After I got my back brace off,  but before we moved to Metamora, I had a disturbing occurrence - one day my big toe on my right foot began to hurt (a LOT!) - I hadn't injured it in any way and there was no apparent reason for the excruciating pain that I was feeling - I couldn't offer an explanation for why I was complaining about it - I was taken to a doctor who diagnosed it (after X-rays) as a calcium deposit on the joint of the toe - after having just recently been allowed to remove that damn back brace (that I had to wear because of calcium deposits in between my vertebrae), this didn't seem like a very good omen - I was given a prescription for the pain and something that was supposed to reduce the calcium deposit - (huge blue pills with yellow, pink and green flecks in them...) - for all that the medication "reduced the pain", (it didn't seem to), I felt as if I might as well have been given a placebo, but  the pain did go away after a few days - despite my fears that I might be plagued by calcium deposits for the rest of my life, there has been no recurrence since that time...

After dad started driving a truck, we bought a camper - Mom and dad would ride in the cab of the truck and Debbie, Patti, Jerry and I would ride in the camper - we went on several vacations in this camper and we also used it when we went up deer hunting -  this was a fairly comfortable way to travel and we could do a lot more activities than if we had been riding in the car - sometimes when we were parked for the night, I would ask to be allowed to sleep in the cab of the truck - I said that this would give more room for others, but I really wanted the privacy to engage in that unspeakable solitary vice...

Debbie: I remember all of us kids trying not to laugh and giggle at bedtime. We'd be in the bottom bunk, dad always saying "you kids shut up and go to sleep". I always had a problem with my giggles, never could control them. Oh well.

One of the plants that we would often see planted as an ornamental, was a tall burgundy colored plant called a cana (?) - mom planted some of these at our house in Elba, but they never seemed to grow as tall as the ones that we saw elsewhere - one of their attractions is the different color of their leaves, but they also produce a bright red flower that looks pretty good in a display with other flowering plants - mom planted quite a few flowers, but she was most successful with the ones that would come up every year like the iris plants - I liked these because the leaves are shaped like swords and that's what many of them became (although I wasn't supposed to be cutting these, of course and I DID have a jack knife) - mom had a rosebush at one corner of the house that was really overgrown, but produced thousands of blooms each year...

Some of the cars that I rode in, would be quite the classics today - then, of course, they were just cars - one of the earliest that I remember, was an old Pontiac - it had a ledge behind the rear seat with enough space that I could lay there sideways and look out the back window - I remember riding there on a number of occasions and sometimes falling asleep - I think that this was my grandpa Skellenger's car, but I'm not sure now - we had a number of different cars over the years - eventually dad bought a truck and mom had her own car - I was never really very excited about cars and I couldn't understand the fascination that some guys had for them...

I did a lot of cartooning because that was the drawing style that I enjoyed the most - I also did some caricatures, but I was always a bit self conscious about these because I felt that I wasn't good enough to do portraits - (an intolerable situation) - I also noticed that while others almost always enjoyed the caricature, that the subject was not always quite as appreciative - I still like to draw in a cartoon style, but I have learned to be able to draw more "realistically" as well...

Debbie: Mike could draw "the best" characters. I remember one he drew of the whole family. I was as usual, depicted with a big butt or legs, no boobs and of course a slightly large nose! He could make a face out of anything, any little blob of paint or clay. It was wonderful!

As a reward to ourselves for graduating, Greg Granger, Clinton Price and I decided that we would go to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio - although I had been driving for some months, this was my first fairly long distance drive to an area that I didn't know - but with confidence in our ability to read a map, we set out and made it there with no setbacks...

Cedar Point is a theme park along the lines of Disneyland - it's not as big or well known, but it's relatively local - we had a lot of fun on the rides and we stayed until closing - that meant another long drive home in the dark and I was the only one with a license - the other two helped with the map until they both fell asleep - by this time I was exhausted, but at least into relatively familiar territory - somewhere in Genesee County I fell asleep zzzzzzz - I woke up driving through  the midst of a whole bunch of construction lights, barriers and flaming oil pots -  I must have only been out for a few seconds because we didn't hit anything - I struggled to stay awake and that white Ford Galaxy must have known the rest of the way back - we all got home safely... I didn't tell my dad about falling asleep at the wheel that night...

Walking to school in Metamora one beautiful fall morning (8th grade), I farted and shit my pants, (Hey! Big kids aren't supposed to do that!), telling sisters and brother that I had forgotten something, I returned home to change - I was late getting to class that morning, but this was not a usual occurrence and our class didn't actually have a teacher at that time anyway - I didn't explain the real reason for my tardiness for some reason...

Grandpa Skellenger wasn't much for playing around with kids, but he could be persuaded to play a game of checkers or cribbage from time to time - there was a part of me that looked down on these games as too easy (I was learning to play chess after all!) - but if this was so,  then how come he won so
damn many of them - as an adult (and presumably a bit more humble) I have come to recognize these games as having their own intelligent logic(s) and I can appreciate that grandpa may have been a bit smarter than he let on (or at least smarter than I gave him credit for...)

Mr. Gormley was my teacher for chemistry in 11th grade - he was an ok teacher,  but when I first discovered that I had been signed up for chemistry,  I complained and said that I didn't want this - my counselor (Mrs. Calvert)  suggested that I try this for six weeks and that if I still wanted to change after that time,  that I could do this...

I participated in this class for those six weeks (but I didn't exactly try very hard - I got a D for this 6 week period and then went to my counselor to tell her that I wanted out and to give me another art class - she expressed surprise that I would even consider this and denied having suggested this arrangement in the first place - she said that I knew that no-one could change classes after the first three days...

I calmly suggested that she had lied to me and that from that point on, that I would not attend that class, do homework for it, etc - I did Not attend classes in chemistry (I went to study hall or the library) for the next three days - I was summarily informed (with no apology) that I was now scheduled to attend an additional art class - this may not have worked if I had any kind of rebellious history in school, but this was so unlike me that I guess that they decided that I would not back down on it ...

If the counselor had done her job properly, she could possibly have convinced me to stay in the course, but when she denied having made this agreement with me in the first place, it really made me angry... Gee, what a real Hellion I was, eh? - of course this may be one of the reasons that I didn't get much counseling about college...

Debbie become a school cheer leader for the Lapeer Panthers (Blue & Gold) - it was interesting to watch her practice her routines and I saw her with the squad at pep rallies (on school time) - I only saw her actually doing the cheerleader bit at one football game - I didn't really go to school football or basketball games as these were not something that I was really interested in... she made Varsity Cheer Leader Squad after I graduated... one of the caricatures that I drew of Debbie showed her as a cheer leader in her Junior Varsity sweater...

Debbie: Hard to believe, looking back, how much I enjoyed being a cheerleader. I was never good in large crowds and this seemed like the way to get over that feeling. I was told each year that my voice wasn't loud enough, my enthusiasm made up for it. I was basically pretty shy but tried like Hell not to show it.

Chess was a game that I loved to play - my uncle Bill Donahue taught me and I got so that I played fairly well - during high school my friends and I would meet at lunch time and we would often play as many as three games in that half hour period -(sometimes playing 2 or more games at once...) -  I DIDN'T  win every game, but I was known as the one everyone tried to beat - we didn't have tournaments or a chess club and never really even thought about starting one until some of the little 9th graders (freshmen, ugh!) formed one - they formed this as a freshman ONLY club (because they couldn't beat us and we would DOMINATE and ANNIHILATE them !  ) - we laughed about this and decided this was their problem, not ours - we just continued to play our games at lunch...

I played other friends at home, but they usually weren't any real competition - Michael Burke once got so mad at me for beating him so often, (well always actually...) that he threw one of his knights at me (he missed ‘cause I ducked!) and broke the leg on it - (I wasn't very happy about that as it was my chess set...)  - I never read any books on chess, but I would frequently have as many as 3 or 4 boards set up in my room, where I would set up problems to figure out - sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and work out these strategies - I had some really nice plastic chess sets that I got for different Christmas' - (I still have one of them - the Napoleon set with the broken horses leg) -I also made a chess set and board from clay and glazed it in art class, but I didn't think that it turned out all that well...

When I was in Mexico City, I played 10 games of chess one day with an older gentleman at his house - he was a  Jewish, German immigrant who taught me more in those 10 games than I've ever learned before in 1 session  (I won one of them,  (I think it was game 7) but I'm sure that he let me win, just so that I wouldn't get discouraged and stop playing...)

Debbie: I always wished I was smart enough to play, I just couldn't think about "all" the options and the big picture of the whole game. My son Shaun learned how to play chess from his grandfather Kardinal when he was about 7 or 8 years old and to this day he loves the game and even plays it with the computer.

I liked walking in the cornfields when the corn stalks had grown up tall - of course these were not places where we were supposed to play, but who could see you in the tall corn? - besides we WERE careful about not damaging the plants - the wind rustling through the leaves in a cornfield makes a very unique sound - in the fall it was really eerie to walk through a dried up cornfield in the October twilight - sometimes, I would startle a pheasant eating the dried kernels of corn - this would startle me too - there were still a few farmers who gathered the cut stalks into shocks like you see in some Halloween pictures - the Halloween party at the Methodist church was decorated with some of these in the corners (along with a friendly scarecrow sitting on a bale of straw...)

One year we grew some popcorn in our garden - Grandma Running grew some of the sweetest corn around - they got the seed kernels from a Michigan State Agricultural Farm (in Lansing... I think...) - I can remember dad smoking from a corncob pipe, but this was commercially made, not one that he made from a cob from the field - after dad got his false teeth, he had to take the corn off from the cob with a knife...

Debbie: I remember shucking corn as a child and keeping the fine silky hair and the "shucks" and making dolls with them. They sell these items now as country crafts, with a little more flair of course.

As a small kid I wasn't really aware of what " racism " was, but I definitely lived in a racist environment - there were two "colored" kids in my school - a brother and sister named Fred and Alfreda - black people were not prevalent in Lapeer County and for many years the only place where I saw blacks living in the county was a short dead end gravel road (in Elba)  with a row of houses on it - this was known locally as "chocolate valley" and despite traveling by car, bike, horse and walking just about every other road in the county, I don't believe that I ever set foot even once on that small stretch of road - certainly there was no reason to go there as it was a dead end and I had no friends there and besides maybe it wasn't safe for a white boy to be there - ( I had heard stories about kids who had been caught alone in washrooms in Flint who had theirpenis cut off by black men)
 
 - jibes were tossed around the school yard about different boys having Alfreda as a girlfriend - I didn't like being teased about having a girlfriend period - but it always seemed better to more vehemently deny this charge when Alfreda was the girlfriend alleged...

Parents and relatives would often admonish children not to put coins in their mouths with the phrase "you never know where that has been" - it was tacitly understood by the children that this meant that a colored person may have handled it... I would sometimes hear relativesand other people  use the word "niggers" ,but my parents told us that we were not allowed to use that word - we should call them colored people or Negroes - I felt that my immediate family members were not prejudiced because we didn't use the "nigger" word - there was a lot of controversy about "allowing" them to call themselves "blacks" - that was just a bit uppitty you know -  like many white Americans, I had a lot to learn about racism...
 
Mom:  "When you kids were little we told you that certain words couldn't be used. Such as four eyes, nigger, etc. Mainly because you had started wearing glasses (I didn't know the other kids called you that. Probably a good thing that i didn't) Actually, I was proud of the fact that I wasn't a racist. That is until the girls came home from high school to inform me that some kid named Rubin, I even remember the name, liked Patti. Instantly, if not sooner, I became enraged, horrified and all of the other words that you could think. I also knew in that instant that I was as racist as they come. As long as it didn't involve my own I was fine. You kids used to love to antagonize me. What with the god awful (I thought) records all of you played, but I remember one that the girls had playing when I came home from work. It was the one that if I can recall only had one word in it. That little old F word. They got the reaction they wanted from me."

Debbie: I remember seeing the black boys wearing nylon caps on their heads and mom said they had "ringworm". As a child of course that really sounded horrible. I used to think that only black people got it and that it really was a "worm" inside their heads. It scared me. Of course I later learned that this was not true and I learned a lot about racism and prejudice.

Starting in the summer after I graduated 8th grade, I worked each summer at Coulter's Christmas Tree Farm - for part of each summer he hired two of us to walk down the long rows of trees with machetes and shape them so that they would grow as a "cultured" Christmas tree - the pay was $1.25 per hour (minimum wage) so at 40 hours, I was earning $50 per week (BIG BUCKS eh!) - the work was tiring and it was under the hot sun, but he usually drove us back out to the field on his tractor and showed us where he wanted us to start each day - I learned to drive this tractor in the last summer that I worked there ... (1968)

There were a LOT of snakes on that Christmas tree farm - we weren't supposed to harm them because they ate the mice and insects that could do damage to the trees - however sometimes it was very hard not to give in to the urge to slice a head off once in awhile - once, just as I raised my machete to trim the tree, a blue racer snake poked it's head out from the tree, right at eye level and flicked it's tongue out at me a few times - I just stood there (paralyzed with fright) with my arm raised and my heart pounding - this snake (blue racers are harmless) got away! - there was one HUGE garter snake that lived in a big rock and wood pile near where we worked - when we went by there, it would rear up and hiss at us - garter snakes are supposed to be harmless too, but I never had any desire to get too close to that particular one...

In the month of November we would return to work there on weekends to help cut some of the trees for shipping elsewhere - I also worked there for a few days one spring, planting seedlings - all in all I actually enjoyed working there...We got our Christmas trees free during those years, but gee ... they only cost a couple of dollars each, anyway - I always thought that we had pretty good looking Christmas trees, but I also thought that we put too much tinsel on them...

Debbie: I remember Mike being allergic to the Christmas trees and having an itchy rash all over. He had to take benydril just to keep working there.

It's hard to believe,  I know,  but I really did sing in the Elba Methodist Church choir!

(No,  I was NOT an undercover agent for Satan!) - I even sang solo when my voice deepened - my favorite hymn was "The Old Rugged Cross" - I enjoyed singing and besides which,  the choir also went on roller skating trips to Flint  - on one of these however,  I was denied entrance to the facility because I was wearing blue jeans (they had a dress code) - for this reason I didn't  wear any of those low class, hillbilly blue jeans for a long time after that - it was more than a little embarrassing!

My relatives on both sides of the family didn't seem to have any particular interest in religion, although I suspect that ALL of them would CALL themselves Christians - this only seemed apparent at weddings and funerals however - at some point, I guess that my parents thought that we should be exposed to RELIGION (and I do remember a lot of those Bible stories)

The first place that we went to worship was the Baptist church in Elba - I'm not sure why we switched to the Methodist church (although it was a nicer building,  made of red brick with a steeple and a bell in it) - at some point (long after the blue jeans incident) I began questioning the apparent hypocrisy of the church members who were there on Sunday, but who I KNEW (NOT in the Biblical sense...) to be quite willful sinners (at least from community gossip) the rest of the week... Deb, Patti, Jerry and I continued to attend for quite awhile after our parents no longer attended, but this eventually just disappeared... sorry... no fire and brimstone story!

Debbie: I think I also sang, but I was told that I was better at harmony than actually singing the tune. Still am. I too remember the stories and think we went to church more for the "Social" activities than anything else.

In 1960 the United States celebrated the beginning of it's civil war centennial -
(The War Between the States or The War of Northern Aggression if you had southern sympathies)

I was still in elementary school in Elba and my best friend at the time was Denis Zeitlow - He would be the General of the Yankees and I would be the General of the Rebels (this was NOT because I believed in slavery... it was a matter of "States Rights" and besides... I liked General Robert E. Lee much better than that drunk, General Ulysses S. Grant...) - we would choose up sides at school during recess and noon hour and wage war on each other - no clear cut victories were ever really proclaimed in these battles - I had a Confederate infantry cap and he had a Yankee cap - I also had two toy civil war cavalry pistols that we used, I let him borrow the brown handled one and I used the white handled (more southern gentlemanly) pistol... it was during this time (5th grade) that my friendship with Denis began to wane and Greg Granger began taking over position as best friend - I always picked Greg to be in the Confederate army as part of my command....

Debbie: Mike always made me be the Yankees when we played war upstairs in our rooms. He had the best sets of little plastic soldiers and horses. Even trees and stuff. I can't believe now that I enjoyed playing this game, but I don't believe that I ever WON any of these game wars.

It seems like I have always been the "class artist" - later, in high school, this "title" became somewhat of a philosophical problem for me - I certainly accepted that I WAS the "class artist", but by this time I was convinced that more people could have become better artists, if they had simply been given the same kind of praise and encouragement that I had been given early - I still believe this
 
- I DID learn some simple tricks fairly early that impressed people enough that they kept encouraging me to draw - this practice is what primarily puts a student ahead of others and it's a self reinforcing cycle - be that as it may, being the class artist often gave me the respect that somewhat negated the "brain" label - (we didn't know about nerds in those "olden times" as my kids sometimes put it...)

I was often called upon for class projects that used my artistic abilities and I really did take some pride in this - I also naively (and arrogantly) believed that artists were of a higher caliber,  morally and that we saw the world in a gentler perspective - (I conveniently ignored that I knew that Hitler (among others) considered himself to be an artist, eh! Hmmm, Hitler was a frustrated artist who sometimes painted signs and houses - I painted garbage cans... I wonder how that would influence me, if I was the leader of a country...?) -  I also considered some other people like Gay Schmidt (a fellow student) to be better artists than I was , but I did a lot more artwork that was visible to the student body...

One year the school newspaper (The Panther Press) printed three of my paintings in one of their infrequent editions - I don't know why they chose those three paintings - they certainly were not my favorites - they were also printed in black and white which didn't do much for them either...

Clay sculpture was a class that I really enjoyed - I made quite a few different pieces , but I made two that I considered to be quite outstanding - these two pieces (I'm sure) were what got me accepted into the University of Michigan, School of Architecture and Design when I presented my portfolio - I haven't done any of this since high school , but I hope that someday I will be able to get back to clay sculpture again - it was fun and I believe that I could produce some excellent pieces now...

Clinton was a fellow student at high school- he, Greg Granger and I formed a somewhat unlikely trio of friends - Clinton was fairly intelligent but relatively immature at the time (as if I was mature... eh?) - he and I would often play chess while Greg looked on - all of us enjoyed science fiction and devising imaginary super weapons - Clinton and Greg enjoyed reading Doc Savage books, but they were never able to get me to read any of them - Clinton had polio as a kid and as a result walked with the aid of arm crutches - no- one attacked Clinton because he would haul off and hit with those crutches - despite being "friends" for four years, I can't really say that I ever really got to know Clinton...

The house in Metamora was divided into three different apartments - sometimes we lived in more than one of them,  but at others we rented out two - once we rented to some people that I would hope never to encounter as a landlord ever again - we began to notice an occasional cockroach in our apartment downstairs,  but soon we were noticing that there were quite a few - not appreciating this, we called for an exterminator...

This meant needing to spray the entire house of course and the people upstairs were away on vacation or something - using our key to get into their apartment, we were horrified to discover that there were cockroaches literally crawling everywhere - there was rotting food left out on the kitchen table and roaches would be seen crawling out of open cereal boxes, opened, soured milk  and other containers - the exterminator explained that this apartment was the original source of the infestation and that it must have been just about as bad before these people went away on their trip - by this time my skin was crawling at the thought that any of these bugs could get onto me - we did have the whole house sprayed and exterminated the lot of them, but I still think about how unclean these bugs make me feel - our tenants were "politely"  told that they were being evicted when they returned and I was not at all sorry to see them go... part of my dislike at the thought of every being a landlord stems from this incident...

Debbie: After the tenants left I got to move upstairs in the BIG bedroom. It was off from the bathroom which also had a door to the attic and to the kitchen. There was a hole in the wall by my bed. I used to have nightmares about cockroaches coming out of that hole and getting into my bed. As I grew older, I've come to realize that roaches are not just from uncleanliness, but I still relate them to nasty surroundings.

Mom, ever alert to making sure that we didn't catch anything that might get brought home from the institution where she worked and just to ensure our good health... made us take a daily dose of a big yellow pill containing cod liver oil - this may be more pleasant than taking it in liquid from a spoon, but not by much - we hated the taste of those pills - but mom said we had to take them, so we did - I don't remember when she stopped insisting that we take them, but if we did notice, I'm sure that we would NOT have reminded her about this oversight... Hey, Jeremy, Jenifer and Jason... now I remember what I should have given you as kids...

Mom: I also remember making all of you take red liquid medicine for pin worms. I can't remember what it was called, but I worked in the isolation wards so often with them (worms) I just knew you guys would get it.

Debbie: I don't remember those (cod liver oil pills) but I remember the "chocolate" flavoured worm liquid. It seems we were always drinking that nasty shit.

Comics cost 8 cents when I was a kid and then they went to 10 cents and later 12 cents... EACH! The BIG ones actually cost a quarter... talk about inflation! -  my mother was NOT concerned about the controversy about comics being bad "literature", etc because she knew that I was reading just about anything that I could get my hands on. I already owned quite a few comics when my cousin Tom Bridges gave me his whole stack of about  100 - a real treasure trove - well not as much as you might think - most of his were Archies, Little Lulu, Casper and that type but he did have some super hero comics as well and those were the ones that I was really interested in... my favorites were Superman and Batman but I collected just about anything that DC Comics published at that time...

I had a few Marvel Comics but they didn't appeal to me as much as DC - I didn't put them into plastic cases and protect them the way that collections are cared for today, they were neatly arranged and looked after but they were certainly read over and over again too... by the time that I gave them to my brother when I left for college, there were probably somewhere between 400 - 500 comics... if they had been kept in good shape, some of them would probably be worth a bit now, but who knew then?

Debbie:  I loved the Archies, Little Dot and Little Lulu, but I also read all of Mike's super hero comics. My favorite was "Aquaman". Mike and I shared a lot of books and time together, which I guess is why we're still close now.

When I got my first racoon (Maria - so named because I liked the song from West Side Story) I took her to my grandma Running's house to show her off... no sooner had I gotten into the door and lifted her up for grandma to see, when that beautiful baby racoon took a long, yellow, liquid dump all over the throw rug / carpet at the entrance to her living room... for some reason my grandma Running never did warm up to liking my pet racoon... I did clean up the mess... well there was still a bit of a stain but...

Hey!  Grandma! Come see my racoon!

Debbie: As I remember, it was brand new carpet! We did think it was kind of funny!

Keith & Leonard Hanson - Craig Eagleston - David Dubois -Elementary school kids can be just as cruel (or more so) as their parents - the Hanson family lived in a run down house and they obviously didn't have a whole lot of money - they always wore torn or worn out clothes to school and Keith and Leonard weren't exactly the brightest of students - I don't know that they ever had many friends in school and they often got called names - I didn't participate in the name calling, but I was still a silent partner in this harassment - Craig was a strange kid who probably had more freckles than anyone I've ever seen before or since  - he also had big teeth and ears - he talked about strange things and was generally shunned by most of the other students - David was a new kid who moved into the area and not only did he have a funny last name, but his head was misshapen (really flat at the back) - he was a relatively smart student, but smart could get you set apart as well... (as I was well aware)

Every school seems to have someone(s) with "cooties" or whatever word or phrase is used today - I really wonder how some of these kids manage to make it in life sometimes with such inauspicious beginnings...
 
In Metamora it was the Dodge family - they had about half a dozen kids and they were all at least marginally retarded (the "acceptable" term at the time) - the family had a chicken farm and the kids would often arrive at school with chicken shit on their shoes - they often wore no socks, even in the middle of winter and their clothes were hand-me-downs at best - they were the butt of many cruel jokes - it was generally believed that they were the result of a lot of family in-breeding...

I had LOTS of cousins - sometimes more than I could handle - uncle Bud's and Aunt Betty's kids alone accounted for seven - I couldn't tell you at this point just how many cousins I had because I lost track of them as I got older - (I don't remember the names of ANY of Bump and Delores' kids...) - most of these have grown up and raised families of their own, increasing the size of the clan yet again - a few of them have even reached grandparent stage as I have, and the family continues to grow...

Ever on the perpetual quest for fish bait, dad once took me to a pasture near Davison where we hunted for maggots in dried cow manure - this sounds pretty disgusting, but it wasn't as bad as it may sound - (as long as you only looked in the dried ones) - we got a lot of bait and as usual the reward was to be able to go fishing...

When I worked at the State Home,  I worked one time, for a couple of weeks, in a building where they supposedly did a regular, weekly crab check on the residents - I suspected that this was a put on, but I didn't call my supervisor to find this out for sure - as the new guy,  I got the unenviable job of sitting in a chair, in the day room, with a portable lamp, while 40 to 60 naked, male residents lined up for inspection of their genital regions, before they showered and went to bed  - I never found anything that I thought might have been a "crab", but I really wouldn't have known what a crab looked like if it had jumped up and bit me - the residents looked like they had been through this procedure many times and were quite bored with it - the TV was on in the dayroom at this time of course and it seems to have always been about the time that Lawrence Welk was on - this was not one of my favorite programs in the first place and now I always associate it with these crab inspections ...

We would sometimes get orders from the institution's doctors to collect a sample, to check a particular resident for worms - the method for doing this was to wear rubber gloves and put a piece of scotch tape over the residents anus while they were sleeping, (supposedly the worms would exit at night while the body was at rest), peel it off and put it in a labeled specimen bottle for the doctor to examine - I was never asked to perform that particular chore and I certainly didn't volunteer to do it - this was also where I saw my first experience with a person having a violent seizure - this was a frightening appearing occurrence and it was made even more so because it was still believed that you should force a wooden spoon wrapped in masking tape between the person's teeth to prevent them from biting or swallowing their tongue...

This was not a place where I felt that the residents were afforded any measure of privacy and dignity...

As part of the landscaping projects around our house in Elba, dad obtained truck loads of broken up chunks of cement roads or sidewalks - he would use these like bricks to build retaining walls to shore up the dirt at the edges of the ditches in front of the house - this was a fairly economical way to do this and the visual, landscaping effect was pretty good too...

Landscaping at our house in Elba was pretty minimal - mostly, we just cut the grass on our flat piece of property - there was a layer of topsoil, but if you dug into the ground you would usually find a thick layer of red clay - when they dug the basement for the addition to the house, there were big piles of this clay that we would play on - we dug caves into these piles that we could play in as well...

I liked the kind of toys where you could process material into something else - I had a creepy crawlers maker, (especially good for annoying sisters and parents), a vacuum processor for making relief forms from heated sheets of plastic and an injection molding kit - I made a lot of creepy crawlers and this was a lot of fun,  but more importantly these toys gave me a basic understanding of some basic production techniques...

We sometimes used crickets for bait (especially for bass fishing) - dad constructed a great cricket cage and we would go around catching them from under logs, stones and boards  - sometimes we would have a few hundred glossy, black crickets in that cage - often,  they were quite noisy, but I liked the sound that they made - sometimes we would put ears of corn in the cage for them to eat... 

Grandma Skellenger used to make throw rugs from knotted rags - these were quite an appreciated art form and very useful and durable - she also crocheted and knitted - some of the doilies that she knitted were very elaborate and beautiful - she sold some of these, but more often, gave them to friends and family...
 
Debbie: Grandma taught me how to embroider.  I loved to learn from her and embroidered simple patterns that she would make for me. I never learned to crochet, as that looked pretty tricky! I have 3 sets of pillow cases that grandma embroidered and crocheted the edges. I'll always treasure them and hand them down. They're beautiful pieces of memories I have of grandma.

Neva Barr - Sylvia Clark  - Janet Evans -as a young kid in Elba, I had a few crushes on girls - hey! - it was nothing serious and none of these ever became "girl friends" - I don't think that any of them ever even knew that I liked them - Neva Barr was from a Baptist, farming family that didn't believe in dancing, makeup or probably in having any fun at all - however I thought that she was beautiful -

Janet Evans lived across the road from us and was one of our playmates - this was a situation where I got teased enough that I quickly got over this "puppy love" and didn't want to even be around her because of the heckling - Sylvia lived across the railroad tracks from us - she had some great drawing skills and she introduced me to acrylic paints (she was allergic to oil paints so her parents bought her the acrylics which are water based)

(OK, I had a crush on one of my teachers too, but it wasn't a puberty triggered thing - she was my first grade teacher and I wanted to marry her...too bad she was already married... we would have made a lovely couple...)

Debbie: I had a crush on Denis, your friend, but of course that never amounted to anything. My school crush was on David Craig, a blond boy who wrote me secret love notes!

I do recall that this event occurred, but it did not cause any particular anxiety on my part - the threat of atomic war was something that I had always lived with and while I remember my parents being a bit anxious at this time, the feeling wasn't really conveyed to me - we did look at some underground bomb shelter kits that were manufactured at the time and I remember mom and dad talking about buying one of these for the backyard  - alternately they talked about building a shelter in our new basement and stocking it with supplies..I did read all of the pamphlets detailing what to do in the case of a nuclear attack... of course if it ever did happen, we would clobber those nasty Russians back into the stone age....

I joined cub scouts and actually enjoyed much of this activity - mom was our den mother for awhile and we had pack meetings in Lapeer - I got through Weblos (sp?), Wolf, Bear and Lion earning a lot of badges along the way - we carved model downhill racers and did a lot of different craft activities - the mother of one of my cub pack "buddies"  arranged with mom for her son Jack (Beatty) to pair up with me in these activities because he was a bit of a klutz and she hoped that he would learn something from me (or at least this is how mom explained it to me when I complained about this pairing)

Later, someone else became our den mother - when I eventually lost interest and said that I didn't want to continue, mom made me go to her and tell her myself - I was crying when I explained that I didn't want to be in cub scouts anymore, but afterwards I felt much better not having so many scheduled activities - I could finally get back out to my play forts in the woods and fields...

One of mom's favorite sayings was "Oh, that really cuts me to the quick!" - always said in a droll, mock request for sympathy - she got this from watching too many episodes of Lost in Space - the bumbling bad guy (Dr. Smith ) would often use this phrase - it seems that she still uses it -
DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!
 
Debbie: I always wondered where that came from. I find myself using it sometimes. Now Shaun has changed it to "wick". Go figure!