Today Would Have Been My Father's 83rd Birthday!

June 6 is an important day in our history because 48 years ago today Robert Kennedy was taken from us all too soon. I often wonder what the world and our lives would be like had the 1960s been different on so many occasions.

The 1960s brought tremendous amount of change for me as a young boy moving from five different communities and learning to adapt to five very different environments. It was also a decade in which my relationship with my dad changed dramatically as I grew up under his tutelage.

I have written about his birthday on several occasions and other times I wrote how he affected me as my mentor, coach and friend. I was my father's shadow in many ways and as I grew older I came to realize just what a wonderful relationship we had.

There was an alternate side of my father I did not know much about until much later. I choose to focus on the positive side of our relationship. That is why I miss him tremendously since he has been gone almost ten years already. I have several pictures of him at various stages of his life on my Screensaver and see him for seven-second intervals every so often.

Attached is my first photograph of him playing with me and teaching me how to blow bubbles in 1957 when I was only two:

Click on the image to make it larger:

Recently, I wrote a blog post that has become one of my most read ever about him coaching me in the summer of 1968 in Sibley, Iowa. After that summer, he accepted the track and cross country coaching job as well as a counselor position at Worthington State Junior College (WSJC) where he stayed for eight years until my family moved again where he took a similar job at Rochester Community College (RCC). He retired after seventeen years in Rochester. 

Several years ago, I was in Worthington in mid-September for the annual King Turkey Days celebration. I took some time and went to visit and give a brief speech for my long time friend Joel Krekelberg who was teaching a class entitled "Prevention and Care of Athletic Injuries." Krek as he is appropriately known in Worthington was teaching his students how to wrap ankles. Every time I get an opportunity to watch him deftly wrap an ankle is a treat because he is so good at!

After his class, I wanted to go over to the athletic building and see if any of my dad's track and cross country teams pictures were still there. We went over there and there were only a few photographs left. The athletic director was there and asked me if I wanted those photos because since track and cross country were eliminated from their sports options, eventually they would be thrown away when the football team pictures crowded them out. I gladly took them and want to share a couple with you now of my father's very successful track and cross country program in the eight years he ran the program that he took over when Bruce Traphagen turned over the program to Dad in the fall of 1968.

I am attaching a couple photographs and their yearly haul of trophies:

As always, click on the images to make them larger:

Some of you may recognize yourself or someone you know. One of the members of the track team, Jerry Schnyders, back row, second from right, I have known since we lived in Edgerton and played baseball together in the mid-1960s!

Roger Schipper who is on the far right in the second row lived with my family for a while when he first moved to Rochester to become the trainer at the Community College. Later, when he was finishing his student teaching, he stayed with Dave Bisbee and me in my first apartment in Minneapolis.

This is fun for me to look at old pictures of not only my dad but also friendships that have lasted many years. I wrote a lot about that in my book.

I look forward to your comments.

Later,

Mike

Fifty-nine Years Ago Today

Fifty-nine years ago today my parents were married in a small, civil ceremony in Ivanhoe, Minnesota. Here is a picture of my parents at their wedding reception in the basement of the parsonage in Aurora, South Dakota:

Click on the image to make it larger:

Their marriage, like so many others, did not end with those three words, "happily ever after."  However, it did produce six wonderful children who I am proud to say have turned into wonderful adults.

Mom likes to jokingly say, "I didn't raise no dummies." Of course, the irony in that statement is the improper grammar, which she uses to make her point very well. 

After their wedding, Dad went on to finish his bachelor's degree from South Dakota State College in nearby Brookings in 1956. Over the years, as SDSC started offering postgraduate degree programs and became South Dakota State University, he earned two masters degrees, one in Physical and Health Education in 1961, and the other one was in Guidance and Counseling in 1967.

Of course, Dad did not earn those degrees on his own. He had help. Here is a photograph of his typist and her assistant:

I was probably more of a nuisance than an assistant; but since this is my story I am calling that large-diapered boy an assistant. I love the antique secretary behind my Mom's chair. Unfortunately, that was put in storage and never survived. We did not know what a treasure we had when we lived above the White Creamery in that tiny apartment.

We moved many times as my dad's career began to develop. When we moved to Worthington in February 1969, I was just thirteen years old. Worthington was town number eight and the house at 716 West Shore Drive was the sixteenth different location I had lived in.

Once Mom and Dad were married, they lived in a one-room utility shed on her maternal grandfather's farm for a few months. After only three or four months of being married, they moved into a house just off Main Street in Brookings and were caregivers for Fred Baker who was roughly one hundred years old. I was born when they lived with Fred.

After that school year, we moved three times. The first stop was a farm just outside of White. Then a few months about the Gambles store, a few more months above the creamery and the Odyssey was on.

That fall Dad got his first teaching and coaching job in tiny Revillo, South Dakota for two years where we lived in a small apartment behind the local café for one year. Next year saw us living in a big house until it was time to move to the next town. Are you beginning to see a theme of change and moving here?

It seems we were always moving. We went wherever my dad's job took us. Every job he got was better than the last one. Every move he made, whether it was his choice or the school board's decision to not renew his contract was an improvement over the last one. Plus, he was earning his advanced degrees, and becoming more qualified to be more of an asset to a school district.

As the years went by, our family was growing. Kathleen came along two years after me. Rick was three years later. Vicki came four years after Rick and Tammy followed four years later. Five years after Tammy, Chad arrived. He was born two years after my accident. Here is a picture of Chad and Dad on Dad's farm shortly before he died July 23, 2006:

My parents divorced in 1991. Chad had just finished high school, and Mom and Chad moved to a small house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota where Mom still lives today. 

The day Mom and I took Dad to the Mayo Clinic for the last time when the doctors told him he did not need to come back because there was nothing more they could do for him unless he wanted to have chemotherapy, we had a very special moment before Mom and I left Dad at his farm.

Dad gave me a big hug as we both were crying, he said, "We had a good run, didn't we? He was still talking about running even as he was dying.

Then it was Mom's turn for a goodbye hug. Mom said as she hugged him, "I loved you a lot longer than I liked you."

That comment puzzled my dad and he did not know quite what to say. It was a very touching moment and one I will always remember.

I have so many stories I could tell you about what happened fifty-nine years ago today; but I have gone on long enough. Thanks for reading. This was good for me!

As always, I look forward to your comments.

Later,

Mike

The Lasting Effects Of 9/11

Like many of you, I just finished watching 60 Minutes and it's special on September 11, 2001. The segment I found particularly intriguing was the last one when Scott Pelley interviewed several survivors. They all talked about their respiratory problems and the long-term health effects they all are experiencing as a result of breathing in all of the toxic dust during their time at Ground Zero.

If you missed it, you can view it here:



I guess the two words none of them uttered that bothered me were asbestos and mesothelioma. The reason that bothered me so much is two-fold. One: The Twin Towers were coated with asbestos and much of that dust was that pulverized asbestos.

The second word which was not spoken was mesothelioma. Asbestos poisoning has a special meaning to me because my father died of mesothelioma in 2006. His lungs were full of asbestos he received from a second job he had for close to twenty years. The frustrating thing for me is knowing the two asphalt companies he worked for never told their so-called "Associates" were slowly killing themselves every day by exposing themselves to this toxic dust they were inhaling constantly as they blew and swept up from parking lots, driveways and rooftops. The insidious thing about asbestos is it can remain in our lungs for as long as forty years before it starts to manifest itself.

I also want to introduce you to one more survivor of 9/11. That is William Rodriguez. After hearing him speak, on October 9, 2007, I wrote about one of the true heroes of the 9/11 attacks. He was a maintenance worker in the North Tower and saved many lives. His story is very compelling. To learn more about him, I have a link to his website on that post. You can read it by clicking here.

We are going to see people dying from all sorts of respiratory ailments for decades to come!

As always, I welcome your comments.

Later,

Mike

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