Fantasy Draft

    “Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”   Dr. Seuss

I just completed drafting my NFL Fantasy Football team for the upcoming 2020 season, due to begin in six days despite the pandemic necessitating empty stadiums.  It seems crazy to proceed; but billions in TV revenue are at stake, and in America that trump’s health concerns.  As customary, I was with Dave, who helped set up my computer and offered advice when it didn’t conflict with his desires. On zoom we chatted with nephew Bob’s family – Niki, Addie, and Crosby - in San Diego and met grandson Anthony’s new girlfriend.  In many ways the Lane family zoom interaction was the evening’s highlight.

California Lanes

Thanks to Carolina running back Christian McCaffrey’s 2019 heroics, I am the defending champ in our Lane league, now in its fifteenth year and recently expanded to ten teams. I had the number 2 pick and, as expected, McCaffrey went first to nephew Dave’s Bruisers.  So, Jimbo Jammers settled for running back Saquon Barkley (on right, below).  The consensus draft ratings recommendations are top heavy with running backs and wide receivers, but after securing Tampa Bay wide receiver Mike Evans with my second pick, I decided to opt for the best remaining choices in the other positions.  Thus, I drafted Eagle tight end Zach Ertz, Baltimore QB Lamar Jackson, and later, the top-ranked Steeler defense and the top-ranked kicker Justin Tucker (left) of Baltimore.

My prediction (hope I’m wrong): Covid-19 will wreak havoc on the gridiron, necessitating cancellations and possible derailment of the entire season. For the 90 minutes of socializing and strategizing, however, we allowed out football fantasies to prevail over the so-called new normal.

Within minutes of posting the above, Facebook Nick Mantis posted: “Your team is solid.”  I replied: “As you know, injuries play such a major role, running backs are the hardest to predict since they are injury-prone, age fast, and an unheralded one typically bursts on the scene in the first couple weeks.  Top-ranked running backs of the very recent past – David Johnson, Todd Gurley, Le’Veon Bell, Mark Ingram, Frank Gore – are far down on the list. 

While I didn’t miss sports that much when everything was on hold, now I’m enjoying the Cubs and Flyers and next week I expect to watch my share of NFL games.  Unless I’m rooting for a team, games bore me; so I haven’t been interested I NBA basketball since the 76ers got eliminated.  Ditto the Kentucky Derby, this year without fans at Churchill Downs. The Bayers used to have Derby parties complete with mint julips; and, more recently, when family was visiting, I’d arrange for everyone to throw in a dollar and have horses picked out of a hat.  My bowling league started up, but Frank Shufran and I decided to drop out and reassess next year if the pandemic is over. Last year, we were scrambling to find substitutes when two players went on the DL, and this year probably would have been just as bad, if not worse.

Stuck upstairs without reading material while the cleaners were at the condo, I found Sue Grafton’s mystery novel “P Is for Peril” in the bookcase and, 50 pages in, plan to finish it.  My dad Vic loved hat genre for work-related train or plane trips, but the private eyes were macho men, unlike Kinsey Millhorn, whom I find infinitely more interesting than a Sam Spade type. The missing person had been a nursing home administrator, a job rendered almost impossible by our current pandemic.  Kinsey found listings for 20 in the yellow pages.  Grafton wrote:

    Most facilities had names suggesting that the occupants pictured themselves in any place but where they were: Cedar Creek Estates, Green Briar Villa, Horizon View, Rolling Hills, the Gardens. Surely, no one envisioned being frail and fearful, abandoned, incapacitated, lonely, ill,  and incontinent in such poetic-sounding accommodations.

South Shore Arts director John Cain (on left) announced he’s retiring within the year. I first met him at a meeting and at first glance he resembled nothing more than a Truman Capote clone, complete with mannerisms. The first time he spoke, I realized he was someone I wanted to know better.  We’ve become friends and collaborators on several arts projects.  I wrote an essay for a booklet for an important show titled “Gary Haunts.”  I’ve given several talks on Rock and Roll music for the Munster Center’s Art in Focus series.  Toni and I are regulars at Cain’s annual Holiday reading, often a selection from his doppelganger Truman Capote.

Former Gary teacher Jim Spicer provided a history of “Joke Day.”  “Since the early 1970’s students in my classroom were taught that on Friday, with a minute remaining in the hour, their response to my question, “WHAT’S TODAY?” would be, “JOKE DAY!” Since retirement the Friday tradition continues. Here’s one of my favorites are repeated: “If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?”

Eleanor Bailey wrote about childhood memories during World War II:

    In the mid-1940s, our family lived in the Newton County small town of Lake Village.  Playing with my friends and cousins was a lot of fun. We didn't know what being safe meant, it just was. It was war time. We had radios, but no televisions. News was not constantly replayed all day long. I remember as a child of five or six that my parents would put we three children to bed and late in the evening they would tune the radio to the Walter Winchell program. He would open his broadcast by saying, “Good Evening Mr. and Mrs America and all the ships at sea.” Lying in bed awake and secretly listening, I would wonder to myself, “Why is this man telling those terrible stories?” I knew that two of my uncles were away from home and they would write letters to the family. The letters came in special thin blue envelopes. Uncle Charles Bailey was in the Army Air Force and stationed in England. Uncle Paul Bailey was a Navy radioman on a ship that carried fuel and equipment to Murmansk in northern Russia. The Russians were our allies at that time.

    Dad and many other men drove every day to the steel mills and other factories in the north end of Lake County. They car-pooled and shared their ration stamps to buy gas. Dad worked at Harbison-Walker Refractories on Kennedy Avenue in East Chicago. Other men worked at Linde-Air, at one of the steel mills, or Pullman-Standard Company. All were making goods that were war-related.

   “Often we would go to Aunt Flora Iliff's restaurant on the south end of town. Town residents gathered there to drink coffee and discuss the latest news. When the bombs were dropped on Japan, their conversation turned to questions, such as, “What will happen now? Someone repeated what they had heard, "The oceans will come up and cover the earth!” This was a frightening time for a child whose only care had been which friends to spend the day with and whether to ride bikes, roller skate or play with our doll-houses.

On a hike along Lake Michigan Dorreen Carey photographed dragonflies mating and basking turtles.  Awesome!

Looking Back

The river in summer

In midstream

I look back

    Japanese haiku

 

Matilda and daughter Iona, 1920

Eleanor Bailey wrote:

   Recently while going through some old postcards, I found one postmarked April 8, 1925, from Matilda Cox to her five-year old grand-daughter, Hettie Bailey. The Cox and Bailey families lived just a mile or two from each other. They didn’t have telephones, so postcards were a common mode of communication be it near or far. It read: “Dear Grand Daughter you are invited to come out Friday night or Saturday Morning and bring papa mama Charles Chester and the twins and stay for Easter be Sure to come. grand Mo and Po to Hettie.” How thrilled the five-year-old must have been when she received the card from her grandmother.

I came across an article about queer activist Sarah Schulman, above, in New York magazine and realized I had seen her speak at IU Northwest about “Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community responsibility, and the Duty of Repair.”  She seemed particularly eager to hear students’ opinions of her book and what, in their opinion, constituted harassment.  Author Molly Fischer identified the book’s central insight:

    People experiencing the inevitable discomfort of human misunderstanding often overstate the harm that has been done to them – they describe themselves as victims rather than as participants in a shared situation.

The key distinction between conflict and abuse: the nature of the power relationships.  For example, what might be simply a disagreement among colleagues or associates might constitute harassment if a superior in a position of dominance is the source of the discomfort. In the classroom Schulman has a “no censorship” rule and students are encouraged to debate and critique one another in any language they feel appropriate without the need for “trigger warnings” that the forthcoming subject matter may be disturbing to some. Needless to say, Schulman believes universities college campuses should be forums for open debate on controversial subjects.

 

I knew about novelist David Foster Wallace’s thousand-page tome “Infinite Jest” but little else until viewing “The End of the Tour” (2015), about Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky spending a week with the troubled novelist who later hanged himself. As portrayed by Segal, Wallace was a rather pathetic, albeit talented, figure most comfortable with his dogs or, his one social outlet, dancing at a Bloomington, Illinois, Baptist church.  Part of a “New Sincerity” school that regarded banality as truth, Wallace during a Minneapolis stop admired the Mary Tyler Moore statue, visited the Mall of America, and took in a “Die Hard” movie.  Throughout Wallace is wary that Rolling Stone will portray him as ambitious or a sell-out.  When asked if wearing a kerchief on his head were an affectation, he replied defensively that it kept sweat out of his eyes. He didn’t want a TV in the house not because he was a snob but out of fear he’d never turn it off.  He wrote: “What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is "all it does"—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison.”

David Foster Wallace gave a memorable commencement speech at Kenyon College titled “Thoughts on Living a Compassionate Life.”  It opened with a parable about two young goldfish being asked, “How’s the water?” and replying, “What is water?” Wallace left us this introspective insight:

    The so-called ‘psychotically depressed” person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote “hopelessness” or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.

Alexandria, right; MaryAnn below

Alexandria Quinn wrote that Toni’s sister MaryAnn, who is battling cancer, was the strongest women, with the biggest, most passionate heart, that she’s ever known. She wrote:

    I cannot begin to express how much her passion and heart has fed my soul and the woman I have grown proud to be. She is unstoppable and relentless, beautiful and educated, loving and driven, passionate and stubborn. Times are hard: no one could deny that cancer is one hell of a battle. Even being exhausted and in pain, I had to tell her not to make us breakfast this week and to stop worrying about taking care of everyone else. She has still been making jokes and laughing at herself instead of getting down on herself and asking “why me,” blaming everyone and everything else.  She’s a fighter and is proving that through the toughest battle imaginable.  I love her to the moon and back. Lanes and Okomskis, 2019

Toni’s older sister was a risk taker who eloped while a senior at Little Flower High School and kept the marriage secret until she graduated.  She had four kids in quick order before a doctor warned her to cease or risk dying.  She waited a few years and then gave birth to two more daughters.  The first time I met her while dating Toni MaryAnn’s daughter Andrea cut herself trying some daredevil feat in the backyard; Sonny wasn’t home, so I drove them to the ER.  I was so freaked out by the bloody wound that MaryAnn had to calm me down.  MaryAnn’s kids, no surprise, turned out passionate and opinionated.  Family was everything to MaryAnn, and she loved nothing better at the end of the day than to tell or listen to family stories accompanied by much laughter.  In her sixties she roughed it in Thailand with her daughters.  Two years ago, she participated in the Eagles Superbowl celebration in downtown Philadelphia. Sonny, not one to give out compliments, admitted not long before he died, that he had hit a grand slam when he married MaryAnn.

This from Anne Koehler: “With my 98-year-old friend Babe Poparad who is still a crossing guard in Porter. Has a beautiful garden and shares her produce.  We are both of German descent and know how to milk cows but don't have any!!!!”

Past and Present

"won’t be long now it won’t be long

till earth is barren as the moon

and sapless as a mumbled bone”

    Don Marquis

I had never heard of Midwestern humorist Don Marquis until historian Ray Boomhower shared one of his poems.  The popular columnist created such characters as the Old Soak and Archy and Mehitabel.  Boomhower found a statement where Don Marquis claimed he would “look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age” and, if called on, would “address public meetings in a vein of jocund malice.”  Alas, he died in 1937 at age 59.

 

A special issue of Bucknell’s alumni magazine was devoted to class disruptions during “Our Pandemic Spring.”  A sidebar documented previous disruptions during the Lewisburg, PA, university’s 174-year history.  For instance, classes were suspended for six weeks in 1863 as Rebel troops advanced toward Gettysburg; 36 students took part in the momentous battle. In 1918 the Spanish flu hit Pennsylvania particularly hard; classes continued with precautions, but several football games got cancelled, including one at the last minute against Penn State. Flooding of the nearby Susquehanna River in 1936, at which time students had to be rescued by canoe, caused suspension of classes and damaged residence halls and fraternity houses. In 1970 a student strike supported by faculty in protest over the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings pressured the administration into cancelling classes for the week of May 4 for teach-ins and demonstrations.

Pioneer sociologist Max Weber, who died in 1920 at age 56 of complications brought on the flu, is most famous for his two-volume text “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1904-1905). In New York Review Peter E. Gordon wrote:

    In the United States today one often encounters the boastful claim that its citizens are the beneficiaries of a “Protestant work ethic,” as if this explained the power of American capitalism.  But Weber offered a more tragic view.  In his estimation the religiously inspired ethic of a calling had died out long ago, a casualty of the rationalization process it helped set in motion. Capitalism, Weber argued, now runs on its own, with machine-like indifference to all spiritual values.  Meanwhile, those who are caught in its mechanism are left with little more than a sense of mindless compulsion.

    Although Weber could not have anticipated the unfolding catastrophe of climate change or the environmental ravages that have attended the process of industrialization, he understood that capitalism’s unrestrained expansion across the planet could hardly be taken as a sign of social betterment or historical progress.

above, Perry and Aggie Bailey in 1910 with Flora, Maude, Oscar, and Ethel
below, Aggie holding baby, back, middle, circa 1918

“A Rural Family Near Roselawn, Indiana, 1923-1935, by Eleanor Bailey and Hettie Bailey Abbott describes the struggles of Perry and Aggie Bailey and their children, who rented a small farm without electricity, refrigeration, or air-conditioning located west of Roselawn in Lincoln Township. The couple wed in 1899 when Aggie was 17 years old.

    Coal oil lamps were used for lighting, washing done by hand. Putting food by for winter meant a lot of work in the summer. They planted a large truck patch to grow vegetables for the family and to sell in town. The cash crops were potatoes and strawberries. The potatoes had to be bugged by knocking the bugs off with a paddle or a stick into a can of old oil.  Eggs and butter were taken to Thayer once a week to trade for flour, sugar, rice and lamp oil. Perry grew and hybridized gladiolas and shipped some orders by rail.  Beans put in gunny sacks and hung up to dry. In the winter the bags were taken down and beaten with sticks so that the beans would pop out of the shells.

    When blackberries, raspberries and huckleberries were ripe, Aggie and her children would take a horse and buggy go to the woods and pick berries to can for the winter.  Canning was done without the convenience of a ready supply of hot water. Water had to be pumped, heated on the stove, the jars washed, scalded, filled and everything went back on the stove to be boiled again. Many hours went into the work of canning food for use in the winter.  Aggie’s father, Israel Cox, would butcher a hog; after the meat was prepared, he and wife Matilda would share it with other families.

    Entertainment was square dances on Saturday night. Model T’s would bring the families to a neighbor’s barn.  After a picnic lunch, younger children would be asleep before the dancing was over. Perry Bailey played the fiddle for most of the dances. He played a few times as a guest on WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago.

    During those years of Prohibition and gangsterism, John Dillinger was robbing banks and Al Capone was spending a lot of time in south Lake County, Indiana where he had a hideout at Wildwood near Schneider, Indiana. The intersection of State Routes 10 & 55, between Thayer and Roselawn, was called “Little Chicago.” At a corner gas station bootleg whiskey or homemade beer could be purchased.  Rowdy card games took place on Saturday nights. If the FBI agents were in the area, gunny sacks would be placed on the roads as a warning to bootleggers. During the Depression, many local men took jobs cutting willows out of the road ditches when State Road 10 was paved from Lake Village to the Illinois State Line.

Ray Smock wrote:

    Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV: These five words will be part of the narrative of Donald Trump’s late stage unraveling. He bragged to Fox News medical reporter, Dr. Marc Siegel, that he aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test and then lied that the doctors were amazed that he was able to do what he did. In great detail, and with no embarrassment, and only pride in his personal accomplishment, the president seemed to be acting out a caricature of himself on Saturday Night Live. The president repeated the five words several times to prove he could do it. This feat proved to him, if no one else, that he was cognitive enough to be president of the United States. He is a good five-word guy. The doctors were amazed.

    Why, after watching Trump and bearing witness to his conduct for five years now, does my jaw still drop and my eyes pop out at this man’s behavior? The dark tragedy that is the Trump Administration has no bottom to it. As dark as it is, it somehow gets darker with each passing week. I thought the nation was in free fall when Trump was elected. But I underestimated how far we would fall, and, at first, I thought we had a parachute we could open into a lovely blue sky that had the word Constitution written across it in big bold letters. The Constitution would save us.

Joe Kernan

On the day of Congressman John Lewis’ funeral service attended by three former presidents (but not Trump), I learned that former Democratic governor of Indiana Joe Kernan passed away, sparking eulogies from Democrats and republicans who knew him alike.  He 1968 Notre Dame graduate piloted a plane shot down over Hanoi in May 1972 and was a POW for eleven months. He served three terms as mayor of South Bend and became governor when Frank O’Bannon died in office. Former Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson recalled flying to a campaign appearance with Kernan and his joking that on one of his previous flights, he crash-landed in enemy territory.

Since I’ve been home these past months, I have been binge-watching the eight seasons of “Homeland,” starring Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, an intrepid, bipolar CIA agent. Watching the series finale, I realized the perfect symmetry between the first episode, when an American POW appears to have been brainwashed by ISIS terrorists but overcomes what he’d been programmed to do, and denouement, after Carrie is released from eight months of captivity by the Russians. Like the series finale of “The Americans,” I found it gratifying and full of surprises.

Tomfoolery

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” Mark Twain

Thomas Skelton

The origin of the word “tomfoolery,” meaning to acting even worse than a fool, comes from England in the time of William Shakespeare.  Thomas Skelton was a sadistic jester at Moncuster Castle in Cumbria who allegedly played vile jokes on those whom Sir William Pennington disliked, once cutting off the had of a butcher with whom
his master’s daughter had fallen in love with his own knife.  Rumor had it that he’d sit under a tree and tell passersby who asked for directions to take a path that led to quicksand and their death.

Trump’s latest tomfoolery is to announce that despite the pandemic he’ll be holding a MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, location of the infamous 1921 massacre that killed scores of black people and destroyed their neighborhood. The original date was June 19, known as “Juneteenth” and celebrated when slaves learned of their emancipation. Attendees have to sign a waiver agreeing not to hold sponsors liable in case they catch Covid-19.  Imagine. Trump also announced that he’d be giving his Republican National Convention speech in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 27, the sixtieth anniversary of that city’s notorious “Axe Handle Riot,” when a Klan-inspired white mob attacked peaceful black demonstrators with axe handles.  Trump has also criticized those who wish to rename the dozen military bases (Bragg, Hooker, Benning, etc.) named for Confederate leaders. 

Don Coffin passed on this statement by former General David Petrakis: “For an organization designed to win wars to train for them atinstallations named for those who led a losing force is sufficiently peculiar, but when we consider the cause for which these officers fought, we begin to penetrate the confusion of Civil War memory. These bases are, after all, federal installations, home to soldiers who swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The irony of training at bases named for who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention. Now, belatedly, is the moment for us to pay such attention.”

Even more damning was a recent statement by former Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis, branding Trump the first president in his lifetime “who does not
try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”  The country has not been so polarized in 50 years, since Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate. Some, referencing the poem “Second Coming” (1919) by William B. Yeats, fear the center won’t hold and that the country is slouching toward anarchy. But for the prospect of voting Trump out of office in November, they may have a point. Here are the first lines of “Second Coming”:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world 

Republican Senator from South Carolina Tim Scott, an African American, appeared on the Sunday talk shows to tout a bipartisan legislative proposal for police reforms regarding the use of choke holds, no-knock procedures, and compiling a record of complaints against individual.  When Scott described to fellow Republican legislators how he’d been stopped and hassled numerous times by cops, including after he’d become a member of Congress, they supposedly were shocked and mortified.  While I doubt that anything meaningful will come from Scott’s efforts, given Trump’s intransigence to any gesture of compromise, Republicans are clearly worried about a possible election debacle.

 On Flag Day historian Ray Boomhower quoted Norman Thomas: “If you want a symbolic gesture, don’t burn the flag; wash it.” The flag Trump seems most eager to defend lately is the Confederate Battle flag.  In fact, when NASCAR announced that Confederate flags were not welcome at its events, he ridiculed the decision-makers. 

Former Valparaiso University History professor Heath Carter, now at Princeton
Theological Seminary, has made available on Facebook a lecture series he’s
giving at Nassau Presbyterian Church on the church during times of crisis. Introducing
himself, Carter noted that the series will offer both comfort and cautionary
tales. The initial one dealt with racism during a time of epidemic - the 1793
yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia, founded by Quaker William Penn as the
“City of Brotherly Love” and then the nation’s capital and largest city. Noted
doctor Benjamin Rush, believing African Americans to be immune to the disease,
convinced many free blacks to nurse the sick with dire consequences. Not only did
many perish, others were unfairly blamed for thefts and for spreading the disease.
After the terror abated, members of St. George’s Church, heretofore integrated,
voted to restrict blacks to the balcony. When Richard Allen refused to obey the edict and was forcibly removed, the other black members walked out and subsequently founded Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, which is still in existence. Meanwhile, at Valparaiso religious leaders and many others of good will participated in a peaceful vigil and later a die-in to honor and mourn the black victims of police violence.

photo by Allison Schuette

Liam off camera

Sampter in sports jacket

Alissa visited overnight, and James celebrated his twentieth birthday with friends Andrew, Nate, and Liam. Dave got them to go on Facebook and sing Smash Mouth’s “All Star” (You’re an all star, Get your game on”). Janet Bayer found a1990 photo her
friend Anita took of a Going Away party for the Bayers upon their move to Vermont. I’m wearing a blue vest and tie and except for the nerdy glasses was looking quite dapper but, I wrote Janet, not as dapper as Al Sampter, mentor to my mentor, Mike Bayer.

Eleanor Bailey wrote:

    On This Day-June 15, 1943 -77 years ago. The town of Sumava Resorts in Newton County Indiana had been flooded for several days. (May-June flood Kankakee River 1943). We lived on the first road to the left. Mother was expecting her third child and our family was staying temporarily at the home of Dr. Raymond Merchant, who made house calls and had his office in his basement, in Lake Village. My brother Bill was born at Gary Methodist Hospital on June 15. I remember being in the car and crossing the railroad tracks at entrance to Sumava. There was a sign
that read 15 miles an hour to avoid dust. The flood waters were half-way up on
the sign post. R.I.P. Bill Bailey (1943-2014).

I was tempted to respond with the song title, “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” but feared it would be taken the wrong way.  I befriended Eleanor Bailey thinking she was a high school classmate, but she knows mutual friend Kay Westhues – so I don’t know Eleanor very well.

Anne Koehler wrote about growing up in Germany with two brothers and a sister on a farm in Damendorf, northern Germany, less than a two-hour drive from the Danish border.

    The farm was medium sized with a variety of crops and animals. We grew wheat, barley, rye, potatoes, sugar and regular beets, flax, alfalfa. There were horses, about 25 milk cows, turkeys, ducks,laying hens and pigs. We were located in an end moraine.  Rocks and stones would surface every year and had to be picked off the fields. They were crushed and used for roads.- Our little pond in back of the garden had diving boards in three heights. This is where the children from the whole village would gather for a swim. We had to share it with calves and pigs, which did not bother us in the least. Great times until one day a boy drowned. A trained diver found him, but he could not be revived. It was a sad experience. - The low fields behind the farm would flood and freeze over in winter, making a splendid skating surface. The older boys would play ice hockey, we would skate or be be pulled on sleds. We also had a chair-like sled, -- In those days we did not own a milking machine. A hired man was singly in charge of milking the cows. Occasionally he got days off. So on Easter 1955. We had to help with the chores. I had gone to a party in the village tavern the night before and was hung over. While milking the cow Undine, my visiting cousin Hermann from southern Germany decided to take a photo. He captioned it: The city dweller says: oh that's where the milk comes from. The cow looks really good. It is a Holstein!!!