Author: Paul W. Konopacki

Starting in 1979, I got a job driving the town vehicle that pulled the Luck Winter Carnival royalty in local parades.  I got the job because my dad worked for the maintenance crew in the Village of Luck, Wisconsin.  The pickup truck was red, the same color as the Luck High School mascot, a cardinal bird.

The job entailed washing the truck the day before each parade at the Village of Luck maintenance shop.  I usually took advantage of the opportunity and washed my own car.  The morning of the parade I would hook up the float that was stored in a garage behind a building on Main Street in Luck.  The first float was built on what I would call a small hay wagon.  After a few years it started to fall apart from age and was replaced by a small one-axle trailer.

I would hook up the float (covered in a tarp during storage) to the pickup and head to the staging area of whichever town was having the parade.  Some of the towns where I pulled the float were Luck, Frederic, Grantsburg, Siren, Milltown, St. Croix, Clayton.

Typically the families of the royalty (queen, 1st and 2nd princesses, miss congeniality) drove their daughter to and from the parade, but occasionally they would ride with me in the pickup.

As soon as I arrived at the start of the parade route, there would be a coordinator who would direct me our numeric place in line.  I would take off the tarp, fold down the sides of the float (hinged for easy transport and storage), position the Luck ‘horseshoe’, and fill in the bare spots of the cover decorations that might have come loose or lost during usage.

The Luck royalty would mingle with royalty from other towns until time for the parade to start.   The most important thing to remember during the parade was to drive slow and accelerate smoothly.  There was really nothing to hold on to while the girls were sitting on the float seats.  No matter how slow I went, there were always times when I had to go over bumps in the road that caused the royalty to grab their crowns so they didn’t fall off!  And I do admit taking a few corners faster than I should have!  But none of the girls ever fell off.  Obviously, after the parade the girls went home and I packed up the float for storage back in Luck, Wisconsin.

Sometimes Things Happened

One time for the Lucky Days parade in Luck, the town vehicle wouldn’t start so I ended up using my own 1966 Chevy Caprice to tow the float.

On one occasion, I was driving the float and some of the royalty back to Luck.  We came upon a non-standard four-way stop.  Because so much of the traffic made a left in one direction, they replaced one of the stop signs with a yield sign at the end of a curve.  I was not familiar with it and ended up blowing through the yield sign (there was no other traffic around).  Anyway, sirens and lights went on and a local police officer pulled me over.  I hopped out of the pickup and walked up to the officer.  After looking at my license, he realized he knew my dad, and let me off with just a warning.

During the year I pulled the 1980 royal court, I was followed to one parade event by the father of the queen.  He didn’t like that some of the float’s cover decorations were coming loose on the way (they get fixed before the start of the parade, as I already mentioned).  That was the last parade I was allowed to pull the float in that year because the father decided HE was going to do the pulling!

Royalty Courts I ‘Pulled’

• 1978
  Jill Sandstorm – Queen
  Kelly Olson – 1st Princess
  Lori Jerrick – 2nd Princess and Miss Congeniality
• 1979
  Valerie Ellefson – Queen
  Patti Walsten – 1st Princess
  Nancy Hanson – 2nd Princess
• 1980
  Gina Boatman – Queen
  Brenda Lunsmann – 1st Princess
  Shelley Nelson – 2nd Princess
• 1981
  Cindy Patrick – Queen
  Kari Bille – 1st Princess
  Kelly Kreutzian – 2nd Princess
  Barb Skow – Miss Congeniality

Around my sophomore year in high school (1977), I got a part-time job working at the Carson Candy warehouse in Luck, Wisconsin.  The business had a couple of trucks that delivered candy and cigarettes to local businesses.  The warehouse was just a block off of main street.  It had shelves of candy and cigarettes and a garage where the trucks were kept.  I worked after school to stock shelves and ‘stamp cigarettes’.

I reported to Alan Gursky.  He was a grade ahead of me in high school.  I categorize him as a ‘bully nerd’.  He was a nerd who loved to pick on other nerds to compensate for … whatever.  Anyway, I tolerated his poor behavior for the sake of the job.

Boxes of candy would be delivered and we would stock them on warehouse shelves.  Drivers would come by later and stock their trucks with whatever they needed.

The other main task was to ‘stamp cigarettes’.  All cigarette sales in the United States were subject to a special tobacco tax.  The cigarettes were already wrapped in packs and further into cartons.  The cartons were already sealed with glue.  What Alan and I did was to take each carton and feed it through a special machine that would break the carton’s glue seal, stamp each pack with an ink marking, then re-glue the carton.  Alan did the work of feeding the machine and I was on the other end to package the cartons back up.  He loved to shove them through so fast that I was unable to adequately handle them at the other end!

Speeding Ticket Number 1

The first traffic ticket I ever got was while driving my first car, a 1966 Chevy Caprice.  I bought it from a fellow high school classmate in 1978 for about $300 cash.  I was heading south on Wisconsin Highway 35.  I had just passed Luck, Wisconsin on my way to Milltown when a Wisconsin State Police car went by heading the other direction.  I was going 62 MPH in a 55MPH zone.  As soon as I noticed he was making a U-turn, I floored it, thinking I would be able to out run him.  As I topped a small hill, I saw a dirt road and decided I would be able to be out of his sight before he knew I turned.  I slammed on the brakes and was about to make the turn to the dirt road when my car stalled right in the middle of the highway.  I kept trying to get it started, but the officer was on me within a few seconds.  I finally got the car started and moved it to the shoulder.  He asked me, “You weren’t trying to outrun me, were you?”  I said, “No, my car just stalled.”  Luckily I just got a speeding ticket and not a citation for trying to evade a police officer.

Speeding Ticket Number 2

I got my next ticket on Feburary 14, 1980.  I was on my way home to Luck, Wisconsin for the weekend from my first year at college at Stout – University of River Falls.  I was giving a fellow classmate a ride to his home near St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.  We were minding our own business, listening to rock music on my 8-track player when I saw the red lights flashing.  I was shocked he pulled me over because my speedometer showed I was only going a couple miles over the speed limit.  He said I was going 72 MPH in a 55 MPH zone!  I argued a bit with the officer and said, “I’ll see you in court!”

When I got to Luck, I arranged for someone on the Luck police force to do a radar run for me while I drove 55 MPH.  He told me it registered 71 MPH!  After some thought, I realized I had just had a new transmission put in the car in the summer of 1979.  I went to the mechanic, who ran a dynamometer test.  Turns out the problem was a plastic gear was installed with the incorrect ratio that improperly showed my actual speed.  Which means for about 8 months I was constantly speeding and did not know it!

I tried to fight the ticket in court in Hudson, Wisconsin on March 26, 1980 with the excuse that it was a mechanical error,  But I was not well prepared to defend myself.  The judge said regardless of the improper plastic gear ratio, I should have known I was speeding.  Because the ticket showed I was over the speed limit by 17 MPH, three points were taken from my license and I had to attend a ‘driver improvement course’ in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin.  The entire experience cost me over $150.

The other day I was trying to remember some of the music concerts I had been to. Here is a list, not including many small bands I saw at festivals.

These are mostly musicians playing in theaters or arenas.

In the mid 1980s, I went with co-workers to see Huey Lewis and the News in Detroit, Michigan. Seats were far away from the stage. The only thing I remember about it was being in an altered state once the music started.

In the late 1980s, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri. A girlfriend had tickets to see Clink Black. He was pretty popular around that time. Even though his playing style was considered Country, his songs were not as ‘twangy’ as I had anticipated. In 1990 I went to see Billy Joel with co-workers. We had floor seats which were regular metal chairs. Immediately after the concert started, everyone in the rows ahead of us stood up on their chairs. In order to see the stage, we had to, too. We spent the entire concert standing! I remember Billy jumping on top of his piano during one of the songs.

A few years later I began hanging out with co-worker, Orlando, in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis. He worked as a volunteer MC for radio station KDHX on a show about blues music. I went to a number of shows by blues players in very small venues.

This was the first time I heard Marsha Ball in person. I bought one of her CDs and had her sign a t-shirt. Years later, she played at Union

Station in St. Louis. I wore the t-shirt and asked if she would trace over the signature again because it had faded! Also playing at Union Station was Little Feat.

In the early 1990s, I went to a Def Leppard concert at the St. Louis Arena with a girlfriend. Half way through the concert, a drunk guy stood up and would not sit down. We started throwing things at him, but he was so drunk he didn’t get the hint.

I saw Jimmy Buffet twice at the RiverPort Amphitheater. You could bring a blanket and sit on the lawn on the hill. It was interesting to see the new generation of parret heads enjoying Buffet songs the second time I saw him play.

In the mid 1990s, a co-worker had box seats to see Elton John at the RiverPort Amphitheater. He invited Elaine and I to join him. We saw Elton wearing his silly outfits and playing the piano from underneath the keyboard.

I saw John Prine at the Westport Playhouse in 1990. I don’t remember it, at all! The last major concert I attended was a performance by John Prine at The American Theater in 1995. Elaine bought good seats toward the front as a birthday present. John’s voice was failing and this was before his neck and lung cancer. It was fun when he encourages the audience to sing along with his classic songs.

Other than the small band venues I occasionally record video for, I haven’t been to a large concert in decades. I don’t miss the crowds, the bad behavior in the stands, the speakers that are too loud, and the overpriced concessions.

Concert Tickets – Click an image to open lightbox viewer

High School Chat

I would say the earliest exposure I had to what would become the internet is when I was attending Luck Public High School in the late 1970s. The science teacher brought in a timeshare computer terminal and put it into a soundproof room in the library. Besides using it to learn computer programming, there was a chat program that could send

messages back and forth between other public high schools in Wisconsin on the same network. What a cheap thrill for high school boys to chit-chat with girls from another town! Make note that output was printed on paper; there was no monitor.

Discovering the BBS

In the early 1980s, I worked for a company that had a 1200 baud Hayes SmartModem in the office. It was used for business, but I made a deal with the owner that I could use it after work hours for my own geek purposes. I learned there were sites where you can dial in called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). You could download games and participate in discussion forums. Using an IBM PC, I ran an “interpreted BASIC” program called PCTalk that took care of cataloging a list of BBS sites, doing the modem connection and making it easy to download files. In those days, the transport mechanism was XMODEM, followed by YMODEM, and then ZMODEM. Each version downloaded files faster because of better compression techniques.

FidoNet Forums and ‘EmptyFest’

A man named Tom Jennings came up with software called FidoNet that allowed many BBS systems to network together as nodes. This was the beginning of what I consider the start of the known Internet. I had made friends with other on FidoNet that lived in the Detroit, Michigan area. One of them,Tony Bauman, ran a BBS out of his house. I got to know him very well. He asked me to administer some of the forums he was running at his site. Over time, people who participated in the forum decided to meet in person. For some reason, we called them EmptyFests. We joked as if we were too busy to attend, but everyone showed up on the day of the event. We were a very eclectic group. One time we met at the Tom Colby home. The;y had two girls they were home-schooling. I had never heard of that before. I traded computer games with a boy, Chip Joyce, who was still in high school. One day, I, a young man in my 20s, showed up at his house and met his mother. She made us sandwiches to eat while to swapped software and games. It was all innocent, but I can imagine it would be questionable behavior in these days! One time we held an EmptyFest at the home of a true hacker. I was overwhelmed with how many 5 1/4″ floppy disks were swapped that day! I even brought a girlfriend to an EmptyFest help at a park during the summer. So many of the single geeks were jealous!

And Then?

In 1988, I moved from Detroit, Michigan to St. Louis, Missouri. I started to use faster modems, such as the U. S. Robotics 9600 baud. I got a Compu-Serve account and eventually created my own personal web sites. I went from analog modems to digital ISDN lines and today, DSL through AT&T. But the most fun I had and best memories I forged were during my days being part of the start of social media and the beginnings of the internet while living in Detroit. I would still have the source code of PCTalk.bas if the 5 1/4″ floppy disk I saved it on did not crap out in the early 1990s.

One of the biggest employers in the area where I grew up as a teenager was the Stokely Van Camp bean processing factory in Frederic, Wisconsin. The work was seasonal because it revolved around planting, picking, cutting and canning green beans harvested from fields in nearby towns. Farmers would contract with Stokely to plant beans on their land. They would get compensated by the number of hoppers of beans cut during summer months.

Steam Cleaning

My first summer job at Stokely was working the night shift in 1977. A handful of rookies like me were taught how to steam clean the machines that sifted and cut the green beans before they got sent by conveyor belt to other locations at the factory. These machines would be working from sunup to sundown, as long as there were beans waiting to be harvested. We wore yellow rain slickers and gloves because we were spraying water from hoses for hours. It was steam that came out of the hoses at high pressure, so we had to be careful not to spray others or contact the hot steam for very long. One machine consisted of a spinning drum of sharp knives. I avoiding being the guy who clean it because you had to get into the drum to clean it. Obviously the power to the machines was turned off while cleaning, but accidents do happen!

Icing

In 1978, I moved up to working the day shift. My job was to fill crates with beans that had just been cut, put ice on them, and help load them into trucks. There were only three of us on my shift. It took some strength to do the work, but it was also outside the factory building, so it was not very noisy and the temperature was nice.

Harvesting

In 1979, I became part of the team that harvested beans in the farm fields. The very first day, we met at the factory in Frederic, Wisconsin and drove a dozen tractors along Highway 35 shoulder to the first field in Centuria, Wisconsin. I was assigned to one of the small, blue-colored tractors. It was a manual three-speed. I had never driven an 3-speed, let alone a tractor! But I picked it up quickly. Every other day the team would meet back in Frederic and take a group van to which ever field we had left the tractors in. To get the most out of daylight, we arrived at the field right at sunup and harvested until sundown. That’s a lot of hours constantly sitting in the sun going around in circles, filling up our bins with beans. The repetitive work affected my mind so much that I would find myself awakening in the middle of the night; sitting on the edge of my bed holding an imaginary steering wheel! There were also a couple of times I over-slept and had to have my mom drive me to the field. The skill of harvesting was 1) knowing how to align the slots in the harvester with the bean rows; 2) setting the blades at a height that would not scalp the dirt and not be too high to miss the beans. I got good enough that the crew supervisor would send me in first on a brand new field. It was tougher than usual because the first rows to cut were at the edge of property and were usually not planted straight. Toward the end of the year, I was taken off the manual tractor and given one with hydrostatic drive (much easier to put into gear. Because we were at the mercy of Mother Nature, we had rainy days off.

Forklift

1980 was the last year I worked at Stokely. I had earned the right to be one of two forklift drivers on the day shift. They were powered by propane. Instead of forks on the front, we had ‘squeezers’ that were made to move regular pallets around, but helped keep the boxes of beans in place while we stacked them in the warehouse. After cans of beans came out of the steamer, they went through a machine that pasted labels on them. At the end of the conveyor belt, workers would put them into boxes, then the boxes on a pallet. When a pallet was full, I would move it into the warehouse. I confess I didn’t work as hard as I was expected to. If I was going to be waiting more than 5 minutes for a pallet to fill up, I was supposed to help the others pack the boxes. I never did that. It didn’t make sense to me to turn off the forklift, jump off, then run back to it a few minutes later. Pallets were stacked in the columns up to 6 high and about 10 columns deep. Putting the top pallet on was nerve-wracking because if you moved the forklift too fast while the pallet was raised to its highest, you could tip the forklift! All the beans in the boxes would crash to the ground and either open up or be dented. I did drop a couple of pallets, but they were not far off the ground, so I was able to regroup the boxes. Dented cans could not be shipped, this they were considered ‘spoilage’. On the bright side, Stokely workers could take as many of the spoiled cans home with them. Yes, I got sick of canned green beans after awhile.

Conclusion

By working in various jobs in different locations in the factory, I learned to appreciate what it took to take raw materials and create a product for market. These were all menial jobs. During subsequent decades working in the computer industry using my brain to solve problems and getting stressed out about the silliest deadlines, I often thought about how fun it would be just to spend the day on a forklift moving things from here to there. It would be easier to quantify my accomplishments that way.

My first memories from childhood started when I was 6 years old and our family moved for a short period to Tucson, Arizona. My mother explained our move in a note to me:

“We moved to Tucson, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, in June of 1967 to May 31, 1968, the day that Dad retired from the Air Force. You were in first grade in Tucson, but you never went to kindergarten because they didn’t have kindergarten in Luck, Wisconsin until 1968. Until that time kindergartners went to 6 weeks of summer school before they started first grade, but since that was the summer we left for Tucson, you didn’t go.”

My sister and I were fortunate that our school, Lowell H. Smith Elementary, was just across the street from where we lived. Technically we could jump the school fence to get there in just a few minutes, but the proper way was to walk around the block and go in through the front doors. I recall that on the way to school, we had to walk fast in certain places to avoid fire ants.

I went to first grade on one side of the building. My sister, Barb, went to third grade on the other side. Occasionally the classes would co-mingle during events and lunch. Apparently I was the best reader in my class of 27. I remember one classmate who would eat paste. This was the type that was non-toxic, not Elmer’s glue. She had blond hair and a pale complexion. I thought that was because of the paste she was eating.

The ‘Cold War’ with Russia was in full swing. We were taught the ‘duck and cover’ technique of hiding under our desks. My favorite part was when we were allowed to run home as part of the ‘save your butt’ exercises. This was one time I was allowed to go straight home and jump the school fence.

In 1978, I took a solo summer trip to California in my car.  On my way back to Wisconsin, I stopped by the old neighborhood to get some photos of 2210 Albro Blvd, where we used to live, and of the elementary school.

Some of My School Papers – Click an image to open lightbox viewer

Dream Category: Tornadoes

I grew up in northwestern Wisconsin on the edge of tornado alley.  I have never seen a tornado in real life.  A few have passed within miles of me.  I think instances of  dreams I have had that involve tornadoes occur when my subconscious is telling me to get a handle on my fear of not being in control of life events that happen to me when I am awake.

When these dreams first started, I would never see a tornado.  There would be a threat of bad weather approaching and the sky would be dark.  I, and other nondescript humans, would be in a building scrambling for shelter.  The roaring of strong winds would begin.  There would be general panic.  Then I would wake up.

More recently the dreams were made up of dozens of thin, micro tornadoes.  They would appear somewhere high in the sky and touch the ground.  I usually woke up before anything devastating occurred.  But there was this one time about a year ago.  I remember hearing the roar of wind before everything went black.  I felt as if I was being sucked into the vortex of a tornado.  I expected to wake up before anything bad happened, but when a second or two passed and I was still dreaming, a thought went through my head that this was really the end.  A second later I woke up.  I was in a dream-state funk all the next morning – trying to get clear of the feeling of finality I had from that particular dream.

Dream Category: Dude, Where’s My Car?

After some event or after work, I need to get back to my car and drive home.  The problem is I don’t remember where I parked.  Sometimes I follow a crowd hoping I will remember where I parked or spot my car.  Other times I wait for people to leave and whatever car is left might be mine!  Most of the time I continue to look for my car and get further and further away from where I started.  I would end up in a bad neighborhood and it would be getting dark.  Then a familiar scenario would occur where I know if I go down a street, I will get mugged.  Luckily I have conditioned myself to recognize I am dreaming at this point and wake myself up.

Dream Category: Gotta Go!

People have reported that they have dreams about needing to go to the bathroom because in real life they really had to go!  For my ‘pee dreams’, that has mostly not been the case.  The problem in these dreams has been that I look for a nearby, private place to go, but cannot find one.  Sometimes I am in a strange house.  I locate a bathroom, but it is in use or there are people nearby.  If I am in public, the toilets are in the strangest places or I have to navigate a maze to find them.  There are always people around and no privacy.  I end up not going.

The most recent ‘pee dream’ I had was a week ago.  I was naked in public and standing on a street corner.  I was aware enough that I was dreaming to allow myself to get relief on the side of a bridge.  I woke up a few seconds later.  I did not have to pee in real life.  I think about how I was able to decide I was dreaming to make it seem OK to pee instead of just waking up.  I am not sure how to interpret this category of dream.  I am not afraid to use a public restroom.  Perhaps I am just uncomfortable navigating in unfamiliar locations?

One of the money-making activities for me as a teenager was picking cucumbers from a field on my parent’s property.  I must admit that I did little in the overall scheme of things.  My dad did the tilling of soil.  I helped plant the seeds, did some of the watering, did most of the picking.  But the idea of planting cucumbers and driving the produce to the sorting facility would not have happened if not for the involvement of my parents.

When the cucumbers started to grow, you had to check the patch every day.  Small cucumbers were more valuable by the pound than larger ones.  The small ones would be be pickled by Gedney and made into ‘Sweet Gherkins‘.  The larger ones would be used for sliced dill pickles.

I would harvest the cucumbers using bushel baskets or cardboard boxes.  You have to bend down and brush back the leaves to see what was worth picking.  Even if you used gloves, your forearms would itch after picking.  If there was a large harvest, cucumbers would be put into gurney sacks before transporting to the sorting facility.

There was a place a few miles from our house in Milltown, Wisconsin that had a machine that would sort cucumbers by size.  The harvest was dumped onto a conveyor belt at one end.  The machine would shake the harvest by size into baskets, which were then weighted.  At the furthest end was a bin for very largest cucumbers that were of no value to Gedney.  We could either take them home or they would be thrown out.

I remember one visit where the guy running the sorting machine (an old man named ‘Johnson’ who had some fingers missing on his hands) wrote a check for less than one dollar.  Old man Johnson  was a nice man.

I think the reason I picked cucumbers was probably because when my mom was growing up on the property where I grew up, she helped her parents harvest cucumbers, too.

One of the first jobs I had as a teenager in the mid 1970s was a busboy at a place near St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin called “The Windjammer Supper Club”. It was on the south side of U. S. Highway 8 not far from the intersection of Wisconsin Highway 35. https://www.loopnet.com/Listing/18417063/1984-US-Highway-8-Saint-Croix-Falls-WI/

I was about 16 years old. I had just gotten my drivers license, but did not have my own car. I drove my dad’s Plymouth Fury III about 15 miles to work. I worked in the evenings because I was going to Luck Public High School during the day. They only had one busboy on duty at any one time. My job was not only to clear the tables of food, but steam clean the dinnerware, set the tables, take the empty bar liquor bottles to the dumpster, mop the kitchen floor, and crack the shells of frozen Alaskan crab. I rarely saw the owners, but when they showed up on the nights I was working, they usually yelled at me if they didn’t see me busy. Even if there was nothing to do, I was supposed to be mopping the floor.

One of my tasks before people showed up for dinner was to crack the shell of frozen crab. I used a mallet to crack the shell, then put them back into the boxes and back into the freezer. This made it easier for the diners to get to the crab meat.

The waitresses would call me into the dining room when a table needed to be cleared. It was depressing to see so much food that was wasted by the diners. Once every evening, the bartender would have the busboy take all his empty liquor bottles to the dumpster. I had heard that other busboys would find a place in the back room, then empty out the few drops in each bottle to get enough to get themselves drunk. A that time in my life, I was not interested in alcohol and I thought it wasn’t a good idea since it was illegal to drink hard liquor at my age.

When the dinner rush was over, busboys were allowed to order anything off the menu for free. My go-to meal was beef au juus. I had never had it before working this job. My next frequent order was grilled cheese.

One evening, I left my shift after midnight and drove the Plymouth home. The next morning my dad started screaming at me about damage done to the left rear taillight. I had not noticed it when I left work because it was dark, I was tired, and why would I think of examining the car, anyway! Apparently the car was the victim of a hit-and-run. My dad reported it to the police so he could get insurance coverage.

In Wisconsin in the 1970s, it was important to put special ‘snow tires’ on the rear of the car to get better traction in the snow. This was before the invention of all-weather radial tires. When going to work, I often took country side roads because I could go whatever speed I wanted. One night I was on a road I was not familiar with. There had been a large snowstorm the previous day and all side roads were covered with snow. I wasn’t paying attention until I realized I was coming to an unmarked ‘T’ intersections. I hit the brakes, but the car just skidded and hit a snowbank flush with the right side of the Plymouth. I walked to the nearest farm and had the car pulled out of the ditch by a tractor. There was only a couple of pock marks in the car body as a result. I don’t think my dad noticed. In fact, I don’t think I have ever told this story to anyone, before!

If anyone has an old brochure or photo of the front of the Windjammer Supper Club, please let me know. I would like to include it in this post.

Home Away From Home

My first year of college was at the University of Wisconsin – Stout located in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was a one and 1/2 hour drive from where I was living with my folks during the summer in Luck, Wisconsin. I shared a dorm room with a sophomore on the third floor of Callahan Hall – Room 314. This was my first adult experience living away from home. I drove back to Luck every weekend for the first month before I realized I should be finding things to do in Menomonie.

Roommate

My roommate, Erik, was a tall, pasty-white redhead. He wasn’t a geek, but wasn’t that out-going, either. I don’t remember us socializing that much or even having any existential conversations.

Music

I didn’t study very hard, but got decent grades. I remember spending a lot of time with a reel-to-reel recorder that my dad brought back with him while overseas in the military. I used it to record music being played on the college radio station. I went down to the local record store to rent albums and recorded the songs to tape on the reel-to-reel. I had this strange idea I wanted to work at a radio station, perhaps as a technician or a disc jockey. That was a crazy pipe dream since I have never had the personality or wit of conversation to pull off a job like that. I had probably watched too many movies about pirate radio stations and the romance of talking to people over the airwaves from a dark basement room took over my imagination.

Letters to Home

My mother saved all the letters I wrote to her while at college. I found them in a drawer a few years after she died. I digitized them and read through them for this blog. I had forgotten that I was trying to learn to play the guitar and wanted to start a band. That all ended abruptly the next year and never came back into my mind until reading my old letters. What a moody and depressed young man I was! I wrote about my feelings in every letter! See snippets from the letters, below.

The Rockford Files

I brought a small color TV with me to college. The only place it would fit in the dorm room was on the top shelf in a closet on my side of the room. In the evenings, my roommate and I would watch reruns of The Rockford Files. He had never heard of it before. I had seen it on TV during its original shows. Eventually others on the floor who didn’t have a TV or had never seen the show began to hang out in our room. From 10pm – 11pm, we had a dozen people crammed into the room staring up at the TV in my closet.

Sunburn

One weekend Erik went on a boat trip. For hours, he was on a river without his shirt on. He got heat stroke and had severe sun burn on his back. For the next week, he had me rub lotion on his back, which by the way, was covered with acne. As gross as it seemed at the time, I knew he was in need so helped him out without complaining.

Darts

Much to my disdain, Erik brought with him darts with steel tips. He put up a poster on our dorm door and threw darts at it. After awhile the door had hundreds of small holes in it. You knew someone was playing darts in our room because you could here one hit the door from down the hall! Even worse was that a number of times I came home from class and opened the door just as a dart came whizzing by and into the hall! Eventually Erik bought a cork dart board, but darts still found there way into the wood of the door. Our dormitory floor’s R. A. (resident assistant) looked the other way until the day we moved out. We took down the dart board and put up a nice new poster on the door covering the damage. When it came time for inspection, Erik and I figuratively twiddled our thumbs and whistles with the slighted of hope the R. A. would forget about the dart holes in the door. Of course, he did not. We had to split the cost of replacing the door. At the time it seemed like a lot, but it only cost me $7.50.

Are you related?

Years after I left Stout, my sister ran into my old roommate, Erik, at a religious retreat in Illinois. He happened to recognize our common name, “Konopacki” and asked her if we were related.

Letters From Paul To Mom

Throughout his life, my grandfather, Holger Koch, took on the role of director, actor, and musician in communities where he lived. It was his way of contributing to the local culture. He learned its importance as a child in Denmark.

As the Little Butternut 4-H Club leader, my mother, Helga Konopacki, directed many plays and musicals made up of 4-H members (I was one of them). We performed in pageants with other 4-H groups.

For a few years as a kid, I got the idea I wanted to produce skit programs and perform them in front of neighborhood parents. My sister and a couple neighbor kids would come up with a handful of short skits and performed them. Mostly we lip-synced celebrity songs and mimicked comedy acts. I don’t think we did more than four performances within a three year time frame. One was specifically put together for Father’s Day.

It wasn’t in my DNA to continue to perform in front of a crowd. I did play small parts in high school plays, but my heart was never in it.

Neighborhood Skit Programs – Click an image to open lightbox viewer

A few months ago my wife and I started to record episodes of “Jeopardy!”.  We would watch it together and pause playback immediately after each answer was presented.  It might take up to two minutes for us to come up with what we thought was the correct question, then we would restart playback.  We amazed ourselves at what we could pull from the recesses of our minds.  When our response was incorrect, we would just say ‘RATS!’ and moved on to the next answer. The other day one of the answers had to do with the famous play, “Man of La Mancha”.  It is the story of Don Quixote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza.  It brought back one of my best memories from my short college career at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls.

One of the classes I took was theater.  Everyone in the class had to choose a role in the upcoming performance of “Man of La Mancha”.  Some chose to perform; some chose to work on set design or publicity.  I don’t know how I was assigned the role of ‘lighting and audio operator’, but there was only one position and I was it!

I started out by working with the director over a number of days to program in the lighting sequences.  As he figured out what configuration he wanted at each step of the play, I would lock each one into the computer.  During the two public performances, I would be in radio contact with the stage manager who would let me know when to go from one sequence to the next.

I had the entire control room to myself.  I was responsible for turning up and down the house lights at the start and end of the performances.  It was also my job to begin the play by running a reel-to-reel audio tape of the British national anthem.

During the first of the two performances, I took my place in the control room.   Everything I did worked according to plan.  I turned down the house lights, played the national anthem, changed lighting sequences on command.  However, there was one student in the theater class who was put in charge of operating the one spotlight.  Their only job was to turn it on and move it to its proper position.  That’s it.  There were just a couple of times it was needed.  One was during a critical moment of a death of a character that ended one of the acts.  As the actor crumpled to the ground and feigned death, the spotlight was nowhere to be found.  A few seconds later the light from the spotlight found its way to the actor from the corner of the stage.  But the dramatic effect was lost!  The audience slowly began to clap now that they knew the act was over.

That night at the after-party, I got disapproving looks from the actors.  One even scolded me for not doing my job with the spotlight.  Even though I said, “It wasn’t me!”, they had already made up their mind that *I* was the one who ruined the moment.  (The second and final performance went over without incident.)

All-in-all, it was a memorable experience being part of the performances.  I was in my element.  I was disappointed I didn’t get a better grade in the theater class.  I wrote home to my mother about the experience.  She kept the letters and I found them a few years ago in some old boxes.  I published a few excerpts from them, below.  (Apparently I was an angry young man!)

Thirty-seven years later, I still get excited preparing for and recording media at live events.  I love being involved behind-the-scenes.  I don’t want to be in the spotlight.  My satisfaction is being part of a troupe working together to pull off ‘The Big Event’.

Resources

Man of La Mancha (wiki)

August 27,2018

I reached out to the University of Wisconsin – River Falls archive department via email.  I had heard that the play performance was recorded.  I also wanted to see if I could get a copy of the playbill.  While I wait for a response, I decided to go ahead and publish this blog post.

Letters to Mother

…

It was an agreement between my mother (Danish Lutheran) and my father (Polish Catholic) that my sister and I would be raised in the Catholic faith.  The nearest Catholic church to where we lived, Luck, Wisconsin, was St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in Frederic, Wisconsin – 7 miles away from Luck.

I had been thinking about writing this post about my experience as an altar boy for quite some time.  It is only a coincident that there are new revelations in the news about bad behavior within the ranks of the Catholic clergy.  I am glad to say that in my experience, I did not witness, nor participate in, any inappropriate behavior during the time I was involved.  Unfortunately, I have no photos taken by my parents of me in my robes!

Catholic services are full of ceremony with no room for creativity.  You follow the script and that is that.  I don’t remember when or why I was asked to play the role of an altar boy, but in those days I remember almost never saying no to a request.  I would have to show up about 30 minutes prior to the service, go into a room in the back of the church and slip a couple of pieces of clothing over my dress clothes.  As people were filing into the church, I would go into small rooms next to the pulpit, to prepare the wine and light the main candle.  Once the main candle was lit, I would light other candles from it; genuflecting at the proper station.  Then I would go back and wait for the priest.  Never once did I think about taking a drink of the sacramental wine when no one was looking!

At the start of the service, we would walk behind the priest down the center aisle and place  accoutrements (cups and candles) at their proper location.  Then take our place at the side.  When the priest would speak at a particular time, we would ring a bell.  When time came for communion, the priest would administer it to the altar boys, then we would either hold the container of wafers for the priest, or hold the cup of wine for the congregation (wiping each time where their lips touched the cup).

During Easter and Christmas, I was asked to be one of the altar boys.  Instead of black robes, we wore red ones.  I don’t know if I was asked because I was reliable, or because no one else wanted to do it!  Anyway, as I said, during those days I never said no.  And I don’t remember being nervous.  Easter service was unique in that we have to follow the priest as he moved along the stations of the cross.  I remember having to hold the incense ball for the priest as we moved along.

One year I played the role of an Apostle.  We acted out the washing of feet during the “Mass of the Lord’s Supper”.  It was certainly awkward for me to be up at the front of the church during the ceremony where all the other apostles were the same age as my father.

Since this post is about being an altar boy, I won’t include my experiences here about confirmation classes and my First Communion.  I’ll save that another day and another post …

My participation in the Dr. Fred Urquhart research program to locate the over-wintering destination of the Monarch buttery was a brief blip in the life of a young boy growing up in the rolling hills and dairy farms of northwest Wisconsin in the early 1970s.

There was a patch of land on the 5 acres my parents owned next to Little Butternut Lake that was ripe with milkweed plants.  I would walk the area with my dog, Ralph, and see fat, black-striped caterpillars slowly munching away on the leaves of the milkweed.

In 1970, when I was 9 years old, I joined the Little Butternut 4-H Club and selected the ‘Nature Conservation’ project.  Throughout the year I studied nature, collect samples, took notes and pictures, then put together a booklet to enter into the Polk County fair.  That included a diagram of the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly and a write up on my experience with raising and tagging them.

My mom had heard about a request from Dr. Urquhart for volunteers to tag Monarchs in order to help determine where they migrated every fall.  Since I was very young, mom was the go-between the University of Toronto and me.  She would mail them a check to cover the fee to defray material costs.  She would pass along the butterfly tags, report forms and newsletters to me.

I created a butterfly net out of cheesecloth, a coat hanger and wooden dowel.  After catching a Monarch, I would handle it gently in order to attach the tag over the top of one of its wings.  I would record the tag number, date and sex of the butterfly.  At the end of the year, my mom mailed the activity log back to Dr. Urquhart.

I continued to tag Monarchs in 1971.  Except this year, I raised a few from caterpillars.  I built a wooden box with screen sides and put a few caterpillars inside with plenty of milkweed leaves.  After they built their chrysalis, I would guess at the day they would emerge.  One time I got lucky.  Just 10 minutes after my mom and I went to look in the wooden box, a Monarch broke out of its cocoon and began to dry its wings!

Over the two years as a ‘research associate’, I do not know the exact number of Monarchs I tagged.  My guess is about three dozen.  I never received notification that one of my tagged butterflies was ever found somewhere else in the world.  But I do not consider my efforts as a waste of time.  I learned to respect nature and what we can learn from it.

In 1975, just a few years after I lost interest in tagging, the cumulative effort of all the Urquhart butterfly research associates provided enough data to help determine the Monarch wintering grounds.   You could say my efforts were even mentioned in an article summarizing Dr. Urquhart’s research on Monarch butterflies: “…After forty years of determination in mobilizing thousands of professionals and amateurs in a massive volunteer tagging program, they located the over-wintering sites of the monarch butterfly in a remote area of Mexico …”

That discovery did not mean tagging no longer needed to be done.  With technical advances over the decades, better tagging techniques and light-weight materials had been developed that continued to help researchers and scientists better understand why nature does the things it does.

Going through a foot locker full of memorabilia, I came across newsletters, log sheets and unused tags from back in those days. A quick search on the internet for ‘Monarch Migration’ found a large list of videos and articles that brought back memories from those days in Wisconsin – over 45 years ago.

In the evening of 5/28/2007, Memorial Day, Elaine rushed me to the emergency room.  That morning I started to feel an intense pain in my lower abdomen.  I had this type of pain before –  decades ago – but on my left side. At that time, soaking in a hot tub of water made it go away.  Not this time.  The pain came and went in slow waves.  On a scale from 0 – 10, it hung around as a 3 with crescendos going to 8.   I tried drinking water to hydrate, but couldn’t keep it down.  I felt bloated and nauseous.

I finally realized I was not going to solve this on my own.  It took at least 30 minutes to get to the hospital.  Being a U. S. national holiday, the emergency room was full.  I walked in doubled-over.  I found a couch and headed right for it.  Elaine started the process to get me checked in.  I writhed on the couch for at least 15 minutes before they could get me into a wheel chair, then onto a portable hospital bed that was set up in the hallway due to the over crowding of patients.

I was given a morphine drip while waiting to be seen by a doctor.  It wasn’t helping.  30 minutes later they switched to another pain killer and THAT worked!  Eventually I was put into a wheelchair and taken to a hospital room.  They put me into the hospital’s heart wing because all the regular rooms were full.  It was a very nice room.  Made for two patients, but the other bed was never filled the entire time I was there.

They couldn’t do x-rays and CT scan until the next morning.  The pain continued throughout the night.  I called the nurse each time the medication wore off.

The next morning they ran tests.  Medically speaking, I had “right ureteral calculus”.  Kidney stones.  One of them tried to get out and got stuck in the kidney’s exit tube.   The diagnosis:  “There is suggestion of a 3mm calcification projecting over the right transverse process of L3 which may represent the right proximal ureteral calculus.  A small calcification in the left hemipelvis is visualized likely represent a phlebolith (calcification within a vein). …”  They also discovered that my other kidney, the left one, was not working properly.  “There is marked atrophy of the left kidney”.  I had no idea.  After some thought, I bet the pain in my left side from decades ago was also related to kidney stones and may have been the cause of the atrophy.  I go and get the exit route of my right kidney plugged up with a stone and suddenly there is no way for fluid waste water to get out of my body.  I was poisoning myself slowly with a buildup of creatinine.

Time for the operation.  I was ‘put to sleep’. The doctor worked his extraction tool through my urethra (that is correct, gentlemen, he went through THAT way) into my right kidney.  He tried to grab the stone to pull it out, but instead pushed it further in.  Here are the doctor’s notes:

“After informed and signed consent was obtained, the patient was brought to the operating room and placed on the table in supine position.  He was placed under general anesthesia, prepped and draped in a sterile manner.  I could not advance the scope all the way into the kidney.  As a result, I removed the ureteroscope and then back loaded the guide wire on to the cystoscope.  I put a Cook stent over the guide wire.  The proximal limb curled in the kidney and the distal limb curled in the bladder …” 

He made a decision to put in a stent (a tubular support placed temporarily inside a blood vessel, canal, or duct to aid healing or relieve an obstruction) that would stay in my body for a week until lithotripsy procedure could be scheduled.  Lithotripsy: Extracorporeal shock wave – technique for treating stones in the kidney and ureter that does not require surgery. Instead, high energy shock waves are passed through the body and used to break stones into pieces as small as grains of sand. 

I was in the hospital room overnight and went home the next day.  The side-effect of having the stent put in was blood in the urine.  I tried to do my regular chores.  An activity such as mowing the lawn caused the stent to rub against my ‘insides’ and induce bleeding.  Urinating was painful.

A week later I went back to have the stent taken out and have the lithotripsy procedure done.  Then it was a waiting game for the little pieces of kidney stone to pass naturally.  I was supposed to keep the remnants in a jar and return them to the hospital for evaluation.  I had to pee through a strainer.  As each piece passed through, it was like trying to pee out a shard of glass.  Over a few weeks, everything went back to normal.

Eleven years has gone by.  I often wonder if the left kidney has any function, at all.  If not, the right one will have to work with me to stay longer on this crazy ride.

X-Rays – Click an image to open lightbox viewer

I was waiting to post this topic for when I had more accurate details about it.  I wanted to contact the other participants to see if we remembered the event the same way.  Restlessness won out, so here is as much as I remember.

Back in 1967, the mother (Mrs. Tolan) of a girl in my grade school class (Cathy Tolan) arranged for some of our classmates to be a part of a TV show called “Romper Room”.  According to Wikipedia, the show aired on KMSP channel 9 (1962–74) in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  It was recorded at Foshay Tower, a prominent skyscraper at the time.

We lived in a small rural town called Luck, Wisconsin.  The TV show was being produced in Minneapolis.  Wee got in a station wagon and drove one and a half hours to the ‘big city’.  I remember sitting in the back bed of the wagon most of the time on our way to the studio.  I would fake like I was asleep and the girls in the station wagon would try to sneak a kiss! (Well, maybe once or twice).  The students were:  me, Karl Lake, Cary Jensen, Cathy Tolan, Laura Nygren, and Gretchen Nies.  The station wagon belonged to either Mrs. Tolan or Mrs. Jensen.

I think we made the trip to the studio every day for one week – from Monday through Friday.  They changed out kids every week.  Each show highlighted examples of how a ‘good’ child should behave.  Be polite; be a ‘good eater’.  We played with toys on desks.  We played very simple games like follow each other in a circle doing the ‘do bee’ dance (put your hands under your arm pits and flap them up and down like wings).  One bit had Miss Betty, the host of the show, look through an imaginary looking glass and name off a series of names, as if she could see them.  How delightful if you heard her say your name!

My dream was to drive the milk truck in one of the episodes.  A segments during the show was to have one of the kids appear as if they were deliver milk to the other kids.  The day came when it was my turn to ‘drive’.  I sat in a seat in a prop milk truck while the stage hands pushed it into view of the film cameras.

I sure wish those TV show recordings were still around. I would love to find out that one of our mother’s has old photos of us.  Since I share these posts on Facebook, hopefully those who were on the show with me will share their memories.

Below is the certificate my mom kept from that event.  I found it in a scrapbook she kept of my school papers and drawings.

Here is a link to an old episodes someone recorded and published on YouTube.  I am not in this one!

I have two anecdotes to share regarding a child who ran away from home. The child is me; I did not run; and I can back in less than a day. Boring? Sure. And I am glad.

I think both times the cause of me running away was I had an argument with my mother. She wanted me to do something and I did not want to do whatever it was.

The first time I left was when I was a pre-teen. I went over to the house of my friend, Jeff, who lived just down the road. I am sure his mother called my mother soon after. Jeff, his brother, and parents cooked hot dogs that evening in their yard. I remember Jeff’s mom singing ‘Polly Wally Doodle’ to me to make me feel special. I stayed the night. I remember waking up and crying and Jeff’s mom letting me know it was OK. I went back home the next morning.

The second time I was in my early teens. My uncle was in town for an event at the West Denmark Hall. I had an argument with my mother about something. Instead of attending the event, I started walking down Highway N, west toward the town of Cushing. About three miles into the walk, I realized I had no long-term plan and the sun would be down soon. So I turned around. When I got back to my parent’s yard, my uncle was there to greet me with a stern look. I don’t remember what happened after that. I think my mom was just glad to know where I was.

I do have another tale to tell about leaving home one summer in the late 1970s for a week after having a disagreement with my parents. It involved a solo car trip to California and is a lot more interesting than the previous two anecdotes.  But I wouldn’t call it running away as much as ‘exploring my independence’!

I thought I would cover my experiences playing softball and baseball during the early parts of my life.  (I haven’t played in over 30 year).

Even though I am right-handed, for some reason I learned to bat left-handed.  This gave me a slight hitting advantage during games.  A majority of ball players bat right-handed and hit the ball into left or center field.  The defense puts their “least capable” player in the right field position (where I usually hit the ball).

I also developed a bad habit of “pulling the ball” (swinging early) so quite often I would hit the ball hard down the first-base line.  Because I could run fast, I would make it safe to first base because the first baseman couldn’t get control of the ball in time.  When the defensive team saw me coming up to bat, they would adjust their position toward the left side in what was called  ‘The Konopacki Shift”.

I played organized team baseball at Luck School for one year in junior high.  I didn’t like it.  Compared to a softball, a baseball is too small and too hard.  It hurts when it hits me!  I have to admit – it was quite often what got me on base.  I would hug the plate and not back off.  When the pitcher threw the ball inside, it hit me and that would put me on base.  I did hit the ball legitimately quite often, though.  I knew how to hit a pitch and could keep my eye on the ball.

In my entire time playing baseball and softball, I never thought about strategy.  A smart player would have considered who was on base, how many outs there were, and where the ball would best be placed.  I just thought about hitting the ball hard so that no one would catch it and I would safely get on base.

Most often defensively I played left or center field in both baseball and softball games.  That was a good place for me because of my speed I could cover ground quickly.  Once the ball was hit in my direction I was committed to catching it.  I had a preparation stance and fast reaction.

There was one game where I realized I was getting old and had lost a step.  It was a 4-H softball game at the Luck High School ball field.  A kid a few years younger than me hit a ball over my head in left field.  Normally I would be in front of it, but this time I was not prepared and was caught sleeping.  Honestly, from that point on, I realized I had physically and mentally ‘lost a step’.  Essentially the end of my ball career.

My mother was the leader of the Little Butternut 4-H Club.  As her son, I was part of all 4-H activity event setup and cleanup.  That included any softball practice and game.  My mom was a life-long sports fan and a tomboy, but I did not appreciate that fact at the time.  The bats and balls used by our 4-H club softball team were stored in a hallway of our house.  When we went to a game with other 4-H softball teams, I would grab the gunny sack full of bats and balls and toss it in the backseat of the car.

It was my mom, not my dad, who tossed the ball around with me as a kid.  She taught me to be a softball pitcher, which I was for a few years with the Little Butternut 4-H Club softball team.  This was not slow-pitch, but you had to throw underhand.  I did a modified windmill pitch that had enough velocity that occasionally it would curve before it hit the plate.  (Note:  Nothing like the windmill pitch of ‘Bug’ Larson who threw a true windmill pitch!)

In 1979, my senior year in high school, I could whack a softball out of the park.  During Luck High School reccess, we played a game called ‘Pop Up’.  A dozen kids would stand on the football field with ball gloves ready to fight for the catch of a hit ball – the batter would be on the adjacent hill and hit pop ups toward the field.  When someone caught 3 popups, then would become the batter.

In the late 1970s, I was also a part o the West Denmark Lutheran Church Softball Team.  We played other Lutheran Church organizations.  There were many people on our team named Paul, so they gave us nicknames:

• “Small Paul” – Paul Pedersen – The youngest of the pauls, but grew to be a tall guy!
• “Tall Paul” –  Paul Petersen – Tallness was in is genes and was tallest at the time
•  “Fast Paul” – Paul Konopacki (me) … because I could run the bases fast
• “Pastor Paul” – Paul Andersen – Pastor of the West Denmark Lutheran Church
• “Crazy Paul” – Paul Hansen … because when he was running bases he would dive head-first into a base!

When I moved from Detroit, Michigan to the St. Louis, Missouri area in  1987, I joined a slow-pitch softball tea with my employer, Citicorp Mortgage, Inc.  I played in the outfield.

At this point in my life, it was about being part of a social activity and never about whether we won or lost the game.

The only pets my family had when I was growing up were dogs.  They are still my favorite type of pet, although I have never owned one for myself as an adult.

Puppy and Fuji

In the mid-1950s, when my parents were first married and living in Japan at a U. S. Air Force Base in Miho, Japan, they acquired two Japanese-breed dogs, named Puppy and Fuji.  They were brought back to the United States when my dad was reassigned to a base in Clovis, New Mexico in 1957.  My sister and I were born there in 1959 and 1961, respectively.  The dogs moved with us as we were relocated to a base in Duluth, Minnesota in 1966, then to my mom’s childhood home in Luck, Wisconsin.  I do not have a recollection of the dogs, but my mom saved a few photos of them.  I vaguely remember them being buried in a field behind the Luck house.

Rusty

Rusty was a stray mutt that we adopted in the late 1960s after my dad retired from the U. S. Air Force.  We had fun running around the yard and exploring the back woods.

The fateful day of Rusty’s life was when our neighbors relatives were in town for a visit.  My sister, Barb, and I would play near the road at the end of our driveway with Joel, John, and Shannon.  Across the road was Little Butternut Lake.  Usually when we would cross the road and Rusty was with us, we would make sure no cars were coming.  One day rusty decided to cross the road by himself and got hit by a station wagon in front of us.  I saw him hit the pavement and dragged under the car.  We screamed out.  My mom ran out to get him off the road.  It was only a few minutes later, as he lay on the grass dying from internal bleeding, did we see him take his last breath.  My mother usually held back her feelings, but this time there were tears running down her face.  It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.  Rusty was buried in the pet cemetery, next to Puppy and Fuji.

Ralph

I don’t know where he got his name.  He was also a stray we adopted.  He started out as a dog that would roam the town streets of Luck, Wisconsin.  My dad worked for the Village of Luck Maintenance Department, so it could be that we adopted him to get him off the streets and give him a home.  The problem was that throughout the time we lived with us, he would often roam the 1 mile back into town and have to be driven back by a friend of the family or one of dad’s co-workers.  To keep him from roaming too much, Ralph would have a long chain hooked to his collar during the day and be put behind a closed garage door during the night.  One time he ran away into the woods and did not return for a few days.  When he returned, it was clear that someone had shot him and grazed his back.  Part of his skin was hanging off.  He eventually healed, but the injury caused his gait to change.  He wasn’t the same dog after that.

Ralph was a terrible squirrel hunter.  Squirrels would go up a tree and Ralph would be at the bottom, barking.  The squirrel would jump to another tree and Ralph would continue barking at the first tree.  Dad made a dog house out of an old crate that was lined with stray.  Ralph had one outside our house and one inside the garage.

Ralph had a favorite shoe and rag to tug on.  when he wanted to play, he would drag his toy to you and lay it at your feet.  When you would grab it, he would grab the other side.  The tug of war would start and last as long as you wanted to put up with it!  One of our games was that I would chase him around a huge tree by the house.  It was also surrounded by plants so you could not see around it easily.  I would chase Ralph around a couple of times, the reverse quickly.  I would almost catch him, but he would then run around the tree in the other direction.

Ralph and I got into trouble once.  We had a neighbor who raised sheep in a nearby field.  We would walk through the woods and when we got to the sheep, I would tell Ralph to “Sick ‘Em!”  He would chase the sheep.  The owner found out and called my mom.  I distinctly remember Ralph and I walking back to the house and meeting my mom at the door with a very disappointed look on her face.  I don’t remember if I was punished, but the look on her face was punishment enough.

I left home in the early 1980s.  Ralph was still living at the house.  One day my mom notified me that Ralph’s luck ran out.  After many years of successfully crossing Highway 35 to visit the town of Luck, he was hit by a car.  Ralph was buried in the pet cemetery in the backyard.