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Letter: 20

February 20, 1996

      DEAR CHRIS: Happy birthday! I hope this gets to you on time. I didn't know that the Postal Service was carrying the mail by mule train until I heard that Jeff's card was about 12 days in getting there.

      Gee whiz, you are going to be 14 years old. You kids are growing up too fast, and I hear that you are already taller than your grandpa. Of course that doesn't displease me. I like to see boys grow tall.

      We were glad that your house has quite a bit of elevation from the Monongahela River and that you didn't have any flooding in your neighborhood. I hope the flu season is all over for all of you. I don't know if it is the flu shots that I have had for the last five years, but I haven't had one of those terrible flu colds since I started to take them.

      On January 22 Grandma picked all the tangerines. We had quite a batch of them. She wanted to make sure that Scari didn't mess with them. We have been squeezing a grapefruit into our orange juice daily. The juice taste better. They are fairly sweet grapefruit. Scari has been leaving them alone lately but is digging holes in the back yard. I find it hard to love that dog.

      Grandma likes to squeeze limes into her cokes so I suppose we get enough Vitamin C. To a stranger it would sound like we have a lot of fruit, but the truth is that the trees are only bushes and kind of puny.

      I think it's about time I told you about another Blunt character. Of course cities have just as many characters per capita but the difference everyone knows the characters in and around a small town.

      Another one of the Blunt characters was old Mr. Klingbiel. In fact several members of the Klingbiels were characters. I remember the family name but things about them had slipped my memory until Enid and Irma reminded me of them.

      I believe Mr. Klingbiel was a German immigrant. At least he had some of the old stern, hard-working, thrifty traits that a lot of European immigrants believed were necessary to make a go of a farm. He worked his kids almost like slaves. One of the younger boys had done something that my dad thought was worth rewarding him for and Pa told him he could have a dollar in trade at the hardware store. He thought the boy would probably come in and take something like a jackknife, but when they came to town the old man and the boy came in the store, the boy selected a milk pail.

      As the family expanded they had to expand the house. It wasn't planned well and it was a hodgepodge and apparently somewhat like a maze getting from one room to another.

      The old man was getting up in years and one day didn't feel up to going out to participate in the usual work to be done around a farm. They decided that he could do some harness-mending. After several hours (probably at meal time) they went to get him and found that he was dead. One of the boys remarked, "He must have died pretty soon because he didn't get much done on the harness."

      There must have been some delay in removing the body because rigor mortis had set in and they couldn't take him out through the door but had to take him out the window.

      Another example of a stern hardworking German was Al Ferber's father. I knew Al from working at Douglas Aircraft Company. He was from South Dakota. Al's father had a grain storage building that had a dirt floor. If they put the grain on the bottom floor, the moisture in the dirt spoiled a lot of the grain so they had to carry it in burlap sacks on their shoulders up a ladder to the second story. Al figured this was too much work and he rigged up a contraption that would lift several bags at a time using a team of horses and cutting the work down to a minimum. His dad was mad at him and told him he was lazy. Al summed it up by saying, "That's why I'm not on the farm anymore. I don't like all that hard work."

      As you know, Lawrence Welk was an American-born German who was brought up on a farm. His father was a German farmer. In those days parents had authority over their kids until they were 21. Lawrence was an obedient boy and stayed on the farm until he was 21 and then he left and organized a dance band. I used to hear him over the radio from WNAX, Yankton, South Dakota. They called it Lawrence Welk and his Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra. They were one of his first sponsors. The gum must not have been very successful because I never saw a stick of Honolulu Fruit Gum.

      Your mom told us that you shoveled snow off the walks. It's nice that you help with things like that. I used to shovel the walks at our house in South Dakota. We really didn't have that much snow, but because it blew around so much we had big drifts. I used to help my oldest sister Leona around on her mail route. The snow plow made big ridges on both sides of the road and the drifts would build up again in half an hour. I had to shovel to get the car through them. I got tired of doing that and would try to run the car through them real fast. I'd take a look at the drift and then back up and take a run at it. If I guessed right I would get through without having to shovel but when I judged wrong I then had to shovel it out from under the car. Leona was scared to stay in the car and would get out when I said I going to try to drive through it. A lot of the time the snow would fly up in the air I and couldn't see the road until the car stopped. I didn't know where the road was but I never slid off of it. It saved a lot of shoveling. A little winter and snow is fun but a lot of snow and bitter cold is very tiresome.

      We have been getting rain all day today and last night. It must have been a couple of inches. There is also a lot snow in the mountains, which is better than the rain down here where so much of it runs off. The street in front of our house had a stream of water about 20 feet across this afternoon.

      I had the operation that Doc Vanderkolk was noted for. I told Dr. Polito that I used to see the farmers castrate their sheep and a big dog ate about a dozen pair of the items. He said, "Well, we don't have any dogs here in the operating room,"

      Love, Grandpa

     


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