The Streaker

One of the traditions at Ravenna High School was a staff luncheon held each year on the last day of school at a local restaurant and bar. This was an event where the staff could relax and wind down from the year’s stresses. The entertainment consisted of an “End of Year Roast” where the year’s outstanding goof-ups were mentioned and an appropriate award presented to each unfortunate individual who was involved.

When I was first employed at RHS, Harry Gilcrest was the emcee for this roast. Harry, at various time in his career, was football coach, English teacher, olympic archery coach, glider pilot, kayaker, big band musician, and many other things. He was well-respected by the faculty and throughout the community, and was a very capable emcee. He was extremely funny, had unlimited nerve, and would not hesitate to embarrass anyone, from the superintendent on down. He would often have the crowd in stitches and this event was always anticipated as the highlight of the year.

When Harry retired from teaching I somehow inherited this emcee job. Harry was a hard act to follow but I was well received and quite successful with it. I must admit that entertaining a crowd of teachers who had just downed a couple of drinks on the last day of school was not extremely difficult.

After doing this for several years I decided to share my emcee duties with Helen Pfender, an English teacher with an ornery streak. We made a very good team and both had a good time with it.

When talking over the program for the roast one year we decided that something was needed to liven it up. This was the year when streaking was in vogue, and we discussed the possibility of having a streaker break into our faculty dinner.

First we had to find someone willing to do the dirty deed and not tell anyone beforehand. I looked through the faculty list for a likely victim and came upon the name “Howard Herendeen”.

Howard was our new Industrial Arts teacher, young and somewhat reckless. I approached him with the streaker idea one day after school while he was sitting at his desk. He sat there, thought about it, then laughed for over 10 minutes. After some convincing he finally agreed to do it provided we could find a way that he wouldn’t be completely naked.

To do this and still preserve the “streaker image” would prove to be somewhat of a challenge. I went to the local drug store and bought a pair of “big-mama size” panty hose for Howard to wear.

The party that year was to be held at Baxter Weidner’s restaurant. Baxter was the president of the Ravenna School Board so we saw that as a possible problem. Howard and I went to the restaurant to float the streaker idea to Baxter, who said it would be OK as long as Howard wore the panty hose and stayed away from the regular customers. This would be possible since our party was in a separate room from the main restaurant. Baxter even showed us a little dressing room where Howard could “suit up”.

Over the weekend Howard went home and told his wife about our plan. Since Howard didn’t as yet have tenure, and since this event was to be held in the school board president’s place of business, and since wives tend to be somewhat realistic about these matters, they decided that Howard had better not do the streaking because it might cause him to lose his job.

Now I was without a streaker, so I talked to Larry Fisher, another faculty member. Larry was a young bachelor recently graduated from college, and he immediately agreed to do it.

Larry didn’t have a wife so he didn’t discuss it with anybody – or so I thought.

Larry and I went through the plan and everything was set – or so I thought.

The roast was held as usual. Helen and I were handing out awards, equally insulting just about everyone, and doing quite well. Everyone was having a good time.

When it came time for the streaker, there was a loud noise at the back of the room. In tumbled some guy wearing a ski mask, playing a kazoo, naked as a bird’s butt!

No. Panty. Hose.

The streaker swiftly ran back and forth among the tables and through the audience with the whole works bouncing up and down in plain sight! As he approached the front door he wrapped himself in a curtain, ran through the door onto the sidewalk, jumped in a waiting car, and was gone. The whole event was over in seconds!

The crowd went absolutely wild. Helen and I just looked at each other in dis-belief, wondering what had just happened, and where we were going to work next year.

Larry Fisher was still sitting in the room wearing a sly grin.

It turns out that Larry had enlisted the services of his college roommate to do the streaking.

When I saw Larry later, I commented that He had really ripped us off. He said that since I had been doing it to the others for years, it was about my turn to be ripped. I couldn’t disagree. It was all done in fun and everyone took the event with humor and all were quite entertained.



In November, 1980, there was a strike at Ravenna Schools that lasted 5 months. It was the longest teacher strike in the country and still holds that record today as far as I know. It was very bitter and divisive. After the strike there was no longer the feeling of camaraderie among the staff and closeness with the community that we had before, and no longer could anything like the year-end roast be done for fear of someone taking it personally. I was still able to teach and still enjoyed being with the students, but to me and many of the others, after that strike the feeling was no longer the same, and teaching was now just another job.

Dept. of Education Award

 When I was teaching at Ravenna High School the first thing I did every morning before I started my first class was check my mailbox. One morning it contained this letter from the principal:

 

The previous day I had shown my computer class how to write a program using a “For-Next loop”. As an example of how this worked I wrote a small program for them that printed the following:

THIS IS A COMPUTER

NOTHING CAN GO WRONG

GO WRONG

GO WRONG

GO WRONG

GO WRONG

GO WRONG

I then gave the students an assignment of writing a program that used a “For-Next” loop. I didn’t tell them exactly how to write or what to write in the program, but encouraged them to be creative.

This happened to be “Spirit Week” at Ravenna High School. The highlight of this week was the football game in which the “Ravenna Ravens” played their arch-rival, the “Kent Roosevelt Rough Riders”.

 During Spirit Week the students dressed in the school colors, had pep rallies, made posters telling what heroes our guys were and what dastardly ugly villains the Roosevelt players were…etc.  On the night before the game they would dance around a bonfire and burn a stuffed dummy called “The Rider”, which represented the Roosevelt team’s mascot.

It turns out that the custodian found the following print-outs in one of the waste baskets and gave them to Mr. Ultican, our principal. These were the “enclosed materials” referred to in the above letter, that were going to be forwarded to the U.S. Dept. of Education. 

 

There was no question as to their origin since they were obviously printed on a Teletype machine, and the only one we had in the school was the printer for the IMSAI computer.

I am still waiting for the arrival of my award from the Department of Education, but it must have gotten lost somewhere in the mail.

Building a Computer

In the late ’60s I signed up for a programming class at Akron U. The computer used for this course was an IBM 360 mainframe. The students in the class never actually saw this mysterious machine – I heard that it lived in an air-conditioned room somewhere on the campus. 

This was before there were desktop home computers, and working with a mainframe was a completely different experience. We would write out a program on paper, then type out each line on a “key-punch” machine. This machine punched holes in a 3 by 7 inch card. Each hole represented data, and each line of our program took one card. A program might consist of a stack of cards an inch or more high. 

We would take this stack of cards to the “I-O “ window and hand it to one of the “data priests” who lived behind the window. The “priest”, in his own good time, would perform some kind of holy voodoo back there and a few days later we could pick up our cards, go to the printing room and get a print-out of our results. 

Key-Punch Machine

Punch Card

There were always bugs in a newly written program so of course it didn’t run properly. We would try to figure out where the bugs were, try and fix them, re-punch the faulty cards, and go through the whole process again … and again. After a couple weeks and several more trips to the I-O window, we might have a program that ran successfully. 

It’s no wonder that programming was relegated to the “data royalty”. This process was too cumbersome and time-consuming for the average person to learn, and few had the time and patience to go through these gyrations. 

A few years later I was talking to our principal, Art Fesemyer, about offering a programming class at Ravenna High School. We agreed that computers were the coming thing and it would surely be nice if we had access to a computer at the school. Art was a forward-thinking administrator (one of the few I have known), so he looked into the possibility of our gaining access to one with a grant through the library. He found that we could participate in a time-sharing system at Akron U through a phone modem for a fee of $8000 per year. It could be used for looking up information that would be useful to the library, business, history, and other classes – similar to the internet today. We ended up with two “dumb terminals”, each consisting of keyboards, CRT screens, and modems. These were placed in the library and would allow access to a computer on the Akron U campus. We connected over a phone line by dialing a special number, then placing the phone receiver in a special cradle. When the computer answered, it would write “Hello Ravenna High School “ on the terminal screen. 

Dumb Terminal

Phone Modem

 Navigating this system was quite clumsy and most teachers were deathly afraid of computers and feared breaking something, so it was never extensively used. 

Of course I wanted to use it to teach programming. The only programming language available on this set-up was “APL”, a language written for math majors and researchers. It read from right to left, and everything was done using arrays and matrices. I studied it for awhile and was able to do some things with it, but it did not lend itself to teaching beginning students how to program. Only 2 or 3 of my students were able to handle it – and then not very well.

One day when passing a news stand I happened to notice a copy of Popular Electronics Magazine. On the cover was a picture of a new computer called the “MITS Altair”,  it could be ordered as a kit. When I saw this, the circuits in my brain immediately went into over-load. I bought the magazine and studied the article intensely. The article stated that this computer could be built and programmed at home by a person well-versed in electronics.This appeared to be exactly what I was looking for. I talked to some of my ham radio friends about it and they all believed it to be a genuine break-through. 

Popular Electronics announcing first micro-computer

I went into Mr. Fesemyer’s office and talked to him about this computer. I told him that for half of what we were paying Akron U for a year, I thought I could build this computer, it would live at the high school, it would be our own, and I could use it to teach programming.

Notice that I told him that I …THOUGHT …I could do this (I really wasn’t sure). Some of the hardware needed was not yet available, and much of the needed software had not yet been written. 

 Art went to the next school board meeting, asked the board for $3000 and told them that he KNEW I could build this thing and make it work. He had more confidence in me than I had in myself! Evidently the board had a great deal of confidence in Art ‘s opinion because they gave him the money without hesitation.

So now I was in the hot seat. I called the MITS company to order the kit. They told me that the demand was so great that they couldn’t fill my request for 18 months – not what I wanted to hear.

I did some further snooping around and found another company,The IMSAI Corp, that was furnishing a heavier duty version of this computer. They could deliver immediately, so I ordered one of these for the school. 

IMSAI 8080 Computer

After a few weeks of building, testing, and trouble-shooting, I finally had the IMSAI computer up and running. It had no keyboard or screen. It had to be programmed with the front panel switches – in machine language. That means zeros and ones. When a switch was up, that’s a one, when down, a zero. The only output was blinking lights on the front panel. The IMSAI company promised to deliver software that would allow us to write programs in BASIC along with keyboard, monitor, etc, but that all turned out to be “vapor-ware” and was never delivered. 

I don’t think they were trying to rip us off. Remember that this was all new territory – the “Wild West” of desktop micro- computers, most of us didn’t know what we were doing, and there was not much data available to offer guidance. 

There were, however, some computer hobby magazines available, and I subscribed to as many as I could find. I finally learned how to write some simple programs in machine language, and taught these to the students.

Dr. Dobbs Journal – Early Computer Magazine

 I remember one program in particular that used a series of loops. A loop causes the computer to repeat itself over and over. When a program runs a loop it radiates radio waves, the frequency depending on the duration of the loop. If an FM radio was held close to the computer, these loops would generate tones. I showed the students how to program loops of different durations and produce songs on an FM radio. They would try to generate their favorite song using loops written in machine language. One student even generated The Star Spangled Banner (She received an “A”).

These machine language programs, although fun and useful in understanding the basics of computer science, were very labor- intensive, time consuming, and not exactly what I had in mind when I built this machine. I needed a high-level language that would run on the IMSAI. 

One of my ham radio friends told me about his son who was working on his PhD at Akron U. He and his friend were using IMSAI computers to program a light show that lit up a glass floor at a Cleveland disco club. I spent many evenings with these two guys, getting advice and picking their brains. They were very generous in sharing their knowledge. They told me that they had a pirated copy of a BASIC interpreter and they showed me how to patch it so it would run on an IMSAI. They further told me that this program was written by some kid who had dropped out of Harvard – his name was Bill Gates.

This is exactly what I needed! The problem was that they had it on a Model 28 teletype tape and I had no way of reading it into my computer. I scanned the literature and found plans for an optical tape reader that supposedly read a teletype tape. I ordered the parts, put it together, hooked it up to the IMSAI, wrote a machine language program that accessed the reader, and to my pleasant surprise it loaded the BASIC interpreter onto my computer much faster than a teletype reader could. The teletype reader read the tape at a fixed rate but the optical reader read the tape as fast as I could pull it through. 

I bought a keyboard kit from a company in Texas and modified one of the old TVs I had scavenged previously to use as a monitor. I found a system that allowed each student to save his/her program on a tape cassette . 

Keyboard made from a kit

Finding a way to print from the computer was a special problem. I had an old teletype that I wanted to use as a printer. The problem was that this machine used an old protocol called Baudôt, which is 32 bit, and ran at 60 words per minute. The IMSAI computer spoke ASCII, which is a 256 bit protocol. Also, the computer ran many many times faster than the teletype 

Teletypes using Baudôt only had room for 32 characters. Since there are 26 letters in the English alphabet along with 10 digits and punctuations, this was not enough choices. Teletype got around this by printing only in caps and using up-shift to furnish the extra characters. This gave them 64 characters which was more than enough for communication. 

Teletype Tapes – Baudôt (left)  ASCII (right) Note that Baudôt has 5 rows of holes, ASCII has 8 rows (plus feed holes).

I wrote a printing program that mapped Baudôt to ASCII. To slow the output of the computer down to the teletype’s speed, after each character was printed I inserted a loop in the program that wasted time until the teletype could catch up. This solved the interface problem and worked like a charm. 

Model 15 Teletype used as a printer. The keyboard was not used. The computer controlled the printing.

We now had a system with a TV monitor, ran the BASIC language, printed out the programs, and stored them on audio cassettes. We were now in business, and still under $4000!

I used this system to teach programming for 10 years. No student had to hand in cards to an I-O window and didn’t have to wait for days to see if a program would run. In all this time the system was down for repairs for 3 days when a chip burned out and I had to order a replacement from California. 

The Akron U computer we had been using was down at least fifty percent of the time. 

Around 1981 the school obtained a beautiful computer lab outfitted with Apple ][ computers. I used these to teach computer science, and they were also used by the business department to teach word processing and spread sheets. These computers were convenient in that they hardly ever crashed. Upon starting up there was a BASIC interpreter ready to go – you didn’t need to load anything in with tape. They stored data on floppy disks and the printers were much better than my old teletype. Thus the days of the IMSAI were numbered. I still used it to teach students during their free period but later it turned out to be pretty much a museum piece. I kept it around so that students could see Portage County’s first micro-computer.

Apple][ Computer with 2 floppy disk drives

When the business people moved into the computer lab I found some of the teachers to be unbearably anal. One teacher didn’t want anyone sitting in her seat when she was gone. One was constantly spraying the phone for germs and going through the waste basket to see if students were eating in the lab. Some complained when one of my students left a sheet of paper in the printer or if candy wrappers were found in the waste basket. All this nagging was starting to “make my ass tired”.

Finally our curriculum coordinator began telling the administration that the only thing students needed to learn about computers was how to use Microsoft Word, and all that programming stuff was just unnecessary “fluff”. 

That did it! I decided that Ravenna High School no longer needed me as a computer teacher, so I gave up my programming classes and concentrated on teaching math.

When I retired the janitor told me he was instructed to throw the IMSAI in the trash, so I brought it home. At the time of this writing it sits on my living room book shelf.

More Photos Here

Breaking Things

Tom Gregory recently emailed some photos to me that he took in the ’60s while he was a student at Ravenna High School. These pictures brought back memories of the following events:

When Spohn’s TV Repair Shop in Ravenna closed and went out of business, the owner contacted me and asked if I would like to have the remaining stock of old TV’s and various electronic parts for use at the school. He informed me that there was about a truckload of stuff and I had to take it all. When he said a truckload he wasn’t kidding. The stuff completely filled my flat bed truck. There was everything from TVs in various stages of dis-repair to vacuum tubes, capacitors, resistors, knobs, wires, nuts, bolts and screws, along with things I didn’t recognize. This was an experimenter’s dream!

This stuff filled one corner of the physics lab. One problem that immediately needed to be addressed was that some of the TVs didn’t have a cabinet and the picture tubes were exposed. This needed to be taken care of for two reasons:

1) A picture tube acts like a large capacitor and can hold a lethal charge of electricity for a very long time.

2) If broken, the tube’s high vacuum will make it implode and go off like a bomb, causing glass shards to be violently thrown around the area – not a good thing to have in a school full of ornery kids..

So the first thing I did was remove the picture tubes from the TVs that were not to be repaired.

We repaired the remaining TVs, then sold them and used the money to buy lab equipment. Others were torn apart and the parts used for various projects. The power transformers and rectifiers were used to power radio gear and for power supplies in the lab. We also built some 6 volt power supplies as battery replacements for Mike Lenzo’s 6th grade science classes.

Now I had to decide what to do with those potentially dangerous picture tubes. I couldn’t just throw them away because they had so many interesting possibilities.

Tom Gregory was one of the students who first got me interested in ham radio. He was also the school photographer and an electronics experimenter. One day Tom showed me his recent project – a device that would allow sound to fire a strobe light. With it he could take a photo simply by clapping his hands.

When I saw this device my evil mind went into high gear. Why couldn’t we use this to take a high-speed action shot of a TV picture tube imploding? The sound of the implosion should set off the strobe light and cause the picture to be taken.

There were several problems to overcome. How and where could we safely do this, and how could we do it without sending the instigators (us) to the hospital? We consulted with “Otch” Houston, the chemistry teacher, who was also interested in this project.

Otch had recently built a new house with a large and almost empty basement. We decided that this would be the perfect place to conduct our experiment. I didn’t think his lovely wife, Dianne, would let some weirdos blow up stuff in her new house, but we convinced her that this was in the interest of science and the future of mankind, and we would clean up any mess we made and fix anything we broke, so to my surprise she foolishly consented.

We hung a pulley on the basement ceiling with a rope running through it. On one end of the rope we tied a large brick, the other end we strung behind a barrier where we could all hide and be shielded from the flying shrapnel. We then put a picture tube below the pulley where the brick would fall. Tom set his camera on a tripod, turned on the strobe device, turned off the lights and opened the camera’s stutter. We then crouched behind the barrier, hoisted the brick up to the ceiling, and let ‘er fall.

The resulting implosion was much more violent than we had expected- sounding as if a shotgun had been fired. It threw pieces of glass all over the basement, some as far as 40 feet. The size of the razor-sharp shards ranged from palm-size down to grains of sand.

We were so shocked at the violence of the implosion that we started talking and laughing excitedly – each of these sounds was repeatedly setting off the strobe. This cut down on the picture quality since the shutter was still open. More problems occurred when we walked over to close the shutter – each step crunched the broken glass, again triggering the strobe. To solve these problems we re-adjusted the sensitivity of the trigger device and restrained our laughter until after the shutter was closed.

The results of our efforts are displayed below. I hung these pictures on the bulletin board at school to show the students what a dangerous device they had in their living rooms, and to convince them that a television set needed to be treated with care.

This one had previously lost its vacuum and merely broke apart

These imploded violently 

Clean-up time

Tom, Otch, Gene – The Instigators

(Also read Tom’s comments below)

MARS

While conversing with some of my amateur radio friends I learned about a group of hams who were attached to the military. This group was called “The Military Affiliate Radio System”, or “MARS” for short. Members were trained to help the military in emergencies. Much of their time was devoted to providing communications between soldiers on active duty and their families. This was before satellite phones and the internet, and by ordinary means these communications were often slow and difficult . The MARS system made these contacts more efficient and almost instantaneous. This appeared to me to be a worthwhile endeavor since our country was in the middle of the Vietnam war, so I joined MARS.

After some training I became very proficient in Morse code and was put in charge (net control) of the Sunday night MARS CW (Morse code) net. Message traffic was passed from Vietnam by the military to state-side MARS members. Any of us who lived close to the receiving family would accept the message, translate it to regular English, and forward it to the appropriate person by phone or letter. We could also communicate in the other direction- from civilian to military.

Some MARS members provided “phone patches” so that soldiers could talk to their families in real time.

At that time MARS was the quickest way that messages could be passed between members of the military and civilians.

As a reward for providing this service the MARS member received outdated surplus military equipment that could be modified to use for his radio hobby. Through this program I received much of the equipment that I used for my radio station, along with some that was used at the Ravenna High School radio club and and in the physics lab. My students and I rebuilt several transmitters and receivers that we used in the school radio station.

Collins AN-ART-13 auto-tune transmitter used in WWII bombers. I used one  in my amateur radio station.

Hammarlund BC779 Super Pro. These were used onboard ships by the Navy  and when modified worked well as short-wave receivers.

The most fascinating things I received from MARS were Teletype machines. These beasts consisted of an amazing array of levers, gears, motors and springs, and just sat there and typed all by themselves without any apparent human intervention.

Model 19 Teletype

I built an interface that connected a Teletype machine to my Super Pro receiver. This combination interpreted two timed audio tones, 850 cycles apart, that were sent by the transmitting station, and turned these into typed messages. This seemed like absolute magic! When the cover of the machine was removed, it revealed a whole bunch of stuff in motion that magically typed out messages on a roll of paper!

The “Innards”

When I received my first Teletype machine I hooked it up to my receiver, tuned it to the MARS Teletype station at the Pentagon, and began to make adjustments. All of a sudden it started typing:

” WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR “

I didn’t know whether to run or to get under the bed!

It turns out that the MARS station in the Pentagon had the call letters “WAR” and the machine was acknowledging that I was receiving them. WHEW!

The highlight of my MARS career was when I was chosen (twice!) as an operator of the CW station at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on Armed Forces Day. MARS celebrated this day with a military to amateur crossband communications test and a message-receiving test. These tests gave amateur radio operators an opportunity to demonstrate their individual technical skills. On this day hams from all over the world tried to contact the Pentagon. If successful they received a QSL card from the Pentagon MARS station.

A QSL card is a fancy postcard acknowledging the fact that your station made contact with another station, naming the call sign, country of origin, signal report, and other comments. These are proudly collected by hams showing the different countries that were contacted. Most ham stations have their walls covered with QSL cards from all over the world. Getting one from the Pentagon on Armed Forces day was a coveted honor.

QSL Cards

When operating this station on Armed Forces Day, I was the most sought after person in the ham radio world.

I would send an invitation in Morse code that went something like this:

“CQ CQ CQ de WAR WAR WAR        K “

Then listen – and try to untangle the swarm of replies, all jumbled up, sounding like a bunch of mad hornets were after me.

I would answer the strongest signal with a signal report – RST 599 or whatever, and log the event so that the Pentagon could send this guy his QSL card. He might give his QTH (location), but there was no time for chit-chat since there were too many people waiting in line. I would terminate this message and try to identify another caller. When the racket subsided I would send another “CQ” and the process would start all over. This went on all day, and I made literally hundreds of contacts. Needless to say my head was full of dots and dashes for the next week or so.

Gene at the Pentagon MARS station

MARS is still active today. It is now called The Military *Auxiliary* Radio System. Morale and welfare messages are no longer the largest activity in MARS due to the increased use of the Internet and e-mail by deployed military personnel. Its primary mission now is to provide contingency communications to the Department of Defense and Military Services. It is also available to assist state and local emergency response agencies.

            

 

Ham Radio

The curriculum for the physics class I taught at Ravenna High School involved some electronics. The first year I taught the course I found two boys in this class that knew more electronics than I did – much more. On further investigation I found that they both possessed amateur (ham) radio licenses and had studied electronics in order to pass the required license exams. Getting an amateur radio license looked like fun and a way to obtain some valuable knowledge. Otch, the chemistry teacher, was also interested, so we did some investigating. At that time the requirements for a Novice Class license were a basic knowledge of electronics, FCC rules, and the ability to send and receive Morse code at the rate of 5 words per minute. After a few weeks of study and practice we went downtown and talked to “Pete”, the proprietor of the local TV repair shop. He had a “ham” license and also was qualified to administer the license exam. After we passed the test and obtained our licenses we built radio stations in our homes and put them on the air. We had a lot of fun doing this and as we became more proficient with the code and technical knowledge,  we both advanced through the program to obtain higher class licenses. I ended up with an Amateur Extra Class license which I still hold (WA8TPO). This license required code proficiency of 25 or more words per minute and knowledge of advanced electronics.

I thought that this might be a good way to stimulate student interest in electronics so I started a radio club at the school and had several students join. We built a small station from WWII surplus parts and located it in a corner of the physics/chemistry lab. We ran a lead-in wire through a window which then connected to a long-wire antenna on the school roof.This was strictly a CW (code only) station and any student who wanted to get on the air had to learn Morse code and pass the license exam.

Our first radio station. Notice the transmitter and receiver taken from a WWII fighter plane

One of the nice things about being young is the speed at which they learn a new language such as Morse code. Otch and I had to”sweat bullets” to learn it but these kids picked it up so quickly that I HATED THEM ALL!!

Since I now had an Extra-Class license I was qualified to administer the amateur radio license exam. As a result we had several licensed students in the high school before a year had gone by. They spent their spare time on the air talking to other hams around the US and Canada, comparing notes, and becoming more code-proficient. Some of them obtained General-Class licenses before graduating.

 Transmitter built from old TV parts

Now the club members wanted a more powerful station so they could talk to hams around the world. We ran some fund raisers and obtained enough money to buy a better transmitter from the Heathkit company. This was excellent equipment, but was not assembled. All you get is a bag of parts with instructions on how to build and trouble-shoot the transmitter. That was good because the students could participate in the construction and testing. I obtained an excellent surplus receiver and other equipment from the Military Affiliate Radio System (MARS), and converted it to the amateur bands (I will write about “MARS” in a future article).

We also obtained some aluminum tubing from Montigney’s hardware store with which we built a 15 meter directional antenna. We mounted it on a TV rotor and put it on the school roof.

Maryann Chlysta, Gene Roliff, Roger Tsai, Carl Danford

Assembling the 15 meter beam antenna

The Science Department had recently moved into a new building and our new radio station was now located in a small room adjacent to the new physics lab. This room had no windows, so in order to hook up an antenna we needed to go through the roof. I got out my trusty drill and drilled a 1/2 inch hole through Ravenna High School’s shiny brand new roof, inserted an L-shaped piece of conduit with a metal plate through it, ran a coaxial line through the conduit, and sealed it up with tar so it wouldn’t leak.

It would be an under-statement to say that the principal was not happy with me when he saw what I had done to his new roof. He told me that before I did something that radical to his new building, I needed to fill out a work order in triplicate and present it to him. He would then take it to the school board and eventually they would bring it up for consideration at some future meeting.

I knew all that. I also knew that the board would table the work order for at least 3 months before acting on it. If they approved, it would then take the same amount of time for the custodian to get off his butt to do the job, and in 6 months or so we might have an antenna connection. During that period of time the students had already contacted over 50 countries from around the world.

New Station

To me this appeared to be a perfect example of where it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Christmas Visitor

One Christmas night about 11:00PM my home phone rang. It was a call from Ron Snowberger, our assistant principal. He told me that he had just received a call from the Ravenna Police Department. They told him that a lady who lived down the street from the high school had called in a state of panic and said that a strange thing was occurring at her house. She told them that a small, eerie-looking, bright red spot of light was coming in through her window and running up and down the walls of her bedroom. She further informed them that this spot of light appeared to be emanating from a third floor window on the street side of the high school. This was where the physics lab was located, so Ron decided to give me a call to see if I had any ideas about this before he returned a call to the police. I immediately figured out what was happening, and told Ron to have the police tell the lady that it was harmless, not to worry, she was not being visited by the Holy Ghost, ignore the light and go back to bed. Furthermore, I would take care of the problem when we returned to class after Christmas break.

One of the industries in town had obtained a new laser gun and had donated the old one to our physics department for us to use in the lab. This was shortly after the laser had been invented and had recently become available commercially. Most people had never seen nor heard of a laser and had no idea what it did. The students were quite excited about this laser and we had used it in several diffraction experiments. This unit was about 18 inches long.

Laser Gun

John, the son of the town plumber, was one of my extremely gifted students. He had a curiosity that knew no bounds, legal or otherwise. He was also extremely curious about our new laser. I knew that John had access to the keys for the school since his dad had keys to every lock in town. I was sure that he was in the lab on this Christmas night, trying to see how far the laser beam would travel in the dark, and that this ornery individual was running it up and down the street and shining it into people’s windows.

The following Monday I walked into the lab looking for the laser gun. There it was on the shelf with the cord neatly wound, looking as if it had never been moved.

Later that morning I met John in the hallway. I said to him, “John, do you have any idea what the penalty is for breaking into and entering a public building at night? It is a very serious offense and anyone who gets caught doing that could be sent so far up the river that he would become water-logged.”

John thought for a while, slowly rubbed his chin, grinned slightly, and replied,

“… Yeah…I think …I see what you mean”.

And that was the end of the Christmas laser incident.

The last I heard of John he was “Captain John”, flying the weather helicopter for a Cleveland TV station.

Adventures of a Classroom Teacher

After teaching at Suffield and Field High Schools for 4 years I obtained a position at Ravenna City High School teaching physics and mathematics. At that time (1963) Ravenna High School was a high quality academic institution and I felt honored to be part of it.. They were regularly placing their graduates in ivy league colleges which was unusual for Portage County schools at the time.

Ravenna High School  c. 1963

When I started teaching at RHS I must have looked rather young, even though I had been in Korea with the military, attended graduate school, was married and had 3 kids. During our first fire drill I was guiding some students to the exit when an elderly business teacher mistook me for a student and told me to shut up and get in line. So… I… shut up and got in line. She was quite embarrassed later when she discovered her mistake.

During my first few years at Ravenna High School I had many students for 3 classes during the day. Because of this we had a very close relationship, and were almost like family.

Many of the students in my classes had a higher IQ than I did which made teaching challenging and kept me on my toes. I always had to be well-prepared because these guys were constantly “laying for me”, trying to find a crack in my knowledge. This turned out to be fun for me and the students. I could usually outwit them even though they were extremely capable, since I possessed more information and experience than they did. I have never enjoyed anything as much as the “give-and-take” with these students. It was really stimulating and we all had fun learning together. I couldn’t fake my way through if I didn’t know something, because hiding it from these characters  was next to impossible.

I had many students in physics class and the same students later in calculus class. I was able to teach the principles and uses of calculus in the physics class before the students had ever heard of calculus. For example, we would plot the graph of the speed of a falling object using a home-made timer made from a door bell clapper, ticker tape, and carbon paper. We then tediously measured the slope of the graph and area under the curve in various places in order to find the velocity and distance traveled. This is what is done mathematically with calculus, and the students were doing it without knowing anything about that subject. In the following class when we did the same thing using calculus it made much more sense to the students since they had previously done the same procedure graphically. When the school increased in size and became departmentalized this was no longer possible since each teacher had to teach in his own department – math or science, but not both.

I never believed in using complex digital instruments in the lab at this level until the student had done the experiments with simpler equipment. Although not as impressive to administrators or in science fairs, this was much more informative and easier to understand than was some black box with digital readouts and wires hanging out. The doorbell timer mentioned previously was an example.

Other examples:

A timer made from a funnel full of water which drained into a graduated cylinder.  This measured time in ml. of water. (This is how Galileo did it!)

For a strobe we used a slotted hard board disk which was rotated in front of one eye.

After developing some wave theory with ripple tanks made from window panes we were able to measure the differences in wavelengths of red and blue light using blackened microscope slides and two razor blades.

Bob is studying wave motion with ripple tank and simple strobe

It is amazing what one can do with simple everyday things. Later after obtaining some understanding we could drag out the whiz-bang digital stuff and get more accurate readings.

Studying motion using a high speed camera and strobe light. Abe is dropping a golf ball and Tom is ready to fire the strobe and open the shutter

This group of students was deadly serious about obtaining knowledge and pretty much all business and on-task, that is, until a visitor walked into the classroom. They would then go into “attack mode” and try their best to embarrass me by doing something really outlandish. I couldn’t scold them because I would do similar things to them. It sometimes appeared to the other staff members in the school that all we did was have fun and goof off. They were only half right – we did have fun!

I remember the time Mrs. Hulbert, our very proper librarian, came into the physics lab to talk to me about some event. The next thing I knew, a student (the valedictorian) had exited our second story window and was standing on a ledge, other students were holding the window shut, and Mrs. Hulbert was about to have a major heart attack. I told her not to worry, they do this all the time. After she left they settled down and everyone went back to work.

One day we were having a lab where the students were measuring a magnetic field using a large piece of paper, a bar magnet and some small compasses. The students were in groups of four. I decided to see how well one group of boys could think on their feet and handle unexpected data. I had a very strong magnet from a klystron tube that I obtained from a war surplus store, and unknown to the group I placed it in a drawer under their lab table. Of course this violently affected the expected results. Their small compasses would come to a certain point and then snap around and point straight down toward the floor. The boys worked for over an hour and were completely frustrated and befuddled. Finally in a fit of desperation one of the boys opened the drawer and found the klystron magnet. The gaze of all four guys immediately fell on me, and I saw blood in their eyes. I was standing by the door, so I gingerly exited the lab and ran down the hall with the four guys after me. I quickly stepped into principal Jim Call’s office since I knew they wouldn’t follow me there. I then asked his secretary for some staples, tape, and paper clips, killing time until the bell rang. They would not have done anything to me other than maybe mess up my hair, but I didn’t want to give them that option.

At the time Ohio held a mandatory state-wide exam for physics students. That year one of these students placed fourth in the state. Three others were in the top 20.

The physics lab was on the top floor and immediately below were some English classes. When doing experiments we were constantly dropping bricks on the floor or running roller skate carts across the room causing large amounts of racket. Unfortunately this noise transferred to the classrooms below. I was aware of the problem but had no way of controlling it without jeopardizing the program.

One day a student came to my door with a note from an English teacher whose class was directly below my lab. It said,

“Could you please cut down on the noise up there because it is very uncomfortable holding class with all of that horrible racket going on overhead”.

I appreciated her problem and she was a good friend of mine, but I could not think of an immediate reply. I decided that the best defense was a good offense, so I sent the student back with a note saying:

“SHUTUP ABOUT THE NOISE OR FORGET ABOUT TONIGHT” ,

and stapled it closed so that the student couldn’t read it. I went down to see her later and after having a good laugh we worked out a solution with some schedule changes.

Carl was one of my better students and an avid note-taker. I noticed that every time I spoke he feverishly wrote in his notebook. It looked as if he was really paying attention, and I complimented him on his note-taking. I mentioned him to the other students as being studious and well-organized.

At the end of the year Carl handed out a 20 page book to every student in the class. The title was “All of my Best – A Book Of Roliffisms”. The notes that Carl had been taking consisted of the sayings and jokes that I told during the previous two school years. He and 2 other students edited the notes, typed them, and printed them on our computer. This guy was taking all of those notes so that he could write this book about me!

He again handed out copies at his 20th year class reunion.

Roliffisms

I guess the book-writing incident didn’t hurt Carl intellectually because he eventually earned a PHD in computer science.

These were the days before calculators were common and we had to use  look-up tables to evaluate the trig functions.

One page of a trig table. Thank God for scientific calculators!

In order to use these tables efficiently one had to learn interpolation. Many of these students had no idea what that word meant, so I had some fun with it. I would say,

“Tomorrow we are going to interpolate, so everyone needs to wear old clothes. Furthermore, the girls will need to bring notes from their mothers giving them permission to interpolate in class”.

Of course they knew I was putting them on, so the following day I would get a pile of notes on my desk similar to this:


Dear Mr. Roliff,

Please allow Linda to interpolate.

Signed,

Mom


One year I had a 7:15 AM calculus class consisting of 9 boys. Each morning I fired up the coffee pot and we all sat around drinking coffee and learning calculus. I was hoping the coffee would give these guys a boost and keep them awake at this early hour. Coffee was not allowed in the classroom, and Mr. Jim Call, then superintendent, knew that we were doing it because his son was in that class. Several times when Jim met me in the hallway he would harass me about it, but he never told me to stop.

These guys knew I had a Honey Farm and I jokingly told them that if they ate honey it would make them smart. One of the boys who was struggling with the subject came up to me one morning and asked me to bring him a pound of honey, which I did. Two weeks later he loudly announced to the class in an accusing tone that he had been eating the honey for the past two weeks and he didn’t feel one bit different. I replied,

“See there, you’re getting smarter already!”.

I got a standing ovation for that one.

On an evening near Halloween four students came to my house in Randolph to pay a visit. Elaine served them cookies and drinks and we had a pleasant time. Upon leaving I noticed that the boys were looking rather suspicious, so after they left the house I brought my Winchester 16 gauge shotgun out of the bedroom, loaded her up with bird shot, and quietly pussy-footed out onto the front porch. After a few minutes I saw a roll of toilet paper sailing way up over the tree tops. These guys were T-P-ing my house! I pumped the shotgun and fired a couple of rounds straight up into the air. The shotgun barked loudly and 3 feet of fire jumped out of the barrel lighting up the night sky. When the bird shot came down it sounded like rain coming through the leaves. I never saw people disappear as rapidly as those guys did.

the next morning we were all back in class doing the usual things. No one mentioned anything about what had happened the previous night.

More pictures here

The Honey Farm

As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by honeybees. My father had several colonies, and as a youth I spent hours watching the bees enter and exit the hives. Seeing the glint of sunshine on thousands of little wings, hearing the pleasant hum, experiencing the sweet aroma of  nectar during a honey flow – these were pleasurable experiences for me.

On seeing my interest, Dad decided to give me all 10 of his hives, thus a new career was born. By reading and practice I learned all I could about bees and producing honey. I acquired more hives by catching swarms and buying colonies from other beekeepers who became tired of them or whose wives or neighbors objected to having those dangerous little critters in the neighborhood.

Swarms are the way that colonies propagate

Chris checking out a huge swarm    c.1975

I worked for two commercial beekeepers for free until I “learned the ropes”. The first man was good with machinery and at managing time and labor. Instead of treating each colony separately, he treated the entire location in the same way at the same time. By loading  supers 5 or more to a pallet, the whole stack could be handled as a unit. (Supers are the part of the hive where the bees store honey – they weigh as much as 60 pounds each when full, and a truck load may consist of 125 or more supers). By building a pit that would put the truck bed at floor level, the heavy supers could be unloaded a stack at a time with a cart instead of being carried separately.

Unloading a stack of supers

This man’s operation was very efficient, but neglected many of the smaller details of beekeeping.

The other man was an old Russian immigrant. He treated each bee as an individual, and spoke to them lovingly in Russian. He was careful not to pinch or harm them in any way. When he harvested honey he would sometimes carry one frame at a time, tenderly cradling each frame in his arms. He made more honey per hive than the first man, but time and energy were used much less efficiently.

Between these two men I received a first class education in beekeeping and honey production.

It wasn’t long until I had over 300 colonies, two pole buildings, and a one ton flat-bed truck. My brother Mark also caught the fever and bought an outfit from a commercial beekeeper in another county, so we merged our efforts. We now had two trucks and over 500 colonies. We built a first class plant for processing and bottling. We could run 3 extractors at a time and were storing honey in 55 gallon drums, 700 pounds to a drum.

Uncapping honey

Loading an extractor

Filling drums

Storing honey

Most locations cannot support more than about 20 hives, so we were constantly looking for new locations to place our bees. From the commercial guys I learned that bees located in Western Ohio could bring in a large crop of clover honey during the summer. The soil there was of a limestone base due to the fact that the area had been covered by a large lake in pre-historic times, and this type of soil caused the clover blossoms to yield large amounts of nectar. At that time the western farmers rotated crops – planting sweet clover or alfalfa every third year, plowing it under to maintain the soil. These farmers were glad to provide a small space for 20 to 30 hives in return for some honey and the benefits provided by the bees.

Bees on alfalfa field in Erie County, Ohio

In some years each of my hives was producing over 100 pounds of beautiful water-white clover honey from this area – sometimes in two weeks! I was on my way to becoming a zillionairre – at least on paper.

In eastern Ohio the soil is more acid and honey is mainly made from locust and tulip tree blossoms in the spring and goldenrod and wild aster in the fall. For several years we moved bees west in the summer and east in the autumn to take advantage of all possible crops.

Chris with frame of aster honey

Frame of goldenrod honey  c.1969

At first we moved the bees with the hive entrances open. In order to do this we had to load the bees at night and make sure we got to the new location before morning. This worked out well on cool nights. It was no fun on hot nights however, since many bees refused to go into the hives, and clustered on the outside ready to do battle. They strongly objected to being loaded onto a truck and bumped around, so they made life miserable for the beekeeper (me). They tried their best to get into my suit – often succeeding. They didn’t fly much at night, but they sure did crawl and got into the smallest places! At times they would get all over the truck bed and I would slide around in them. You haven’t lived until you’ve had thousands of angry bees trying to get into your suit and bouncing off of your veil (both inside and outside) trying to inflict punishment. You just have to keep reminding yourself that the stinger is only 1/4 inch long – the other 4 feet are just imagined!

Otch using our home made loader

As long as the truck was moving the bees would hang on. We couldn’t stop for gas since many of the bees would fly up to the lights. When the truck left a gas station these bees would be left behind to harass the public and spread ill will among the station owners and customers who would sometimes call the police. To remedy this we installed saddle tanks on the trucks in order to have enough gas to reach our destination without stopping.

Later when we gained more experience, we screened the hive entrances and put screens on the tops of the hives for ventilation. This helped tremendously but it involved more work, and we had to be careful not to smother the bees. Things never fit perfectly however –  there were always small holes and cracks where a few bees could exit, so we usually had some “hitch-hikers” on the outside of the load.

Hives with screens installed

Eventually farming practices changed in the west and farms became large and commercialized. Crops were no longer rotated. Cash crops were grown – corn, soybeans, and commercial fertilizer, or cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, and migrant workers. As a result the honey yield became smaller each year in that area, so we stopped moving bees west. We kept them closer to our home and took better care of them. This turned out to be almost as good as moving them, and avoided the hard work and hassle of trucking them distances of 150 or more miles.

The honey enterprise turned out to be a family project, and all members became involved depending on ages and abilities. We had a room in the back of the house where honey was sold, also bee supplies were sold to other beekeepers. We ran an add in the Akron paper , “Honey in your container – organic, straight from the farm”. People would bring jugs, jars, dishpans, Clorox bottles and other assorted containers to be filled. We sold tons of honey this way. Sometimes on weekends our driveway would be full of cars. We also delivered to stores, farmer’s markets, and bakeries.

Denny, Neil, Dave painting supers

Pam, Dave, Neil, Denny, Elaine decorating honey bears

Pam, the beeswax girl

We sold honey at the Portage and Geauga county fairs. Our stand at the Portage County Fair was rather unique. I had designed it to be in the shape of one cell in a honey comb. It was hexagonal in shape with a 3-sided roof that emulated the bottom of a cell. I must have been a frustrated architect in my other life! The whole family participated in building it and operating it at the fairs. We also provided a glass-walled observation hive with live bees.

Our honey products at county fairs

As the business grew larger we found that having a store attached to one’s home was a mixed blessing. People came at all hours wanting to do business – it was difficult to refuse them even though store hours had been posted. We could never relax, even on Sundays. There was always a chance that someone would show up at the back door wanting to buy 1/2 pound of honey, or some old codger would want to come in and tell bee stories. I remember one Christmas morning an old farmer walked through our living room with manure on his boots wanting to buy two dollars worth of bee supplies.

We finally had to quit selling honey in people’s containers. It was too time-consuming and inefficient. For example, a gallon jug with a small neck at the top is almost impossible to fill in less than one half hour because the thick honey will only go through the small hole very slowly. Later we packed 5 pound jars or 60 pound cans and sold them at a good price. This worked out much better.

Unlike the larger commercial operations, ours was small enough that we could keep the types of honey separate. This also added to the market appeal.

L to R: Goldenrod, Clover, Spring wildflower

I’m sure everyone has heard many folk tales and war stories about bees and honey. Some claimed that honey mixed with vinegar would cure everything from ingrown toenails on up. We never argued with anyone about this, but smiled, nodded, and sold them some honey. I did notice that if I cut my finger while extracting, my hands were often sticky with honey and the cut seemed to heal very quickly.

At times someone would come in and say, “Bees won’t sting my uncle ( or grandfather, or…).”

I would tell them, “You bring your uncle over and I promise I will get him eaten alive”.

The truth is that if you can pick the day and conditions, most bees are very gentle and can be handled easily – even without gloves. If you try the same thing on a cold day or right after a rain (or try to move them in a truck), the bees are much harder to handle, and will come out of the hive and attack like mad marines! Also some hives are meaner than others. We only put up with a few of these because they usually made the most honey.

One of the favorite questions asked of me, “Do you ever get stung?”

Well, YES! That is part of the deal. On warm, sunny days I could examine over one hundred hives with bare hands and only get 2 or 3 stings. It was usually my fault because I had accidentally pinched one of the little devils. On days when the weather was bad and all the little guys were home with nothing to do I might get 10 or more stings.

After getting a few stings in the spring I became immune to the swelling and 5 minutes later couldn’t tell where I had been stung . Don’t get me wrong, it always hurt, but there were no after effects. Where it hurt me the most was getting stung on the end of my nose.

One day a person came into the store and declared, “One of your bees stung me yesterday”.

I replied, “Show me which one it was and I will punish it”.

Most people who get stung are not stung by a honeybee, but by a yellow jacket or hornet. These are not bees, but a type of wasp. Honeybees, however, usually get the blame.

One night in late summer I was out in Western Ohio alone. I had 30 hives to load and bring back to Portage County. It was very dark and very hot and very late, and I was having trouble getting the bees to go into the hives – they wanted to cluster on the outside. The bees were in a bad mood and one hit my veil. Her stinger must have been extended because the venom went through the veil and splashed into my eyes. This caused them to water so badly that I couldn’t see, and I still had to load the hives and drive 150 miles. Not being able to see any way out of this I just lay on the ground feeling sorry for myself until my eyes cleared – about an hour later. I finally got the bees loaded and back to Portage County but I was so whacked out that I just parked the truck with the bees still on it and went home to bed. I didn’t worry about theft because I knew that no one was going to steal a truck load of mad bees.

Later I returned, unloaded the truck, and all was well.

I retired from the bee business in the mid-80’s. My son Chris ran the operation for a few more years.

Due to urbanization, increased use of pesticides, changes in agriculture, and importation of bee parasites and viruses, it soon became apparent that trying to produce honey for profit in this area was no longer practical. Keeping a few colonies is still a great hobby. Also, some beekeepers make a living doing orchard pollination, but that is a different field with different equipment and techniques.

 

 

MORE PHOTOS HERE

Kid Quotes

I have often marveled at the way a kid’s mind works. Kids are so pure when they are young, and I find them really fascinating to observe – especially before they are old enough for the world to put a lot of noise into their heads.

When my oldest son Chris was 3 years old his inquisitive mind began to kick in and he asked questions that would just crack me up. I’m sure the other children did also but Chris was my first experience with a kid, so he is the one I most remember. Many of his questions I could not answer.

Here are a few examples of his questions:

“Dad, what’s God’s last name?”

On looking at a world map Chris asked: “Dad, where is heaven on that map?”

We had a world globe sitting on the bookshelf. I explained to Chris what it was. After a long pause in deep thought he asked, “Dad, do we have a globe of Ohio?”

One day Chris and I were riding around in the truck and we passed a site where there was a house jacked up ready to move to a new location. I explained to Chris what was happening and he asked, “Dad, how do they move the basement?” Now I had never thought about that so I didn’t have a ready answer. I am surprised he didn’t also ask about moving the well!

We had some beehives behind our house in Randolph, and sometimes I would take Chris along when I worked on these hives. Bees don’t like having their hives opened, so beekeepers use a tool called a smoker to apply smoke to the bees to help control them. Burning rags or grass are placed inside the smoker to produce the smoke, and the bellows are pumped occasionally to keep the fire going.

Smoker

One time I gave Chris the job of puffing the smoker so the fire wouldn’t go out. He was standing behind me.

“Should I puff it a lot, Dad?”. “Yes”, I replied…

“…Should I puff it 100 times?”.

I replied he could and then I became busy with something and forgot about him.

A bit later I heard him ask,

“…Dad, what comes after 56?”.

I turned around but I couldn’t see Chris. He was completely enveloped in a large cloud of smoke. He evidently got all the way to 56 puffs when his “counter” jammed and he couldn’t proceed.

Chris smoking the bees

One time I noticed that Chris’s fly was open so I said to him, “Chris, better close your barn doors or the horse might get out”.

Several days later he noticed that MY fly was open. He said, “Dad, better close your barn doors or the horses might get out”.

Horses?

My number 2 son Denny had a rather interesting way of learning the language. It was often “last in – first out”. This would often cause him to reverse parts of words. So, for example, instead of “cup” he would say “puc”, and “eleph-a-nut” for “elephant”. He once told me he didn’t like to go down into the basement because there were “spide webers” down there (spider webs).

Denny, Neil, Elaine, Chris 

Denny, Neil, Chris, Gene  c. 1963

Neil’s favorite hideout – under the TV

Then there was Pam, the verbal child. Before she was a year old she could speak very clearly, but she didn’t always know the meaning of the words. She knew when certain phrases were used because she noticed where we used them. At night we sometimes had trouble keeping her in bed because she wanted to come out to join the folks and watch TV, so we had to put her back in bed several times before she would stick. On several occasions this little sprite would come bouncing out of the bedroom hugging a blanket announcing,

“She’s up again!”.

 

Pam – 1 year old

Pam’s oldest son was just as verbal at the same young age with similar effects. “Joe” would stir the dirt in a flower pot and exclaim loudly, “Get out of that dirt!”. He once threw his spoon on the floor and loudly scolded, ”Why did you do that?”. He would climb up on the coffee table and exclaim over and over, “Get down from there!”

Joe

My son Dave told  me about his son Ryan, who was 3 years old at the time, coming out of his bedroom completely naked except for a Darth Vader mask, and swinging a light saber.

Dave said to him, “Ryan, go back in there and put on some clothes.”

Ryan replied, “How did you know it was me?

Ryan

There is a very special person inside a child’s body when he or she is young. Later when they grow older that person is gone. Forever.

Denny, Neil, Dave, Pam, Chris – Xmas 1965


When Dave was in his 30’s a friend of mine asked him if he and his siblings had everything they wanted as kids. He answered, “Yes, we had everything we wanted – our dad just made sure we didn’t want very much.”

Now if I could remember how I did that, I could write a book on kid-raising!

This same friend asked Dave how he got his sex education. Here’s how he answered:

One evening Dad asked me to help unload a truck load of bees. It had been a hot day in August and I was having 2-a-day football practices, so I was pretty well tapped out. We put on all of the usual protective gear – coveralls, veil, hat, gloves, etc. The temperature was 90 degrees and we were drenched with sweat. When we finished and were lying beside the truck trying to catch our breaths I said, “Dad, how did you ever get yourself into this mess?”

Dad replied,” I had 5 kids, that’s how. Keep your pants zipped up and stay in school or some day it may happen to you!”

I remember Dave helping me unload bees but I do not remember giving this valuable advice. Maybe God is merciful and causes us to forget certain things, thus protecting what little sanity we adults have left.