Alpha
Well, I got started on my Tumblr blog, and wrote about a page of info, and the computer decided to lock up! I love my PC…not!
So I will do it a paragraph at a time, which will take longer, but oh well!
See you next time!
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11-16-08
I’m back again!
I wanted to share some of things I did while I was growing up. My Dad had a huge influence on me during my formative years. Looking back, I can see how he cultured my thinking. He passed away on December 24th, 2000. He was 86 years old when he left us. I remember not liking him very much when I was a teenager. He was always pushing me to do thing I did not want to do. I guess that is what most Dad’s do.
I was a lazy kid, and since I was the youngest, I got away with a lot. I was a bookworm, reading anything that was in the house, voraciously. There were always Readers Digest monthly books, which contained some good humor, and all kinds of medical articles, like “I am Joe’s liver”.
There were articles on famous people, and stories of real heroes, brave firemen and policemen. There were stories of regular people like you and I, saving peoples lives in all sorts of terrible circumstances. Wars, burning buildings, shipwrecks, tornadoes… To me these stories were really inspirational. These were real people, pushing themselves to race into a burning building with no regard for their own safety, just a single minded drive to help someone else.
But I digress…Dad would have chores for me, and so would Mom. Dad chores were to clean out the dog pen (I’ll leave that to your imagination) every day. Take out the garbage on Fridays, and help him on the endless projects that he was working on around the house. We would prepare the house for the onset of winter, by taking the furnace apart and oiling the bearings, and tightening the belt. We would vacuum the inside of the fan, and clean out the burners. Then we would shut off the power to the outside air conditioning evaporator and hose the leaves and cottonwood seeds out of the unit, and wrap it up for the winter to protect it.
Next was the leaf raking, which was a project that we would undertake each weekend during fall until all of the leaves fell to the ground. We didn’t have just a couple of tree’s, but about thirty to fourty good size tree’s. I was not very atheletic, so it was pretty hard to keep up with my Dad, because he was a tough old bird. I would always get some good blisters on my hands, until I saw the wisdom of using gloves. We used to rake them in piles, and burn them, which I enjoyed. The burning leaves smelled good! But then the city decided that this was not safe, and we were forbidden to burn leaves.
There is a specific way the Campbell’s rake leaves…never leave one behind. Under the bushes, and even the low growing myrtle had to be raked out. No stone left unturned was my dad’s hallmark! He had one of those old Parker leaf sweepers that would cut a swath of 40 inches wide on the lawn. Not a bad device, but you had to cut the lawn real short before the leaves covered the grass, because the sweeper was almost impossible to push when the grass was long. Trust me, I know!
We got smart and bought tarps to lay down in the back yard and raked the laves on top and dragged it up to the front yard where the city would come by and pick them up if you left them on the curb. Then Dad bought a mulching machine and it would turn the leaves into a fine mulch that you could put down in the flower beds. You still had to rake the leaves into piles, but then you could roll the mulcher to the leaf pile, which if you were smart, was right next to the flower bed…
My Dad was the inventive type, who loved to come up with a solution to a problem. One day as we were raking the leaves into the mulcher, he had a brainstorm. Why don’t we take some of that dryer vent hose, and adapt it to the suction end of the mulcher? He promptly went up to the hardware store and bought the parts he thought would do the trick. The concept did work, but the mulcher did not have a great deal of suction. Today, you can buy that mulcher at at Sears with the same kind of hook up. He used to drive me nuts with that stuff, but after a while I started to notice some of the goofy idea’s he had were pretty cool. He would try to involve me in helping him make some of these things in our shop in the basement.
Another one of his pet peeves was the squirrel climbing up on the birdfeeder and emptying it out. So my Dad, Mr. Inventive, would come up with all kinds of goofy things to keep the squirrels off of the feeder. His most effective one was the feeder that he put a upside down serving tray below the feeder, to foil the squirrels attempts to jump up on the feeder.
Dad would sit at the kitchen table, looking out the window to the back yard where the birdfeeder was located, having his snack of smoked cheese and crackers. He also would have a Carling Black Label beer (one of his customers) and watch the squirrel jump on the tray, and slide right off, because it would tilt when the weight of the squirrel was on it. The birds would have no problem when they sat on the edge of the tray, because they were so light weight. Dad would chuckle, and go downstairs for about 45 minutes to rest his back by laying on the hard family room floor. Then he would go back at the leaves until it was dark.
The home we had was custom built. It was “finished” in 1963, and we moved into it that fall. My Dad prepared the front yard, brought in topsoil, and had sod brought in to roll out like a carpet for a beautiful lawn. But before the sod was delivered, Dad had another brainstorm.
The trench that was cut in the yard for the sewer and storm sewer lines was filled back in by the construction company, but it was still soft to walk on. So up to the hardware store he went, and made himself a device to hook up to the garden hose that he would shove into the soft ground and it would take the loose soil, and turn it into mud, and it would sink in to the trench. Dad would fill the trench back up with soil, and do it all over again, until the ground did not sink in any more. Then we could lay the sod. actually that was not my job, since I was too small to help, but my brother Mike was the laborer on that job, and a dirty one that was! The lawn did turn out nice, and that trench never sunk in at all for over 30 years! I guess Dad knew what he was doing!
We would burn logs in the winter in the downstairs fireplace, just because Dad liked a good fire. So to support that passion, we had saved all of the lumber that was cut down when the house was built, and let the cords of wood dry out for a few years until it was ready to split. That was another of our tasks. I was not very good at splitting the logs, but I stacked the split logs the way Dad liked them to be, with spaces to dry them out. Dad would take the axe, and swing it time after time to split the wood. If there were some really stubborn logs, Dad would get the sledge hammer out and a big chisel that we would take turns driving deep into the log before it finally split. Then he would go in the house, and grab a beer, and after he had a long pull of of it, he’d hand it to me and told me I had earned a sip. Of course I took a big slug, since I was parched from sweating so much, and he would put his hand out for the bottle, and I gave it back. He always let me finish the rest. I liked the fact that he shared that beer with me, because it made me feel like I was doing something worthwhile, and to be old enough to drink a beer with my Dad felt kind of cool. We would stop from time to time, and pet the dog, who was dying for us to let him come out of the pen and play with us.
When Dad did not have anything for me to do, Mom’s chores were many. First things were to clean the bathrooms twice a week. We had two full baths and one half bath. The girls did their bathroom, and my brother and I shared the duties on the mens bathroom. Then there were the floors to mop. The kitchen had to be mopped once a week, and the hallways upstairs and downstairs had to be mopped as well. The upstairs had to be vacuumed, and all of the bedrooms and the den needed cleaning too. Dusting was a big deal to my Mom, but fortunately for Mike and I, we were able to leave that to the girls. (I know, that was chauvanistic, but those were the times) Then there was cleaning the windows. Mom would follow you around the house, on the inside of the window pointing to a spot I missed on darn near every window I did!. There were a lot of windows, let me tell you.
I also had to bring in the milk from the milk chute as soon as I got home from school, and put it in the refrigerator. On a day off of school, the milkman would drive up to the house, and I would run out and get the milk from him. His name was “Tiny” and he knew both my Mom and Dad. He would offer me a ride around the block if I would help him deliver the milk. Well, I was not of much help, because he would give me a small box of chocolate milk, and I would sit next to the blocks of ice in the truck, and enjoy the “air conditioning”, while Tiny did his job. After I had polished off the chocolate milk, Tiny would have made it around the block, and dropped me off at the house on his way back thru. Mom would be waiting at the door with a smile on her face, and wave goodbye to Tiny.
When I was going through my adolescent rebellious years, I still worked around the house. but I had some time to pursue some of my other teenage hobbies. I would play my records on the family stereo too loud and play the same songs over and over again.
I bought a bass guitar of of a good friend, and worked on mimicing the great bass guitar players of the time like Paul McCartney (I had the same style guitar as he had) and Led Zepplin, Yes, Iron Butterfly. But I had no one else to play with, so I sold it to someone else. I was singing in the school glee club, and I used to sing harmony with a bunch of guys that were good acoustic guitarists. They gave me the bug to play guitar, so I bought one off of a girl at St. Augustine Acadamy, and started teaching myself to play. My sister Katie wrote me a song, called “my fine curly towhead”, and we tried to collaborate on making the song work. Unfortunately, I was not very good, and once again I gave up on playing an instrument.
Well, that’s enuf for now! More to come soon!
Next installment will be on the Campbell way of painting a room.
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