Cut and Paste

     Yesterday I did my first stint as a classroom volunteer in my granddaughter's kindergarten classroom at Seward School.  While I never attended kindergarten, it hadn't been invented yet :), my assigned job reminded me of my feelings of inadequacy from early elementary school, Starting first grade at age 5, I was able to walk the mile so school (uphill both ways) with no trouble.  However, coloring in the lines, cutting and pasting were never my best skills.
    So my first task in the classroom?  Supervising three students at a time cutting and pasting the names of the continents on a map.  Putting old feelings aside I soldiered on.
    Gwen, the teacher, introduced me to the class as "Mr. Al, Mai-Evy's grandpa".  One little boy leaped up excitedly announcing that his grandpa was also named Al.  My name was quickly forgotten as the students all referred to me as "grandpa".  I'm looking forward to being "grandpa" to 28 kindergarten students.

Leslie's Tractors

   There's a vague recollection back in the recesses of my mind that Leslie, or his father, Sam, once had an old Case tractor, maybe even a crossmotor. More certain is that he had a F-20 Farmall and I have a faint memory of that.  In 1938 my father bought a new 22" IHC threshing machine.  When it was not in use it was stored in a lean-to shed next to an old granary.  To get it into the shed the feeder was removed.  Then a front wheel of the machine was raised and the tongue was pivoted from protruding from the front under the wheel so it was 180 degrees reversed and under the thresher. Long chains were attached to the machine through a little trap door and it was pulled backwards into the lean-to.  I have vague memory of the F-20 being used to pull the thresher in this operation.
   Sometime before WW II the F-20 was traded for an IHC M.  (See the last post about the M and a mounted corn picker.)  When tractors became generally available after the war, Leslie had a farm deferment, he traded the M for a new IHC MD.  The D stands for diesel and he was the first one in the community to have one.  Those IHC diesels started on gasoline and after a brief warm up were switched over to diesel.  There was an internal mechanism in the engine that close off the spark plugs and increased the compression so it could run as a diesel.
  At some time Leslie bought an IHC WD-6.  This had the same  engine as the MD but was not a row crop tractor as was the MD.  The WD-6 was called a "Standard" and often referred to as a "Wheatland."   The front tires were spaced widely apart, the same distance as the rear wheels, which, unlike the row crop tractors, could not be adjusted.  As with the MD he was the first one in the community to have a WD-6.
   Leslie owned two other tractors that I remember.  Departing the long line of IHC tractors he bought a VAC Case which was a  small row crop type, less that half the horse power of the MD.  Most farm tractors regulate engine speed with a hand operated throttle.  The VAC had such a throttle but it also had a foot operated accelerator similar to what is used in an automobile.  I thought that made it fun to drive.
   He was also the first person in the community to buy an IHC C, which was just slightly larger than the VAC,  It, too, was a row crop design and was so modern that it had "live hydraulics" , i.e., the hydraulic lift would would work even when the clutch was depressed.  In contrast my father's '41 IHC B had no hydraulics so when dad was cultivating he'd have to manually raise the cultivator.
   I don't remember which of the tractors he still owned when he had his machinery auction before moving to Washington.  The auction was on a school day so I was not allowed to attend.  Leslie did tell me that, during the war, he was offered the chance to buy the Nordby Place, where Dennis Miller just built a new house.  It was 3 quarters of land, 480 acres, and he wished he would have done it but the debt seemed to high so he turned it down.

F-20 Farmall

B Farmall

M Farmall

WD-6 would look like this but smaller.

Remembering Leslie

     My father was a horse man.  Some where there's a picture of him in front of our barn with 24 horses.  Grandpa Lars, Dad and Uncle Sam farmed 480 acres with those horses,  That was a lot of land to work with horse power.
   Finally, in 1941, Dad bought a tractor...a '41 B Farmall, 17 horsepower, it was designed for small truck farms.  By the time he realized that he needed more power WW II made it almost impossible to buy a tractor.  He could have gone to the black market but his scruples prevented that.  It wasn't until 1947 or 1948 that he was able to buy a new Farmall H.
   Leslie was different.  His father, Sam, was mechanically inclined and in the '30's Leslie bought an F-20 Farmall and before the war a Farmall M.  The M was the largest row crop tractor that International Harvester Co.made for many years.  Leslie's tractors set him apart, might that be where I get my fascination with tractors?
   With a two row mounted corn picker on that M Leslie was busy all fall picking corn.  My friend and classmate, Lloyd, remembers Leslie coming to his farm to "open the fields."  The two row mounted picker could start at any place in a field without running over unpicked corn.  Then, the farmer, with a pull type picker, would be able to drive down the picked rows pulling his picker off to the side.
   Considered "very" modern that M was equipped with 6 volt electric lights.  Pretty dim by today's standards but that was enough light so that Leslie would pick night and day.  Leslie told me that he was once picking at night on the Teller farm.  The corn was badly lodged from a strong wind.  Picking through the middle of the field he found that when he reached the other side he was six rows away from the rows on which he started.
   The old mounted pickers were very heavy...so heavy that once the rear axle on the tractor broke.  I can only imagine how difficult it was to remove the picker with the rear of the tractor on the ground, replace the axle in the field and remount the picker.  Contrast that with my neighbor's recent experience.  His tractor wouldn't run and he called the dealer who sent a repair technician from Omaha, NB., 150 miles away.  The technician parked his van next to the tractor, worked for two hours, said "the tractor's fixed now" and never touched the tractor.
  In a subsequent blog I'll write about other tractors that Leslie owned.

Relying on NATO.

   Visiting the Baltic countries via a cruise this summer brought us to Russia and several countries that border Russia.  At each stop we took guided shore excursions which were very informative. Soviet occupation and the aftermath were frequent topics of discussion.
  I enjoyed talking to our tour guides when they were not actively engaged in managing the tour.  We had a particularly good tour guide in Latvia.(pictured below) When the opportunity arose I asked her what Latvians thought of the events in Ukraine.  She expressed concern about the violence and how people are suffering.   Then I asked her if her people were worried about Russia.  She replied "No, we do not worry about Russia because Latvia is a member of NATO"

Tour guide in Riga, Latvia

Riga, Latvia

Leslie Negstad 4/717-10/13/14

   He was more like an uncle to me than a cousin.  Twenty one years older than me, my father married very late, he lived on an adjoining farm until I was an early teen. Leslie would take my two brothers and me fishing.  I remember catching my first fish with him, a bluegill at Lake Goldsmith. Sometimes we would go ice fishing and in the summer he'd use his small fiberglass boat powered with a two and half horse Johnson motor.  It was the same motor he used to take Ed and me fishing for salmon in the Straits of  Juan de  Fuca in 1962.
  Leslie, son of Sam, my father's younger brother, also persuaded his father to lend me his shotgun for duck season one year before I got my fist shotgun.  It was a 16ga. Winchester model 12.  It was the gun with which I shot my first duck, aiming at the first one in a line of 6 or 8, and killing the last one in line.
  Leslie died Monday in Salem, OR., far from the SD farms where I knew him best. I believe the last of my Negstad cousins.  In the early '50s he and another man from the community, Earl, sold their machinery, invested in a new pulpwood plant in the state of Washington and moved their families west and settled in new houses.  They were not only investors in the plant they were also to be employees.  After moving to Washington they showed up for work on the first day and found the plant shuttered.  The plant's financial officer had embezzled the money and Leslie and Earl lost all of their investment and their houses.
   Years later Earl's son told me that with that loss they moved into a garage and Earl spent his weeks selling Bibles door to door. The son said he didn't know how poor they were until he asked his dad for a penny for a piece of candy and Earl started to cry because he didn't have one.
   Leslie moved to Anecortes, and then Port Angeles, where they ran a motel and were living when he took me salmon fishing.  In Port Angeles they ran a motel.  Later they moved to Soap Lake in eastern Washington.  His wife, Esther, had rheumatoid arthritis so the climate there was better for her. Sometime after Esther died Leslie moved to Salem, OR to be near his son, Paul, which is where he was when he died.  
   As I grieve for Leslie and Esther I also grieve for what was lost when they moved to far away.  How different might have been some of my early experiences had they still been across the road?  I've had so little time with Leslie's children who are only a little younger than me.   That would have been much different had they remained in the community.  God bless the memory of Leslie Negstad.

The Pins are Out.

    Taking the pins out of the Curmudgeonette's arm required  2 little incisions each one closed up with  one stitch. The plate remains as a permanent emplacement.  A slightly larger incision below her wrist relieved the carpal tunnel pressure on the nerves to her fingers.  She reports that the numbness in her fingers is gradually dissipating and she is encouraged as the feeling returns.  The current splint she is wearing will remain until she see the surgeon a week after surgery. There has been very little pain associated with this surgery.

For-Profit Colleges.

  "If you hope for a more equitable society, one with broader opportunities, then there's hardly a more important topic than job training.  So it's especially distressing that so many disadvantaged young people--people who believe they're doing the smart thing by enrolling in for-profit colleges to train for careers in medical technology, criminal justice and other fields--are ending up disillusioned, in debt and without the careers they'd counted on.
   "Evidence increasingly suggest that some segments of the for-profit college industry are taking students--and taxpayers--for a ride.  Drawing up to 90 per cent of their revenue from various government programs intended to help low-income students pay tuition. some of these schools deliver questionable degrees suffer extraordinarily high dropout rates and loan-default rates and charge tuitions that are far higher than those at public community colleges."  quoted from an editorial in the October 9, 21014, STAR TRIBUNE.
   If you haven't read it go online and look it up.  The editors argue for accountability and comparability with other institutions.  They point out that the average annual tuition at a for-profit is $15,130. while a public four college it is $8,893.  They also point out that accessing higher education is difficult for many and for-profits can provide access.

Revisiting a book,

    "Memories--they are all the aged have.  The young have their hopes and dreams, while the old hold the remains of them in their hands and wonder what happened to their lives."  p. 11, The Gift of Rain, Tan Twan Eng.   I've read the book three times; when The Curmudgeonette gave it to me in 2008, again when a friend was reading it and again before our book club discussion.  Now I'm reviewing it again before a discussion with a book club member who missed the meeting.

   The book is set in Penang, Malaysia and some of my memories of Penang from when I visited a few years ago is the rain.  It poured rain one afternoon when I was there.  When the rain stopped I ventured out of my hotel...room for $10. but if I wanted single occupancy it was $20. :)...for dinner at a local restaurant I found it flooded.  No problem, though the water on the floor was about six inches deep, many people were seated at the tables eating while the wait staff sloshed through the water.

   Eng has a phenomenal gift of description and reading his prose is akin to hearing a great symphony orchestra. His descriptions are far superior to a photograph.   But, he also has an incisive  mind and imagination that allows illustration of  the terrible ironies and decisions that life forces on us made even more poignant by the exigencies of war. 

   Eagerly I anticipate the discussion with KDS and dabbling in the book again makes me think I just may re-read it soon...4th time!

Meditation on an Umbrella.

   It's an attractive blue and white umbrella purchased many years ago while visiting Bergen, Norway, which has a climate much like Seattle.  Memory doesn't work tell how it came back to America. Carrying it in the rain while I walked the best dog in the world, Trygve, got me reflecting on my life with, but particularly without, umbrellas.
   Growing up as I did on a small farm in South Dakota in the 40s and 50s there were very many things we did NOT have.  Umbrellas were only known to me from magazine pictures including a Norman Rockwell painting.  In addition to the frugal way we lived perhaps there were other reasons for being umbrella less.
   Average annual  rainfall in eastern South Dakota was 18 inches in the 40s.  It just didn't rain very often and when it did it was typically a violent thunderstorm with much lightening and gusty winds. We just did our best to be under a roof until the storm passed,  (A small digression: Dad told of standing in the house looking across the yard and seeing lightening strike the shed attached to the granary.  He went to investigate and found that the bolt of lightening had shattered a two by four rafter and started a small fire in the roof which he was able to extinguish.  I suspect that this incident was before the farm was electrified in 1941.)
   Umbrellas don't like wind that may be another reason for our lack of umbrellas.  South Dakota is mid-continent and that geographical fact means almost constant wind.  During childhood I'd see in disbelief pictures of New England snow scenes with snow piled on fence posts.  "Snow always comes sideways" I thought, based on my experience.   I do remember one snowfall of about a foot that came without wind when I was a senior in high school.  The memory lingers because it was so out of the ordinary.

Pheasant Propects

   I didn't see a pheasant.  Discing  a track through the middle of the cornfield did not flush a pheasant.  Neither did driving through the CRP grass to pull an errant Russian Olive Tree scare up a single bird.  Granted pheasants are less likely to fly from a tractor than from a person on foot but still I would expect to see some flush.  Season opens Oct. 18,...????????

A Third Opinion

    Back in Minnesota after our Baltic cruise the Curmudgeonette scheduled an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon who ordered x-rays of the arm and thumb she broke aboard ship.  The x-rays showed that the cast on her arm, which was done in Russia, had not held the bones in place.  He said "we never rely on a cast for such a break but always use a surgically implanted plate."  Surgery was scheduled, completed with a plate and two pins, and she was sent home with a brace.
  Next week the pins will be removed and carpal tunnel surgery done to restore the feeling in her finger tips.  She has gained both strength and mobility through extensive physical therapy.  My stint as personal care attendant is about over for this time or as I chose to re-frame it "my opportunity to serve."
  The right thumb healed quickly and she only needed to wear a splint for a couple of weeks.