosome.”

“This man could, in fact, be called M173 after the marker. All his sons also carried this marker, marking them uniquely as his male descendants. They in turn passed it on to their sons, and over time it increased in frequency.”

“Today, M173 is very common in Western Europe, where my (and mine too!) male ancestors come from – over 70 percent of the men in southern England have it.”
The book continues in a later chapter, “Intriguingly, the highest frequencies of M173 are found in the far west, in Spain and Ireland where M173 is found in over 90 percent of men. It is, then, the dominant marker in Europe”

The National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's report continues: again, “The descendents of M173 arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago and immediately began to make their own dramatic mark on the continent. Famous cave paintings, like those of Lascaux and Chauvet, signal the sudden arrival of humans with artistic skill. There are no artistic precedents or precursors to their appearance.”

“Soon after this lineage's arrival in Europe, the era of the Neanderthals came to a close. Genetic evidence proves that these hominids were not human ancestors but an evolutionary dead end. Smarter, more resourceful human descendents of M173 likely out competed Neanderthals for scarce Ice Age resources and thus heralded their demise.”

"The Journey of Man, A Genetic Odyssey" by Spencer Wells adds, “ The coincidence of the genetic and archaeological dates, as well as the increase in population size implied by the large number of Upper Paleolithic sites from around 30,000 years ago, suggests that the invading moderns (M173s) actually displaced the Neanderthals. But did we actively kill off out distant cousins as we spread through Europe?”

The book continues, “Features of modern human behavior that may have played a role in giving us an advantage over Neanderthals were our complex social networks and our less physical (more mental) life styles which would have given us a longevity advantage over the Neanderthals.”

“Many Upper Paleolithic people survived into their fifties. Old people are good to have around. They can care for children while younger generations go about their lives including continued childbearing. Perhaps this “grand mothering” and the small advantage it gave allowed modern humans to drive the Neanderthals to extinction.”

“Whatever the causes of their demise, Neanderthals had given up the ghost within a few thousand years of the arrival of modern humans often called Cro-Magnons after the rock shelter in south western France where some of the first bones were unearthed in 1868.”

“ Of course, M173 is simply the terminal marker in a long line of genealogical descent that traces back to M168 and our African Adam.”

“M173, though, does solve the mystery of where the earliest Europeans came from. The marker on the way to M173 is M45 – making Europeans a subset of the Central Asian clan.”

The National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's report then continues: again, “The long journey of this lineage was further shaped by the preponderance of ice at this time. Humans were forced to southern refuges in Spain, Italy, and the Balkans. Years later, as the ice retreated, they moved north out of these isolated refuges and left an enduring, concentrated trail of the M173 marker in their wake.”

“Today, for example, the marker's frequency remains very high in northern France and the British Isles—where it was carried by M173 descendents who had weathered the Ice Age in Spain.”

“Haplogroup R1a originated about 10,000 years ago, most likely on the grassy steppes of the Ukraine or southern Russia. Its defining genetic marker, M17, first appeared in a man of the M173 lineage. His descendents spread from Europe to the Middle East, India, and even Iceland.”

“Early M17 peoples were nomadic steppe farmers and possibly the first to domesticate the horse, which might have eased their numerous migrations. From the Czech Republic to Siberia, and south through Central Asia, some 40 percent of all men are members of this haplogroup.”

"The Journey of Man, A Genetic Odyssey" by Spencer Wells adds, “M17 is a descendant of M173, which is consistent with a European origin. The origin, distribution and age of M17 strongly suggest that it was spread by the Kurgan people in their expansion across the Eurasian steppe.”

The National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's report continues: again, “This interesting line of descent may be responsible for the birth of Indo-European languages. The world's most widely spoken language family includes English, the Romance Languages, Farsi, and various Indian tongues. But many Indo-European languages share similar words for animals, plants, tools, and weapons—suggesting a common ancestor that linguists call proto-Indo-European.”

“Some linguists believe that the nomadic Kurgan people were the first to speak proto-Indo-European languages, some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.”

“Geneticists subsequently theorize that these people may have been descendents of M17. The Indo-European time line and linguistic distribution interestingly mirror this lineage's genetic and physical journey.”

“Further language parallels are seen in India where speakers of Indo-European languages, such as Hindi, are predominately M17. Speakers of India's unrelated Dravidian languages show much lower frequencies of this marker—even when they live in close proximity to one another. These data suggest a striking relation between the spread of language and the arrival of a unique genetic lineage brought to India by migrants from the steppes.”

ANCESTORS WE KNOW OF THAT LIVED ALONG THE JOURNEY ROUTE.

Here are just samplings of a few specific individuals from our Family Tree (remember, just the one of our Grandparent's ancestors) who are from the same areas trough which our ancient ancestors journeyed. These individuals lived there and their descendants, our cousins, still live there today:

AFRICA...Adam and Eve of the Garden of Eden. Could this be the " Eurasian Adam? The African man, who lived some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago and is the common ancestor of every non-African person living today" that is mentioned in our Genetic History above? Or, if Adam and Eve existed in the real world, was it in the Middle East? Other African ancestors we know of include Osorkon I "The Libyan" Pharaoh of Egypt, Nibitou Princess of Kush and thousands more.

THE MIDDLE EAST...Abraham, Jesus of Nazareth, Noah, all the other Biblical figures, Antiochus II "Theos" King of Syria, Salma Bind Al-Sa"igh of Iraq, Andromachus General of Syria, The Prophet Muhammad and thousands more.

IRAN... Darius I 'The Great" King of Persia, Shapur II "The Great" Shah of Persia, Vishtaspa Satrap of Parthia, Arsaes 0r Arses Shah of Persia, Xerxes I "The Great" King of Persia, and thousands more.

RUSSIA... St. Vladimir or Vladimir I "The Great" of Kiev, Arlogia or Arlogis De Orkney of Russia, Olel Veshehi Great Prince & Tsar of Novgorod, Mstislas or Matislav I Grand Duke of Kiev and thousands more.

INDIA...I have identified no ancestors, from the one Grandparent, that I know lived in India so far but as we have some ancestors from China, and Mongolia such as Attila the Hun King of the Huns, no doubt we have, now unknown by name, ancestors from India too.

THE BALKANS... Alexander "The Great" King of Macedonia, Yngvi King of Turkey, Artaxias I "The Conqueror" King of Armenia, Arsaces XIII Mithridates I King of Media, Darius Arshakuni King De Media & of Parthia and thousands more.

SPAIN...Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain who sent Columbus on his journey to America, Abbad Ben Amr of Muslim Spain, Muhammad II A-Mutamid Emir of Seville, Alfonso XI Fernandez King of Castile & Leon and thousands more.

ITALY... Caius Gaius IV Julius Caesar Dictator of Rome, Mark III (of Anthony and Cleopatra) Anthony of Rome, Lothaire I Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Italy, Paepin or Pepin I Carloman King of Italy and thousands more.

FRANCE... Charlemagne King of France and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, William I "The Conqueror" King of England, Robert I or II Beauclerc 6th Duke of Normandy Louis VIII Capet "The Lion" King of France and thousands more.

THE BRITISH ISLES... Robert I "the Bruce" King of Scotland, Colius "Old King Cole" King of Britain, Alfred "The Great" First King of England, Heremon (from the Cooley Epic) 2nd Monarch of Ireland and thousands more.

NATIVE AMERICANS...Although I know of no individual listings identified as Native American from the one Grandparent, some individuals listed may have been and there may also be Native Americans among the unknown ancestors of the other three Grandparents.

Even though believed to be German Americans rather than Native Americans, the Pusch family sure qualified in at least looking like Native Americans. Fritz's and my Father looked like a Native American and my Aunt Anna and Uncle Herman could have been cast as Native Americans in any Cowboy Movie.

And...COMING TO AMERICA...Just one of our four Grandparent's ancestors include at least nine Passengers on the Mayflower and we have shared ancestors with all of the American Presidents and many other famous people.

Who knows whom the other three Grandparents ancestors included? Maybe some day we'll find out.

We know this National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's Genetic History refers to the migratory journeys of the ancestors of all four of my Grandparents

We should also remember that none of the individuals made all, or even very much of, the, journeys that are described in the report's text.

Most individuals probably lived and died within a few miles of the place they were born, and these same DNA markers survive today in many of their ancestors, in all of the places along this journey's route.

In one story, told elsewhere, a cave man's bones were discovered in his cave in rural England. Scientists extracted DNA from the cave man's bones and were able to match that old DNA to that of individuals still living today in the vicinity of his cave. His family hadn't moved much in thousands of years.

In other words, we still have many, many cousins, living today in the Middle East, India, Russia, Eastern Europe and everywhere else along the migration routes outlined in the story of that long journey.

We have cousins living today and had them in the distant past, living in all the places along the journey route in the thousands of years since our line moved beyond Africa.

These areas include the Middle East, Asia, all of the Western European countries and, now, America.

As I’ve detailed earlier, I have been able to find names of people on our tree living in areas all along the migration routes and most of the places mentioned in the Genetic History.

Remember, these individuals we know of and are now on our tree are thought (not proven) to be ancestors of just one of our Grandparents, we know we have many ancestors, and cousins, yet to identify by name, that are ancestors or the descendants of ancestors, of our other three Grandparents.

In addition, as I said before, to all these ancestors who lived, or now live, along the routes described above, we must add the millions of cousins living today, scattered throughout the whole world both descendants of our other three grandparents and descendants of those who lived along the journey described above but have since migrated to other places since the journey described by the National Geographic/IBM Project ended several thousand years ago.

Not discussed in the journey, the Genetic History also says, "the marker M45 first appeared about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago in a man who became the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native Americans.”

We today here in American then, not only now have cousins who are the descendants of immigrants to the Americas but also this Genetic History notation tells us that we also have cousins on Indian Reservations in America who are the descendants of our Indian ancestors who were already here to greet our later European immigrant ancestors when they arrived.

The Genetic History says journeys of our ancestors included countries or areas including Africa, the Middle East, Iran, Russia, India, Spain, Italy, France, and finally the British Isles.

The National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project's general migration information search continues for the next five years and I've listed the information I now have, as of 7/1/06.

Additional information about all of these ancient migrations is available from many sources on line including the video "The Journey of Man" that tells the larger story of how modern man originated in Africa over 160,000 years ago.

This video tells how Homo sapiens came to inhabit the entire globe and the role climate played.

You can trace the migration of modern man. It follows man from the cradle of civilization to the far corners of the world.

Along the way, you can read about supporting archaeological evidence.

You can also see how changes in climate influenced migratory paths.

To see this video, go to

www.bradshawfoundation.com

A DNA SEARCH FOR UNKNOWN LIVING RELATIVES OR CLOSER ANCESTORS.

As I said earlier, I submitted a second DNA sample to FamilyTreeDNA at the University of Arizona in an attempt to find more recent ancestors or connections with other living, but now unknown to me, relatives.

I told you earlier about my Pusch, Busch, Push or Pusch FamilyTreeDNA project, which you can read about or join at

:http://www.familytreedna.com/(cxp5jqiabifpdn45ri5fl345)/public/pusch/index.aspx

There are also many other FamilyTreeDNA projects tied to other surnames listed on this site.

For example, I list over 400 BARTLETTS on this site and descendants of this BARTLETT line have participated in the Bartlett FamilyTreeDNA project. Their results are on the BARTLETT public web page, also at familytreedna.com, or you can contact Jim Bartlett at jim4bartletts@verizon.net for more information."

MY FAMILYTREEDNA 37 LOCI SAMPLE

The FamilyTreeDNA test results for a 37 loci sample, rather the just the 12 from the National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project, are:

FTDNA Haplogroup Tests
R1a-

FTDNA DYS markers

We provide the actual scientific Allele values and DYS #'s for your results unless the markers were discovered at the University of Arizona and do not have a publication schedule.

When that situation occurs we provide your results in "scores" to allow us to use the marker without compromising the discoverer until publication dates have been established.

We are pleased to report your results below:

Bruce Cooley Pusch's DNA genetic sequence. Type: Y-Chromosome Haplogroup: R1a (M17) Your STRs (Locus DYS# Alleles) are:

DYS 1 393 14, DYS 2 390 25, DYS 3 19* 16, DYS 4 391 11, DYS 5 385a 11, DYS 6 385b 14, DYS 7 426 12, DYS 8 388 12, DYS 9 439 10, DYS 10 389-1 13, DYS 11 392 11, DYS 12 389-2 31 (and/or 18, either 18 or 31 is correct), DYS 13 458 18, DYS 14 459a 9, DYS 15 459b 10, DYS 16 455 11, DYS 17 454 11, DYS 18 447 25, DYS 19 437 14, DYS 20 448 20, DYS 21 449 31, DYS 22 464a** 12, DYS 23 464b** 15, DYS 24 464c** 16, DYS 25 464d** 16, DYS 26 460 11, DYS 27 GATA H4 12, DYS 28 YCA II a 19, DYS 29 YCA II b 23, DYS 30 456 16, DYS 31 607 16, DYS 32 576 17, DYS 33 570 20, DYS 34 CDY a 36, DYS 35 CDY b 40, DYS 36 442 13, and DYS 37 438 12.

*Also known as DYS 394

**On 5/19/2003, these values were adjusted down by 1 point because of a change in Lab nomenclature.

***A value of “0” for any marker indicates that the lab reported a null value or no result for this marker. All cases of this nature are retested multiple times by the lab to confirm their accuracy. Mutations causing null values are infrequent, but are passed on to offspring just like other mutations, so related male lineages such as a father and son would likely share any null values.

I'm hoping for more specific information including matches and information about more recent specific ancestors of mine and connections with other living, but now unknown to me, relatives from the FamilyTreeDNA listing,

My records there at FamilyTreeDNA, and those of many others who’s DNA they tested, can be visited and examined at http://www.ysearch.org/

As the Y chromosome is passed from father to son, unchanged, except for a mutation about every 500 generations, I’m sure I have many matches out there among the untested.

Comparing my results to others with similar surnames should be the best way for me to find them although adoption and name changes could result in matches with surnames far from mine. In fact, these matches could be related as distantly as approximately 725 years ago (29 generations at 25 years per generation). This is a time before surnames were in common use in much of Europe. So if the matches are only distantly related, they may have different surnames than mine.

Nevertheless, most matches would share a surname so if your surname is Pusch, Busch, Push or Bush (or you know someone with that surname), please go, or have them go, to FamilyTreeDNA at:

http://www.familytreedna.com/(cxp5jqiabifpdn45ri5fl345)/public/pusch/index.aspx

There is a reduced Pusch surname project DNA test price for them there.

We may be long lost relatives.

Or, if you've already been tested and know your markers, you can compare your markers with my 37-markers shown above.

We are Very Tightly Related, if you find a 37/37 match between your test results and mine for this means we share a common male ancestor. Our relatedness would be extremely close with the common ancestor predicted, 50% of the time, in 5 generations or less and with a 90% probability within 16 generations.

We would be Tightly Related with a 36/37 match and it's most likely the mismatch will be found within DYS 576, 570, CDYa or CDYb. Very few people achieve this close level of a match.

We would be Related with a 35/37 match and our mismatch will probably be found within DYS 439 or DYS 385 A, 385 B,389-1 and 389-2, 458, 459 a, 459b, 449, 464 a-d, 576, 570, CDYa or CDYb.

We would also be related with a 34/37 match. Because of the volatility within some of the markers this is slightly tighter then being 11/12 or 23/25 on those smaller marker tests. The mismatch will most often be found within DYS 439 or DYS 385 A, 385 B,389-1 and 389-2, 458, 459 a, 459b, 449, 464 a-d. 576, 570, CDYa or CDYb.

We would be Probably Related with a 33/37 match. We probably have a mismatch at DYS 576, 570, CDYa or CDYb in our newest panel of markers. If several or many generations have passed it is likely that these two lines are related through other family members. That would require that each line had passed a mutation and one person would have experienced at least 2 mutations. The only way to confirm is to test additional family lines and find where the mutations took place. Only by testing additional family members can you find the person in between each of you...this 'in betweener' becomes essential for you to find, and without him the possibility of a match exists. If you test additional individuals you will most likely find that their DNA falls in-between the persons who are 4 apart demonstrating relatedness within this family cluster or haplotype.

We would be Only Possibly Related with a 32/37 match. As with those above, we would probably share the same surname (or a variant) with another male and this mismatch by five ‘points’ here again, if several or many generations have passed it is possible that we are related through other family members. That would require the additional testing.

Any comparison, where we found more than six differences, where the match was 31/37 or less, would mean we were Not Related unless we can find an “in-betweener’ as for determining ‘Only Possibly Related,’ above. You may be 31/37 with an individual, but 34/37 with the center of the group, and your potential relatedness to him is through the center of the group.

MORE ON THE DNA SAMPLES I SENT TO FAMILYTREEDNA AND NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/IBM PROJECT

The FamilyTreeDNA analysis of our DNA sample resulted in the same profile as The National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project with one exception. The FamilyTreeDNA value for Loci Designation DYS # 389-2 was 31 while that of the National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project was 18.

I emailed both groups to see if this difference had any significance.

As I understand their answers, they are both right and either the FamilyTreeDNA value for Loci Designation DYS # 389-2 of 31 (the total of 389-1 and 389-2’s values) or the National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project of 18 can be used.

The answer I received from FamilyTreeDNA is copied below:

NGS doesn’t match FTDNA at 389-2???

Marker 389 is a special marker because we can test it in two parts, both of
which are very useful for genealogy. The first test looks at the first part of
marker 389, and we call the marker tested 389-1.

The second test looks at the entire marker, including the first section. In order to find out the results for the second half of the marker by itself, we must subtract the result for the first half from the result of the whole marker.

There are two ways to display the result of the second test on marker 389. In both cases, the name for the marker is 389-2. The first way to display the result is by showing the result from the original test, which is the total for the entire 389 marker, including the first section. This is how Family Tree DNA displays the result.

The second way is to show the result only for the second section that is tested by subtracting the 389-1 score from the original second test score. This is how the Genographic Project displays the result.

Basically, converting between the two is easy; simply add together the two 389 values from the Genographic Project to get the 389-2 value for Family Tree DNA, or subtract the 389-1 value from 389-2 from the Family Tree DNA results in order to get the 389-2 value for the Genographic Project.

Best Regards

Bennett Greenspan
President

www.familytreedna.com

IN 2009, I EXCHANGED EMAILS WITH JOAN ABOUT MY GRANDFATHER JOHANN PUSCH’S POSSIBLE ANCESTRY AND ABOUT MY R1a DNA. JOAN DID NOT WANT HER NAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS POSTED HERE, SO I DO NOT SHOW HER SURNAME OR EMAIL ADDRESS. THE EMAIL STRING IS POSTED BELOW IN REVERSE DATE ORDER WITH THE LAST EMAILS FIRST.

THESE EMAILS ARE SEPARATED INTO TWO STRINGS WITH THOSE DEALING WITH MY DNA FIRST FOLLOWED BY THOSE DEALING WITH THE NAME PUSCH.

Re: PuschTuesday, August 25, 2009
From: pusch@comcast.net
To: (DELETED)

Good Morning Joan,

Thanks for the three emails and all the new information.

As you don't want your name and email address posted, I'll take out your email address but, as I don't know your surname anyway. leave in just the name Joan. I want to remember I was corresponding with a real person and we may correspond again one day.

I've learned a lot more about the Pusches here and now if I could just find Johann's ancestry which, because of your help, I may from the Polish Archives. I'll be happy. I wish you luck finding out more about your Pusch ancestors too. We may very well be cousins.

That switching from sleeping days to sleeping nights must be tough and I hope you get straightened around in time to have a great vacation.

Thanks once more for all this help.


Bruce

EMAILS DEALING WITH MY DNA

From: "Joan" (DELETED)
To: pusch@comcast.net
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Subject: Re: Pusch

Modern Day highest frequencies of R1a in various countries from Wiki-pedia:

Frequency
Main article: Y-DNA haplogroups by ethnic groups
R1a frequency is expressed as percentage of population samples.
Europe
N R1(xR1a1) R1a1 source
Sorbs112-63.39Behar et al. (2003)
Hungarian4513.360.0Semino et al. (2000)
Hungarian11320.420.4Tambets et al. (2004)
Poles5516.456.4Semino et al. (2000), Pericic et al. (2005)
Ukrainian502.054.0Semino et al. (2000), Pericic et al. (2005)
Belarusian30650.98Behar et al. (2003) ?- Pericic et al. (2005)
Russian1227.047.0Pericic et al. (2005)
Belarusian-46Kharkov et al. (2005)
Belarusian4110.039.0Pericic et al. (2005)
Ukrainian-44Kharkov et al. (2004) ?
Ukrainians, Rashkovo5341.5Varzari (2006) ?
Kazan Tatars38324Wells et al. (2001)
Russian, North49043Wells et al. (2001)
Latvian3415.041.0Pericic et al. (2005)
Udmurt4311.637.2Semino et al. (2000)
Pomor28036Wells et al. (2001)
Macedonians2010.035.0Semino et al. (2000)
Moldavians, Karahasan7234.7Varzari (2006)
Lithuanian38634Pericic et al. (2005)
Croatian5810.329.3Semino et al. (2000)
UK Orkney266527Wells et al. (2001)
Gagauzes, Etulia4126.8Varzari (2006)
Czech + Slovakian4535.626.7Semino et al. (2000),14
Norwegian8326.5Wells et al. (2001)
Icelander18141.423.8Pericic et al. (2005)
Norwegian8721.69Behar et al. (2003)
Moldavians, Sofia5420.4Varzari (2006)
Orcandin7166.019.7Pericic et al. (2005)
Swedish (Northern)4823.019.0Pericic et al. (2005)
Swedish11020.017.3Pericic et al. (2005)
Danish1241.716.7Pericic et al. (2005)
Mari46013.0Semino et al. (2000)
German8812.50Behar et al. (2003)
German4847.98.1Pericic et al. (2005)
Greek7627.611.8Semino et al. (2000)
Albanian5117.69.8Semino et al. (2000)
Saami248.38.3Semino et al. (2000)
Saami23922Wells et al. (2001)
UK Isle of Man62158Capelli et al. (2003)
UK Orkney121237Capelli et al. (2003) ?? 7% <> 23% *5
UK309~7Weale et al. (2002) see references
Georgian6314.37.9Semino et al. (2000)
Turkish52316.36.9Cinnioglu et al. (2004)
UK Shetland63176Capelli et al. (2003)
UK Chippenham51166Capelli et al. (2003)
UK Cornwall52256Capelli et al. (2003)
Dutch2770.43.7Semino et al. (2000)
German1650.06.2Semino et al. (2000)
Italian central/north5062.04.0Semino et al. (2000)
British~1000~4Capelli et al. (2003)
Irish22281.50.5Pericic et al. (2005)
Calabrian3732.40Semino et al. (2000)
Sardinian7722.1Semino et al. (2000)
British25720Wells et al. (2001)
Poles91311.657Kayser et al. (2005)
Germans121538.917.9Kayser et al. (2005)
Dniester-Carpathian-50.06Varzari (2006)
Gagauzes, Kongaz4812.5Varzari (2006)

(Sorbs and Poles have the highest percentages of R1a DNA, and interestingly enough to me, Sorbs are also the West Slavic group that often became Germanized. Many were deported or expelled to Germany after WWII, because they identified themselves with Germans and spoke German. Those that remained were in the eastern areas of Pomerania and identified themselves with Poland. They are now called Kashubians in Poland.

Excluding my ggg-grandmother Pusch of which I know very little, many of my ethnic Germans were most likely a combination of Kashubians that had Germanized by mixing with the other Northen Germans and Dutch that had been moving eastwards into Prussia, and what is now Polan


Joan


Here are the labels:for the DNA Map copied below

Labels:
AL Altaians
DR India, Dravidian population
ES Eskimos
GE Georgia and Armenia
GM Germany
HA Han Chinese
IB Iberian peninsula
IS Iceland
IN India, Indo-Aryan population
IT Italy
KG Kyrgyzstan
KT Kazan Tatar
KZ Kazakhstan
MA Mideast Arabs
MO Mongols
MY Malaysia
NE Nenets
NW Norwegians
PE Persians (Iran)
RU Russians
SA Saami
SC Scotland
SL Selkups
TB Tibet
TU Turks
UG Uygurs
UZ Uzbekistan

Joan

From: pusch@comcast.net
Subject: Re: Pusch
To: "Joan" (DELETED)
Date: Monday, August 24, 2009
Hi again Joan,

Sorry to keep bugging you on this but I forgot to ask a question in my last email.

What are those letters next to the circles in that map? I thought they were abbreviations for countries at first but most of them don't seem to fit with any country name I know of.

Do you know what those two letters next to some of the circles mean?

Thanks,


Bruce

Re: Pusch


From "Joan" (DELETED) On:Aug 08/25/09
To:BRUCE PUSCH

Hi Bruce!

I am taking a few days off and staying at a motel with a dear friend who is flying into town. So, I've been busy getting ready. I work nights and I am in the process of switching over to sleeping night and being awake in the day to enjoy her company.

What I've contributed to you in my emails is only general information. Distilled information from reading many articles. That particular diagram I found to be very helpful and is on Wiki-pedia. So, no special mention of me is necessary.

I like this circle patterned diagram because while we want to be able to trace the source and trek of a specific DNA mutation to obtain a look at our most distant origins, as for the more recent past, I like seeing where most people with this type of Y DNA have stayed, and settled down. This diagram seems to do tha, and it provides a border or dividing line as to where R1a is more prevalent and where R1b is more prevalent.

As far as ancestry goes......both Y DNA and MtDNA show the particular origin of your most distant male or female ancestor, (your patriarchal or matriarchal ancestor), but does not take into account the general DNA contribution of all your ancestors which contributes to your ethnicity and most of your physical characteristics.

However, that being said.......the male Pusch Y DNA in recent history is more common in Eastern Europe and among Slavs than the other Y DNA. "They" have been fighting over whether Copernicus is Polish or German for many years (he's mixed).....and scientists believe they have found a hair of his in one of his books that matches the Y DNA of the remains of a body suspected to be Copernicus. The Y DNA of the hair and the remains are both R1b leading the conclusion that he was from a German patriarchal lineage. No one can be sure if it is his hair though.

So, I believe and could be wrong...that the Y DNA of the Pusch surname is more closely associated with Slavic ancestry in recent history. And that like with many Slavs or Germans, they often married into the other group and became either Germanized or Polonized. So, Pusch is probably a German group who had as a founding paternal person, someone with a Slavic background.

The information on Ancestry.com seems to hint at that by saying Pusch is a German name that could be a derivative of a Slavic form of Peter.

I'll send you that if you cannot find it....but I will be out of touch for a few days.
Joan

From: pusch@comcast.net
To: "Joan" (DELETED)
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009
Subject: Re: Pusch

Good Morning Joan,

I was able to print out and then scan your DNA circles map into Microsoft Paint and then into a photo format so I will be able to post that in my notes too.

Now all I need is your permission to post all this. I guess I could remove all references to your name and address and post it as an "anonymous contribution" but I think some researchers would rather contact the source and their contacts could be helpful to you too.

Do I have your permission to use your name and email address or should I post it as from an "anonymous source"?

Thanks again for all this.


Bruce


From: pusch@comcast.net
To: "Joan" (DELETED)
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009
Subject: Re: Pusch

Good Morning Joan,

Thanks for all this additional Pusch information.

First, I have sent an email to ndap@archiwa.gov.pl saying

My grandfather John or Johann M. Pusch was born between 2 and 19 April 1841 in Krottoschin, East (or West?) Prussia. I have been unable to find his parents names through microfilmed birth records of the local German Lutheran church although they may be there for I found those records difficult to read.

Can you, or can you direct me to someone, who may help me gain information about John’s ancestry?

Thank You,


Bruce Pusch

I thank you for this email address and hope to get a response.

On the DNA map with split circles you just sent me, it’s very interesting, but I’m not sure I understand it.

I am in Haplogroup Rla (M17) and my ancestor’s migration map from National Geographic/IBM Genographic Project (that I have posted on my RootsWeb page) shows the line of the path of my distant ancestors from Africa to Western Europe.

This new map seems to follow this same course showing the earlier circles along the route as all black and then changing to as much as half purple (which I guess is my R1a group) and then, the farther East they travel, changing from purple to red. Is this correct? Is R1b a later, more modern, offshoot of R1a?

I would like to post this new map as notes too but the color won’t show up unless I post it as a photo. Do you have this same map as a photo file you could send me as an attachment?

You comment on the dark complexions was interesting too for apparently my Grandfather was dark as were his children. Does this mean, like the circles on the chart, our DNA is somewhat closer to all of our African heritage?

Thank you for your permission to post these two email strings to John and my RootsWeb pages.

Would you like to add your surname?

Do you have a photo of that DNA circle map?

Thanks again for all this new information. I look forward to your reply.


Bruce



Re: PS PuschSunday, August 23, 2009
From: (DELETED)
To: pusch@comcast.net

Thanks for the information about your Y DNA.

You may have seen this illustration of the comparison between frequencies of R1a vs. R1b in Europe. If not, it is an interesting way to look at where these haplogroups are today.

Since I read on ancestry.com that the surname Pusch may have derived or be associated with a Slavic pet form of Peter, it is possible that your Germans, like some of mine....were Slavic people such as Wends, Pommeranians, Kashubs, who were Germanized.

That might also explain the darker complexions for your father's family, too.

ILLUSTRATION OF THE MIGRANTION OF R1a AND R1b FROM AFRICA THROUGH ASIA TO EUROPE

(THE GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION TWO LETTER ABBREVIATIONS ARE LISTED IN AN EMAIL COPIED ABOVE)



R1a is in Purple

R1b is in Red


Joan


From: pusch@comcast.net
Subject: Re: PS Pusch
To: "Joan" (DELETED)Date:
Saturday, August 22, 2009

Hi again Joan,

All my DNA information, probably much more than you really want to know, is on my RootsWeb page at

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=pusch&id=I000001

The notes are long but the DNA information starts just a few pages into them.

I hope this helps you. If not, let me know and I'll try to come up with whatever it is you need to know.

I hope we can help each other.
Bruce

From: "Joan" (DELETED)
To: pusch@comcast.net
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009
Subject: Re: PS Pusch

What is your Y hapolgroup? H?

Just curious.

My mother was Polish, so my MtDNA is not related to my father's German side.

Joan

THE EMAIL STRING ON MY EFFORTS TO FIND MY GRANDFATHER’S MORE RECENT ANCESTORS

Ancestry.com meaningsWednesday, August 26, 2009
From: (DELETED)
To: pusch@comcast.net

While I've heard Pusch means dweller in the forest, this is the ancestry.com set of meanings:

Pusch Name Meaning and History

German (southern and eastern): possibly a variant of Busch, but probably in some instances of the same origin as Pueschel.

Pueschel

1. Variant of Peschel, from a pet form of the personal name Puscho, from a Slavic form of Peter.

2. Peschel

German (of Slavic origin): from a pet form (e.g. Czech Pešl) of the Slavic personal name Peš (see Pesch 2), common in Lower Silesia, Upper Lausitz, Saxony.

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4


Joan


Re: PuschSunday, August 23, 2009
From: (DELETED)
To: pusch@comcast.net

Hello Bruce,

I am glad you enjoyed the information. I've gleaned it from reading a lot of the history of the area and the general migrations of Germans in Eastern Europe.

When I wrote to the archives in Poland, it was necessary to write first to the main archive and they forward it to the correct district.

Polish districts have changed a lot over the years. This is the contact information for the main archive, both the address and email. You may email first and they may reply that they found information and how much it would cost.

I did my contact with them before email was an option.

Hopefully you will get someone who can understand English, but you will probably get a reply in Polish. My replies have always been in Polish. However, the genealogy records are fairly easy to understand even in Polish.

Yes, you may use anything I've said on your RootsWeb pages. I wish I had some references for you, but I was writing from the "top of my head" about so many things I've read.

Naczelna Dyrekcja Archiwów Panstwowychul.
Rakowiecka 2D02-517 WarszawaWarszawa

telefon (22) 56-54-600

email ndap@archiwa.gov.plwww http://www.archiwa.gov.pl

Good luck!

Joan

From: pusch@comcast.net
Subject: Re: Pusch
To: "Joan" (DELETED)
Date: Saturday, August 22, 2009

Good Morning Joan,

Thank you for your response.

From what I've been told, I think there were possibly two different Krotoshins one in East and one in West, Prussia.

I have gone over the Krotoshin church record microfilms that I ordered from LDS and was unable to find any Pusch references, As they were handwritten in German, it's possible there was something there that I missed for they were very hard to decipher,

I’d like to follow your suggestion to write to the Polish Archives. Do you have their address or a link to it on the Internet?

To see if I could find it I looked up Polish Archives on Google and found the addressArchiwum Panstwowe w Gdansku 80-958 Gdansk, P.O. Box 401 ul. Waly Piastowskie 5

At

http://www.gdansk.ap.gov.pl/english/kontakt/kontakt.php

Is that the correct address? If so, when I write them, do I just tell them that I’m trying to find the ancestry, or more about, my grandfather John or Johann Pusch who was born in Krottoschin, East (or West) Prussia in April 1841?

Do you know what the postage is? Or do I have to take it to the Post Office to find out?

You have much interesting information in this answer. Can I have your permission to add this email string, together with your name and email address, to my RootsWeb notes on Johann? Someone else may see it and contact you or I with more information on either Johann or you ancestor Katarzyna Pusch.

Thanks again for this new information. I look forward to your response/

Do I have the right Polish Archive Mailing address?

Is it OK to post this email string as notes to Johann's RootsWeb page?

Bruce

From: "Joan" (DELETED)

To: pusch@comcast.net

Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009

Subject: Re: Pusch

Hi Bruce,

You probably already have figured out where Krotoschin is now. Back then, it definitely was in West Prussia, and now it is in Poland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krotoszyn

All during Prussia's time, German settlers were being brought in from other parts of what is now considered Germany, and even Holland.

Frederick the Great wanted to settle the areas of Posen with more Germans to make the majority of people German, rather than Polish. After a time, the German settlers from both West Prussia and East Prussia moved into Central Poland, which was taken over by Russia during the partitions of Poland.

My Germans had moved into the Central Poland area of Dobriner Land on or near the Vistula River. They had their origins in West Prussia from the dialect they spoke.

Katarzyna Pusch was my great-great-great-grandmother, born @ 1820 or so since her husband was born in 1818. Not sure where she was born...but the records I have list them living in Osowka, sometimes spelled Ossowka. I went there in October. This branch of my family were pioneers in Central Poland around Ossowka, Bobrowniki and the nearest big city was Wloclawek although it had a different name during the German times.

Here is the record transcribed from the Polish Archives extraction: (All the names were written in their Polish or Russian form rather than the German although they themselves used their German forms).

Marriage record Fryderyka Karolina Hammermeister, daughter of Jakub Hammermeister and Katarzyna Pusch to Bartholomew Rodhe son of Bartholomew Rodhe and Elizabeth Pangrau, register number 30 from the 1858 Evangelical Lutheran Church in Osowka.

The Germans in West Prussia wanted to move there because they could make money growing and weaving textiles and sell them to the Russian market without taxes. So that is where many moved, and many others emmigrated to America.

The local Polish nobles liked the Germans at that time because they could drain the marshes and swamps and make them productive which would bring wealth to their estate due to lease money.

I think you need to write to the Polish Archives and ask for an extraction of the Pusch you believe most likely to be your ancestor.

It seems you have all the descendents and just need this vital link.

Or you could write to the parish in that area. Some records are online now for the Polish Archives, but it seems to complicated for me.

I write a letter and wait a few months and they are good about researching all the names connected with a family.


Joan

From: pusch@comcast.net
Subject: Re: Pusch
To: "Joan" (DELETED)
Date: Friday, August 21, 2009

Good Morning Joan,

Thank you for your Pusch query. Maybe we're cousins.

The furthest I've been able to get back with proof is my grandfather John or Johann Pusch who was born in Krottoschin, East (or West) Prussia in April 1841.

I have found five DNA matches so far but none have the surname Pusch or know of any in their ancestry. Probably these matches are from far back in time before surnames were even used.

All I have on Johann, including many pages of notes, is on my RootsWeb site at

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=pusch&id=I151673

If you see anything there that looks familiar or have any other ideas on where I might find his ancestry, I sure would appreciate any help.

I wish I could be of more immediate help to you but perhaps together we can make a connection that will help us both.

Thanks again for contacting me.


Bruce


From: "Joan (DELETED)
To: pusch@comcast.net
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009
Subject: Pusch

I have a Pusch ancestor on my mother's side. They were either ethnic Germans or Dutch in Central Poland near Prussia.

I am female, so that would not be testable for Pusch.

Did your Y testing reveal anything of the origins where the name came from? Dutch, German?

Just curious....


Joan


READ NO FURTHER FOR ANY MORE GENEALOGICAL INFORMATION

FROM HERE DOWN, I'VE COPIED AND PASTED IN MY PERSONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

THIS IS OF NO GENEALOGICAL INTEREST BUT IS OF INTEREST TO ME AND PERHAPS TO A FEW OF MY FRIENDS AND RELATIVES.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BRUCE PUSCH

I am interested in genealogy and have done some investigation of my Mother’s Cooley and Father’s Pusch family lines. In my efforts, I found my half brother Walter Pusch 65 years after he had been separated from my brother Fritz and me.

Mother was Walter’s stepmother and they didn’t get along. Walter had to leave our home when he was only 16. He had to leave just shortly after I was born for he was just 16 years older than I am. Walter, after living on his own and finishing school, moved to Texas and lived for many years in San Antonio. He then lived in Houston, Texas until he died on May14 2000.

Walter wrote an autobiography he titled, “Eh? So What!” that my brother Fritz and I both found interesting. His efforts inspired me to write this autobiography.

Walter’s autobiography runs 160 pages and I’m in the process of scanning it and adding it to his WALTER (NOTES) PUSCH page as NOTES to his page on my RootsWeb site.

I don’t expect this autobiography to be of general interest to others but it may be helpful to relatives who wish to know more about the times I lived in and the light my story throws on the lives of other family members such as on the live of my wife Jean and my brother Fritz.

When I sent the first pages of this autobiography to Fritz for his additions or corrections he said, “I think what you have done on the autobiography is fine but you skip around a bit and strangers (my kids) may have a tough time following it.”

Jean agrees. She too says this autobiography skips around too much.

I guess what they both say is true.

In my defense, I can only say that if I were writing this utobiography for publication, I would fill in the blanks in my memory with enough fictional transitional material to make a more readable narrative. What I’m trying to do here, however, is put down as accurately as I can my memories and nothing else. I do try to put these memories in chronological order as best I can but that’s about all that I can do short of adding fiction.

For the first 22 years of my life, years 1928 through 1950, I have no written records but only my memories, some photographs and the additions given me by Fritz and Walter when they read my first draft.

For my ages 23 through 25, my Army years 1950 through 1953, I have, in addition to memories and photographs, all my letters home. Mother saved them all. In re-reading all these letters, I see they are heavy with references to the last letters from Fritz and Mom, thanks for gifts and detailed descriptions of what I’d been eating. This leaves my memory as the main source for these years too.

From 1956 to the present, in addition to my memory, I also have financial records. I know all of my salary amounts to the penny and even how much I spent on each month’s utility bills. In going through these records, I find myself remembering and listing houses and cars bought and sold and trips taken, for these are the sorts of things showing in financial records. As in previous years, however, I have only my memories for all of the most significant or really important events that took place during my lifetime.

So, if reading an account, which switches around in time, lacks connecting narrative, lacks objectivity, and is written unprofessionally will bother you,

STOP READING RIGHT HERE!

I hope the few that ever do take the time to read this account any further than this can make sense of it as it’s written, if not, I’m sorry.

I was born on July 11, 1928 in St. Paul, Minnesota in the Northern Pacific Hospital. This hospital was operated for the employees of the Northern Pacific Railway by whom my father, Friederick Wilhelm Pusch, was employed as a tax auditor.

My Mother, Leila Floretta Cooley, was an Assistant Superintendent of Schools in Valley City, North Dakota at the time of her marriage. She often used Forrester, her Mother’s maiden name, as her middle name for she apparently didn’t like her real middle name Floretta. She told us her first name, Leila, was an Arabic name that was taken from a novel popular in 1900 the year she was born.

Mother’s family traces back through the Cooley line to Ensign Benjamin Cooley who was born about 1617, place unknown, but believed to be somewhere in England, and who died on August 17,1684 in that part of Springfield, Massachusetts that became Longmeadow. Her family line also traces back through Sarah Alden, who married Elias Cooley in 1820, to John Alden of the Mayflower and Longfellow’s famous poem. Mother had many other more distant names she thought might be ancestors but we lack genealogical proof.

For example Mother believed, and I have since traced the line so I also now believe she was right, that we were descended from Robert Bruce the Scottish leader for whom I am named. There were also many Cooleys mentioned in Irish and English history going as far back as the 7th and 8th centuries and the old Irish prose epic-saga “The Cattle Raid of Cooley”. I have also traced a line back to the “Cattle Raid of Cooley” participants as well as several lines all the way back to Adam and Eve.

Through DNA testing, I also have proof of descent from a different? African “Adam” and “Eve”.

Mother was born in West Liberty, Iowa in 1899 and was 16 and living in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota when both here parents died. She moved to Valley City, North Dakota to live with family friends and attend college there. After college, she stayed in Valley City working at the Court House as Assistant Superintendent of Schools until she met and married Father.

Father’s family is harder to trace for we have found no information on his Father, Johann, other than that he was a stonemason who came to Mankato, Minnesota from somewhere in Germany or Prussia sometime before 1873. Father’s Mother was Anna Mayer. Her Father, Joseph Mayer was a liberal college student in Austria who had to leave in a hurry in the 1840s when the Hapsburgs recaptured Vienna and liberal college students, who had earlier driven them out, were verboten.

Joseph Mayer became a successful businessman in America. First he came from Austria to New York City, then to Mankato, Minnesota where he did very well during the 1862 Indian uprising by buying up fleeing settlers property and belongings. After the uprising, he resold it to returning settlers and leaving his daughter Anna married to Johann, he returned to New York City.

Father was born in Mankato, Minnesota in 1880. After graduation from High School he became a local schoolteacher. After a few years teaching, he homesteaded in North Dakota. Under the Homestead Act, you could get a quarter of a square mile of agricultural land for $200 if you built a house on it and worked it for a year or so. Dad built a sod hut, worked the land as necessary, killed wolves for the bounty and, teaching himself shorthand, worked as court reporter whenever there was a local trial. After his year, he sold the land at a profit and returned to Mankato.

Back in Mankato, he became active in a Congressional candidate’s campaign and when the candidate won, went to Washington D. C. as his secretary. He, at the same time, enrolled at Georgetown University to study law and became active in dramatics and other extra curricular activities.

With so many activities and interests in Washington DC, he overdid it, became ill, quit and went to New York to stay with his grandfather Joseph Mayer and family.

He soon recovered enough to hold two jobs. One selling Westinghouse Industrial lighting fixtures and the other International Correspondence School courses.

He was doing well financially but decided to move back to St., Paul. He bought a home, soon married and had two children Walter and Ruth. He now worked as a Tax Auditor for the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Father, Walter and the whole family were hospitalized in the terrible flu epidemic of 1918. Father, Walter and Ruth survived but his first wife, and the children’s Mother, Ella died. The three survivors moved in with Father’s Brother, Sister and Mother in the house Father had bought and for the next ten years they all lived together. Father was often away traveling for, and on, the railroad with the two children cared for by his Mother, brother and Sister.

Apparently Father met Mother on one of his auditing trips for the railroad through North Dakota. He would visit each county courthouse along the railroad line in North Dakota and Montana several times a year to check their tax records to see if that county was overtaxing the railroad. Mother’s office was in one of those courthouses in Valley City, North Dakota. Frtiz remembers Mother as having worked in the Tax Recorder’s Office, I think she was Assistant Superintendent of Schools for I remember her speaking of one of their students, the singer Peggy Lee. In any case Mother and Father met.

Although Father was by then about 30 years older than Mother, I guess they went out on dates whenever he came to Valley City. Eventually Mother drove down to St. Paul in her Model T Ford to visit him and meet his family. This was probably in 1927. We have pictures of this visit, taken at Father’s, later our, lake cottage, including pictures of Mother’s shiny black Model T car.

The lake cottage was on the St. Croix River just East of St. Paul at a point where the river becomes a mile of so wide. This river is the boundary between Minnesota and Wisconsin and this wide area is called “the lake”.

I don’t know how that first visit Mother made to St. Paul and the lake cottage went but as I said, we have the pictures taken at our lake cottage at that time that look as is everyone is having a good time.

In any case, Mother and Father decided to marry. They bought and furnished a nice two-story house at 2133 Wellesley in St. Paul. About a year later I was born. Fritz followed about a year and a half later.

I don’t remember much about my very early life except the pain when I was circumcised. I don’t even know why this was done to Fritz and me. I don’t think it had anything to do with our possible Jewish ancestry or if our parents even knew of that. I guess either Father or Mother just thought circumcision was a good thing to do.

If I had been asked at the time, I would have said, and would still say today, No!

I also remember, when I was very young, Father teaching me how to stand at the toilet and pee into it. I must have been just a toddler. I also remember him teaching me how to rake the front yard being careful to rake with the wind so the leaves didn’t blow back where I’d already raked. This would have also been good advice for peeing but I don’t remember him warning me not to pee into the wind. It was not until I got into sailing that I learned that.

Although Father was a German Lutheran and Mother an Episcopalian, I guess Mother won out and I was baptized, as an Episcopalian, at home, for Mother later showed us a ruby glass bowl that had held the “holy water”. She said she threw what was left after the baptism on a sickly maple tree in the front yard and the tree perked right up. I remember the tree as very strong and beautiful when we were growing up. We all attributed that to the “holy water”.

The “holy water” didn’t seem to help me as much as the tree for I got bronchial pneumonia when I was about four. I was back in the Northern Pacific hospital, this time in an oxygen tent. It took about six months for me to recover. This was in the days before antibiotics and I guess luck and time were the only cures. You either died or, eventually, made it. I came out of the hospital looking very emaciated. I have, ever since, been thinner and more lightly built than Fritz and I’m not sure if that’s traceable to the pneumonia or if I was always thinner.

That summer, at the lake, I was costumed as Mahatma Gandhi, who was much in the news at that time. Thin, with glasses, tanned and wrapped in a sheet, I looked much like him. I still have the picture that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the summer of, perhaps, 1933.

I also remember an Easter egg hunt in the house when I was very young and finding an egg inside a little door on the stairway that led to the bathtub plumbing.

Of course I remember hearing Mother and Father fighting and arguing about Father’s heavy drinking.

The kids I remember in town from early childhood include Mary Catherine Lennon, a Catholic girl, with whom I remember playing Doctor in the bushes in front of our house, the Towel kids whose father owned the Log Cabin Maple Syrup Company, Jimmy Wolf whose father always called us Hans and Fritz after the Katzenjammer Kids in the Comics, Howard Mothersill, Junior Dersey and many others whose names I’ve now forgotten.

I remember one of the Towel boys was a bully and one time he stuck my cap in his dog’s poop.

Speaking of neighborhood dogs, the terrier down at the end of the block chased his tail all the time. Dogs don’t do that now. Did he have fleas or what?

At the Lake, the only kids whose names I can remember is Bubsy Sinks (isn’t that a great name) and Bobby Barbeau. Bobby’s mother was a great friend of Mother’s in later years. Bobby’s father owned Brown & White Taxicab Company in St. Paul and had sort of a gangster aura. St. Paul, in those prohibition years was a gangster town home to John Dillenger and many others.

Bobby’s grandmother, from Poland, and lived at home with them. She somehow reminded me of our grandmother Anna Pusch from what little I saw of either of them. They were both small, dressed in black, quiet but when they talked, talked with strange accents.

At home, in St. Paul at 2133 Wellesley, I remember the ice, vegetable and milk men coming by the house each day with their horses and wagons. One time an itinerant photographer came by with a pony and cowboy costumes and Fritz and I had our pictures taken. I think Fritz still has those pictures.

I can also remember eating breakfasts in a built in breakfast nook in the kitchen and Fritz getting rid of the breakfast oatmeal he didn’t like by dumping it behind a radiator near the nook. Mother fed us our oatmeal out of child’s dishes with pictures on the bottom intended to lure us to empty the bowl to see the picture. When that didn’t work, she sometimes boiled pennies, to sterilize them, and buried them in the oatmeal hoping we’d finish the oatmeal to get at the pennies. In spite of all this, Fritz dumped his. Of course it was always later discovered behind the radiator and he was punished but he continued to dump it, rather than eat, it.

In those first years, Mother had help at home. Maids who also went to school but helped Mother take care of us and do other housework in exchange for their room and board. I’m sure they all more than earned their keep, especially with the trial we two must have been. One maid was Signe and she played a guitar. The one I remember especially was Doris Elision. Doris later worked at Brown & Bigelow (B&B) a local advertising specialty-manufacturing firm. But when I started working there 15 years later in 1948, she had already left. She had money, and in 1935, Father was gone and we didn’t. I remember she generously gave both Fritz and me ice skates that Christmas.

I remember when we were very small, in the early 1930s, just before Christmas time, Mother sitting in the breakfast nook with us in the early morning, looking out the dark window at the yard and exclaiming, “Oh, there’s Santa Claus.” Then, when we whirled to look, saying, “Oh, he was too fast for you. You missed him but he’s checking up on you to see if you’re being good.”

One Christmas, maybe about 1932, Frtiz and I came down Christmas morning to find Santa Claus fast asleep on the fireside bench in front of the fireplace. Fritz and I woke Santa up and, I think, gave him milk and cookies. He soon said he had to leave, for his reindeer were parked outside and he had to continue on to all the other children’s houses. Before he left, he gave us small pipes which we later practiced with outside where our frosty breath looked like smoke.

I had always thought that the Santa Claus we found that Christmas morning, was our half brother Walter. Now that we’ve found Walter again, I asked him if it was. He says it wasn’t. So who was it? Was that the real Santa Claus we saw?

As I said earlier, Walter had to leave home when he was only 16. I was an infant and Fritz still in the planning stages. Walter and Mother couldn’t get along and Mother engineered his departure. Father must have agreed to it and Walter found himself living alone at that young age. He made it but he must have felt like Hansel thrown out with Gretel by the evil stepmother.

Walter still came over very occasionally for dinner (when I talked to him about it after I found him again he called them Command Performances), so we knew him and, at least I, was sure he was that Santa Claus we found in front of the tree that one Christmas morning.

Later Walter stopped coming over and one time we visited him in a boarding house downtown. The next we heard of him he was living in Texas. When Father died in San Diego in 1958, we heard that Walter had come from Texas to make arrangements for Father’s cremation and gather his effects. I had a slide rule that I had used for years before noticing sometime in the 1960s that a W.H Pusch of San Antonio, Texas manufactured it. Later I saw his name listed in a MENSA member roster again listed him as living in San Antonio, Texas.

Then, as I said earlier, in 1997, I tracked him down in Houston and was in correspondence with him, and even visited him in Houston once, before he died in 2000.

Walter’s autobiography throws a different light on these early years particularly on the difficult relationship and eventual breakup of Mother and Father. He sees Father as the victim. Fritz and I, ending up with Mother taking care of us after the breakup, are more inclined to see Father as the cause, perhaps through an unavoidable illness, but the cause.

Mother was very difficult to deal with but Fritz and I lived with her for over 20 years so we know it was possible. In fact, I remember some very good times when the three of us were together.

Ruth, Walter’s sister, stayed at home with us for another year or so and. I guess, helped Mother to take care of us. In about 1932 she moved back in with Aunt Anna and Uncle Herman and in about 1941 married a German Lutheran minister and moved to Janesville, Wisconsin. I guess I was working in Boy Scout Camp that summer, but Fritz, Father and Uncle Herman drove to the wedding in Uncle Herman’s 1936 Ford. We (Fritz mostly) exchanged Christmas notes with Ruth for 10 of 15 years but she had basically dropped out of our lives as had Walter and as soon Father would too.

Speaking earlier of Christmases, I remember one Christmas about this time we went to Aunt Anna’s and Uncle Herman’s. I think Grandma Pusch was there too and I especially remember, Jerry their dog. I remember their house, how it was laid out, and the glassed in back porch where they kept the sack of dog biscuits for Jerry. I think I remember going with them to the German Lutheran Church service that evening perhaps it was on Christmas Eve. The service was in German and it was a very large church, all much different than the small Episcopal Church we were used to.

All during our childhood, up until we were teenagers and working, we went to our local Episcopal church every Sunday we were in town and to a country church when we were at the lake. We were alter boys, sang in the choir and were confirmed when we were twelve. I don’t know if it helped us turn out any better but I don’t think it hurt.

Fritz remembers Uncle Herman taking us to a Hardware store and buying us sets of skis. Somehow I can’t remember this but we had skis
so this must be where they came from because we sure didn’t have any money to buy them for ourselves after Mother and Father’s separation.

Father had taught us to sing German songs when we were very young and I believe that at least one time we sang them on a children’s radio program. The only song I can remember now is Oh, Tannenbaum (Oh Christmas Tree). This all took place long before World War II but if we were any good and had any prospects as German singing radio entertainers, World War II sure would have killed them. German speaking or singing was not very popular then.

Once we visited Uncle Herman’s lake cottage. I think it was a better cottage than ours at St. Croix Beach but was not on as good a lake. I remember we had bread with just bacon fat on it. We’d never had anything to eat like that before, but it tasted just like bacon. Fritz also remembers Father and Uncle Herman sharing a can of sardines. Gross! He remembers.

Of those early morning breakfasts I talked about earlier, that we ate in our breakfast nook at our Wellesley home with Mother, I remember the radio was always on tuned to a man named Clellen Card. He gave the news, weather, stock quotations, hog and grain prices, told lame jokes and recited silly poems in a put on Swedish accent.

I remember one poem was:

Birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon my window sill
Cocked his shining eye and said
I see your shaving, mug

I guess you had to be there to appreciate it.

Fritz and I wore sleepers in the winter to bed. They were like long underwear buttoned up the front with a trap door in the back and had feet sewed on them. When it was real cold, remember this was in Minnesota and many mornings were well below zero, Mother would wash them, hang them on the line outside until they froze stiff, then stand them in the corner by the stove to thaw out and hopefully dry. The sleepers looked like two little boys standing there in the corner until they thawed and fell to the floor.

In the summer time, I can remember Mom making us an afternoon snack served in the back yard at Wellesley with an upturned bushel basket as the table. All I remember of the menu was that it included fresh strawberries.

Of course most of our summers were spent at the lake. We’d pack up the car in June, Fritz and I and the dog would lay on top of all the clothes and bedding in the back seat, and we’d go out and stay until September.

A high point of the drive out was when we could first see the hazy blue hills of Wisconsin. The first person to spot the hills would call out, “I see Wisconsin.”

Lazy summer days, spent mostly on the beach with our dog and our friends.

We swam, fiddled around with, and sometimes borrowed, people’s boats or found planks to make rafts with. We explored the farms, swamps looking at frogs and birds, and walked a few miles to the town of Afton.

The summer storms at the beach were sometimes violent and the roof leaked in any rain sometimes in more places than all our pans could catch. Mother had a box of old dominos, Mah Jhong tiles and other games and parts of games she would bring out for us to play with. She called that box “Rainy Day Games.”

I also remember the sound of squirrels scampering across that leaky roof and sometimes building nests, and having babies, in our dresser drawers.

At home, in the winter, I always remember Mom doing a lot of baking. We had cookies, cinnamon bread and rolls. She even made little individual loaves of bread or little pies for each of us. I remember how we got to lick the mixing spoons and cookie batter bowls. When Mom baked a cake, we were told we had to be very quiet and walk carefully for fear we’d make the cake fall.

Not only was Mother’s cooking good but the fresh produce and other fresh food was always good. It tasted much better than what you can buy today. I guess today produce is bred tough for easy picking and sorting by machine and designed to be indestructible to survive the long shipping times. No longer is produce bred just for taste. No longer do we get to eat it the day after it’s picked.

Produce was purchased mostly from country farmer’s stands or from the daily horse drawn produce wagon that came down our street. It was fresher and, as I said, tasted much better than produce does from the supermarket today. We had a National Tea Company food store near us in town but, as I remember, in those days it was used mostly for staples like flour and meat.

Of course butter and milk came from another daily horse drawn wagon.

At the lake, a man would come by in a caged wagon with live chickens. Mother would point to the ones she wanted. The man would grab them by the head, twist and throw them to the ground (without the head). The poor chicken would run wildly around the yard without its head but soon die. Then we dipped them in very hot water to help remove the feathers, Mother would pluck, dress and, within an hour or two, fry them. Very fresh and very good.

At the lake, Mom had a large gasoline powered cook stove that she had to pump up to get the gasoline (or kerosene?) released under pressure. The resulting flame sometimes leaped feet into the air and the stove and the walls around it were black with soot. I'm sure the thing was terribly dangerous but somehow she kept it from burning down the cottage and turned out great meals on it.

In town, she had an electric stove that I suppose was “state of the art” for that time. Here again she turned out great meals.

Wonderful fried chicken and fruits and vegetables and, as I said, fresher and better tasting than anything you can get today.

The foods I remember especially, in addition to the fried chicken, oatmeal and baked goods, were the fresh peaches and tomatoes, watermelon we ate in our bathing suits and had to sit outside because we got all wet all over, rye crisp with honey on it which we also dripped badly so ate it mostly outside, and one time a dinner with a whole roast piglet. I also remember big frosty root beers with a scoop of real vanilla ice cream (ice cream tasted better then too) floating in it. Big breakfasts with grapefruit, home fried potatoes, eggs, pancakes and pork sausages, particularly at Christmas.

I also remember birthday parties where all our friends would come over and Mom would make Spanish rice and we’d have cake and ice cream.

Although we saw a great deal more of Mother than Father, I do remember Father coming home from a trip before the separation and rummaging through his Gladstone bag and coming up with a Mr. Goodbar for each of us. I guess many of my memories, at least, are connected with food. Good food.

I also remember the black and tan (ebony and?) bedroom set that Mother and Dad shared and getting into bed with them in the early morning. They also had a fold out bed on a back screened in porch that they used summer nights when it was very hot. At the lake, we all shared the same long narrow bedroom with a double bed for them (and later Mom alone) and two narrow cots for Fritz and I.

In town, Fritz remembers leaning out the windows on that second floor screen porch where they had the fold out bed and letting pea pods flutter down like helicopters (although I don’t think helicopters had even been invented yet) in any case they fluttered. I remember doing that with those propeller like seeds from the “holy water” maple tree too.

Another memory from that time involves my Mother’s efforts to teach Fritz and me manners. This was at the Wellesley house. She had us go out on the front glassed in porch dressed in our coats and hats and shut the front door after us. We were to knock on the door, tip our hats when she opened it, and say good morning.

We were absentmindedly leaning on the door when we knocked, and when she opened it, we fell in knocking her down.

We, all three, ended in a pile just inside the front door.

She was a small woman, less than five feet tall, and the two of us were already large enough, at least together, to knock her down.

I believe she gave up on at least that particular politeness lesson.

I remember as a child, particularly at the lake, liking to get up very early, before anyone else, and going outside. The grass would still be wet from dew, the sun just coming up and the morning doves crying. I still like the very early morning the best of any part of the day.

In 1933, we started school, I went alone the first year, at Groveland Park School on St. Claire and Cleveland Avenues there in St. Paul. This was our neighborhood school and less than a mile away from home.

For some reason, I can’t remember why, we switched to the further away Horace Mann School in about 1935. Maybe it had something to do with Mother and Father separating. I do remember that for the first year or so we were there, we were still living on Wellesley for we had that much longer, probably at least a two mile, walk to and from school each day. I can remember how cold it was some days and the matching heavy plaid coats and caps we wore.

I know Mother and Father (he may have been in the hospital by this time) tried to sell the Wellesley house. We used to have a clipping of the ad they ran in the paper. It was offered at something like $3,700. As this was in the depths of the depression, there were no buyers. When we last visited St. Paul in 1995, 60 years later, this same house is still there and similar ones were selling then at somewhere near $200,000.

In spite of what now seems like a ridiculously low selling price, deep in the depression they couldn’t sell it and they finally lost the house for non-payment of property taxes. Father must have lost his job by then.

We moved to a rented duplex at 1773 Randolph Street a few miles North in the direction of our new Mattocks grade school. This was the third primary school we had attended in just those few years.

Fritz remembers the move from Wellesley as traumatic, he couldn’t figure out why we were moving. Remember, he was a year and a half younger than I was. I knew why, because we had to. I’m not sure if I ever told him that, or if he ever asked me. You can live through tough times together and be as close as we were and still fail to communicate fully especially on the important things.

Father was no longer living with us but I do remember him visiting us with his sample vacuum cleaners. He was trying to make a living selling them door-to-door. It was now in the depths of the depression and the best of salesmen couldn’t have made a living selling vacuums door to door in those days. Many people didn’t have enough money for food let alone have any left for a vacuum cleaner.

Mother got us our first dog a fox terrier we named “Croix” about that time at the dog pound. I remember him on Randolph but also remember we got him in the summer for we washed him in the St. Croix River (we always called it the lake) when we first got him. He had on a rope collar, which the water shrunk. Fortunately someone told us the trouble and we were able to cut that collar off before he was injured. We named him Croix because Paul Light, a St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist who lived near us at St. Croix Beach, was having a contest in his column for a good name for his new dog.

Our entry of Croix didn’t win the contest, but we thought it was a good name for our own dog.

Although we got some help from charities and friends, Mom had to work to support us. She first worked, for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) a federal program set up by President Roosevelt to supply employment for the millions out of work in the depression. With her college education and educational work background, she was placed as a Children’s Librarian at the main St. Paul Library downtown. I think she made something like $40 a month.

In Walter’s autobiography we discovered that this same year, 1935? Walter was spending a lot of time studying in the James J. Hill Reference Library that shared a large building with the St. Paul Public Library where Mom worked. Apparently they never saw each other and had lost track of each other’s lives so never knew they were sharing the same workplace for a year or more. Maybe if they had met, they could have somehow made some amends.

In winter, in Minnesota, heating was always a priority. I think we had an automatic oil furnace on Wellesley but on Randolph, we had a big coal furnace in the basement. Fritz and I were still pretty small and father was gone, so it was up to Mother to do most of the coal shoveling. I’m sure she got upset with the chore but always tried to maintain her composure. I remember one time I was with her, in training to shovel, and after shoveling in enough to last for a few hours, she got mad and slammed the furnace door loudly shut. Then, to make up for her burst of anger, she told the furnace door, “Pardon Me”. I didn’t hear any acknowledgment from the door but her attempt to make up for that angry outburst and apology was the subject of many future reminiscences. I have sometimes been accused of being “overly polite”. Perhaps this too, is inherited.

Both Fritz and I soon learned how to shovel coal. That skill came in handy, for me at least, much later. In the winter of 1951 at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, in my first year after I was drafted into Army, I pulled coal-shoveling duty for weeks on end. I came to the Army experienced and ready to shovel.

Perhaps a year later, in 1936? we moved to an apartment at 244 South Cleveland over the Dutch Bakery. I remember the great smells of the fresh bread baking about 10:00 every morning. We’d often run down and buy a loaf so hot the butter would melt on our first slices.

This new apartment was directly across the street from the Groveland Park school, so we were back enrolled were we had started in school again. I think this school transfer is when the administrators got us mixed up and put Fritz in my grade and me in his. When they discovered their mistake and put me back in my regular grade, Fritz was doing all right in the higher grade so they left him there. From then on through high school, we were in class together.

Mom had transferred to a branch Public Library that was in a temporary building on the Groveland Park school grounds so we were living just across the street from our school and she just was across the street from her work. We were poor, and living in cramped quarters, but it was sure handy.

The quarters were so cramped and we had so much furniture and other stuff we’d moved from Wellesley to Randolph and then to here that I remember that getting into the bathtub required squeezing behind a large dresser we had sitting in the bathroom.

I remember one day Mom gave us a quarter to buy some groceries. Somehow we lost the quarter on the Groveland Park school playground. When we told her we had lost it, she was beside herself. A quarter was a lot of money. All of us spent hours looking for it but never found it.

This is probably one of the times that Fritz remembers her beating us.

My selective memory has apparently buried most of the bad things and I don’t remember any beatings but Fritz told me when I asked him to comment on this autobiography, “I remember the good times too but with heavy emphasis on punishment if I did wrong (interpretation) and certainly remember a foul mouthed Leila beating the shit out of me, or us, whenever she felt like it. In later years at Fort Snelling and up until my marriage and beyond her manner was threatening, abusive and completely unnecessary. I learned, however, my lesson, and with few exceptions never lost my cool with my kids to any degree approaching hers. Perhaps these are my feelings because I was younger. I remember times when I looked at you as the older brother to do something about her but you didn’t and I didn’t understand.”

What Fritz says here is undoubtedly true.

I’m sure she did beat us on occasion when we were younger. But somehow, I can’t remember any specific instances. I remember being cautious around her when I was little but I don’t remember ever thinking I could, or should, do anything to change her behavior. The idea of somehow protecting Fritz never crossed my mind. I saw him as an equal from as far back as I can remember. I saw us as in it (and I don’t remember ever thinking it was that bad an it) together.

The only specific instances I can remember of being beaten, the one beating on me was Frtiz. He never “beat the shit” out of me but did once knock me out in a Boy Scout boxing match.

When I got into high school, I guess I got more argumentative and (as Mother termed it) “mean”. She brought in social workers in to “cure” me but I don’t think any cure they tried ever helped.

Since then, I’ve read many “self help” books over the years and even attended group transactional analysis therapy sessions for a year or two. All to no discernible improvement in my behavior. When I get mad, all my people skills go out the window. Jean’s put up with it and is still with me but I’m sometimes not sure why.

When I grew older, I was mostly sorry for Mother rather than afraid of her. She was a financial and emotional problem for both Fritz and I though and she was thoughtless and mean (that word again, maybe it’s inherited) to Jean. The first time I brought Jean home to dinner, she served roast pork. Not exactly a Jewish favorite. She made remarks about the “Hebrews” or “Jewing someone down” and was just generally unfriendly and unhelpful. All these years later, Jean still resents the treatment she received from Mother.

Nobody ever seemed to think Fritz needed any social workers curing him for he suffered in silence. Apparently, as I now find out, the same tough treatment from her was tougher on him than on me. At least all I honestly can specifically remember are the good times.

Maybe, there’s something buried inside me that is the cause of my occasional outbursts of “meanness”. I, however, prefer to think those weaknesses are my own fault, not Mother’s.

On a brighter note, I believe it was during these years that Fritz and I developed our love of reading. We used to go up to Mom’s library pulling a sled in winter and check out a whole sled full of books. We read them all in a week or so and then would return them for another sled full.

I also remember winter at the ice skating rink next to Mom’s library with its warming shed and red-hot wood stove. Of course in the summer, there were all sorts of games on the playground. All just across the street.

Up until about 1940 when I went to Boy Scout Camp, all our summers were spent at the beach. With Mom working now, we were alone all day every workday. I remember we had a case of pop (soft drinks) and were allowed a bottle apiece each day. These we normally drank just as her car was leaving the driveway in the morning. If we got a nickel, that was spent as soon as Roudel’s General Store opened.

One time, I remember we got into Mom’s Kool cigarettes. We must have smoked several packs apiece during that day. When Mom got home, we were sick as dogs. Although Croix our dog wasn’t sick for he was smart enough not to smoke.

Anyway, Mom thought we had the flu or something and put us right to bed. She started making potato soup or some other cure all when she discovered her missing cigarettes. She got us right out of bed and put us to work for several hours pumping water and then carrying the buckets and dumping them down the privy. Make-work. And as Fritz remembers, maybe another beating.

It slowed down our smoking then but we both really became addicted in high school and didn’t get rid of the habit until, in my case, 1952 in the Army. Fritz continued to smoke until, I think, the early 90s.

We moved to 760 Mount Curve in about 1938? I’m not sure why. Maybe because it was cheaper.

It was about two miles from another elementary school, so we went back to Horace Mann again. I guess this was the fifth transfer among three elementary schools. I remember Mom arranged for us to get hot lunches at the Ford Road Inn, a tavern near the Ford Plant. Soon I, and then Fritz, was old enough to cook so then we went home for lunch.

In fact I won $25 from the company that made Dinty Moore canned meals in a contest writing them about how I fixed Dinty Moore Spaghetti and Meat Balls for our lunches.

We also did most of the grocery shopping, paying with food stamps and hauling the groceries home on our sled in the wintertime. We always used to add a box of donuts or some candy to the purchase and eat it on the way home until one of the cashiers at the store mentioned it to Mom on one of her infrequent trips to the store with us. That was the end of our donuts.

One time Mom sent us to the store with a small amount of money to get two pounds of the “cheapest” chicken parts. We came back with two pounds of necks, which surprised her. She made something, perhaps soup, with them but was much more specific about what chicken parts she wanted after that.

Another memory of Mom and shopping took place when she had purchased some ice cream and was waiting in line to pay when someone pushed ahead of her. She walked up to the offender and showing him the ice cream told him, “If I’d have wanted soup, I’d have bought Campbell’s.”

For some reason, this story stuck in our minds and may have been the reason for Fritz winning a Montgomery Ward National Refrigerator Sales Contest when he was the Store Manager at Madeira, California in the early 60s. He sold the most refrigerators of any similar sized store by giving prospective customers (those who seemed serious about shopping for a refrigerator) a pint of premium ice cream as a thank you gift for considering Wards along with the other appliance dealers downtown. When the prospective customer got outside in the central California summer sunshine there was nothing to do but go home cutting their shopping trip short and keeping them from shopping competitors stores. They couldn’t let that valuable ice cream melt and turn into soup. The next day Fritz’s salesman would call to thank them for stopping by and would, many times, be able to close a refrigerator sale.

Of course it also helped that Fritz, as Store Manager was able to OK the customer’s credit.

The following year Fritz’s old store had some problems with some of these refrigerator contracts but Fritz had already been promoted to a larger store in another town.

Our new apartment at 760 Mount Curve was at the end of a nice street in a very good residential area, but that particular apartment building had inexpensive apartments designed for the single male workers at the Ford Plant across the Ford Road. We first lived in a one-room apartment on the third floor. It had a private toilet in like a small closet, but shared a communal bath down the hall. There was always the worry when you took a bath or shower that someone would walk in on you even though you had hooked the door. There were about four showers and just one bathtub for perhaps 30 one-room apartments.

Later we moved to a bigger two-room apartment, perhaps the largest in the building, on the first floor. It had it’s own private bath. We stayed in that apartment through grade school, and high school until 1946 when, after the war, we were given a mess hall to remodel and moved to Fort Snelling.

About the same time we moved to 760 Mount Curve, 1938? Mom started working at the St. Paul Labor College downtown (still on WPA). This was where she worked not only as the librarian but also as secretary to a teacher named Hubert Humphrey. He later became Mayor of Minneapolis, a Senator, Vice President and finally a Presidential candidate. He sent Fritz a very nice letter when Mom died.

As I said, our new home was across from the Ford Plant so we tried selling magazines, Liberty and Saturday Evening Post to the workers at shift change, but we had little luck. We then got paper routes, set pins in the local bowling alley and, I remember, Fritz got a job driving a grocery truck when he was still far to young to get a drivers license. About this time, without Mom’s knowledge, we stopped going to church. There was a Sunday Morning Jewish bowling league that we set pins for and the Catholic pinsetters would tell us what the scripture lesson of the day was when they came in from their Church. When we got home about noon, Mother would sometimes ask us that Sunday’s lesson. Thanks to the Catholics, we were always prepared with the proper answer.

We then had, for the first time in our lives, some money of our own. Soon Mom found out and most of that money went into the common fund for all of our support but we always had at least a little for ourselves.

I didn’t get involved in attending church again until I got to Korea during the war there. I never missed a Sunday there and particularly enjoyed the singing. We had a great Black Chaplain in our unit and he could really make us all sound good on the hymns and get excited about the singing and even the praying.

Since then, I’ve become an agnostic again. However I’m sure I may rejoin a church if things ever get tough for me again.

Fritz and I used to walk to Horace Mann grade school from our Mount Curve apartment across large empty fields covered with clumps of wild sumac. In the winter, when the snow was deep, Fritz, who was larger and stronger than me by now, would sometimes make an X in the snow. Then we would fight and no matter whatever I did, I always got thrown in that X.

There were also areas where steep cuts down to the roads left deep drifts of snow and we would dive into these drifts just like it was water. The problem was that sometimes sumac bushes were buried in the drifts and several times I broke my glasses by sliding headfirst into tree limbs under the snow.

I generally was able to mend my plastic eyeglass frames with airplane glue and, although lumpy from glue bumps, they lasted until I outgrew them anyway. A high point of any trip downtown was stopping at the Kinney’s eyeglass store and getting them straightened. It was free and a man in a white coat would spend lots of time straightening and polishing them with something that smelled good that he spritzed on them from a fancy squeeze bottle. I really felt all cleaned up and snappy after I’d had my glasses cleaned.

Another big treat on our perhaps monthly trips downtown was stopping at Snyders Drugstore for a Chocolate Monday. That was sort of a combination Soda and Sunday and cost 10 cents.

In about 1938, we got active in the Cub Scouts. We had a Cub Pack that met at Ray Bell Films about a block from our apartment. One of the neighbors, sure we were up to no good, called the police on us one evening as we were walking over there. She thought the flagpole we were carrying to the meeting was a crowbar we intended to use to break in.

Ray Bell Films was also were Fritz and I had to first register with Social Security and get our cards. We were hired as actors in the films they made, mostly as advertising for local merchants that were shown between features at the local movie theaters. I remember being filmed at a picnic, enjoying Wonder Bread and for a safety film playing on a house under construction. I was shown falling off the house and then later with a cast on my leg supposedly the result of my playing where I should not have. I’m sure there were other parts I can’t remember now but apparently no one saw such talent, in either Fritz or I, that we were forced to leave St. Paul and poverty for Hollywood acting and riches.

The Ford Plant had large landscaped grounds and was the end of the line for both the St. Paul and Minneapolis streetcars. This gave us good transportation to school, or anywhere else, and lots of grass to play on. Kids came from all over the neighborhood to play football with us on a nice grassy area near where the streetcars turned around.

We lived on Mount Curve as we went from Horace Mann grade school to Maria Stanford Junior High and then on to Central High School. I remember we were able to ride our bikes most days to the Junior High School but had to take the streetcar when we got to high school.

I remember one teacher, Mrs. Olafson, who thought I had artistic talent and let me draw decorative seasonal pictures in colored chalk on the blackboard while everyone else was working on their regular class work. She was very nice to me but Fritz remembers her as, “a big gray/blonde lady who wore a medium blue dress, had a red face and a white mustache.”

I remember other teachers in Latin, German and one Mechanical Drawing teacher who we all picked on. He asked for a vote one time, on what to discuss to best use our time between the first closing bell, when we had to put away our drafting tools, and the final bell, when we had to leave for the next class.

The vote on what to we wished to discuss was, as I remember it, 29 votes for sex and one vote for current events.

Mom had a good sense of humor. I remember her getting a phone call one day and the caller, probably a salesman, asked for Mr. Pusch.

Mom answered that he wasn’t home.

“When will he be home?” asked the caller.

“Well, I don’t know. He left in 1935,” answered Mom.

Another time a cemetery let salesman called and wanted to sell her a cemetery lot.

“Do you discriminate against any race or religion?” asked Mom.

“No. Of course not”, answered the salesman.

“That’s great!” said Mom. “We’re Winnebago Indians and we bury our dead on platforms of poles set high above the ground. We’ve been having trouble finding a cemetery that doesn’t discriminate.”

The cemetery lot salesman hung up.

Neither Fritz nor I did particularly well in school. We got by, but as we were generally also working, we didn’t ever do much, if any, of our assigned homework. Consequently we were often behind the rest of the class. I graduated with good enough grades to get into college but that was about it.

In our early years, our work was mostly selling magazines, delivering newspapers and setting pins in a bowling alley. Later, I remember for a short time I was an usher in our local movie theater and got to wear a paper dickey with a fancy coat. Then I worked as a soda jerk and delivery boy at the local drugstore and did quite a bit of baby-sitting.

I remember Fritz got a job driving a grocery delivery truck when he was only about 14. I guess they thought he was older. Mom was driving our car one day when Fritz pulled up next to her in the truck and honked. It didn’t seem to bother her that he was breaking the law and soon he was driving our car too.

World War II started in 1941 when we were 12 and 13 and all sorts of jobs suddenly became easily available. Within another year or two we had almost full time jobs at the local Army Base, Fort Snelling.

I remember the day the War started Sunday, December 7, 1941. We were at the local movie theater for the early morning attack on Hawaii was about 3:00 in the afternoon Minnesota time. We went to the movies almost every Saturday and Sunday afternoon if we weren’t working. If we were short money for the admission, generally we could pick up enough bottles at the local “Lovers Lane” to turn in for enough deposit money to get into the movie. If not, sometimes we had enough for one admission, and that person could open an exit door to let the rest of us sneak in.

As far as the social end of high school went, by then we were working every day after school and that meant we couldn’t take part in sports or any of the other after school activities. Being poorer, and not as well dressed as many of the others, also stigmatized us. We found friends, some from our scouting activities and later from Fort Snelling and I think we were generally happy and did what we wanted to do. Maybe Fritz feels he missed out on sports, I wasn’t a good enough athlete to have done much there anyway. All in all, I think our school days were pretty good.

In 1940 the war buildup started and Mom got a job on Civil Service at Fort Snelling only about four miles away. She was off WPA and on regular Civil Service. Her job was secretary to the Commanding Officer and she even had a blue military style uniform. I remember she wore it a couple of years later to the ceremony where she had to pin on my Eagle Scout badge.

During all this time, we both continued active in the Boy Scouts. In about 1940, Mom got me a job at the St. Paul Area Council Boy Scout Camp at Balsam Lake near Amery, Wisconsin. I carried the mail and did garden work at the camp in return for a summer of camping and free board and room. I really enjoyed it. The next year, Fritz came too and over the next few years we became Councilors teaching various scouting subjects like canoeing and sailing. We also had the opportunity to progress in scouting rank. Fritz to Life rank and me to Eagle.

In that first year, when I was at camp and Fritz was home, he got to appear on the Dr. I Q Junior radio program. This was the junior version of a popular radio quiz program that featured announcers in the studio audience finding targets for the on stage Dr. I Q’s questions. The program was best known for the phrase, “I have a lady in the balcony, Doctor.” In, any case, Fritz got on it, answered a biographical question on Paul Bunyan he’d gained from his reading and won enough ”silver dimes” (not dollars like the adults got) to buy a War Bond (I guess at that time a Defense Bond). He also got his picture in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

We continued in scouting through our teens joining an honorary scouting society in St. Paul, the Pine Bend Scout Club. This club had been given telephone poles by the local phone company and also given land fronting on the Mississippi river. The telephone poles were formed into a raft and floated down the river to the land. Just like in the old lumberjack days. Then the boys built a beautiful main cabin and bunkhouse. This was all before our time. When we were members, it was mostly a matter of going down and camping for several days, doing some work like cabin upkeep, trail maintenance or tree planting but mostly playing cards or just fooling around. We’d take the streetcar to the end of the line in South St. Paul and then walk, or in season ski, the seven miles or so down to the cabins. We had great experiences and made wonderful friends.

In about 1943, Mom got us after school and weekend jobs in the Fort Snelling Post Exchange (PX) a sort of store for the soldiers that sold things like toothpaste, cigarettes, candy bars, gifts to send home and of course soft drinks and beer. We worked almost 40 hours a week during the school year and more than 40 during vacations.

The War was in full swing with most men in uniform. All the other workers in the branch PX we were assigned to, were young women. As we were the only males, we were assigned the bar, selling soft drinks and beer, even though we were only 14 and 15. We also sold potato chips and condoms (the girls didn’t want to sell those). In addition to selling, we had to keep the floor clean for the whole PX. I can remember a soldier telling me he thought they called us the Pusch boys, because we were always pushing a push broom.

During wartime, there was a special school program that allowed us to get out of high school at 2:00 if we had a war job. We’d take the streetcar to Fort Snelling and the PX and get there at maybe 3:30. We’d work until about 5:00 then be allowed to eat supper with the soldiers in the mess hall. Lots of good, heavy food. Then we’d work until 9:00 and take the streetcar, or walk the four miles, home. We’d be in bed by 10:00 but have to be up to go to school before 6:00 AM. This didn’t leave much time, or energy, for homework.

We didn’t see much of Father after that one visit to the duplex on Randolph in about 1935? with his vacuum cleaners. I think he went into the hospital (St. Peter’s Mental Hospital?) for alcoholism or as I think he told us “sleeping sickness”.

Walter remembers this period of Father’s history much more specifically. In the portion of his autobiography he entitled “Dad” he quotes from a notebook of Dad’s who writes in about 1935, “This happens to be the second anniversary into my initiation into the mysteries of Mental Hygiene. A more than ordinarily efficient tap on the head with a footstool wielded by my better two thirds resulted in my volunteering for treatment in what our Legislature kindly re-christened a “State Hospital”. Just a bit more speed and I would have joined the Russian intelligentsia in the Happy Hunting Ground or whatever Bolsheviks call that Indian heaven, and so this story would never have been written.”

Walter continues in his own voice, “The “cleaning job” had been pretty well done by 1936. A divorce action was started...Dad’s notes suggest to Leila’s (Mom’s) attorney that the complaint (was wrong in) terming him a “deserter” when he was in fact a “refugee”...the alcoholism and the growing narcolepsy demanded attention. He applied for voluntary admission to a state hospital. As he made progress, to the point where roundly 20 cups of coffee and a handful of dispensary issued Benzedrine tablets sufficed to keep him awake for about eight hours a day, he took on work assignments with the institution such as keeping records. His old enthusiasms for music manifested themselves in his organizing and directing a men’s Glee Club.

After Dad got out of the hospital, I remember him coming to see Fritz and me at the schoolyard maybe once or twice.

I think he then bought a Model A Ford, built a bed in it and drove out to California. We got postcards from him for a while. I can remember he always called mom “Schotzi” in the postcards. I think this is German for sweetheart.

I believe Mom missed father or at least the thought or remembrance of him.

In about 1944, we heard Frank Sinatra for the first time on the radio. I remember we had read that women fainted when they heard Frank sing. Fritz and I watched Mom very closely as Sinatra sang but she didn’t faint.

On New Year’s Eve we always tried to stay up until midnight for we’d heard animals can talk at midnight on New Year’s Eve and we wanted to see if our dog Croix said anything. We never made it until midnight on most New Year’s Eves and on those when we did, Croix never said anything. Maybe he just didn’t have anything to say.

Our President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in the spring of 1945 and I remember we were in school when we heard of it. Everyone, regardless of politics seemed genuinely shocked and saddened. I can’t remember if they let us our of school or not but for a week or so, no one seemed to think, or talk, of anything else.

The War ended in August 1945 with the dropping of the Atom Bomb and there was celebrating all over the world. Fritz and I went to downtown St. Paul and joined in.

We still worked at the PX, went to Central High School and lived on Mount Curve. The PX job lasted as long as it took to bring all the soldiers home. Then Fort Snelling was turned over to the Veteran’s Administration (VA) and the PX was closed.

Mom, still on Civil Service, transferred from the Army to the VA and continued working. Fritz, as soon as he graduated from High School in 1946, went to work for Montgomery Ward and I went on to college and found other work within the VA at Fort Snelling. I tended bar, waited tables, washed dishes and mopped floors in the hospital. Almost 50 years later, in 1993 when I finally retired from Civil Service, I got credit for 1 1/2 years of this VA work toward my Civil Service pension.

Even later after retirement, in 1998, I started working as a volunteer in the Information Management department at the large new VA Hospital in West Palm Beach, Florida. Among other duties, I sometimes took computer trouble calls and tried to help people with their computer problems on the phone. If I couldn’t, I sent out technicians to help them.

So I was still with the VA after 50 years but had progressed from dishwasher, at almost no money, to volunteer computer assistant at absolutely no money.

In 1946, when we graduated from St. Paul Central High School, Mom asked me to take our graduation pictures to father. He was somehow now back from California and living in St. Paul managing, and living in, an office building on University Avenue. I took the pictures over and knocked on his door.

He was pleasant and courteous, but remote. I guess I didn’t remind him of happy times. In talking, he found I needed part-time work and I worked for him for a few months as a janitor. I was going to the University of Minnesota then and I’m not sure why I left the job with him perhaps I just got a better one. I remember working at the University Library and again for the Veterans Administration both before and after that. Dad and I never got any closer. He was a good boss, but I don’t think he ever said or did anything that I considered fatherly. Of course I was probably pretty cool too. I guess I didn’t know how to act with a father.

I attended the University of Minnesota for only two years (1946-1948), this first time in college, and left with an Associates Degree. This early college career was light on study and heavy on outside work and other, to me at that time, more interesting activities.

A friend and I went out for a planned University of Minnesota 150 pound football team. It was fortunate for me they decided not to have such a team for with my poor coordination and lack of athleticism, I never would have made it. The Athletic Department did, however, suggest my friend and I become student managers of the regular (mostly 250 pound) Minnesota football team. At that time they were coached by Bernie Bierman and were quite a national powerhouse. My duties, as Mom said, were to “wring the sweat out of the jerseys.” Actually, we gathered them in baskets for the laundry. We also had other duties such as carrying the extra football along the sidelines at games, keeping track of the equipment and running whatever errands the coaches asked of us. I got to see all the games from the sidelines and do some traveling with the team.

I was also in Alpha Phi Omega a service fraternity allied with the Boy Scouts. I guess Bill Clinton was (later) also a member. He joined because they ran the student elections at Georgetown where he attended. I joined at Minnesota because I wanted the fellowship and couldn’t afford a regular fraternity.

The first summer I was in college, 1947, Mother got me a summer job at Yellowstone Park, though, I think, Mr. McCrarey Father’s old boss at the Northern Pacific. I was a Bell Hop at Lake Lodge.

I had a great time. We put on shows for the tourists every evening followed by a dance. We had our own employee dance band. On days off, we’d hitch hike to nearby towns or attractions. We went to Jackson Hole and the Grand Tetons, Cody, West Yellowstone and all over the park itself. There were as many girl employees as boys so we all had girlfriends to dance and hitchhike with on our days off with.

I, and another employee nicknamed Smokey built a beach on Lake Yellowstone and named it Puschsmokey Beach. Everyone used it and thought the beach name was an Indian name.

That following fall, when traveling with the Minnesota team to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for a football game, a stadium guard came to get me in our locker room at half time. Someone wanted to see me. I went to the door and it turned out that, in the crowd of 100,000 people, a family had spotted me working the sidelines and recognized me. It was a family that had given my girlfriend and me a ride to Cody, Wyoming the summer before. It’s a small world after all.

We were living at Fort Snelling by now in a mess hall we had remodeled. When the war ended, the Army turned over Fort Snelling to the Veteran’s Administration (VA). As I said before, Mom was working for the VA now on civil service and one of the employee benefits was the ability to live in the old, now empty, mess halls and barracks if you remodeled the interior of them at your own expense.

We took a half of a mess hall and for a few hundred dollars, made a nice, roomy two bedroom, one bath home out of it. We lived there for about three years. I don’t think we had to pay any rent or utilities, the yard work was all done for us and we had the use of all the post recreational facilities.

Fritz and I had a great social time at Fort Snelling. We had great times and made many friends. Fritz says it was a “highlight” of our youth. Among the names we remember are Bud Hook, the Chaplain’s son, Pete Jackson, Ned Smith and Betsy Clapp all children of Veteran’s Administration employees.

Fritz was doing well at Wards. He started as a stock boy in the Plumbing and Heating department, progressed to salesman and then manager. He had a car and money he wanted for anything else. He also was paying a large part of the housing and food expenses at home.

Frtiz has since said, “I’ve regretted catching up to you in grade school. I’m sure it was convenient but I think to this day (1998) I should have had that 1 1/2 to 2 years of youth before so much responsibility and in my opinion I was too young at 16 1/2 to handle it.”

I, in college, needed every bit I could earn just for tuition, books and my other basic expenses. I wasn’t contributing much, if anything, to our joint food and housing expenses. A car, which I really wanted, was out of the question as was almost anything else that cost money.

I don’t remember Mom or Fritz really pressuring me to quit school but no one was pressuring me to continue on either.

By 1948, I was sick of school and being poor. I rationalized that if I didn’t get out and get a job before all the GI bill students got out in 1950 (the War had ended in 1945 so most would have competed 4 years in 1950), there’d be so much competition that I might never get a good job.

So I picked up the two-year Associate’s degree and quit college to go to work for Brown & Bigelow (B&B) a St. Paul advertising firm.

That was the same firm that Doris Ellison, who bought us our skates when we were teenagers, had gone to work for 15 years earlier. I went there because it, and Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) were considered the best places in St. Paul to work. Fritz had gone right from high school to Montgomery Ward so when I had heard nothing soon from my B&B and 3M applications, I decided I was going to go to work at Ward’s too. I couldn’t just sit around waiting.

I was there at Ward’s undressed getting a physical when someone, Fritz I guess, called over a partition wall in their medical office and said I’d received a telephone call saying a job was open to me at B&B. I dressed, left Wards, went to B&B.

I was to return to Wards six years later when my B&B experience, and three years in the military, taught me I was better suited to retailing then straight inside office work.

I enjoyed working at B&B. I made progress working up from mail boy to Sales Correspondent. I had a good job and I could see where I could have made it a life’s career. You kept getting a little more responsibility, more money and moving back a row in this big office until you were finally in the last row at the windows, making good money and ready to retire.

There were a lot of friendly, good people there and we had many activities. One was “broomball.” This was played on a frozen lake in the wintertime with brooms and a basketball to the rules of hockey. We didn’t wear skates, just overshoes, but we had a lot of fun slipping and sliding and falling in the snow.

I also bought a car. A brand new 1949 Ford. It cost me something like $995 and was my pride and joy.

Also in 1949, we sold the lake cottage and got enough to replace our ailing 1933 Ford and buy a new 1949 Studebaker the kind you couldn’t tell the front from the back.

Fritz, Mom and I took a vacation trip in the spring of 1950 to the Black Hills, Glacier and Yellowstone. It was the first such trip we had ever taken together as a family. Going through South Dakota in that Studebaker, we heard on the radio news that South Korea had been invaded and the United States was at war again.

I knew I would be called up quickly for I had just missed the World War II draft. In fact I had tried to enlist in the Navy’s V-12 College program in 1946 but was turned down because they said I had an “overbite.” If I did, no one else ever noticed it but these desirable programs that paid your college tuition were getting very tough to get into after the war ended. I bet it was my high school grades rather than any “overbite” that kept me out of the Navy.

Anyway we continued with our vacation and had a great time. In Glacier, Fritz and I slid for miles down a long snowfield near the “Going to the Sun highway” on our moccasin covered feet. I’ll never forget that long fast ride. We partied with the young employees at the various campgrounds and, of course when we got to Yellowstone we had even more fun. Some of the young people were the same ones I’d worked with a couple of years before.

I can remember all the waitresses gathering around our table in the dining room singing to the three of us, “Yellowstone, Yellowstone grandest place in all the world I’ve ever known.”

A couple of months after I got home from the trip, in September 1950, I got my notice to appear for my draft physical.

The physical was pretty casual. The war had just started and casualties were heavy. The Army needed more men. I remember at one point they asked if you could hear. If you answered, or even looked up, you passed the hearing test.

One doctor asked me, “Is there anything wrong with you?”

I said, “I have asthma and bronchitis.”

He said, “Who told you that?”

I said, “My Mother.”

He said, “You pass.”

My friends at Brown and Bigelow Advertising where I worked, most of whom were World War II vets, threw me a big party. For some reason it included a corsage, of dead flowers. I never understood the symbolism of that, but I guess it was all in good fun.

In the Vietnam War, not many wanted to go into the service. I think if the Military drafted today, many young men would resist. In the Korean War however, most of us went willingly, some even enthusiastically. Times and attitudes have changed.

So in October 1950, many hundreds of young men came willingly down to the National Guard Armory in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota with our parents and other relatives on the appointed morning. After a moving ceremony, we were marched (we weren’t in step) to the railroad station. Here we were loaded on a long train. Neither our relatives nor we had any idea where we were going except that it would eventually be to Korea.

Up until now, everything I’ve written in this autobiography is based only on my memory. Mother, however, saved all the letters I sent home while I was in the Army and gave them to me when I got back. I have three big notebooks full of them. So much of what I write of this Army period is based on those letters as well as my memories.

My first postcard home was sent late the next day from St. Louis. It says, in part, “Here I am in St. Louis. Had a nice trip. Good food. Weather is nice here with the leaves still on the trees (remember I was coming from Minnesota where in October the leaves are all on the ground). I’ll write again when I get to camp.”

Apparently we still didn’t know where we were going. The food was cooked in a mess kitchen installed in a baggage car. We walked back and forth from our seats to this kitchen car gathering paper plates and cups full of food and carrying them back to our seats. Spilling some on the way because of the rocking train.

I don’t remember how good the food really was. I remember only the cocoa and beans from that train. All of my letters and most of my memories are upbeat even Pollyanna-ish. I was putting the best face on everything that happened. Food was also a safe subject and I found myself often talking about it in my letters home.

My next letter is from Fort Leonard Wood. That’s the camp were our train ended up. It’s just a few hundred miles west of St. Louis.

This first letter from Fort Leonard Wood says in part, “ We got in at 8:00 last night and to bed at 12:00. They got us up at 4:00 and have really kept us busy all day. We marched all over and policed the grounds, picked up leaves etc. Then they marched us about two miles down the road to a PX and I had two beers. Nothing ever tasted so good. We’re supposed to be here about five days for processing and then on to our basic training base”

The main thing I remember most about that five days at Fort Leonard Wood is the smell of coal smoke. The Army still used coal stoves for cooking and coal for heating so in those days Army Camps always smelled of coal smoke. I eventually got used to it.

Another memory that first few days in the Army is of the sort of noncom later popularized by Sergeant Bilko on TV. We green recruits were asked to contribute to funds to provide salt and pepper in the Mess Hall, very expensive padlocks were offered for sale for us to use on our footlockers and many other attempts were made to separate us from the little money we’d brought along with us.

Just a few days later I wrote, “Here I am at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. We came in about 3:00 this afternoon and they had a band and photographers and all. I’m in the 847th Field Artillery Battalion and am supposed to be here for about six months. Later on I’ll be able to have my car here and have some weekends off and can come home. The food is wonderful.”

The main thing I remember about that winter at Camp McCoy is the cold. It’s in the middle of a cranberry growing area, which is like a swamp or bog in the low areas but otherwise very steep and hilly. It’s colder than St. Paul and no matter how much coal we threw in the furnace, when it got down to 30 below; we just about froze at night. According to my letters, one night it got down to 53 below and was the coldest spot in the United States. Of course during the day, we couldn’t stay in by the fire, we had to get out with our artillery into the hills and practice firing.

Complicating our problem with the cold was the fact that this was the first winter of the Korean War, the Army had little cold weather clothing in stock and the little they had went, as it should have, to the troops in cold Korea. Because of this shortage of military clothing, we were allowed to buy civilian ski caps, scarves and gloves in town and wear them so, if we didn’t look too military, we were at least warmer.

The 847th was a reserve 155 Long Tom Battalion from Decatur, IL, which had just been called up. They’d just arrived a few weeks before we got there. Although the officers and one or two senior non-coms were World War II vets, the few other enlisted men were just as green as we were. Because they had joined up just before the unit left Decatur, they got the best non com slots but the remainder of us were assigned regular TO &E positions and we all went through basic together as a unit.

Apparently the Battalion was being brought up to strength to train and then go to Korea as a unit.

My education and work background in the advertising business didn’t seem to qualify me for any specific position in the TO & E so I was made the Battery Agent a corporal’s slot. I was assigned a Weapons Carrier and was the officer’s driver and supposedly the messenger between the Forward Observers on the hill and the guns if the radio and phones went out. Later I was also given classes such as map reading to teach to all the soldiers, reservists and draftees alike, and assigned the duties of Troop Information and Education Officer. I had to give a class and lead a discussion on current events every Saturday morning just after inspection that all the enlisted men had to attend before they could leave on a weekend pass at noon. You can imagine how popular this class was.

Because most of the reservists were just as green as we draftees were, even though they were assigned to the best slots for rank, it soon shook down to a sort of live let live situation with no one exercising much authority except for the officers and veteran non coms.

We probably didn’t have the normal basic training experience but we all worked and learned together.

We were all confused and frightened by the, new to us, Army protocols. For example, the first time we went by the Camp Headquarters together loaded in a truck there was much discussion about whether we should be saluting the flag even though seated inside the truck and if we didn’t, what our punishment would be.

A few weeks after we arrived, we received new Long Toms and spent many weeks cleaning off the cosmoline (a kind of grease) they were covered with for protection with solvent and by scraping at it with our bayonets. When the guns finally were clean and ready to fire, we began to spend most of our time in the field firing.

I’m sure we missed many of the infantry oriented things most Basic Trainees experience but we sure did learn all about the guns and the duties of an artilleryman.

The terrain at Camp McCoy is very rough with swamps in the lowlands, and very steep hills, almost mountains, scattered around it. In the winter, this was all frozen solid and covered with feet of snow. Not that far off of what Korea was except it was colder than Korea and had more snow.

As Battery Agent and driver, I would take the forward observer and his party up some precipitous hill to a forward observation post. Our Battery Executive Officer was a World War II Forward Observer who had spent most of his time as an Air Observer in a small plane but he loved to adjust artillery fire under any circumstances.

I would be trying to get up the side of some cliff, dodging rocks and trying to find a way through the trees with this gray haired 1st Lieutenant, whose civilian job was as a semi-truck driver, sitting in the passenger seat and the rest of the team hanging on tight in the back. Those Weapons Carriers are hard to shift and I’d be double clutching and grinding the gears up and down and finally the Lieutenant would break. He couldn’t stand my driving and all the gear grinding and he liked to drive almost as much as he liked to adjust artillery fire.

He would make me stop, switch seats and then he’d drive. I’ll have to admit he did a better job than I could. He also taught me to adjust artillery fire and here again, he did it much better than I.

One time, after a long day in the field, I dropped everybody off at the Orderly Room while I was heading off to the Motor Pool when the men who piled out the back forgot to fasten the strap back across the back. I forgot to check that and I had to back up to make a turn. I backed over the loose strap, which tightened and pulled all the wooden slats off the one side of the truck it was still fastened too.

I got out, looked at the pile of slats and everyone rushed out of the orderly room drawn by the terrific noise. The Lieutenant and the First Sergeant just looked at me and shook their heads.

I picked up all the slats, threw them in the truck and headed for the Motor Pool.

President Truman was just in the process of desegregating the Army and I had been raised without ever really knowing any black people. There were a few blacks with us at Fort Leonard Wood but the 847th was lily white.

A still segregated black unit occupied a block of barracks near us and they were really gung ho. When they marched by it was a sight to see. They had imaginative and lively cadence chants they used when marching. One of their chants I remember was, “I don’t know but I’ve been told.” This was sung out by the drill sergeant and then repeated by the marchers. Then, “If I should die in a combat zone”. Again, sung out and repeated. “They’ll box my ass and ship me home.”

I’m sorry to say that when we marched we had little to say and slouched along more like civilians. We couldn’t march but we did begin to get pretty good with the guns.

This black unit was so gung ho that several of them broke bones jumping from their 2nd floor barracks balcony in efforts to prepare to become paratroopers.

All our vehicles were parked in long lines in a vehicle park. The black unit’s vehicles were in the park adjoinng ours both fairly near our barracks. One bitterly cold nights we’d hears their guards sing out, “Corporal of the Guard, my feets cold” in the hope someone would be sent out to relieve them.

When it came my turn to serve as a vehicle park guard for our vehicles one night I vowed to myself I would not cry out. After half an hour or so walking alone in the cold wind and dark, I understood what they were crying out about. I decided to get inside the back of an ambulance and sit there awhile. It would at least cut out the wind. I sat there for 10 minutes or so very nervous for I was afraid that the Officer of the Day or the Sergeant of the Guard on an inspection tour would find me and for all I knew, have me shot.

I got out to resume my rounds walking and almost immediately turned a corner and almost ran into the Officer of the Day who it turned out was that same 1st Lieutenant I drove, or rode with, in the field. I was so startled and nervous I almost dropped my rifle. He asked me how things were going and somehow all I could answer was “Okey Dokey”. As you can imagine, this went over like a lead balloon.

As you remember, I told the doctor at the physical I had bronchitis and asthma. He disagreed but whatever I had made me a very deep and very noisy sleeper and often bothered my barracks mates. One morning I awoke to find my bed and I had been carried into the latrine, another time outside and it was sitting in a snow bank. Later, in OCS, one morning I found paper with Chinese writing on it under my bunk, someone had set off fire crackers under me.

With all this, no one ever seemed to carry a real grudge about it. They all seemed to forget about it the next morning. At least until that next night.

I was able to bring my car up to the Camp and spent many weekends at home. Camp McCoy is only about 150 miles from St. Paul.

I remember one time we had some sort of high level inspection that required we send trucks full of excess equipment from the Supply Room out to park in the woods. Many of the men in my barracks trying to avoid problems in the inspection also asked to temporarily put some things in my car. I ended up with so much stuff in my car I cracked a window.

When the Basic Training time period at last was completed, it was found the Battalion wouldn’t be going anywhere soon and would, in fact, train at least one more set of recruits. Most of the men I had arrived with were then transferred to Germany. We all got the shots for Europe including the Black Plague and I remember one weekend the whole barracks was down with something. We all recovered though.

I had signed up for Officer’s Candidate School (OCS) and a few weeks after basic training was transferred to Post Special Services while I waited for my orders for OCS to come through. As it was summer by now, and as my background included all the Red Cross swimming and lifesaving courses when I was on the staff at a Boy Scout Camp, I was made a Lifeguard at the Officer’s Club Pool and raised to the rank of Corporal. My main duty was to teach swimming to the Officer’s wives and children. Pretty good duty.

I was told that if I didn’t want to go to OCS, when winter came and the pool closed, I could be the Theater non-com and supervise the movie theater maintenance.

One hot afternoon at the pool, my 1st Lieutenant showed up alone driving the Weapons Carrier. He had come in from the field, was dusty and hot and had the orders for me to go on to OCS.

He looked at me, and the pool, and the officer’s wives and said, “Let me give you a piece of advice. Don’t go. They’ll kill you there and you’ve got it made here.”

I went home that weekend and thought about it. I came to the conclusion that if I stayed in Special Services for three years, I probably wouldn’t be worth anything. I thought I’d better go on to OCS.

Before I could attend OCS, I had to graduate from Enlisted Leadership School, so in the fall of 1951 I was sent back to Fort Leonard Wood to attend that. This school was interesting for me for having missed much of the regular Basic Training; many of the basics reviewed here were new to me. I particularly remember one exercise where we were supposed to be a patrol behind enemy lines and one of us was secretly instructed beforehand to “go crazy” so we’d have to somehow shut him up or he’d give away our position. We discussed killing him but settled for gagging him and tying his hands up.

Mom and Fritz visited me there at Fort Leonard Wood and in one of my letters I tell them of the nice cabin I’ve rented for them at a cost of $7.14 a night. I say that I don’t think that’s too bad a price.

Just about this time, Mother and Fritz moved from Fort Snelling to a nice new apartment in St. Paul. I can’t remember the reason they moved, perhaps everyone had to leave Fort Snelling. The area where we used to live is now part of the Minneapolis/St. Paul International airport.

After I graduated from Leadership School at Fort Leonard Wood, I was promoted to Sergeant and after a short time as an instructor at the school, I got my orders for OCS at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and a 30 day leave to go home.

My first letter from OCS tells the story, “Dear Folks, Well I really got into something this time. I’ve never seen anything like it. They make it just as hard as they can, but I am going to make it, if I go screwy in the attempt. My main worries are PT and Leadership. Two important things and two of my weaknesses.”

OCS lasted five months but I had my car and got to drive home a couple of times on leave and my family came down for my graduation.

I had no problems with the class work but was put on probation once for my poor “command voice”. After a week or so of shouting into my duffle bag (to avoid disturbing my barks mates too much), I was pronounce much improved.

The one OCS exercise I disliked the most and never could figure out the positive reason for was a requirement to grade each of our classmates and rank them including ourselves. Who was best, who was worst?

It was very difficult to come up with the worst. I didn’t have anyone I thought was really worthy of the distinction of worst. I guess the idea was to see how your rankings compared with everyone else’s. But what would that prove? I’m not sure how I solved it. I’ve blanked that one out of my mind.

After graduation from OCS on April 22, 1952, I was assigned as a brand new 2nd Lieutenant to the school troops there at Fort Sill. We worked to help train the later classes of OCS candidates, ROTC summer camp students and students at all the other artillery schools.

I can’t remember the Battalion number but we had self propelled 105 Artillery and were staffed mostly by returned Korean War veterans. We were very short staffed and most firing was done with just one or two of our guns in position, one officer, sometimes me, and a very few enlisted men.

We used nowhere near the number of men it should normally take to run such missions. This was OK for we knew what we were doing and no one normally saw us to criticize it. The classes we were firing for were a long way forward just looking at the explosions from the rounds we fired and trying to send us commands by radio or telephone that would bring those explosions closer to a target. I’m sure if the students and instructors could have seen how loosely we followed the standard operating procedures and with how few people we were operating; the class instructors would have had many difficult questions to answer. We sure weren’t following proper procedures but this is the way many of these men had had to operate many times in the early fighting in Korea. To them it was routine.

I was good to remember that a mil is a yard at a thousand yards when you’re operating without a Fire Direction Center. If you move the gun settings a mill in any direction, this should move the shell impact point a yard, for every thousand yards of distance to the impact point, in the same direction. You also have to remember where you are, where the class is and where the target is. You also have to know the distances and directions but with that you’re OK.

Later I was assigned as a Battery Commander for a group of ROTC students from Texas A &M during their summer training there at Fort Sill. My duties as Battery Commander were limited to the support functions such as supervising the Supply Room and Mess Hall, signing for all the property and supervising the supporting enlisted men. I had little actual contact with the students except for instances like a near riot in the Mess Hall because they didn’t think they were getting enough milk. I got an urgent call from my Mess Sergeant and I had to go to the Mess Hall, get up on a table and explain to these hundreds of future officers that the officers and enlisted soldiers at Fort Sill, and everywhere else in the Army, were getting much less milk than they were. The Army, apparently for public relations or recruiting reasons, was already giving them an extra ration of milk.

About this time Fritz and Mom bought a brand new house at 1111 Colette Place in St. Paul. It was a big move and involved taking out a $7,500 loan. With all three of us working at good wages, it didn’t seem too big an obligation. After living in the converted mess hall at Fort Snelling the apartment had seemed far too small. Also this was the start of the big building boom after World War II so there were lots of houses going up at relatively inexpensive prices.

I wrote and asked, what color is this house? What architectural style? Is the street paved in front? I suggested they have the title searched and make sure we had all rights to the property. I wrote, “Please go through with this deal as soon as possible but not so fast as to rush anything. I look forward to our first meal in that new kitchen.”

During all the time I was in the service, Fritz, while working full time, was also in the Army Reserves. He wrote me about his experiences at drill and in summer camp. He went to Fort Lee, Virginia for summer camp and ended up in just a few years as First Sergeant of his unit with the rank of Master Sergeant. Most First Sergeants have to spend many years to attain that rank and position.

On my 24th birthday in 1952, I wrote home from Fort Sill, “I sure have been lucky. All my life things have worked out right for me. I got drafted into the army and then I find I like it. I’ll be glad to get out for I’m sure I’ll like whatever I do. I’ve had a fine past and look forward to a better future.”

As of 2007, when I’m writing this autobiography, it seems to me that I have been lucky enough to actually have had the better future that I was only able to look forward to and hope for back there in 1952.

I got my orders to go to Korea in September of 1952 and had another 30 day leave at home. This leave was at the peak of the 1952 Presidential Campaign and I took an active interest.

I’m not sure how I became a “bleeding heart liberal” but I’ve felt the way I do on political subjects since at least high school. I remember my father voting for Alf Landon and any other Republican who ran. Although my mother always voted for FDR, I think she voted for Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson that year. After all, Eisenhower said he promised he had a “Secret Plan” to quickly end the war in Korea and she had two sons at risk.

Other than for that reason, I couldn’t fathom how any sane person could do what a majority of Americans ended up doing that year, voting for Eisenhower.

My first presidential vote was that fall and was for Stevenson.

As I said, I was home on leave from the Army before I left for Korea. I went to see Harry Truman speak when he came to St. Paul to campaign for Stevenson. Truman was on a platform in front of the St. Paul courthouse and leaning out the windows up above him were old white haired men, members of the House Republican “Truth Squad”, who followed Truman from town to town trying to make sure he told the “truth”.

In any case all those old Republicans are now long forgotten and most historians consider Truman, to have been one of our better Presidents. I have never heard of Eisenhower or his Vice President Richard Nixon being ranked very highly by any serious scholar.

Later, on my flight to Korea, I heard that Eisenhower had won. I couldn’t believe it. How could even halfway intelligent people prefer him to Stevenson? When I got to Korea, everything I heard and saw only deepened my belief that not only didn’t Eisenhower have the “Secret Plan”, the solution he claimed in the campaign, but that he knew himself, all along, that he really didn’t have a clue about how to stop the war. Saying he did got him elected however.

Ike’s son, David Eisenhower, was our 3rd Infantry Division G-2 (Intelligence Officer) and I saw him several times. I’ve also since read several of his books. I think David was a fine, intelligent man. So may have been Ike but he sure took bad advice and told lies like in his “Solution for Korea” campaign promises and during the U-2 incident.

In early November, we were flown toward Korea in a military transport plane via Hawaii and Wake Island. The Army thought they needed us over there in a hurry.

Sitting on that cold metal airplane floor for three days left me with a prostate infection and bad groin pain. When I got to Camp Drake, near Tokyo, I went on sick call and was told to report each morning at 8:00 for a shot.

At 8:00 the next morning, it turned out there was a long line for similar shots, mostly enlisted men, mostly for VD. When the enlisted men asked me what I was getting a shot for, I said a prostate infection. This was a source of much humor. “Yeah sure, Lieutenant, that’s what I’m here for too, a prostate infection.”

In any case, I got cured.

On my first day into Tokyo, I was given a Japanese phrase book that they had prepared for the invasion of Japan. Thankfully that invasion never had to take place but the Army still wanted to use up all of the old phrase books.

This was in the fall of 1952, not that long after World War II, and most of the Japanese, even in the stores, hadn’t yet learned to speak English. We tried to use the phrase books to communicate but the phrase books were heavy on such phrases as, “Help, I am wounded.” Which weren’t much help

When we couldn’t find what we needed in the phrase book we started trying to use sign language and pidgin English to communicate.

In the very fancy Imperial Hotel, designed before the war by Frank Lloyd Wright, in one of the shops in their expensive shopping arcade, I saw a beautiful Japanese salesgirl dressed in an elaborate traditional kimono.

I approached her and said something like, “Where go eat, chop, chop?” Making eating gestures.

She smiled and said, “There are several fine restaurants here in the hotel, follow me I’ll show them to you.”

It turned out she was a recent graduate of the University of Washington.

Well, so much for my linguistic efforts. I would have plenty of practice and chances to do better later on.

I stayed in Japan a total of about three weeks that first time. It turned out, after flying us over in a rush, there was not now the urgent need for new Artillery Officers in Korea that the Army had, a few weeks earlier, anticipated. Maybe they didn’t lose as many Artillery 2nd Lieutenants during those few weeks as they thought they would.

After about three days in Tokyo, I was sent to attend a two-week Chemical, Biological, Radiological (CBR) school about 300 miles south of Tokyo near Gifu. The train ride down was right along the coast and by Mount Fujiyama an extremely beautiful and scenic trip.

At the school, we all rented bicycles for $1.50 a week and spent much of our off class time pedaling all over the beautiful countryside. When, two weeks later, we graduated from the school, we took a train further south, through the wreckage of Hiroshima, to Sasebo, a Naval base, for three days, mostly spent drinking and dancing, and then took a troopship to Pusan, Korea.

On December 11, 1952, I wrote from Pusan that I was waiting for a train to Inchon and my permanent assignment. I said when we had arrived in the Pusan harbor that morning, we were met by a band playing “If We Knew You Were Coming We’d Have Baked A Cake.” and “Too Young.”

I reported to the 9th Field Artillery Battalion, (155 mm Howitzers), 3rd Infantry Division in the line near Chorwon, perhaps 100 miles Northeast of Seoul, on the 15th of December 1952.

I was lucky to get assigned to the 9th. I guess it was my good efficiency report from Fort Sill.

When the 3rd Division Artillery Commanding General greeted all of us replacements back behind the lines, he shook my hand and welcomed me to the 3rd Division, he said he was sending me to an outfit where I would feel at home. The 9th was not only heavy artillery, and thus supposedly safer than light artillery to serve in, but this unit also had many Minnesota officers.

On December 22nd from my new unit I wrote, “I sure have been lucky. I was just thinking today, everything I’ve ever done has, in the long run, come out swell. That goes not only for me personally, but for our family as a group.”

On Christmas I wrote, “I’m acting Battalion Communications Office (a Captain’s slot) and have many other subordinate duties. For example, I took charge of our, here before defunct, shower unit and, after scrounging some parts from a Quartermaster unit in the rear, got it working. So, we all had a hot shower today. We also had a big Turkey dinner and there were Church services. This Christmas was one I’m sure I’ll always remember. All of the Christmas carols we heard over the radio were in Japanese or Japanese accented English.”

I served until March of 1953 there in the Battalion Headquarters but found I had a problem with the Headquarters Battery Commander. He was a career army enlisted communications sergeant who had been commissioned during the Korean emergency and he wanted that Communications Officer slot I was now filling.

It would help him to have Battalion Communications Officer experience on his record when he reverted back to communications sergeant after the war. As Headquarters Battery Commander, all the enlisted men who I supervised as a staff Communications Officer actually were assigned to and commanded by, him. With his long communications background it wasn’t hard for him to point out to these men much of the specific technical communication knowledge that I lacked in comparison to him. His putting me down behind my back made it very difficult for me to do my job properly.

In addition, being a staff officer and “that close to the flagpole” was difficult for a lowly new 2nd. Lieutenant. I was lowest in rank on the staff, most of the other staff officers were Captains, Majors and or CO who was a Lieutenant Colonel, so I was given every unpleasant duty or assignment that came up. In addition, I was so outranked that I was generally somehow found responsible, or at least chewed out for, any little thing that went wrong anywhere.

I soon found my “cushy” Battalion Headquarters Captain’s job assignment, at least under these circumstances, was not a blessing but a curse.

I didn’t go in to this in my letters home for based on the news they heard on TV they were sure I was probably flirting with death every day and it would be even worse for me if went further forward in the normal new 2nd Lieutenants job of Forward Observer.

In any case, I volunteered for Forward Observer. I transferred to A Battery, a firing Battery, (Richard Bonham an OCS classmate, was already there) and went forward for several months’ duty at various observation posts. I was never happier. I was alone on these posts with 4 or 5 enlisted men, we got along swell and we all felt we were making some small contribution to the war. We were lucky and had very few really difficult times.

I spent all the rest of my time in Korea as Forward Observer, then Reconnaissance Officer and, at times, acting in other Battery officer’s jobs, When it was all over, I was promoted to 1st Lieutenant and awarded the Bronze Star which is the Army’s way of saying, “Good Job, Well Done”.

Among my memories of my times as a Forward Observer are that I remember a burly black Sgt. Harper on my team who was always upbeat and who liked to sing, “How much is that Doggie in the Window” a popular song of those days that he sang very well. I also remember that I was often criticized by my team for having so many of their canteen cups filled with Jello, Mrs. Grass’s noodle soup or some other concoction that it was hard for them to find a cup to use for a drink.

I was also unpopular for once signing for five cases of C rations when we took over an observation post from another, in that case a Marine Corps, team without checking the contents closely enough. We had to all eat beans three times a day for about a week for the previous team had stripped out all the Chicken and Vegetables and other more tasty rations and replaced them with beans.

I was sometimes called “Cousin Weak Eyes” after the comic strip L’l Abner character of that name by many in the Infantry units we supported for I was one of the few Forward Observers anyone had ever seen who wore glasses.

We worked hard to train a Turkish Infantry liaison officer, who had very limited English, to make some unprintable comments in English to our Colonel when he visited us. The Turk was somewhat taken aback with the Colonel’s negative response to his comments.

A continuing problem was getting all my men to travel all the way down the trench line to the proper latrine during the cold, dark, perhaps dangerous nights. There was always the temptation to stop just outside the bunker door and we all had to try hard to fight that temptation.

We also discovered there was a direct correlation between incoming fire we experienced and visits from Headquarters.

Although my Forward Observer experience was relatively uneventful with the various 3rd Division Infantry units and the Greeks and Turks we backed, when the 3rd Infantry went into reserve right near the end of the war and the 9th was backing up the 2nd Division, the Chinese attacked and punched through the Capitol ROK division on our right flank and they fell back about five miles. This left us exposed but our 3rd Division Infantry and Artillery quickly moved in and filled the gap. Our observer team came down from the hill, back to the guns and helped the others fire day and night for about three days as the remaining Capitol ROK infantry streamed by our positions on their way to safety in the rear. I’m not sure who was doing the observing for all our firing, perhaps it was aircraft. I’m also not sure who else came back in to fill up that 20-mile hole in the line; perhaps other 3rd Infantry also came up out of reserve.

During those few days, we moved often and fired all the time.

I’m not sure who all, in addition to us, was firing at the Chinese but they stopped coming after, I heard, about 20 miles and three days of advancing. I’m sure our firing helped but it was said they probably just stopped because after the three days their infantry ran out of rice and small arms ammunition and they had no way to easily re-supply them.

So it turned out all right for two reasons:

1. Our Division acted quickly, professionally and bravely in the emergency.

2. The Chinese infantrymen, attacking with just one pocketful of bullets and another of rice and with no logistic follow-up, ran out of steam in a day or so when they ran out of bullets and rice.

The war ended in July 1953.

As I remember it, the night the war ended, I was off the hill and back with the guns then, we fired a lot of ammunition until 11:00 the time of the official cease-fire. Then they came down from Headquarters to pick up the all the firing mechanisms. The word was that we were firing so much because otherwise we’d have to shine all those shells in the morning. Maybe there really were targets, I don’t know.

The next morning both sides went forward to pick up communications wire and anything else of value before pulling back the 2,000 yards agreed upon. I was told the Chinese out across the valley from us were picking up their communications wire too. They even had a mule to carry their wire reels. Where they had been keeping those mules, I have no idea. Perhaps in a cave.

After the war ended, we had all to get back to training. I was there for about two months after the War and taught in, I guess it was, a leadership school. We set up a rifle on a stand on a hill and sat next to it and I tried to teach students how to adjust artillery fire. The rifle was adjusted according to the student’s commands to change the location of impact of the rifle rounds on the valley floor below. As I remember it, it all seemed realistic and I think the students generally got the idea how it’s done.

From what I understand of the news from Iraq and Afghanistan, now a Forward Observer just points some kind of a laser at a target and the guns and aircraft all know from that where the target is and no adjusting is even needed. I don’t know how they handle targets behind a mountain or call in air bursts. I guess you must just have to do that the old way.

Anyway, I’m glad I volunteered to switch jobs.

I came home in September. After a one-month troopship ride, we arrived in San Francisco.

All of us on the ship planned to have a big time in San Francisco, but I guess the city fathers had experience with returning troops. We, officers on buses and enlisted men on landing craft, were transported directly from the dock in San Francisco to a Mess Hall at Camp Stoneman some miles north of town. A quick bite and then back on the bus just a short distance to a troop train on a siding. The train started right up and made it’s first stop somewhere in Utah. San Francisco had no problems with us.

Several hundred men jumped off at that first stop in Utah, looking for a bar, but the rest of us continued on the train to Camp Carson, Colorado. My outgoing physical was even more perfunctory than my incoming and I was discharged and returned home in October 1953.

After I got home, I became conscious of a hearing problem that my ear doctor, a retired military doctor, said was probably caused by the continued loud noises from several years of artillery firing. Nowadays, they make the soldiers wear ear protection but in those days something like that would have been considered unmanly. After some years, I checked with the VA on it but as I had decided at Camp Carson to come right home instead of staying around there a few more days for an ear exam, I apparently forfeited any right for Government compensation or treatment for this, or any other, service related injuries.

To top it all off, there was a fire in a record storage warehouse in St. Louis some years ago and my service records, together with many thousand more, were destroyed. The only proofs I have now that I was even in the Army are my dog tags, photographs and my Army discharge papers.

Many years later, in about 2004, I did receive a zero disability (recognized as service connected but no pension) for my hearing loss. This entitles me to hearing aids and treatment which is all I need or want.

October 1953 was the end of my active duty military career although I stayed in the Reserves until the uniforms changed in about 1958. At that time the combination of having to spend several hundred dollars, I didn’t have, for new uniforms and my having to use my only vacation time for military training, caused me to resign. I’ve never regretted either my service or my decision to leave. I think I’m naturally more of a civilian than I am a soldier although I was happy and proud to be one.

I’ve re-read all my Army letters that Mom saved while I was gone and they seem to pretty accurately portray what actually happened if you make allowances for my Pollyanna-ish tendencies. Of course, I left some things out as I do with this autobiography.

I returned to live in the new house at 1111 Colette Street they’d move in to while I was gone.

It was a small two bedroom and den home but it was new and it was our

It had a full basement that Fritz and I planned to build a Recreation Room in but never did. Mom was active in American Indian charities and had piles of bags of wild rice, tiny birch bark canoes and other Indian merchandise she warehoused for them down in that basement. I also was trying to learn oil painting and had an easel set up down there but we never did fix the basement up like we planned to. I guess Fritz and I both moved away again too soon.

In any case from the use of that basement, Mom did more for the Indians than I ever did for the Art world.

I don’t know where Mom developed this interest in Indian charities, but she was always joking about “taking chances on Indian blankets” back before she was married when she had worked in North Dakota. I don’t think she was talking about buying lottery tickets.

The outside of our new house was covered with brown stained wood shingles with a turquoise painted door and shutters. After a year or so, Mom decided the brown was too dreary and wanted to paint it pink. We got pink paint at Wards and started out trying to change the brown shingles to pink. The shingles just sucked up the pink paint but remained brown. I can’t remember how many coats of paint it took, but the house finally turned pink. Our friends in the neighborhood said they’d never seen so much paint go on a house but whatever that amount was, it was exceeded by the amount of beer we drank while painting it.

In November 1953, home from Korea, I returned to work at Brown & Bigelow but found I was restless sitting at a desk all day long. In spite of the promise of a good future there, I left within a year or so to enter a Store Manager training program with Montgomery Ward.

After I trained in the Mason City Iowa Wards store and as Assistant Store Manager in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, Fritz (also a Montgomery Ward Assistant Store Manager then working in Winona, Minnesota) and I decided we wanted to transfer to stores in California. I had seen enough of the world to know Minnesota was not where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. Fritz agreed and Mom was ready to go too.

Wards promised us that if we reported in to Montgomery Ward West Coast Headquarters in Oakland, we would both be given California store assignments near each other.

We sold the house at 1111 Colette Place. Mom had retired by then. We left in an April snowstorm and drove in two cars to California. I had raffled off my 1949 Ford in Fergus Falls before I left. The winner had to wait until the Spring thaw to find out if it ran.

We reported to Ward’s in Oakland and we were told that Fritz was assigned to Pomona and I to Whittier (later of Nixon hometown fame). We had to break out maps in the parking lot to find out where these towns were and how we were to get there.

Neither of us had ever been to Los Angeles. On the way out to California, the AAA office in Salt Lake City had advised against going down and through Los Angeles on our way to Oakland. The AAA said, “If you once get on those Los Angeles freeways you’ll never get off.”

Now it looked like we had to go to Los Angeles and drive those freeways to get where we were going to work.

We got there safely, got off the freeway and within a day or two put the money from the Colette Place house on one on Wright Street in Pomona. It was a real California house, all glass, a Cliff May design, yet inexpensive. It was on the last street at the south end of Pomona overlooked by a mountain on the Diamond Bar ranch which was all open spaces for 20 miles or so almost to Whittier.

Fritz was the Assistant Store Manager of the Montgomery Ward store in downtown Pomona and I was the same in downtown Whittier.

I bought a 1953 Dodge and drove every morning through the beautiful Brea Canyon about 25 miles to Whittier. Quite often, I had to slow, or even stop, for range cattle on the road.

Both our stores were old fashioned Wards stores built in the 20s or 30s. Hard lines including plumbing, house wares, hardware and sporting goods were in the basement, Men’s Wear, Domestics, Children’s and Shoes were on the main floor. A front mezzanine held the offices, with my desk looking out over the main floor and a back mezzanine held the Women’s Fashions and the Catalog Desk. A full third floor held Furniture and Appliances. It was the same layout as stores where I’d worked in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and Mason City, Iowa. I’m sure it was the same layout as in thousands of these old Wards stores all across the country.

There was no air conditioning and the windows in my office opened right out to the street and over cars waiting for the corner stoplight. I had a choice. I could keep the windows open and choke or closed and sweat.

Our employees had voted to form a union just before I arrived and the Retail Clerks Union who wanted to represent them had hired pickets to walk in front of the store. The pickets were young women who looked like out of work showgirls. This irritated the conservative housewives of Whittier, so many of them shopped with us just to spite the pickets and the union.

Montgomery Ward Headquarters in Chicago made a deal with the union. They would recognize the union, but there would be no raises for the striking employees. When the employees found out that not only would they be getting no raises, but that their pay would now have union dues deducted from it, they were even unhappier than before the strike.

As a representative of those far off Montgomery Ward managers who had made the deal with the union, I was less than popular.

Fritz and I worked long hours, whenever the store was open, we were there. That meant almost all waking hours from Thanksgiving to New Years and everything but Sundays during the rest of the year. I used to bring my lunch in a cooler and drive up into the hills behind Whittier for a quiet hour at lunch time. The rest of the time it was work, work, work. I liked it though, I sure had what I wanted. Plenty of responsibility and plenty of interesting things to do. I also hoped that all this would someday lead to if not wealth, at least to security.

Mother had a brother, Bruce, who she had lost touch of. I guess I was named not only for Robert Bruce, the Scottish King, but also for her brother. Through our credit reporting contacts at the store I was able to track him down and get his telephone number and address in San Diego. I called him and we arranged to all go down and visit him one Sunday.

It was nice to see him. He and his wife and dog lived in a nice little house in Lemon Grove a suburb of San Diego. We had a couple of drinks and their dog joined us with ice cubes.

On our way back to Los Angeles, we stopped to look at a new Sears store that had just opened alongside the freeway in San Diego. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was so modern and up to date, it made our stores look, like what they were, old fashioned, dark and depressing. Even if we had better merchandise than Sears, it sure didn’t look better the way we had to show it.

I decided that although I liked retailing, I wanted to go with someone more progressive. When I got home I wrote to Sears and all the Los Angeles Department stores.

The most positive response I got was from the May Company in Los Angeles and so in 1956, I left Montgomery Ward to become a Christmas Toy Department Service Manager at May Company’s downtown Los Angeles department store.

My first job at Wards, two years earlier, had been as Christmas Toy Department Manager at their large St. Paul store so I was starting at May Company in a familiar position. I had hundreds of employees and what seemed to be acres of space and certainly had plenty to do.

I soon found differences between May Company and Wards some of which bothered me. For one thing, as Service Manager of the Toy Department salespeople, I was in the Operating Division of the store and had no say or input into the Merchandising. I was used to doing, or directing, the ordering, displaying, and advertising as well as just directing the salespeople, and I felt left out of important parts of the business.

For example, after Christmas, when we had heavy returns, many of them broken, I was making allowances and taking on the spot markdowns if customers would keep them as is. I thought this was better than just giving the customers full credit and throwing the toys in a bin for later markdown or to be thrown away. The customers were happier and I thought May Company should be too.

I was wrong. When what I was doing was discovered, everyone was astounded. “You can’t do that. You just take returns. You can’t take markdowns that’s up to the Merchandising people.”

After Christmas, the Toy Department reverted back to it’s normal small size and the Personnel Director, also in the Operating Division, called me down to discuss my next assignment.

I explained that I thought I should be in the Merchandising Division for that was the part of retailing I liked best.

She was shocked and immediately brought me in to see the Vice President in charge of Operating. We had a long talk and then several more long talks over the next few days.

He explained that the Operating Division really ran the store and had the most important functions. If I wanted to succeed and progress in retailing, I should stick with Operating.

I continued to say I preferred Merchandising.

Finally he got down to brass tacks. Operating was for gentiles like me. Merchandising was for Jews.

I continued to express a preference for Merchandising so finally I was sent to see Mr. Fogel, a Jew and Merchandise manager for Toys, House wares, Furniture and other similar departments.

I already knew Mr. Fogel well.

At Christmas he used to come out on the sales floor several times a day to ask me where all the sales help was. I would then take him on a tour showing him all the salespeople often the same ones twice. He would sometimes catch me at this double counting but seemed to give me begrudging credit for at least trying to show him plenty of help. Of course where I was able to show him hundreds of salespeople in those days, I’d be lucky to show him a dozen today. Times have changed.

He also seemed to have not been that upset that I had tried to keep those toy returns sold, and customers happy, through taking allowance markdowns rather than just taking all the toys back in as returns.

In any case, Mr. Fogel offered me a job as the Wilshire branch House wares Department Manager.

Unlike the downtown store Christmas Toy Department Service Manager job that I had just left, this was a merchandising job ordering and displaying the House wares Department merchandise. I would also had day to day control over the 30 or so sales and stock people although they nominally reported to a Service Manager, from the Operating Division, who was in charge of personnel for all the departments on that floor of the store.

In 1956, May Company Wilshire was the only large department store serving the west side of Los Angeles including Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Bel Aire. We had many wealthy customers and sold more higher priced merchandise than the other May Company Stores.

The May Company’s founder “Colonel” David May started out in the 1860s as a peddler selling from a pack on a donkey’s back in the mining towns of Colorado. He opened a small store in one of these towns and brought in some dresses to sell to the dance hall girls. Building on his success there, he opened a store in St. Louis. His son Tom May had expanded to Los Angeles and still lived in Beverly Hills. He was a great friend of Jack Benny and other movie people and was still active in the business at least to the degree that he visited the Wilshire store weekly.

In any case, I was glad to get the House wares Department Manager’s job. The Department did about $500,000 in sales per year. This was a large sales figure for one department in those days.

I found I had a good professional staff. In those days salesladies were on commission and really sold. My head stockman was a German Jewish refugee who had been formerly a prominent citizen of Berlin. I asked him one time if her had ever heard of the name Pusch in Germany. He hadn’t.

The only problem I found with the department was a lot of dead stock such as old, broken, out of box items, returns not claimed back to manufacturers and overstocks.

Mr. Fogel and the two downtown based House wares Buyers who were my bosses were back East on a buying trip so I had no one to ask what to do about this problem merchandise.

I went ahead on my own and transferred and shipped the heaviest of the overstocks back to our central warehouse, claimed any of the returns and damaged goods that I could back to the suppliers and emptied several counters in the back of the department to make a clearance area. Then I had big clearance signs made for those tables and started taking markdowns. In a week or so, I had cleared out about $50,000 worth of problem merchandise at a cost of about $3,000 in markdowns.

When Mr. Fogel and the buyers got back a week or so later and visited me in my new department, the stock was cleaned up and the clearance area was back to its original use but I did have the $3,000 in markdowns for someone to approve. They weren’t happy. $3,000 was a lot of markdown money then, but they approved it as by that time there was nothing else they could do.

Over the next two years or so that I managed that department, I did well, built strong relationships with both those above and below me and I count those two years as among the happiest in my working life.

To top it off, on one of my first days on the new job in that Spring of 1957, I noticed a beautiful young woman on the stairs one day who apparently worked somewhere in the store. As I passed her I said something I thought clever but she didn’t answer. I asked other employees about her and found that she was the Service Manager, in charge of all the personnel for the women’s fashion floor.

A few weeks later she was transferred to our floor as the Service Manager. I found her name was Jean and I now worked with her daily on problems concerning my salespeople. Among the problems, even though I had 30 salespeople, I always wanted more. I hated to see any potential customer anywhere near my department not immediately approached and, if possible, sold something.

If I were to be assigned more salespeople, Jean would have to approve it.

Her bosses in the Operating Division didn’t believe that more sales help was necessary for my department, but I kept arguing for more.

In working with her, I found I really liked her. She began to at least tolerate me and we started to date. I found she had a hearing problem which may have explained why she didn’t answer or was so cool to me at first. Or, it may have been that she just saw me as someone who deserved that coolness.

In any case, after several months of dating, we became engaged.

As Jean’s relatives were all back East and wouldn’t be able to attend, I tried to have the marriage performed at the Episcopal Church in Pomona.. The pastor there said the fact she was Jewish was OK. “After all that’s a long, well established religion,” he said. However, when he found out she’d been divorced that killed any chance of an Episcopal Church wedding.

We were married in the Church of Religious Science near downtown Los Angeles on June 16, 1957.

After cake and champagne at a reception at our Pomona home (Jean was limited by Mother to two guests), we drove to a rental home we had cleaned and painted in Covina about 15 miles west, toward Los Angeles, from Pomona.

We took three days off from work for a honeymoon and spent one of the days at Huntington Beach and the rest shopping and getting settled in our rented home. I had some furniture left from my apartment in Fergus Falls and Jean had a little from her apartment in Hollywood. We had very little money and I still had an obligation to continue to help support Mother, so not much buying was possible. We just more or less spread out what furniture and other belongings we had.

we lived in that rental tract home in Covina for almost a year. The three-hour a day trip to and from work each day was expensive but we had plenty of time to talk and we got to know much more about each other.

The journals I started keeping when we got married show that out of my take home pay of $310 a month and Jean’s of $150, we had rent of $85, Jean and I contributed $65 toward Mother’s support and $73 toward a May Company bill for the bed, linens, cookware and other real necessities we had to buy to start our home. With food, utilities and a $30 car payment, we found the $50-$60 in gasoline it required for the daily round trip to West Los Angeles took up most of the rest.

I had wanted to live in Covina to stay somewhere near Mother and Fritz but with Fritz, Jean and I always working and with relations with Mother frosty at best, Covina no longer seemed, even to me, like the best place for Jean and I to live. Jean had thought all along it was ridiculous to live so far from work.

In March 1958, we found a small apartment at 5726 1/2 South Fairfax in Los Angeles. It was in the Fox Hills above the Los Angeles airport and surrounded by fields empty of everything except grass and oil pumps. The rent was only $80 a month and our gasoline bills dropped to about $25. We also cut our daily travel time by about two hours.

Our income started to improve. During this year Jean was promoted to the downtown store as a Training Supervisor and I was promoted to Home Furnishings Merchandise Counselor at the Wilshire store. This was an Assistant Store Manager for Home Furnishings. We also got a $400 windfall, a bonus from the State of Minnesota for my Korean War service.

In 1959, we bought a new English Ford, an Anglia, for $1,160. Both of our old cars were pretty well worn out. We sold Jean’s 1950 Oldsmobile and kept my 1953 Dodge as a second car after spending several hundred dollars on the engine.

Our new Anglia was small, white and boxy it was something like driving around in a washing machine. But it was new. We called it “the gutless wonder”.

That Winter we took a vacation trip to Death Valley. The scenery was beautiful and we got longer than the normal times to look at the views for the Anglia was so underpowered that it heated up on any long steep hills and we had to stop and sit and wait for it to cool down. On one such wait beside the road a rattlesnake crawled out and started striking at the front tire. Fortunately the tires were thick enough to take it.

About this time Fritz married Janet (Knox). He had transferred from Wards Pomona store to their Alhambra one and Janet was working part time there while going to school.

It seemed that both Fritz and I were destined to marry someone we worked with for we were spending almost all our waking hours working.

Fritz and Janet had a beautiful wedding in Janet’s family’s Episcopal church and I got to be best man. After a honeymoon in Carmel, they set up housekeeping in Alhambra.

Mother was now alone in the house in Pomona and she started renting out the bedroom and bath, with a separate entrance, that first Fritz and I and then Fritz alone had used.

In spite of the rental income, a small Civil Service pension and $65 a month from each of us, money was tight for her. She had the house mortgage payments and taxes to pay in addition to her normal living expenses.

Based I was told, on advice she got from Hubert Humphrey, she started paying into Social Security as a self-employed worker (landlady). After a few years this also qualified her for an additional small Social Security pension.

The Pomona house was then sold and Mother moved into a small apartment in Pomona. After a year of so more there in Pomona, she moved to Leisure World, a seniors only community, in Seal Beach just south of Long Beach. She continued to live there until she died on December 5, 1966.

After our marriages, both Fritz and I were focused on our own lives and saw less and less of Mother, or each other, as all the years went by.

Later, in 1964, when Bullocks (who I worked for then) transferred me to Lakewood, only 15 miles from Seal Beach, I started to see Mother again every month or so. I would go down and have lunch with her or bring her to the store for lunch in the store’s Tea Room. She seemed to have mellowed out quite a bit but she was generally unhappy alone. In addition to losing both of us, she missed her friends in Pomona. She made friends in Leisure World but everyone was old as she missed knowing and seeing younger people. She also was having continuing trouble with her health which culminated in her death at the relatively young age of 67.

She had accomplished more than many people do with life. She had overcome first becoming an orphan at 16, then the difficulties of being a young single mother in the midst of the horrendous depression. She worked hard persevered and gave both Fritz and me at least as good a start on life as she got. She never got much thanks in life but at least I thank her now.

Fritz told me that shortly after Mother’s death he was driving alone with his then very young daughter Jennifer.

Jennifer suddenly asked, “Who shot Grandma?”

I guess growing up in the 60s with all the TV exposure, that’s the only way Jennifer knew people died.

Going all the way back to the beginning of our marriage, Jean had always been trying to save towards a down payment on a house. With all of her efforts, by the end of 1959, my journal shows the balance in my Credit Union savings account was only $17.58 and in Jean’s $483.14.

Although we were paying all our bills, we weren’t making much progress toward our home down payment goal.

In March 1960, I transferred to the downtown store as Assistant Buyer of Floor Coverings. My pay went up slightly but so did my parking and other expenses. Fritz was working out of Wards downtown Los Angeles District Office now too, so we got together at a deli or cafeteria for lunch once in a while.

Jean had transferred to the Crenshaw store, nearer our home, as the Training Director and when May Company opened a new South bay store near Redondo Beach a year or so later, she transferred there as Employment Manager. She was still very anxious to someday be able to buy a home and increased her Credit Union deduction to $70 a month in July 1960.

I was unhappy in my Assistant Floor Coverings Buyer job. I was never able to connect with my new boss. He was remote, unfriendly and delegated very little meaningful work to me.

A few months later, I found out why.

My boss, the Buyer, had originally wanted to promote one of his top salesmen, to my Assistant Buyer’s job. He wanted to build the sales in the downtown store, not train another buyer to replace himself.

His boss, the Merchandise Manager, wanted me in the job. I guess he thought I might bring something needed for the job other than salesmanship and that, with training, I might make a good buyer myself some day.

Of course Mr. Bloomberg, as the boss, won that argument, I got the job.

As I said, I didn’t find all this out until several months after I started when my boss, the Floor Coverings Buyer started working to replace me. He still wanted that other man in to build sales and he wasn’t about to train anybody that could take his own job.

I started looking elsewhere and in January 1961 went one block down the street to the other large Los Angeles department store Bullocks. I was hired as the Buyer of the Sleep Shop, mattresses, sleep sofas and similar sleep oriented furniture.

I brought home about $80 more a month but more importantly, I was pretty much my own boss again and could be measured on what I did in my own department not on what my boss thought, or said, I did in his.

I did well and found that this job, as well as my May Company House wares job and my Korean stint as Forward Observer were the three jobs that I had so far that I did the best at and enjoyed the most. I guess I was better at being my own boss than I was at being somebody else’s assistant.

One of the reasons I did well at Bullocks is that it was an unusual store coincidentally organized in such a way as to best take advantage of my strengths.

Bullocks was founded in the 1920s by P. G. Winnett, a former Men’s Wear Buyer, and John Bullock, a former Service Manager, from The Broadway another large Los Angeles department store.

They believed the Buyer was the key retailing job and that the Buyer in each department should spend at least an hour each day selling on their own department’s sales floor working with their customers in order to better understand what these customers might want. The Buyers would also supervise and hire their own sales staffs. They wanted each Buyer to think and act much like the proprietor of their own shop.

This was different than other retail organizations who tried to develop “professional” Buyers who did nothing but buy.

Bullocks system was very successful for them particularly with the upscale market segment they were trying to reach. They expanded into the wealthier suburban areas, built an even more upscale Bullocks Wilshire and purchase the I Magnin specialty chain headquartered in San Francisco.

This Bullocks emphasis on the Buyer tied right into what I wanted to do anyway. I wanted to do everything in my own little bailiwick without a lot of direction or interference from the top. My boss, the downtown Home Furnishings Merchandise Manager left me alone as long as the stock investment levels were kept in line and the sales and profit figures continued to improve.

I also discovered that I could advertise whenever I wanted to run an ad. The cost was charged to my department but as long as the profit growth more than covered the advertising costs, I was free to spend the money.

The Simmons Mattress Company salesman assigned to me also proved more than helpful. He was the son of the Simmons Company President who had been sent to Los Angeles for management training. As the company president’s son, he could get anything he wanted out of the local Simmons manufacturing plant.

I started studying all the mattress and sleep sofa ads in the Los Angeles papers. I figured those ads that repeated must have worked for whoever ran them and started to run similar ones myself. I kept very careful track of what worked and what didn’t and over time developed quite a selection ads that were proven winners.

My Simmons salesman was a help in two ways. First of all, most of the ads were at least 50% paid for by the manufacturer and secondly I didn’t buy much of the merchandise I sold until after I sold it and so required very fast delivery. My Simmons salesman could get me delivery in two or three workdays. Simmons advertising budget for me, or the money he could spend on my ads, was based on my purchases and was given to him on a computer printout. The totals available to spend always seemed to be increasing.

It turned out that a little diamond printed next to the total available to spend on his printout meant that the figure was negative so he was, in fact, going further and further in debt on my account. As the President’s son, no one at Simmons ever told him that. The result was that he, and I, seemed to have unlimited Simmons advertising funds.

I got other manufacturers to similarly help pay for ads and ship quickly. All this allowed me to balloon my sales with weekly advertising yet keep my stocks low by not buying merchandise until I had already sold it. Almost all my customers could wait a week or so for delivery and that gave me time to first get their merchandise in and then immediately deliver it out to them. Most of the stock was just turned around on the shipping dock never even getting into the warehouse.

All of this activity resulted in continually increasing sales and profit levels. Within a year I was the Store’s fair-haired boy at least in the Home Furnishings Division.

In July 1961, I started going to night school at UCLA. I realized I needed more than the Associates Degree I had picked up at Minnesota. I had waited too long to use any of my GI Bill benefits but we were now, fortunately, making enough to pay for the tuition and school books ourselves.

In December 1961, we finally found and bought our first home at 6200 West 96th Street in the Westchester section of Los Angeles.

It was in a noisy neighborhood, too near the Los Angeles Airport, which was on Century Boulevard only four blocks away. The house had been poorly and hastily built in 1946 right after the war ended. But, it was ours.

I paid a painter from Bullock’s to help Jean and me and we painted it inside and out. I remember the painter telling us that what we were doing with all the painting was, “cleaning, beautifying and protecting our new home”.

I had done a good job my first year at Bullocks so I got a good raise and bonus. It was fortunate that I did, for while the new house payments were only $121.50 a month, there were many other expenses involved in fixing it up and furnishing it.

About this time, one of my sleep sofa manufacturers, knowing we liked animals, presented us with one of his poodle’s new puppies.

I could have been probably fired for taking it. We weren’t supposed to take gifts from suppliers. But the puppy was already in Jean’s arms by the time I could have reacted, so we kept it. We named her Babette (Babbie) and she lived with us, or we with her, for 18 years.

For several years previously, we had a parakeet named Jake. He loved to run up and down a ladder in his cage and from the story of Jacob and his ladder, we came up with the name Jake.

We taught him to say, “My name is Jake Pusch” in case he every got out of the house and was lost. He also learned other short phrases such as, “Where is everybody?” I also tried to teach him, “Stand back I’m an eagle” but with only limited success.

Jake moved to 96th Street with us and one afternoon in summer we’d left the back door open for a little breeze and we heard a squawk from Jake in the next room. We ran in to find the neighbor’s cat had come in the open door, opened the cage door and had his paw inside the cage trying to get Jake. Jake was pressed up against the back wall of the cage trying to avoid the cat’s paw and squawking loudly. We grabbed the cat and threw him outside but Jake seemed pretty shaken up.

It wasn’t that many weeks later that Babette moved in. Although she didn’t try to get the bird, she was noisy and that seemed to bother Jake.

One day we both came home from work to find Jake dead in the bottom of his cage. He may have died of fright or more probably of chagrin.

We buried him with all of his toys in a flowerbed in the back yard. Within weeks a huge sunflower grew up in that area. It was like a resurrection. There must have been a sunflower seed in either Jake’s toys or perhaps in Jake.

As long as we lived on 96th Street, we’d look at that huge sunflower and think of Jake.

By October 1962, we were thinking about having children and as none were coming along naturally, we both had complete physicals.

The doctor thought that Jean might have a malignancy. He recommended a hysterectomy.

We’ve gone over this in our minds many times since and we’re not sure if the doctor said she had a malignancy, might have one or what. All we remember for sure is that he wanted to perform the hysterectomy.

We agreed. He did it. And we’ve wondered ever since if it was really necessary.

Jean was in Daniel Freeman, a Catholic hospital, and she remembers one young nun who was particularly kind to her. But kindness aside, the fact remained Jean had lost her ability to have children, perhaps unnecessarily.

We continued on. We improved the house. Added furnishings including a piano, we both continued working and I went to school nights.

I got another nice raise and bonus from Bullocks for my work in 1962.

In February 1963, I switched night schools to the University of Southern California (USC).

The cheapest school and my first choice, UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles), had decided that full time (day time) study would be necessary for degrees because, “the full college experience included the social activities only available during the day,”

That forced me out for I could only go nights and still work full time. UCLA has since gone back to awarding degrees to night students.

In June and July 1963, we took our first trip back to New York City and Pennsylvania to visit Jean’s Mother, Brother and his family.

In looking at my journal from that time, I see where it cost $80 for four nights in our New York City motel. It was a decent motel on 42nd street near the Circle Line terminal. I bet that bill would be closer to $500 today.

We had a very good time on that trip. I remember finding little Danny, who is now both a CPA and a lawyer, sitting in the back yard with his face smeared with mud looking like he’d just eaten some. I remember as a gift for him, we brought a little shirt with one pocket that said worms and another that said bugs. At the time, it seemed like a serendipitous choice.

In addition to New York City and Saul’s Pennsylvania home, we went with the family to Washington D. C., Mount Vernon, Philadelphia, Buck’s County and saw many other local sights.

In the journal I also see where I gave $1 to the Democratic Party in October 1963. I believe that was when JFK was shot. I guess I felt the party needed it even more than I did.

Babbie was also taking her graduation test from obedience school that weekend of the Kennedy assassination and she, with we, was so upset she flunked.

The Anglia wore out and I sold it to a man who wanted the engine to put in his boat. The engine was apparently much like the old Ford Model A engines. We bought a used Pontiac Tempest convertible. The only convertible we ever owned. We also sold the 1953 Dodge and bought a newer but still used Ford.

I got another nice raise and bonus for my work in 1963 and in April 1964 Jean finally thought we were doing well enough so she could stay home. She wanted to enjoy her home but also work, through progressive real estate investments and then improvements in other homes. She was sure she could make more money doing that than working for the May Company.

In July 1964, we took a trip to Las Vegas and also visited Fritz and Janet and the children in Bakersfield. Fritz was now Assistant Manager of the large Wards store there in Bakersfield.

Also in 1964, my boss, the Merchandise Manager told me to be sure and be on the sales floor every Wednesday about 1:00. That was when Mr. Winnett, the founder of Bullocks, came down from his lunch in the Tearoom on the floor above and started his weekly tour of the downtown store. Mr. Winnett apparently wanted to be sure he saw me every Wednesday.

I didn’t know it then, but later found out that there was a conflict between Mr. Winnett and his son-in-law Walter Candy who was the Bullocks Chairman of the Board. Mr. Winnett no longer had a title but he owned most of the stock and had most of the power.

A new store was being built in Lakewood and Mr. Winnett was still unhappy about the last store Mr. Candy had built in Santa Ana. He thought most of the problem was the people Mr. Candy picked. The management had already been selected for Lakewood but Mr. Winnett, looking at my sales and profit figures, thought maybe I should be among them.

In any case, he wanted to get to know me better, hence the directive to be in my department on the sales floor every Wednesday at 1:00.

I did get to know him better. He had also had me come to his office near the Wilshire store for several long interviews and had consultants give me batteries of psychological and intelligence tests.

The net result was that I was promoted by Bullocks to Home Furnishings Merchandise Manager for that new store they were building in Lakewood north of Long Beach. In addition to supervising the Home Furnishing Buyers for this new store (as I said, in those days each Bullocks store bought separately), I shared the running of the store as a member of the four-man management committee.

In 1965, after I had taken all those tests for Bullocks, I took the MENSA test to see if I could pass it. I did and bought a 1965 Membership Register for $1.50 (my journal says). I found our half brother Walter’s name in it. He lived in San Antonio, Texas then.

Judy, Jean’s niece visited us in July and we went to Universal City and Disneyland. I remember she met, and posed for a picture with, Al Green, Papa Munster. Al Green ran for Governor of New York as the Green Party candidate 23 years later in 1998.

In November 1965, following Jean’s real estate plan, we purchased a new home at 5870 Abernathy in a better part of Westchester.

We sold our old home on 96th Street to a Realtor who, we later found, quickly resold it to the Airport Commission who was buying up homes in that neighborhood to expand their airport parking lots. We hadn’t heard anything about that planned expansion and purchasing but apparently the Realtor had some inside information and made a quick profit on us. Capitalization at work. We didn’t investigate the possibility of a lawsuit. Perhaps we should have.

The new home on Abernathy in addition to being in a much better neighborhood was quite a bit larger. We soon added a large new family room, complete with a dog door for Babbie, and a swimming pool.

The back yard had three or four large avocado trees and I found myself taking bags of them to work to give away. We couldn’t eat even a small fraction of what was growing on them.

Directly across the street lived an actor whose name I can’t remember now but whose face was very familiar from the many movies he made for Disney.

Next door lived a nice family who had a small dachshund with a bad back and on the other side a retired gas company employee whose wife made his lunch every day and forced him from the house. He might be retired but that didn’t mean he could clutter up her house all day long.

That Spring we took a trip to Laguna Beach that was a harbinger of most of our later vacations during the years up to and including the present. Although we had a good time, and saw the sights, most of our time and energy was spent in looking at real estate. Jean was really into her new vocation of buyer/improver/seller of homes and she wanted to find these homes in the very best areas and neighborhoods.

We didn’t find anything we could afford on that first Laguna trip but that didn’t discourage Jean from continuing to look.

Jean also started taking adult school courses and got interested in needlepoint. I had, over the years, made various stabs at oil painting but observing here work I saw it was just as beautiful as any painting but had two advantages over it. It was clean, no paint to mix or spill and it was always ready to just pick up and start work on. So Jean soon got me started on needlepoint too. Over the thirty years or so since we’ve filled our various homes with pillows, rugs and wall hangings. More important, we have both found much pleasure and fulfillment in doing so.

The Lakewood Kiwanis Club met in a banquet room we had adjacent to our store Tearoom and I was the member host. I often received complaints about the “Tearoom” type food we were served from the “he men” members who preferred less feminine fare. I solved the problem by distributing detailed questionnaires then generally ignoring the answers but claiming we were trying to meet the wishes of the majority of the members as expressed in their answers to our questionnaire.

I was behaving just like today’s politicians but some years before it became so common. The funniest part of it was that it worked so well. I now started getting compliments from the same people who had complained before.

As I said earlier, Mom was living at Seal Beach Leisure World, near Lakewood, now that I was working at Lakewood I saw quite a bit more of here.

Leisure World is an adult community with all the politics and problems this generates. For example, wild rabbits were eating up some of the landscaping. The right wing of Leisure World politics wanted to poison all the rabbits. The left wing couldn’t understand how anyone could want to be so cruel to those cute little bunnies. If I had a vote, I’d have voted with the left wing.

Mom was working at the local Long Beach Community Hospital as a volunteer in their gift shop. When she died in that hospital in 1966, we found she had brought quite a few greeting cards home from the shop. I guess she felt she was owed a little something for all her volunteer efforts.

In June 1967 I received my Bachelors of Business Administration from USC and was elected to Beta Gamma Sigma the honorary business fraternity. I continued on with night school working toward my MBA.

That Spring we took another vacation/real estate scouting trip. We went up the coast seeing everything from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Like everywhere else on the coast, we checked out Carmel. We didn’t know at the time that 16 years later we’d be moving there.

In March 1968, I contributed a large, to me, $10 to McCarthy for President. He didn’t make it but I still think we’d have been better off if he had. In April, I contributed even more, $15, to Martin Luther King. He got to do some good before he too was killed.

I was now making regular business trips and show I spent $57.45 over my per deim on a trip to New York that May.

Later that same May in 1968 we took our first foreign vacation. We spent 21 days in Greece and Israel and on a Mediterranean cruise. Israel was particularly impressive.

It was right after the six-day war and the Israelis were actively recruiting tourists to move there. When our guide asked what I did I told him I worked for a department store. “Oh, we really need those,” the guide told me.

This trip was the first of several foreign vacation trips we took as well as the business travel that was now a regular part of my work. I went to Chicago and New York several times each year and most years to Europe on buying trips. On one foreign trip and several New York and Chicago business trips, Jean traveled with me.

We were also now able to afford to give a little more to charities and causes we believed in. Mostly we gave to Democratic or liberal causes and we gave even more to various animal charities.

In September 1969, we took a 21-day trip to the Orient including Japan, Hong Kong, Cambodia and Thailand.

The two main things I remember from that trip are flying over Viet Nam on the way to Cambodia and having the commercial airline pilot point out places on the ground over the loudspeaker that we’d been hearing about on the war news. It was much like happens on flights in the United States when you’re flying over the Grand Canyon and the pilot points it out. The other main thing on this trip was the great food we ate. Jean and I have always loved oriental food and there’s no question, the orient is the best place to get good oriental food.

In June 1970, we sold our home at 5870 Abernathy and moved temporarily into a rental house at 162 Carmelina near Brentwood. This rental was a block or so away from the small house where Marilyn Monroe was then living and where she committed suicide a few years later. Several times a day the tour buses came by our house and I’m sure the tourists wondered when they saw us who we might be. We were, of course, nobody.

We were only there because we had made an offer on a home in Bel Aire and were still in negotiations when our old home sold. This necessitated our living in this temporary rental near Marilyn and on the tour bus route.

Finally, in August 1970, we closed on the purchase of our new home at 133 N. Glenroy in Bel Aire. It was a nice large, well-built home with a pool. The neighborhood was far above where we had been living in Westchester. The new house was about two blocks north of Sunset Boulevard and three or four blocks east of the Sunset Boulevard turnoff from the San Diego Freeway. Jean’s real estate efforts were starting to make real progress.

In November, I had a ten-day New York business trip and Jean came along. We had to pay her portion of the expenses but it was well worth it. She got to see her Mother and do some shopping and museum looking while I worked. We rented a car on the weekend and took drives in the country and once up to Mystic Harbor. In those days, manufacturers were very generous with theater tickets so we saw a Broadway show almost every night.

At the Glenroy house, as we had done at Abernathy, we had a dog door installed in the outside door to our laundry room so Babbie could go in and out as she wished. Babbie slept with us and I can remember many nights when she’d get up and I would lay awake and listen to her nails click down the hall tiles, across the kitchen floor and laundry room and then hear the dog door open. She’d be out side for quite a while and then eventually I’d hear the dog door open again and soon she’d be back in bed.

She was getting old faster than I was and had the need to get up often at night long before I did. I guess this is what’s meant by “dog years”.

Bullocks started giving me stock options and deferred compensation in addition to raises and cash bonuses for good performance.

In June 1971, we took another European trip. this one was an “If it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium” trip. It started in Paris and we rode the same bus through France to the Riviera then all along the Mediterranean to Pisa, Naples, Sorrento and Capri. The bus then took us to Rome, Florence, Venice and then Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Then we flew to London and from there home. All this was in, as I remember, 21 days. It was hectic but fun and we got a pretty good overview and idea of the places where we’d like to spent more time on future trips.

In November 1971, another car wore out and we bought a used 1969 Ford. We had long before decided that homes and travel were more important to us than cars.

In February 1971, still following Jean’s plan, we bought 11882 Beach Club Way in Malibu. It was a big step but looked like a good investment in addition to being a great weekend and vacation home. We discovered later, it was also a good rental.

This Malibu home turned out to be such a good investment, that when we sold it 18 years later in 1989, the gain almost equaled all the salary I’d made during those same 18 years. Jean had proven herself right in her belief that good money could be made in real estate with the return on this one purchase alone. If the gains on all her purchases and all the rental income are added together, they far exceed my earnings.

This Malibu property was a three-story townhouse on an about 30-foot bluff directly on the ocean. We were at the front of a curve of other attached townhouses so although we shared the beach with perhaps 25 other townhouses you couldn’t see anything other than the ocean and beach from inside our house.

The top floor, where you entered from the carport, was basically one large family/living room with the front all glass to the deck and ocean. The back had a kitchen with a large bar separating it from the living room. There was also a full bathroom and fireplace on this top floor. The next floor (down) originally had two small bedrooms and baths with the front wall again all glass and opening on to a large deck and the ocean. We tore out the dividing walls and made it into a large one bedroom and bath. The lowest floor was a “bachelor” or “mother-in-law” apartment with one large room and bath with a small kitchen built into one wall. This lowest level had a separate outside entrance. We ended up renting this floor almost all the time and had tenants including George Carlen, the comedian. One tenant, for seven years or so, was a traveling photographer who was away most of the time.

There was a reef a few hundred yards offshore and the waves broke there violently especially during storms. This reef protected our beach and was also the home to many fish of all types and sizes.

I took SCUBA lessons at the Santa Monica YMCA, bought a wetsuit and all the other gear, an inflatable boat and started diving every weekend. Getting the SCUBA tanks filled and wearing all that extra gear seemed not worth the extra time on the bottom, so I mostly free dove. I could still stay down for several minutes and the depths were mostly less than 40 feet on that reef anyway. I dove with friends or sometimes alone. We got plenty of fish and had great times. Jean never joined in the diving but she swam in the ocean and we played a lot of beach volleyball and paddle tennis.

One of my diving buddies was a fellow named John. He and his wife raised and showed purebred Keeshounds and lived down the beach from us. Keeshounds are fairly large dogs that look as if they’re related to Huskies or Spitz.

Surfers that came down from all over Los Angeles to our beach to surf, used to pick up dogs from their neighborhoods to bring down for the day, then they, often as not, left them there. That’s how John ended up with Teddy. Teddy was a Keeshound but perhaps not pure bred, at least he wasn’t of show quality. John advertised and tried to find the owner and when he couldn’t, told us he was going to have to bring him in to a shelter. That was enough for Jean and that’s how we got Teddy. He lived with us until he died in about 1990. Teddy was Jean’s favorite dog. He loved her and always acted as if he knew Jean had saved him from the Animal Shelter and perhaps their gas chamber.

John was also a very interesting dive companion. He was a much better diver than I, younger, larger, stronger, better trained. I noticed one thing though. When we went out to the reef in our rubber boat, he always fiddled around with his equipment so that I always was the first one in the water.

I finally figured it out. We sometimes ran into sharks in the water, the largest white shark ever caught was caught off the Channel Islands only 20 miles away, John was waiting to see if I drew any interest from sharks, or anything else before he went in.

I’m sure John will lead a long life.

We had good friends there and good times and even had some celebrities as neighbors. Ann Margaret lived there, as did Monty Hall. Monty Hall was especially friendly, played volleyball and had a wonderful family. There were also many lesser-known television soap opera stars and renters. Jonathan Winters rented down the beach for a while. The main thing is we got a lot of wonderful use and had good times at Malibu and when it came time to sell, it turned out to be a gold mine. All of this was thanks to Jean for I never would have bought it on my own.

In June 1972, I got my MBA from USC and started staying home nights.

In September, Jean was still working at her real estate and we sold our home on Glenroy and bought a better one at 953 Linda Flora further up to the top of the hill in Bel Air.

The homes on Linda Flora had been burned in the great Bel Air fire of, I believe, 1960. All the homes had been rebuilt, the trees and other vegetation had grown back and now 12 years later, it was a beautiful neighborhood with magnificent views. Our home faced west, toward the ocean looking across the Sepulveda Pass. The new Getty Museum is now on the hills directly across from us. In those days the hills were beautifully wild and empty.

Our new home was not only newer, but also larger than Glenroy and only a mile or so away to the north. Much of this mile was straight up the hill. Although the freeway was below us, we could seldom hear it. This area of the freeway was where Frank Sinatra Jr. was let out after his kidnapping and much later, in 1998, Bill Cosby’s son was shot and killed while changing a tire.

In November of 1972, a friend told me that the coming Presidential election might be the “last free election ever held in the United States.” This was hard for me to believe at the time but now, looking back, with what we now know of Richard Nixon and also now know of Republican campaign finance money raising and the uses of that money in elections, it makes more sense. We certainly no longer have elections that are entirely free.

In any case, I believed it enough to volunteer to walk my precinct for the Democratic nominee George McGovern. It was quite an experience. There were many show people in our neighborhood and I met some of them but it was mostly a losing battle. Wealthy neighborhoods were not the best place to find support for McGovern. I was almost blown off many of the doorsteps. One man told me he’d rather have a crook than a fool for president. He got his wish.

Also in 1972, Bullocks was sold to Federated department Stores a large national chain of department stores. Other Federated stores included Bloomingdales and Abraham & Strauss in New York, Rich’s in Atlanta, Burdines in Florida and Lazarus in Cincinnati. Federated was a large, aggressive firm and although they purchased Bullocks because of its success, they believed they knew the best way to organize a department store and it wasn’t the way Bullocks had been doing it.

Instead of an individual store Buyer being the key person, Federated was paternalistic and the key person was the Chairman of the Board of Federated who delegated as little authority as possible down the line. Bullocks was soon centralized and I was promoted and transferred downtown as the central Home Furnishings Merchandise Manager supervising the buying of merchandise for 13 departments in the 12 large Bullocks department stores. For the first year or so, we kept the individual Buyers in each of the stores. I would travel to the markets with 12 Buyers for each department and we’d vote on questions that required the cooperation of all stores.

Obviously this was unwieldy and as soon as central offices could be built, a central buying staff was selected and we were organized the same as the May Company or any other large department store. I was now the Mr. Fogel of Bullocks. In fact, the original Mr. Fogel had left the May Company and now called on me as the representative of our largest toy supplier.

Even though I had this “high position” everything I did, was in turn, second-guessed by my superior the Vice President of Home Furnishings and Mens Wear. He was in turn second guessed by the President of Bullocks who was second guessed by.....you get the picture.

Over the next few years I saw most of my old fellow Bullocks employees leave either through retirement or dismissal. The top ranks at Bullocks were now almost entirely new people. Every year at personnel review time, we were expected to fire at least one person. It was called “handing up a head.” The belief was that in any organization, at least one person wasn’t doing the job.

When my boss’s head was handed up in 1974 and I got a new boss in from Abraham & Strauss, I knew my head might be soon “handed up”.

My new boss, the new Vice President of Home Furnishings and Mens Wear was in his early 30s, I was now forty-seven. He was a graduate of Williams College, a former Drapery Buyer at Abraham & Strauss, a consummate corporate politician and had a fashion model for a wife.

Overnight I went from “fair haired boy” to “old fart who is out of it.”

I was the last of the “old Bullocks” Merchandise Managers in the Home Furnishings area of the business and it was soon obvious that my new boss disagreed with me on almost everything.

I was still trying to give each of my buyers as much freedom as possible to make creative decisions and best do their jobs. I knew that freedom was what had allowed me to succeed back when I was a Buyer.

My new boss believed you had to stay right on top of subordinates all the time. A paternal belief that he, or his bosses up the line, knew best. Buyers, or other subordinates were not to be trusted or given any slack in the rope. His beliefs were the common and mine the uncommon in that management group so I knew I somehow had to change my way of thinking or leave.

I tried to change, but I didn’t believe what they thought was right and I guess it showed. In any case, my new boss gave me a probationary note of three pages of handwritten gobble-de-gook that I couldn’t understand or make sense of. When I asked him for clarification, I couldn’t get it. I soldiered on, trying to do the job his way but at Christmas 1974, I was told I would be replaced.

I was offered an Assistant Store Manager’s job but decided to leave instead.

My replacement turned out to be two much younger men from New York’s Abraham & Strauss who, I was told, together made less salary than I did. They would also do whatever the boss asked.

There’s no question that my new boss was a much better corporate player than I was. He knew how to tell his bosses what they wanted to hear. He eventually became President of a large national Department Store chain. I never got any further than that job I lost working for him working for anyone else.

I still believe I was right and that most people do accomplish more if given the freedom to do a job the way they think best.

Several years later, while watching 60 Minutes on TV, I saw an episode about a group of I. Magnin buyers who had filed an age discrimination lawsuit against Federated Department Stores. This was before the days when such a thing was common hence their appearance on 60 Minutes. It sounded like much the same thing that had happened to me, and many others at Bullocks, had happened to them at I. Magnin. The difference was they sued and won a substantial award.

I checked with a lawyer, but he said that after accepting the severance pay and allowing that much time to pass, it was too late for me to do anything. I wish I’d know about the possibility sooner.

When I left Bullocks, I was thoroughly disenchanted with big business and thought of going to work for the government on Civil Service or maybe into business for myself.

I wrote to the U. S. Government Office of Personnel Management and got their local job announcements and at the same time started putting out the word with my business contacts to see what small businesses might be available. We were in no immediate financial danger for I had a small scale “golden parachute” with deferred income and Bullocks pension plan proceeds due me over the next few years.

My Brown Jordan patio furniture representative told me about a Patio Furniture Store in Woodland Hills who did a great business and whose owner was selling to take an around the world cruise on his yacht. I called him up, went out to see him and his store and ended up working with him for a week or two and planning to buy his store. His accountant intervened, however, convincing him he had a gold mine here and that he should not sell it but hire a manager to take care of it for him for the year or so he’d be gone on his cruise.

So that was the end of my Patio Furniture Store.

Another friend, a neighbor at Malibu, told me of a relative of his who wanted to sell his industrial paper distribution business in North Hollywood.

I went to see him. His name was Sol Fraser and the company was the Imperial Paper Company. I worked with him a week or two and we both agreed that we could make a deal. The only problem was he wanted to cash out. He didn’t want to carry any mortgage but wanted to put the money in the bank and travel.

I explained that he’d get killed with income taxes that way but his mind had been made up.

I didn’t have enough cash in the bank. We would have to sell one of our homes. We sold Linda Flora in May 1975.

Although we made some money on it, that sale turned out to be a big mistake for two reasons. First, soon after we sold, Sol, in talking to his accountant, decided he didn’t want cash after all but would prefer to finance the purchase. Second, less than two years after we sold Linda Flora, we saw an explosion in the real estate values in the better parts of Los Angeles. Two years later the resale values for homes on Linda Flora had tripled.

In June 1975, we moved into a rental apartment on Coldwater Canyon in North Hollywood, put our house money in the bank and Jean and I bought and started running Imperial Paper Company.

I enjoyed it. It was a real challenge and over time we started to do well. Jean was less happy for she preferred a more structured work environment (I was continually experimenting with new people and new types of merchandise).

Jean was also frustrated at unnecessarily losing out on those great real estate opportunities taking place all around us. It took us almost a year, until May 1976, before we were able to get back into another home at 3140 Dona Sarita in Studio City. The year we lost was probably the hottest year ever in Los Angeles real estate and we were renting. Fortunately we still had Malibu which shared in the price jump.

Adding to our frustrations was a burglary we suffered in our Coldwater Canyon apartment. The burglars must have known we spent weekends away for they parked a van at the curb, broke in a sliding glass window and took what they wanted from our home during a weekend. We were called at Malibu by the Los Angeles Police department and came home on Sunday night to find the apartment ransacked and many valuable items gone. The police dusted for fingerprints, but never caught anybody. It looked like someone was decorating their home from ours for much of what they took was decorative. We also lost a shotgun. I used to go hunting before I was married but Jean put a stop to that. I agreed as I learned to think more about and for animals. We had not sold the shotgun for Jean felt it would get into the wrong hands. Instead, she hid it in a closet. The burglars found it and it sure did end up in the wrong hands.

We ended up getting $1,300 in an insurance settlement for the burglary but we would gladly have given it back for the things we lost. We especially missed an imported rosewood, hand carved Kwan Yen which we had purchased for the Linda Flora house. We tried to replace it or find a similar piece at the various importers in China Town but had no luck.

The Dona Sarita house was small and the neighborhood less grand than Bel Aire, it was like being back in Westchester. But, at least we were in our own home again and Jean set to work decorating it.

In February 1977, we bought two rental townhouses as investments. They were on a golf course in Thousand Oaks which is out beyond Westlake in the San Fernando Valley. So now we now owned four pieces of residential property and the business and the building it was in.

In January 1978, we sold our home on Dona Sarita and bought a better one at 6930 Oporto Drive in the Outpost section of the Hollywood Hills. This was an old residential section that was the Beverly Hills of the 1920s and 1930s when Beverly Hills was still countryside. Most of the homes were large old mansions built on the hills over looking Hollywood, Los Angeles and, on a clear day, the ocean and Catalina Island. Our home, newer than most in the neighborhood, had been built in 1939.

The house was Spanish in style, two story, walled and gated, smaller than most in the area, but had a beautiful unobstructed view and was plenty large enough for the three of us (counting Babbie). We tore out a maid’s room and pantry and opened it up to form a family room connected to the kitchen.

We were at the top of the hill so our neighbors, across the street, looked off to the north and west toward the Hollywood sign while we looked south and east toward downtown Los Angeles and over Hollywood Boulevard some hundreds of feet below.

The back row of the Hollywood Bowl backed up to our neighbors across the street’s back yards and sometimes we could hear the music in the evenings. The neighborhood was also a great one for our evening walks with Babbie and for my early morning jogging. It was beautiful, quiet and un-crowded. They say there were more deer, coyotes and other wildlife in the area than when the Indians had been there. We often saw coyotes at night when walking Babbie and they often walked in three and fours toward us much to Babbie’s discomfort. One time, from our window, we saw a herd of seven deer grazing on a neighbors lawn just down the hill below us.

Over time, I developed our business, or it evolved, into a different sort of business than I had purchased and different from that of any of my competitors. I was still an industrial paper distributor and sold the same things but I did it differently.

For example, most paper distributors depend on commissioned salesmen who have personal followings and work to obtain new customers. In my case, the salesmen I inherited were poor, or part time, and the new ones I hired were generally unsuccessful even those few who really tried. To hire a top professional salesman away from a competitor, would have required that I give him some equity in our company. This I didn’t want to do. I myself, was generally unsuccessful in the few direct sales attempts I made so me becoming a salesman didn’t look like the answer.

The result was that, over time, I depended more and more on yellow page advertising and less and less on salesmen. This had several effects. My business turned more toward smaller, less demanding, users who were charged higher prices and accepted longer delivery delays. They were also generally C.O.D. cash customers so I had fewer credit problems. Most were small businesses but some were individual households needing boxes for moving or storage. I also set up a retail self-service showroom in my warehouse.

Because many of my customers would now wait a week or so for delivery, I started following much the same routine I had as a mattress buyer. I carried very little inventory in my warehouse and I would take orders with deliveries promised on the fact that I would be purchasing what they wanted on Wednesday. If they ordered late Wednesday, it might be over a week before delivery.

On Wednesdays, my trucks would leave early for my suppliers and I would then order, and add to the orders, until they arrived to pick them up. Then, if possible, they would deliver some of what they had picked up on the way back to our warehouse. Thursday and Friday were big delivery days, we were off Saturday and Sunday and Monday and Tuesday were also delivery days.

Of course I carried some inventory, we had walk-in retail customers and some items were so basic there was no gamble at al in stocking them. However, eventually, I was doing about $1,200,000 in sales a year with an average stock of only about $30,000. This is a yearly stock turnover of about 40 in a business where the normal is perhaps 6.

This turnover rate is very profitable, assuming you’re not losing a lot of sales because of lack of stock, for there are lower stockeeping charges, interest (if you finance it), markdowns (for mistakes), and inventory shrinkage (theft).

Adding to my sales, but not my inventory, was the increasing amount of brokered business I worked to develop. I followed through on everyone who called for a quote on any sort of special order. I’d get a price from a supplier, add a, what I hoped competitive but still sufficient markup to my quote. If I didn’t get the order, I’d follow up and try to find out why. Over time, I developed a good brokered business with my only costs the phone, my time and my credit risks if the sale involved credit.

Most of these brokered special orders were drop shipped from the supplier to the customer except in those cases where the supplier wouldn’t or where I didn’t trust them to not try to steal my customer from me.

The early 1970s were also a time of rapid inflation and high interest rates. My method of operating with a very low inventory and the smaller, less sophisticated, customer gave me a break here. Many of my competitors were being killed by interest charges as high as 20% so I could get good low prices if I would take what I needed of their inventory off their hands.

Several of my large competitors developed “small distributor” programs to help move their inventory and one of my competitor’s salesmen, to help him in his sales efforts to me, kept me supplied with copies of his retail price lists. These were lists of all the various types of merchandise (thousands of items) together with selling prices at perhaps six different levels depending on quantity purchased. I used them for my price lists generally trying to charge the highest listed price to my customers. With the rapid inflation, these lists eventually were changing upward almost weekly and I quickly made sure my prices went up as fast. Soon customers came to expect prices to be going up regularly. They didn’t like it, but they expected it.

I also took an active role in the various business associations. I eventually served as President of both the Western Paper Trade Association (the largest and many of the smaller distributors in the Western United States) and the California Independent Paper Merchants (local Los Angeles mostly smaller distributors).

We got together for regular social/training meetings and I learned a lot about the business from my various competitors and bought jointly with many of them to obtain better prices.

The net result was that in the seven years I owned the business, I built the yearly sales from $420,000 and yearly profits of $20,000 in 1975 when I bought the company to $1,120,000 in sales and $100,000 in profits in the last year before we sold it in 1983.

Jean had wanted for some time to move out of Los Angeles and we’d been spending a lot of time looking at property up the coast.

I was ready for a change too. There wasn’t a lot more I could do with the business without giving up some of the equity to a partner who could bring in sales. I’d done about all I could with the yellow pages and the only other sales building opportunity I saw was sharing the business with a competitor’s salesman with the hope he’d bring his accounts with him. I didn’t want to do that.

I paid to get the business appraised and started advertising it in the Los Angeles Times. I also put out the word to my competitors and although many wanted to buy my accounts, they didn’t want to pay what the business was worth or buy the building.

One of the prospects who answered my advertisements was a recent wealthy refugee from Iran who had been a supporter of the Shah and, among other things, the owner of a paper business there. He wanted to buy the business for his two young sons who were graduating from U. S. universities. One of his sons, who had just graduated, worked with me for several months and on March 1, 1983 the deal was finalized.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. We did a lot of other things between January 1978, when I started talking about the business and March 1983 when we sold it.

Jean, in addition to her real estate, home remodeling and redecorating and craft interests, and worked at various volunteer jobs and at the business every day for several hours around noon.

Among her volunteer efforts were tutoring at a low income Venice grade School (where the children were so difficult she eventually had to give up trying to help them), the UCLA Hospital, and a Jewish Council Thrift Shop on Wilshire Boulevard.

Our next-door neighbor at Malibu was a rock musician with the group Rare Earth. When he quit taking drugs, he gained a lot of weight and his stage costumes no longer fit. He gave Jean the costumes, mostly jeans and T-shirts covered with sequins and beads, to take into the Thrift Shop. Needless to say they didn’t stay long. Jean even kept a few pieces to wear herself.

Also in 1978, I started attending a weekly Transactional Analysis group in an effort to better understand what motivated me to often behave in unproductive and even sometimes destructive ways. I hoped to learn and improve.

I may have learned, but I didn’t improve much, if at all, but it was interesting attending the group sessions. Some of my fellow group members had problems that made mine seem insignificant except, of course, to Jean and me who had to live with them.

For example, one member of the group was a newly successful screenwriter, who had just written a screenplay for a surprise hit, “The Buddy Holly Story”. His newfound wealth caused him to quickly get divorced, take up with a young girl, develop a drug habit and commit suicide all within less than a year after his initial success. Nether the psychiatrist leading the group nor any of us group members had any success in helping him although we all certainly tried.

Another member of the group lived in the Hollywood Hills like I, and like I, was sometimes wakened in the middle of the night by police helicopters flying low over his home swooping down to catch criminals in the valley below. Unlike I, he leaned out of his window in anger at being awakened and shot at them with a revolver. He understood it was wrong and we in the group and the psychiatrist, reinforced him in that belief.

I found it very difficult to unload my small problems on them but when I did, and when the consensus seemed to be for me to leave Jean and start over with someone else, I knew that the psychiatrist, the group and maybe even the psychiatric science? itself, were not for me.

I understand that nowadays, this sort of psychiatric counseling, group or individual, is little done. Now it’s mostly a matter of prescribing mood-altering drugs. I even hear that electric shock therapy is back in vogue. Talking seemed to solve little so now they’re concentrating on the physical or the chemical “cures”.

In 1979, we bought another residential property. Real estate values in Los Angeles were going through the roof in these few years and Jean wanted to take full advantage of it. We bought, a yet un-built home, in a new home tract in Northridge in the North San Fernando Valley. The mortgage I took on it required that we live in it. This was designed to keep people, like us, who were just in it for the investment opportunity from taking advantage of it.

When the house was completed, six months or so later, we had draperies put in and the electricity turned on. We put lamps and a radio on a timer, visited the neighbors to introduce myself and explain that we both worked long hours, traveled and that they might not see much of us.

Then we put the house up for sale.

We soon sold it for a good profit only eight months after we had bought it.

In 1980, we bought a new condo on a golf course in Palm Desert, near Palm Springs. This was about 130 miles east of our home in Hollywood while Malibu was about 40 miles west.

We found ourselves using them both as weekend homes spending one weekend in Malibu and the next in Palm Desert.

Now Jean’s real estate business was up to five pieces of residential property not counting the temporary Northridge home or the business building.

Palm Desert was, at that time, a new community with many developments built around golf courses and had an upscale shopping area. We had friends living there too and had good times there. We still had the business, so we would drive out after we closed on Friday night and would come back to town on Monday mornings.

We followed the same procedure on the weekends we went to Malibu and so, although we worked hard during the week, we had nice long restful weekends. The only difference was now we would go one weekend to the desert and the next to Malibu.

In April 1983, as I said earlier, we sold the business including the building. We had been there eight years, had good experiences, made money but were ready to leave. Jean was anxious to move out of Los Angeles and I felt I had done all I could with the business by myself. As I said, to go further I would have to either take in a partner or sell equity in the business neither of which I wished to do.

After the business was sold, we took two long trips.

The first was to Carmel, where we would soon move, and then to Pennsylvania, to visit Jean’s family and see the sights.

In October 1983, we sold our Oporto home in the Hollywood Hills and moved to 7039 Valley Greens Circle in the Carmel Valley about three miles inland from Carmel. The Carmel/Monterey area is about 130 miles south of San Francisco on a very beautiful stretch of the California coast just above Big Sur.

This new Carmel home was different from Oporto in several ways. It was a single story ranch style home built facing a golf course. Although it had a beautiful close in view, it did not have the expansive view we were used to at Oporto. In fact this home, rather than being at the top of a very high hill, was at the bottom of a valley surrounded by high hills. We had looked at some view properties in Carmel but most of these hills were undeveloped and the few houses we looked at were, either far too expensive or wrong for some other reason.

I grew to really like the Carmel house, especially after we remodeled it, but Jean always missed the expansive views we’d enjoyed at previous homes.

We both enjoyed living in Carmel and now that I at least had retired, we had time to drive down and spend more time in both Malibu and Palm Desert.

In 1984, I decided to look for a new business opportunity there in Carmel. I found I wasn’t ready to fully retire yet.

I checked with all the business brokers but the prices they wanted, and the rents that were charged small businesses in Carmel, were ridiculous.

You couldn’t buy a business building if you wanted to for that’s where the money was made by charging exorbitant rents to small businessmen.

After exhausting what I believed were all the local business broker possibilities, I decided to canvass local accountants and lawyers believing maybe one of them had a small business client who wanted to sell.

The first business building, in fact the first office I went to, yielded a lead. I was an office occupied by a retired Air Force Colonel and his staff who were organizing to open a new local Savings and Loan Association.

He offered me no salary, but two opportunities.

The first opportunity, was that I take over a previously unsuccessful attempt to build a business equipment leasing business that would later be financed and folded as a department into their new Savings and Loan when, and if, it was approved and opened.

The second opportunity was to develop, promote and market and series of inventions/marketing ideas another associate of this Colonel’s was working on.

I wouldn’t be getting a salary but neither did either require an investment so I decided to take a closer look at both.

I took over the files of the business leasing business, did some reading to educate myself on the business, prepared some material to leave with potential customers and starting “cold calling” on potential business lease customers. Potential customers included almost any business that used equipment and so in the Carmel, Monterey, Salinas trading area I had hundreds, if not thousands, of potential customers. The type of equipment that could be leased included almost anything imaginable from office equipment, to furniture to vehicles and machinery.

The main problem in our relatively small business community was education. Most of the local businesses had never leased anything and had a built in distrust of the procedure particularly as I represented Savings & Loan in organization not one actually in business. I represented no local money but would have to marry potential lessees with money from outside sources.

I kept at the cold calling and also made contacts with other leasing companies with whom I planned to place any leases I sold for financing. Of course, I would place them with our Savings & Loan when and if it was approved and opened for business. I attended several conventions of leasing companies making contacts and attending seminars. One was in Phoenix and I was able to visit Fritz for the few days I was there.

Although I did sell and place a few leases, the net result, after a year or so of real effort and hundreds of cold calls, was negative. Building such a business from scratch, with no in house financing available, seemed impossible, at least for me.

At the same time as I was working on the possible business equipment leasing business, I also spent some time on the inventions and marketing ideas the other associate of the Colonel’s had developed. We three formed a corporation called the Product Design & Development Group, designed a letterhead and some promotional material and I started writing various venture capitalists, manufacturers, agents and others who we felt might assist us in the marketing of not only this one man’s ideas but others we started to pick up.

Among the items we worked on was a colorful children’s book of paper punch-out (like paper doll) chess pieces that stood up on a large colorful foldout chessboard battleground. The book also contained the story and rules of chess and was designed and written to appeal to sub-teens.

We also had an electronic “breathalyser” that attached to the ignition of an automobile, which then would not start if the breath breathed into it contained any alcohol. Local judges were interested in using it to control those they sentenced for drunk driving that still had to use their cars for work. We had venture capitalists and manufacturers visit us in Monterey in response to my letters on this, and some of the other products, but were never able to make a deal.

Shortly after I started working with the Colonel, he leased a large, former bank building on the main street of downtown Monterey and we worked out of there. This building extended all the way through to the next street with another entrance on that street. It was an imposing building in the best central location and the Colonel planned to use it for his new Savings and Loan as soon as it was approved. In the meantime, the half dozen of us rattled around in this big building. Several times a month the Colonel hosted large meetings of his investors, or potential investors, in the proposed Savings and Loan.

As time went along, and the Colonel had more and more problems getting his Savings and Loan approved, the investment they had made looked worse and worse. Thank goodness the only thing we had invested in it was my time.

It turned out, that Savings and Loans already in existence were not that thrilled with the idea of a new competitor. These Savings and Loans were also big political contributors and had influence with the state agencies that had to approve new ones. In fact the current head of that agency was a San Diego Savings and Loan owner himself and was a friend of all of our potential competitors. Needless to say, he was not going to approve our application unless we either contributed more than everyone else put together or somehow else put pressure on him. Anyway, it looked less and less like our Savings and Loan would ever be approved,

One of the things the Colonel did to cut the overhead while he continued to try to beat the political system was to rent out the rear portion of the bank, facing the other street, to a computer retailer. I started spending time in his shop, covering for him when he had to go out, and learning about computers. I even attended a factory Apple Computer school in Palo Alto that was set up to train dealers.

In May 1985, we sold our Palm Desert home. Since we’d moved to Carmel and I’d started working again, it was difficult for us to make much use of it. It was difficult to sell and took a long time for new projects were continually being built and as it was empty desert all the way east to Phoenix, there was almost unlimited land for them to build more. This turned out to be our worst real estate investment and although we owned it for a little over five years, we were lucky to just about break even on it.

As 1985 progressed, with the probability that the Savings and Loan would never open and my difficulty in making a go of either the business equipment leasing or new product businesses, I started to use my computer shop time and newly found computer skills to write an updated resume and I started to re-investigate employment opportunities.

I no longer was thinking of a business of my own now I just wanted a 9 to 5 job working for someone else.

I found that while Carmel was a wonderful place to live, there wasn’t much opportunity for work unless it was in a resort-oriented job like bartender or bellhop or agriculturally oriented like farm labor.

The only other option seemed to be the various levels of government. I visited all the agency employment offices and made weekly visits to the newly named “Employment Opportunity Office” (State Employment Office). I checked all the listed jobs and mailed resumes to those that seemed a possibility. The Federal government, represented locally by the Army at Fort Ord seemed an impossibility for their employment office told me I had to already be on the Civil Service rolls and that required passing an examination given in San Francisco. The exam hadn’t been given in several years.

The fellow I had been working with at the “Equal Opportunity Office” did find one federal job notice for a federal job at Fort Ord they evidently hadn’t been able to fill from the Civil Service rolls, so I mailed a resume in on that.

Other job opportunities included an interview where I was strongly urged by the owner to take a job as an art salesman in a fine art gallery. I decided against it for his explanation of the high pressure selling techniques necessary to succeed turned me off. His efforts to sell me the job certainly did.

I also interviewed, and was offered a job, by Brown & Bigelow, the advertising firm I had worked for back in the 1950s. This was selling, on straight commission, in the Monterey area, but I decided against it.

Because I had good luck hiring from temporary agencies when I had my own paper business, I also investigated working as a temporary accountant for customers of Kelley Temporary Services, formerly known as Kelley Girls (but now unisex).

Just as I was about to accept a temporary job as an accountant for a home building firm through Kelley, I got a call for an interview from the Monterey County Medical Center in Salinas. I had earlier dropped off a resume there.

I interviewed and was hired as the Chief of the Medical Records, Cashier and Special Clinics Division. I started in June and found it very interesting work. I supervised the clerks filing all the patients’ medical records, the cashier who collected cash and checks from all departments and the medical personnel who conducted various clinics both at the hospital and in various other locations.

Among the clinics were baby clinics for poor families, visiting nurses, clinics at farm labor camps and other remote locations and even a monthly clinic to check the prostitutes allowed to work Salinas for venereal disease.

I had taken over for a just retired supervisor who had held the job for many years after being promoted from Cashier. She had never trained or delegated anyone to do the daily deposits that were taken down to the County Treasurer’s office each afternoon so I found that to be my personal duty. It was a complicated deposit made up of much cash and a large number of checks, many of them small. We had all the Health Department checks and cash, including that for dog licenses, restaurants, health related construction such as wells and all the hospital related income. It was often a real chore to get it all sorted out and balanced and down to the Treasurer’s Office before they closed.

I also found there were no controls or ways of checking the various departments to be sure all the money actually got to us. For example, dog licenses were not numbered or accounted for so many could have been sold and the receipts pocketed. I didn’t know if this was actually going on in any of the departments but I couldn’t believe it wasn’t. In any case, I reported the problem and made recommendations for proper controls.

I had been on the job only five weeks when I got a call from the Army at Fort Ord.

They had received my mailed application and were offering me a job as a GS-11 (roughly equivalent to a Major) Management Analyst. I asked what the job entailed and if I could come in for an interview to find out about it. I was told no, I would have to accept it based on the information I already had, or reject it.

Apparently the rule was if one applicant was given an in person interview all applicants would have to be. I asked the personnel office clerk to give me some general information about the job and told her I would call her back within a day.

I then went to my new boss at the hospital to ask her advice. She was retired military and would have some insight of what might be best for me to do. I explained to her that I liked my job at the hospital but that I had been offered this job with the Army and although I knew it paid more money, I knew little about what my duties might be.

She was very helpful. My job with her at the hospital was roughly equivalent to a GS-09 and although they liked my work and wanted me to stay, there was no way they could match the Army offer’s money. She was familiar with a Management Analyst’s duties and was able to accurately describe them to me. As Fort Ord was also 20 miles closer to home, I decided to take the new job.

This new Army job was with the Combat Experimentation Development Command (CDEC). We tested new weapons and tactics for the Army. My particular assignment was in Force Management. I made sure the sub units had the proper levels of civilian and military manpower and equipment and helped process requests for changes in force structure and equipment.

An extra duty was Civilian Personnel Liaison for CDEC with the Civilian Personnel Office (CPO). I had to process requests for new or replacement civilian personnel then, stay on top of the Civilian Personnel Office until those requests were filled. These duties put me in daily touch again with the same people who had earlier turned me away and told me there was no possible way I could get a job without first being on the Civil Service rolls.

Now I not only had a job, but I outranked them. The ones who had told me I had no chance were not happy to be proven wrong. Nevertheless, with some difficulty, and over time, I was able to build a good, mutually respecting, working relationship with them.

Over time, I moved into other areas of work, writing reports on various subjects and heading various programs.

One example was the result of the Army’s way of getting around obstacles and getting things done through trading. This was the same system I had used 30 years earlier in Korea to get shower and vehicle parts by trading liquor for them.

CDEC often had to run experiments requiring personnel or equipment they didn’t have. For example, if we were testing new helicopter tactics, we had to borrow helicopters and pilots. We had a few tanks, some infantry but any test requiring anything else required getting it from someone else.

Often to get everything we needed we found it difficult, or impossible, to do it through normal, or proper, channels and would have to trade something we had, or could get, for what we needed.

One thing we seemed to be able to get, that others couldn’t, was computers. We would trade the use of computers, still on our books, to other units for temporary use of men, equipment or whatever we needed.

Finally, after years of this, an outside auditor realized we had an awful lot more computers on our books than we seemed to actually have physically for him to look at.

I was sent to travel around to White Sands, New Mexico, Washington, D. C. and all the other places still using computers on our books and make sure they were all still there. I went, looked for them, found most of them and that particular problem was solved.

My CDEC duties also routinely took me to Fort Hunter Liggett often for several days at a time. Fort Hunter Liggett was where we did most of our actual testing. It was in a remote section of the California mountains about 30 miles from Paso Robles. Before World War II, the land had been William Randolph Hearst’s ranch and was only about 20 miles by horseback over a mountain from San Simeon his large estate on the ocean. A road couldn’t follow that horseback trail, so by car it was about 50 miles.

In any case, the old ranch buildings used at Fort Hunter Liggett were large and well built although not as fancy as San Simeon. The land was rough and picturesque. Many mountains, steep valleys, small meadows and many rivers and creeks. It was far enough from any other populated areas to make live firing possible and there was no ambient light from homes or businesses to interfere with laser or night sighting devices. If this picturesque land was anywhere near any large population centers, it would have made a great State or National park.

In 1986, we sold our two Thousand Oak rental properties for a good gain. Jean’s real estate empire was now down to just our Carmel and Malibu homes.

About this same time, I volunteered to work with our Carmel valley Golf and Country Club Homeowners Association and found myself immediately elected President. It took me five years of service before I could find a good replacement. It wasn’t all bad however, I found I enjoyed working with the other volunteers on our common problems and many of my experiences were good ones.

In 1987, we bought a membership in the Carmel Valley Golf and Country Club and both started to learn how to play golf. I really worked at it, took lessons and practiced almost every lunch hour. I never got much better though. I guess I’m just not well enough coordinated to be a good golfer.

I did enjoy golf though, particularly playing alone. Alone, I had no pressure on me and I played two balls adding up all the scores so that in 18 holes, I really had 36. When I wanted to play, I would just look down the 7th fairway from our living room window and when I saw no one coming on the 7th, or the end part of the 6th that I could see, I would just cross the street and start out by myself on the 8th.

I also often played with other Club members or on other courses with other neighbors. When Fritz visited, we played together. One time we played with a neighbor who Fritz said cheated. I had never noticed. I never cheated, even when playing alone for I always wanted to know what I really got. Why anyone would cheat, especially when there was no money involved, I still don’t understand.

In 1988, we sold our Malibu home with the very good gain I spoke of earlier. We had very heavy taxes to pay as a result.

Also in 1988, we took a two-week, three-island tour of Hawaii. We spent much of the time looking at real estate. Jean thought Hawaii might be a good place to buy to replace Malibu and that we might even end up moving there.

Then we discovered that we would not be allowed to bring our dogs right in, they would have to spend six months in quarantine. That took care of any idea of our moving there but we had a good time looking and thinking about it and of course saw all the sights.

We had the same problem with the dogs determining our future in another instance about that same time. Working for the Army, we were periodically asked to fill out a form asking where in the world we might be willing to work. Many employees spent most of their careers overseas and it was also easier to get into the higher grade levels if you were willing to travel. I always listed Hawaii and Japan as places I’d be willing to work and one day I got a call from an Army base in Japan, near Tokyo, offering me a job. I talked to Jean about it and it seemed like it might be a good thing to take. On weekends we could see all we hadn’t already seen of Japan and on our vacations we could travel throughout Asia. I called back to accept if we could bring our dogs. We couldn’t. So that was that.

Fritz visited us several times while we lived in Carmel and we always played a lot of golf. One time, I remember, Tom Hanks the actor was making a movie nearby in Pacific Grove. We also often saw Clint Eastwood playing golf on our course and Doris Day at the market but I don’t think that was ever when Fritz was there.

The one thing I do remember about Fritz, Carmel and golf was that on one of his trips, playing golf, he lost the diamond out of his ring. When he noticed it, we went back over the last few holes but had no luck. Jean had also lost diamonds from rings and I developed the theory that there was a conspiracy in the diamond business to mount them in such a way that they easily came out, got lost and had to be replaced. I still think that’s at least partly the reason they mount diamonds as they do.

In 1991, the government, in an economy move, decided to move the administrative functions of CDEC to Fort Hunter Liggett where our experimental troops were already stationed and where most of the actual experimentation took place. I was promised a promotion to GS-12. I had already been temporarily promoted to GS-12 several times for a few months at a time while waiting for new military bosses to arrive but this would be permanent. If I were to take it, I would have about an 80 mile a day commute each way.

I decided that life was too short and transferred to the Fort Ord post Logistics Division. I was still a GS-11 and was now a Supervisory Contract Compliance Administrator. I had various inspectors and clericals reporting to me and we checked the performance of civilian contractors who ran all the dining facilities, laundries and mortuary affairs for both Fort Ord, Fort Hunter Liggett and The Presidio of Monterey. We also supervised the contractors supplying these services to reserve units training at Camp Roberts, smaller units in our geographic general area and military and other government, including civilian, personnel traveling through that part of California. In other words, services for people in any of the government services who were authorized to eat, have laundry done or who died in central California were our responsibility.

As far as those who died, our services also included those to service people who died overseas but had to be shipped home to our area. We supplied any mortuary work still necessary and services for their families. Desert Storm took place in Iraq at about this time and we were doubly thankful that only a handful of Americans were killed there and just a few of those, were from our area.

I enjoyed my work except for the occasions I had to fill in for my Mortuary Affairs Technician and inspect the work done by our contract mortuaries.

My boss was a Dane who had immigrated to America as a young man, made a career out of the American Army and retired as a Major. He was responsible for not only my departments but all the food and petroleum product purchasing and distribution for all the local military units. He was easy to work for and very supportive of me. His only problem was a fondness for drink that sometimes left him home with me filling in at work for him. He later had a stroke that kept him away for some months but he recovered enough to eventually return to limited duty.

In 1992, we took a long trip to Florida. Jean wanted to get back to living on the ocean again. We probably should have never sold Malibu.

We had made many trips and had really looked up and down the California coast including even Catalina Island and even made offers on a few places on Coronado Island near San Diego. California had just gotten too expensive right on the coast. At least for the sort of place we wanted. Another thing, the water was cold along the Pacific coast and this made it too cool and foggy for us over at least the northern portion of California and Oregon and Washington. We wanted something on the ocean where it was warm.

Anyway, we flew to Jacksonville, rented a car and in a few weeks drove all the way around the Florida coastline including Key West. Jean had called ahead to various real estate agents to be ready to help us and she had also done a lot of additional research before the trip.

In about three weeks, I believe we got a pretty good idea of what was available right on the ocean and what areas we liked best. After we had completed the circuit and were somewhere near Pensacola, we sat down to decide where, if anywhere, we wanted to live.

We agreed on the Palm Beach area and drove back across Florida to spend more time there. We went to a real estate office right on Worth Avenue the Rodeo Drive of Palm Beach. We explained what we wanted and they started to show us condos. Beachfront houses were too expensive here too.

We also needed a beachfront condo that would accept dogs. This cut down the possibilities quite a bit. After a few days, the Realtor ran out of things to show us.

I asked her, “What about Singer Island?” Singer Island was the next barrier island north of Palm Beach.

We had stayed at a Motel on Singer Island on our trip around Florida a few weeks earlier and I’d seen plenty of condos there. Why wasn’t she showing us any of them?

It turned out that Singer Island, a lily white upscale condo community was within the city limits of, and got their services from, Riviera Beach a black coastal town with a bad reputation.

Anyway, the Realtor checked Singer Island and found quite a few condos to look at. We spent several days looking and finally made an offer on one on the 22nd floor, oceanfront, in the nicest building on the island. We checked out the comparatives and made, I believe, a fair offe

The owner, who turned out to be a financial Vice President of Ford Motor Company, refused the offer. He had only had the condo on the market a few weeks and he said he would accept no offers under a figure that was many thousands over what we had offered.

We were getting ready to go home by now. I had only taken three weeks off. We had looked at dozens of condos throughout Florida and found that this was the only one we really liked. So we made an offer at the owner’s minimum and left to go back to California.

In the airport we were paged. We now owned a Florida condo.

I was still working in California, so we arranged to rent the condo until we could someday come back.

The Cold War ended and with the 1992 elections there was a great interest in the “Peace Dividend”. This was the money we were all going to share with the cutting back of the defense effort. I was working for the Army and there was a great effort to cut back on Army expenses. Among other things the Generals in Washington decided to close Fort Ord and offer early retirement to the local Army civil service workers.

I turned 65 in July 1993 and with the new condo we had purchased in Florida to move to, looked forward to retirement. Under civil service I did not have to retire at 65, but I was ready.

As part of the early retirement program for civil service workers, they offered a bonus to those who would leave early. So rather than just retire on my own, I signed up for the early retirement program and the bonus.

This came through in October 1993 and I got a medal, a plaque, a Chinese retirement luncheon, a few very nice words and I retired.

We packed up our clothes, books a few of our Carmel furnishings, called a moving company and had them put it in a van together with our second car a 1983 Chrysler station wagon. The van driver took off for Florida saying it would take him about three weeks to get there.

We had already listed our Carmel home for sale and had sold all our other properties. As the Carmel home hadn’t sold yet, we told the Realtor to rent it, and started for Florida ourselves.

We had purchased a 1993 Honda in February and with some clothes and the two dogs took a leisurely trip. We stopped in Los Angeles to visit friends, in Phoenix to visit Fritz and his family, a little town north of San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Tallahassee and home to Singer Island.

The condo and beach was everything we remembered and more.

It was a beautiful setup and we had a great time getting settled in and acquainted with the people and area.

The only problem revolved around the dogs. Not that they themselves did anything wrong but the fact that dogs were allowed didn’t cause everyone to welcome them.

We obviously had to take them out several times a day to relieve themselves and this was made more difficult by the fact that the only allowable places were down 22 floors in the elevator and then several blocks away. Also the rule was that you had to carry the dogs at all times both inside the building and anywhere outside on condo property.

With two dogs weighing a total of about 35 pounds this was possible, if difficult for me, but impossible for Jean. As long as I was in good health it was OK, but if anything happened to me, or I was gone for some reason, Jean was in trouble.

We always picked up after them of course, so no one had that complaint, but if Jean tried to walk, rather than carry, them on the property on the way to the allowable relief spots, she was often upbraided by a self appointed “Condo Commando”. Jean would reply in kind but didn’t like having to. In any case, this was the only fly in our ointment or snake in our Eden.

I soon felt I had to do something more than just “be retired”. After investigating various volunteer options, I starting working as a volunteer at MacArthur Park.

This was a state park at the north end of Singer Island about 1 1/2 miles from our condo. Although it had a conference center and small aquarium and museum, it was mostly undeveloped land showing the various natural Florida habitats. There was forest, mangrove swamp, a long, beautiful beach and a fine offshore reef.

I worked at several different things. I guided nature-walking tours for adults and special ones for elementary school classes. I drove an elongated eight passenger golf cart/bus that took families from the parking lot across a mile long wooden causeway through the forest, swamp and tidal waterway to the beach and back. I also guided turtle nesting tours at night to see giant sea turtles digging nests and laying eggs and every Saturday led groups on snorkeling expeditions to the reefs. I generally worked two days a week and really enjoyed all but two aspects. Sometimes, especially in the summer, it wasn’t busy enough for me and generally it was very hot and humid. But all in all, I enjoyed it.

About this same time, there was a change of government in Haiti leading to greatly increased efforts by Haitians to illegally immigrate to Florida. Simultaneously Cubans stepped up their efforts to come in too. At one time I counted as many as 25 rafts stranded on the beach between MacArthur Park and our Condo. As the beach was cleaned of them every day or so, that means they were arriving at near 25 a day. Some of them arrived empty, for the Coast Guard picked up the immigrants at sea and left the rafts float on. Other rafts and speedboats arrived packed with immigrants who dispersed into the woods and, if possible into town, as soon as they hit land.

Fritz was visiting us at this time and one morning as I was walking the dogs on the beach, he shouted down to me from our 22nd floor balcony. He pointed down the beach to a speed boat just coming through the surf. I walked down and what seemed like dozens of Haitians came streaming out of the boat heading for the bushes. Women with babies, young and older people. I was just a few yards away and they seemed frightened of the dogs and me. Perhaps they thought I was a policeman of some sort.

In any case, they soon all disappeared. When I got back upstairs, Fritz said maybe we should go back down and try and claim the speedboat. There was no one in it any longer. But as we looked back down at it, we saw the Coast Guard already arriving in a small-motorized boat to claim the smuggler’s boat and tow it in. The Government really moves fast when there’s money involved.

Another time, early in the morning while walking the dogs, I found a pigmy sperm whale beached in shallow water. We called the Coast Guard who put us in touch with the proper animal control people and there was someone soon there to take charge and try and help it.

From our vantage point 22 floors up, and with the clear Gulf Stream waters, we could see many fish, rays, manatees and turtles swimming along parallel to the shore. At some times, when a large school passed through, we could see hundreds of sharks. One time there were dozens of manatees, all in a big group, mating or having a sex orgy.

And of course the birds. There was a large Pelican rookery in tall trees a few hundred feet north of our condo and dozens would be in the air at a time often looking as if they were about to come through our windows.

In fact, one time when we had the condo rented, we did have a broken window. The tenant didn’t know what caused it, but on the 22nd floor, it had to be either the tenant or a bird.

All in all, it was great living and going up and down 22 floors four or five times a day carrying 35 pounds of squirming dogs was keeping me in good shape.

In December 1994, we decided that, as even though we had no trouble keeping Carmel rented, it wasn’t selling. We decided we should go back to California long enough to sell it.

So we packed the dogs and some clothes in the Honda and retraced the trip we had made in 1993. We spent a little more time in New Orleans, had Mexican food again in Las Cruces, saw Fritz and his family again, visited our friends in Los Angeles and got to Carmel before Christmas.

Even though we loved Florida, it was good to be back in California again. We spent time fixing up the house and making sure it was properly shown and advertised.

Finally, in July 1995, we sold it. We sold it to a retired nuclear engineer from the Lawrence Livermore National Nuclear Laboratory, his wife and cat. They loved the house and he also bought our country club membership, but as an engineer, he found all sorts of little things wrong. They also quibbled over the price but we were able to convince them that our price was in line with the comparative prices their Realtor had given them and that their offers were not.

We lost money on the house and particularly on our Country Club membership. There was a housing recession, we were living in Florida now, so we simply dumped it all.

In July 1995, we were ready to pack the Honda and go back to Florida again. We had a renter in the condo though and they wouldn’t be leaving for many months so we had a lot of time before we could move back in. We also had always taken the same southwestern route back and forth and wanted to see a lot of the country we’d never seen.

So after packing yet another moving van headed for storage in Florida, Jean, the two dogs and I headed north rather than east.

We went first to San Francisco. We had, of course, been there many times before, but this might be the last time. We met friends, the Freedmans, from Singer Island who had been on their way out to see us, when our house sold and we had to leave it.

We spent several days with our friends walking around San Francisco and eating good Chinese food.

Then we left for Seattle and the Freedmans continued on south to Carmel. Even though we were no longer there to visit, they wanted to see it anyway. The Freedmans fell in love with Carmel, as we had, and on a subsequent trip there, bought a home and are no longer our neighbors on Singer Island. .

Seattle was beautiful. I had been there on trips to Fort Lewis when I was working for the Army and once visiting Uncle Bruce, Mother’s brother, when I was very young, before the divorce.

We spent several days exploring Seattle and the surrounding countryside and then went north to Vancouver. Remember, we had the two dogs with us but contrary to Hawaii and Japan, we had no trouble getting the dogs through the border.

Vancouver is an interesting, international, city with a wonderful scenic harbor and beautiful parks. Our hotel room in a downtown Holiday Inn, had a good harbor view and I could walk the dogs down to the shore. One afternoon we watched a cricket game in the park but I didn’t know the rules so couldn’t explain it all to Jean. Everyone else seemed to understand it and they all seemed to be having great fun.

From Vancouver, we took a ferry to Victoria. We stayed down on the car deck with the dogs and walked forward to the front of the boat where we could see our progress past and between all the little pine covered islands. Some were wild, some had a few houses on them. Victoria looks like, and I guess is, an old English town. There are a few totem poles around to remind you it’s Canada but otherwise it could just as well be England. Some distance north of town on the island is a beautiful garden. It’s on the former estate of a rich gravel merchant and he filled up all his old gravel pits with the most beautiful gardens and waterfalls I’ve ever seen. It’s a world-renowned garden and very dog friendly. We had a great time walking the dogs through all the flowers, trees and plants.

After a few days, we left for the Canadian Rockies, Banff and Lake Louise. Lake Louise is unbelievable. It is fed by melting glaciers with the water running over minerals that give the lake water a milky turquoise color.
Set among very high mountains with glaciers on their tops and sides and then pines on their lower slopes, it is beyond color calendar picture beautiful.

The town of Banff is picturesque but heavily tourist oriented. Lots of touristy shops, restaurants and motels. We ate one night in a Mexican restaurant, which for hors d’oeuvre served peanuts in the shell in small flowerpots. You were supposed to throw the shells on the floor.

One early morning there, perhaps 5.00 AM, I went to fill up the car with gasoline and on the way back to the motel along a residential street, I came upon a huge elk blocking the road. He was higher than the Honda, eating from a boulevard tree with his rear end sticking out and blocking the road. I just sat there until he finished and ambled down the road ahead of me.

From Banff, we went to Calgary. Our high point there was dinner in a New Age/Oriental/Hippie restaurant that served a delicious chicken/coconut/curry/rice noodle soup. Jean figured out how they made it and it’s one of our favorite recipes now.

Then we went south to the US again and to Glacier National Park.

Going over the mountains in the Park on the “Going to the Sun” highway is really something. I think I spotted the snowfield Fritz and I climbed and then slid down in 1950. A little further along a stream of melting glacier water was running down a cliff and falling out over part of the highway. Jean got out our thermos cup and held it out as we went through the water and we shared a cup of ice-cold glacier water. Further along we came upon a large Big Horned Sheep standing on a cliff side right next to the road.

A restaurant near the park served the best mashed potatoes we ever ate. As Jean is known for her good mashed potatoes, she tried to spy out the magic ingredients. She decided the only thing it could be was just darned good potatoes from nearby Idaho.

Next we went to Yellowstone. I had worked in the Park in 1947 and it didn’t seem to have changed that much since. Lake hotel, which was in disrepair when I was there, had been really fixed up and we had several breakfasts in their beautiful dining room. We would have stayed here, or elsewhere in the Park, but they don’t allow dogs in the rooms.

We visited Lake Lodge, where I had worked 50 years earlier, and spent time looking at my old working places and the cabins. This was all still almost as I remembered it, except they have added indoor plumbing. Buffalo were lying in the grass right in front of the Lodge but I didn’t see any bears running among the cabins as I used to. PuschSmokey beach, the beach Smokey and I built in 1947 had been washed away sometime during the 50 years since we had built it.

We saw buffalo walking right along the highways as well as at the Lodge and many other animals including moose, elk and even some bears. The rangers keep the bears in the backcountry now so that they no longer associate humans with food. You no longer see them in the campgrounds or along the road at “bear jams”.

Old Faithful was still spouting regularly although it’s exact schedule has changed a bit. I guess earthquakes move their natural pipes around a bit from time to time. We had breakfast at Old Faithful Inn one morning and it’s still an impressive place. I think it’s either the largest, or one of the largest, log buildings in the world.

From Yellowstone we went to Mount Rushmore. On the way we stopped at the Little Bighorn site of Custer’s Last Stand sort of a harbinger of Viet Nam.

There were having a national get together of motorcyclists around Deadwood, South Dakota so for several days we were surrounded, both on the road and off, with what looked like Hell’s Angels. In spite of their rough looks, those we met seemed pleasant enough.

Mount Rushmore was crowded, impressive and seemed the same as before. The Republicans haven’t got Reagan added to it yet.

On the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, we stopped at the Wall Drug Store. This is store is the result of the hard work of an enterprising couple who built a multimillion dollar, many thousand square foot business from nothing, by giving free water to motorists in the depression. It’s still a good place to stop and get a drink of water but now it’s hard to avoid spending something too.

Speaking of building a business reminds me of Sam Walton and his Wal Mart business. In the 1950s, Fritz and I were working in small towns in the Midwest for Montgomery Ward, Sam Walton was doing the same for Ben Franklin Stores. The difference is, he decided to go out on his own and took over an old store in a small town and built his own business from there concentrating on small towns that big businesses ignored.

Fritz and I, from the same background, made the mistake of continuing to work for big business instead of trying it on our own like Sam. Of course we didn’t even know what he was doing or even hear of him until many years later.

As they say, the rest is history. Sam became one of the richest men in the world. Fritz and I did not.

The only thing Sam Walton had that Fritz and I didn’t have was more guts, and, perhaps, more luck.

After leaving Sioux Falls and going through Fargo, North Dakota, we came to Fergus Falls, Minnesota. I worked there in 1954 for Montgomery Ward. They have a new (at least new since 1954) store out of town on the main highway now and the old store building is cut up into small shops. One I saw was a martial arts Taw Kon Do studio. Otherwise downtown Fergus Falls looked much the same.

We stayed several days in a nice motel on the lake just north of there at Detroit Lakes. Mother went to Detroit Lakes to live with friends when, at 16, her parents died. It’s a pleasant little town. One day we took a side trip to the headwaters of the Mississippi at Lake Itaska.

After a few days, we left going north to International Falls and then down to Duluth. We drove out along the lakeshore and stayed overnight.

The next morning we drove down to Minneapolis. We stayed near the Mall of the Americas on the south side. This is, or was, the largest indoor mall and has an amusement part built right into the middle of it.

As after three weeks on the road, the dogs needed a bath and clipping and as we wanted to spend some time without them in the mall, we took them to a groomer.

I think we saw every shop in the mall and the next day spent time looking around St. Paul. We found most of the places I’d ever lived including Wellesley, but couldn’t find our last home on Colette Place. Perhaps that was because I was somehow looking for Wright Street (our Pomona, California street). I had found Colette Place on previous trips but couldn’t find Wright Street for it wasn’t in St. Paul.

We couldn’t see the place where our Fort Snelling “Mess Hall” home once stood is now part of the runway at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. I think I spotted that area once when on a Northwest Airlines flight that stopped at that airport en-route to somewhere else.

We also went out to see the cottage at St. Croix beach. The cottage is gone but the beach looks much the same. We then drove down to Afton which is much the same as it always was except a bit more “touristy”.

Speaking of “touristy”, Stillwater, where we went next, even has tour buses with guides pointing out all the old homes and 19th century architecture. We followed behind one for a while and listened to the loudspeakered spiel. Stillwater is also the location of the Lowell Inn a fine old restaurant and hotel where, on a previous trip, Jean ranked the meal as one of the best in her life, anywhere.

Downtown St. Paul was mostly torn up with some redevelopment scheme in progress but the Cathedral and State Capitol were as impressive as before. I’d taken Jean to see the big Indian statue in the Court House on a previous trip but did point out the Library where Mom worked. I didn’t know it at the time, but Walter had spent a lot of time in this same building too.

After a few more days spent looking around the Twin Cities, particularly the beautiful lakes in Minneapolis, the four of us started out going east again.

That night we arrived in Madison. We knew it was built on a lake but for some reason couldn’t find the lake. After driving around most of Madison and asking directions, we finally got a glimpse of it by peering between two buildings at the University of Wisconsin. Here again, in Madison, is a beautiful State Capitol building.

The next day we drove through Chicago. With the dogs in the car, we didn’t stop. When working for the department stores I had gone there several times a year and Jean had made many trips with me. I would have liked to go to the museum there again and maybe had a good meal that night. But it was the middle of the day, we had the dogs, so we just drove down the Lake Shore Drive. It was a beautiful day, the skyline and lake both sparkled so we had a good view anyway.

That night we were in Toledo and the next day Niagara Falls. The AAA had told us to be sure an approach the falls from the Canadian side, but somehow, in following the signs that say Niagara Falls, I ended up coming in through the USA

We soon found out why the AAA specified Canada. We must have gone through 30 miles of city traffic, with motels, fast food restaurants, used car lots, discount stores, T shirt shops and discount houses with, all the while, big signs proclaiming, “This way to the Falls”.

When we finally got there, all we could find was a small park, surrounded by more outlet stores and shops, but with only a poor view of the falls.

We had to take the bridge over to Canada before we could really see it. The Canadians had not only the best view but had also held back most of the T-shirt and other shops leaving their river side nicely landscaped and open.

This U.S. side of the whole area is an extreme example of capitalism run wild with the resulting visual pollution and crowding to the point no one can see anything. You sure can buy anything though.

The next day we went to Montreal. We just zipped by Toronto for I was in the fast lane of the freeway going 70 MPH or whatever number of Kilometers per hour that is, just to keep up with the traffic. It was crowded, near the rush hour, but my lane, at least, was over the speed limit all the way. From what I could see from the freeway, Toronto looked just like Los Angeles or at least the freeway sure did.

Montreal is a nice old town but, here again, we almost missed it. The main highway goes under downtown in a long tunnel and the first chance I had to get off was perhaps five miles past downtown. We finally found our Downtown Holiday Inn (that took dogs) and checked in. We took several long walks and drives with the dogs and there is little vehicular traffic to worry about. Most of the traffic was under us somewhere in that damn tunnel.

A day or so later we went on to Quebec. It is an interesting, historical town and the center of the French Canadian separatist movement. I had a strange experience with that when I stopped for gas. It was self-serve and I filled up and went in to pay. The cashier had on a bright face and said something pleasant to me in French. When I answered in English, her face fell into a scowl and she made no further comment. Apparently the French Canadians will take our money but that doesn’t mean they have to like us.

We walked and drove all around town and found it charming to look at even if some of the inhabitants seemed unfriendly to English speakers like us.

The next day we drove through farming country and then deep woods to Maine. After we crossed back into the USA and were going through deep woods, we kept seeing road signs, “Watch Out for the Moose”.

We thought, Oh, Sure, this sounds like a tourist slogan to keep people interested. Then we came around the bend and here was a moose standing in the road. I guess the signs were up for accident prevention not tourist promotion.

The next day we drove to Bar Harbor and had a buffet breakfast featuring fresh Maine blueberries at a former mansion overlooking the harbor. That day we followed the coastline all the way down to Boston.

We hit Boston at the rush hour and on the freeway through town, at a point were several lanes merged, the was a big jam up with everyone from eight lanes trying to squeeze into four. Jean was driving and a woman in a red car trying to squeeze into our lane behind us and then into the lane on our left, hit our left rear bumper. When she pulled along side of us, we couldn’t get her attention. We thought perhaps she’d try to find a place to pull over and stop but no such luck she just kept going. After, perhaps, 20 miles we came to our off ramp and she was still ahead of us traveling merrily along.

We had her license plate number and the car description so the next day we went to the police. They gave us a computer printout that included her name address and insurance carrier. Later when we got to Florida, we called her insurance company and they sent out an estimator. I showed him the red paint on the bumper as the red color mentioned in the police computer printout. The insurance company later turned down the claim saying their policyholder said she didn’t hit us. I suggested they look at her right front bumper for beige paint from our car. They did so, found the beige paint and paid us.

We’d been to Boston and Cape Cod before, so this time, with the dogs, we didn’t see much other than from the car. We did find that downtown Boston is not the best place to drive. It’s all one-way streets seeming to go the direction you don’t want to. As for the freeways, you’ve heard of our experience there.

The next day we continued on to the Catskills. They were having some sort of motorcycle convention there too and for a while it reminded us of all the motorcycles we’d seen a few weeks earlier in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Catskills are nice to look at though.

The closest hotel to New York City that took dogs I had come up with on the phone was at the Newark Airport Holiday Inn. This was not New York City, but it was close enough for our needs on this trip. Jean was born in New York City and both of us had made many earlier trips there. With the dogs, we didn’t see how we could easily spend much time in the city anyway.

We did drive in that night over the George Washington Bridge and north on the Riverside Parkway to Yonkers to visit some friend’s house for dinner.

Coming back, I was looking for the New Jersey Turnpike exit to get back to the Holiday Inn and I never saw it. What I did notice was that were I had been traveling in a mob of hundreds of cars, I was suddenly all alone on a pitch-black highway. As soon as I saw a gas station, I got off and sure enough, I’d somehow missed the turnoff. Either everyone else saw a sign or just knew where the turnoff was. Anyway, we eventually got back to the Newark airport Holiday Inn.

The next morning we drove down to Jean’s brother’s home at Levittown, in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia. We spent several days there seeing the sights and all the rest of the family again but more importantly, spending time with her brother. He was to die only a few months later in December 1995. This was the last time we’d see him alive.

After several days with Jean's family, we continued on south to Washington DC Although we’ve visited Washington many times before, we always enjoy the museums and seeing the monuments once again. The last several times we have stayed in a Holiday Inn near the Air and Space Museum that allows dogs. It also has cool underground parking so we can leave them in the car for several hours at a time while we walk to the sights.

This trip was the first time we’d seen the new Holocaust Museum. It’s very thought provoking. I was especially struck by the somber reverent behavior of visiting high school classes. Many of the students were black and stereotypes would have you believe they would all be ruffians. They didn’t look or behave like anything but well-mannered students sorry for and impressed by the suffering of all those lost to the Nazi horror.

The new Roosevelt monument was not open yet but the new Korean War memorial was. It was very impressive and brought back memories for me.

After a day or so, we continued south toward Florida. We stayed overnight somewhere in the Carolinas, at Jacksonville, St. Augustine and arrived back in Palm Beach Gardens in September about six weeks after we’d left California.

We had spent six weeks on the road with the dogs but we all seemed to have had a good time and had seen lots of things we’d never seen (or in the case of the dogs, smelled) before.

Our condo at Singer Island was rented and would be for the next six months so we had to find a place to stay. We wanted another place on the ocean and soon found the dogs limited us to a very few possibilities. After checking out what was available on the ocean, we started looking inland and soon signed a lease on a row house at the PGA (Professional Golf Association) Development. This was a large gated series of neighborhoods built around five golf courses and a hotel used for PGA tournaments. It was about five miles directly west of our beach condo.

While looking for a rental, Jean had told the agent we might be interested in buying an inland home for the dogs were a problem at the beach condo. As I said earlier, not only did we have to carry them up and down four or five times a day but even when we followed all the rules, some of the “condo commandos” seemed to find fault with the very fact they existed.

The agent referred us to an upscale development that was just being built a mile or so east (toward the beach) from PGA.

This was BallenIsles. It, like PGA, entirely gated and was also built around golf courses. Three in this case. It is much nicer, however, with some neighborhoods with homes into the millions of dollars. We weren’t looking for anything like that but had always heard that in real estate the most three important factors to consider are location, location and location. Jean has always successfully followed that rule.

BallenIsles sure seemed to have location. We started looking seriously at the various neighborhoods and models. The dogs would be no problem here for all were free standing homes with, at the worst, small, yet private, lots. Even the small lot homes were surrounded with acres of beautifully landscaped open areas, lakes and, of course, the three golf courses.

We soon made an offer on a model and neighborhood we liked and signed a contract for a home to be built and ready to move into in April 1996. We would live at PGA until then.

In December, Jean’s brother died and we went back up to Pennsylvania for the funeral.

What was very impressive to me about the funeral was the number of friends he had. He had been very close and remained in contact with the people with whom he’d gone to grade school, high school and college in New York City. Then working at Remington Rand, now Unisys, as one of the first computer engineers, he’d made many more friends. He’d lived in Levittown for thirty or forty years and seemed to have made friends with all his neighbors. He taught bridge and classes for small children to learn the computer, and made more friends. There were, it seemed, hundreds of people who had known him, would miss him and wanted to pay their respects at either the memorial service or at his home afterward.

I couldn’t help but think what an impressive life he’d led and how much he’d be missed. I was envious thinking; maybe I’ll draw a dozen people to my funeral (if I’m lucky). I didn’t think, however, and don’t know what I could or would do to emulate him and his life. I guess I just don’t have what he had to attract and hold the real affection of all types of people.

When we got back home we were fast approaching the completion date for our home, so got into a whirl of furniture shopping and looking for all the other things we’d need.

We moved into our new home at 321 Sunset Bay Lane in April 1996 as planned.

So now we had two homes again, one in BallenIsles and the condo on Singer Island.

During all of the 40 odd years since 1957, Jean's avocation, and, I guess, business, has been the purchase, redecoration and sale of homes. As I’ve said earlier in this autobiography, we have had homes near Los Angeles in Westchester (2), Bel Air (2), MoorPark (2 rentals), Studio City, the Hollywood Hills, Palm Desert, Malibu, and Carmel (all in California). Now we have these two homes on Singer Island and in Palm Beach Gardens in Florida and she, at least, has not retired yet. She’s still looking at real estate and talking of selling what we have and buying something else.

In 1993, however, I, at least, really retired.

In 2000, we, thinking we might move back to California for Jean missed the scenery and food, sold our BallenIsles home and moved back into our Singer Island condo. We had to live there at least two years full time for after years as a rental, we would get killed with taxes if we didn’t re-establish it as our residence before selling it.

Our two dogs Teddy and Daisy died of old age and we, getting older too, never went back to California but have stayed here in the Singer Island condo. In 2007, we finally got another dog, a Maltese named Bonnie.

We’ve taken several trips back to California and all the places in-between in the years since we moved back to Singer Island but now, with Bonnie at only 9 pounds, and the dog rules here somewhat liberalized, we are happy here.

We still belong to the BallenIsles Book Club and I take a fairlyactive role in three service organizations. I also do volunteer work Information Management (computer) department of the local Veterans Administration Hospital.

We keep busy and happy with our hobbies of reading (at least one good book a month) and I spend a lot of time on my computer with my genealogy. I used to spend more time snorkeling, and I used to work at golf and needlepoint (until we filled our homes with pillows, rugs and wall hangings. We’re not working on any more needlepoint right now until we find a place to put it). My golf has decreased to a few times a year since I found my work at it didn’t seem to improve my score.

I read sometime long ago that the Greek Ideal was to keep a strong mind in a healthy body. This sounded like a good plan to me so I do a lot of exercise. Now that I’m retired, I exercise, walk and/or try to do physically demanding work at least 1 1/2 hours a day seven days a week. Jean is responsible for my good diet and I’ve had doctors tell me that I should thank her for taking such good care of me.

As I write this, in September of 2007, I see our future life as much like the last seven years have been since we sold the Sunset Bay house and moved to the Singer Island condo full time. Maybe someday, we’ll move into one of these fine assisted living homes if we find we need or want it.

I don’t see this as bad, but we would like to travel more. The dog seems to keep us here. We lost Daisy, who was seventeen, in early 1998 and Alfie, a year or two later, (they were both strays). As I said before, in 2007, we got Bonnie, a pure bred Maltese who was given us by a terminally ill friend. We hate to leave her in a kennel and do take her with us on short trips but don’t want to put her in a plane and of course can’t take her on a cruise or overseas. Our driving trips may be limited too for during our 12,500 mile trip in Spring 2006, I found my eyesight had declined to the point it could be dangerous.

Without really knowing what the future holds, it may be early to make any judgments on my life but if I had to rank it 1 to 10, I’d give it at least an 8.

I’ve never been rich (like Sam Walton) or famous. I’ve (we’ve) never had children. I’ve never been as successful with people or as popular as, for example, Saul. My life has been relatively uneventful.

But, as the Chinese say, “It’s a lucky man who lives in uneventful times.”

I did find Jean. I’ve enjoyed our many homes. I’ve been healthy. I’ve enjoyed my work and been reasonably fulfilled and successful at it. I’ve enjoyed good books, good food, good conversation and good thoughts.

As I write this in 2007, I’m happy and thankful. I’ll settle for my life and I believe I’ve been very fortunate.