Dad was born in 1947, raised in southeast Iowa. Hear about the early life of a “city kid” (small town Iowa) who moved to the country with his three brothers. High adventures in the woods as a child, through counseling / leading high adventure camping for at-risk youth. Finishing his degree from Graceland University, to the birth of his first child (me), and first assignment with the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS. Now Community of Christ.)

049.mp3 (1h 26m 38MB)

Dad in my genealogy data.

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Transcript (via OpenAI Whisper):

We can talk about anything as long as Jay Flaunce is ignorant. Welcome to Jay Flaunce’s Ignorance. This is episode 49, born in 1947, Jim Hanna. This is my father’s oral history of his early childhood in southeast Iowa. Enjoy! If you’d like to call into the show, you can leave us a voicemail at 1-402-577-0117. You’re blinking green. Is that good? Yeah. So, the rumor is that you existed before I did. Yes. In the year 1975, for which I’m pretty sure, in which I’m pretty sure the universe actually began. Yours did. Well, not really. Yours began 19 billion years ago with the original blessing of creation. So, you go way back. 19 billion. Wow. That’s a lot. Yeah. A huge amount. It was at 15 billion. I can’t remember for sure, but somewhere along there. So, Mom was born in 47. Yep. Me too. 47. 1947. March 30th. James Bradley Hanna. So, in the world, World War II had ended, and you were born in southeast Iowa, right? Yep. Southeast Iowa. Mount Pleasant, Iowa. My mom always used to like telling a story about since I was born near the Easter season, that the day I was released from the hospital, that the nurse helped carry me to the window, and looked out, and there were children in Saunders Park there in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and they were gathering Easter eggs, and she held me up and said, Oh, you’ll be out there someday too, gathering Easter eggs, she told me. Mom always loved telling me that story. And you were the third boy. I was. Boy number three. Yeah. So, Stevie, we were called Johnny, Jimmy, and Stevie at that point, and so Stevie was about a year and a half older than me, and Johnny was about two and a half, three years older than me, something like that. Yeah. I’ve got those great photos of you kids, really super-duper young, next to each other. You blew one up to like four foot tall, right? I did, and I gave it to all my brothers. Yeah. Like about 50 years ago. It wasn’t 50 years ago. Well, I’m 77 years old, so it probably was that long ago. Really? It was a long time ago, yeah. The big blow-up? Oh, wow, okay, I thought that was in the last 10 years, that you actually got that printed huge. You got that printed huge a long time ago? Yeah, well, back in the day, they were still doing that. You’d send in a normal-sized photo, and they’d blow it up to poster size for you, yeah. So do you have those slides or negatives or whatever? I don’t know that I even have that original negatives. I’ve not done a real search, but I’d like to discover them. Was it 35-minute film negatives? Yeah, it would have been a black-and-white film negative. My mom had a little Brownie Instamatic box camera, basically just a pinhole camera is what it was. She took hundreds of really great photos back in the day. Most of my childhood I remember because of the images that she took on that little Brownie camera, box camera. So you click the button, and you advance it to the next slide. They were sizable. They were probably 2 1⁄2 inches square. The print or the film? The negative. Really? Yeah, so they had a lot of detail in them. I have some of these negatives, and I want to get them blown up, because if you did those with today’s processes, you’d get a lot of detail. I have some pictures of me and my daddy, my daddy holding me, but they’re not very good. The prints back then weren’t as great as what I get now. But the negative might be amazing. Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking, because it had lots of detail in it. You look at 35 millimeter, is it called? Yeah, 35 millimeter is only small compared to these. These are like two-by-twos. The digital revolution brought a whole era of really crappy photos that kind of look okay, tiny, but you don’t realize until you look at World War II photos or whatever that real cameras back then with modern… You can blow those up to the size of a wall, and they look fantastic, whereas digital has ushered in an age of crap that you can’t actually explode much. Yeah, but at this point, they’re getting so megapixel that you can actually blow those up to a wall. But back in the day, the size of the negative had to do with it. Like Ansel Adam, he had glass negatives that he’d pack up in the mountains on mules, and those are like 8x10 negatives. Really? Yeah, they’re like big, 8x10 negative. So yeah, you can blow those puppies up too. Yeah, that’s crazy. But the whole era for about 25 years or whatever, people were like, oh, digital is the way to go, because it’s so much easier and convenient and accessible and blah, blah, blah, and that’s great, except that you realize that photos from 50 years ago were much better quality actually, and people just don’t realize that gap. The problem, of course, is like all things. So Kodachrome was the photographer’s film back in the day. That was as good as it got. National Geographic photographer, stuff like that. Of course, when you make those prints, like I have some of those prints, and they’ve faded by now. The prints faded, but hopefully the stop bath on the negatives keeps them for a couple hundred years. Yeah, probably for a couple hundred years. And you’ve got those. Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of stuff. Negatives that you’d have to mail. Mostly black and white, though. I loaded my own black and white film, like Tri-X film, ASA 400, and I’d buy it in a 25-foot roll and then actually roll it onto the little canisters, cut it off, and I loaded my own. I had my own darkroom, so I developed, processed the negatives. Where did you have your own darkroom? Well, anyway, let’s get back to your childhood. You’re a little kid. I was born a small child in rural Iowa. Okay, awesome. That’s amazing. All right, so what is your earliest memory, would you say? I think my earliest memory that I would say is probably my own, I have a memory of when I would have been about four years old, and we were living near the railroad track in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and it was kind of a brick home, which is no longer there. The house is long since gone, right next to a school that I went to later. And I just sort of remember hazy memories of that at age four, because I was not quite four years old when my daddy died. So he was a truck driver who drove the gas transport. Artery was the name of the company. And he went out one February morning when he shouldn’t have been on the road, and the roads were—I’m not sure if the roads were icy, but there was a massive fog. And some beer truck had jackknifed in the road up in front of him, and the driver of the truck had got out of the cab, and he’d gone up the other way to warn the traffic coming from the other direction. But my dad just came on the scene like that and sandwiched— basically the newspaper description said it kind of sandwiched the cab. They had to actually tow the cab into Fairfield, Iowa, or somewhere, I’m not sure where, and extricate his body. That’s how bad the wreck was. And he was—what was his job? He was driving? He was a truck driver. He was driving a gasoline transport. Fortunately, it didn’t catch on fire. So I was not quite four when that happened. Was that fairly regional, or was that local routes, or was he gone for weeks at a time? No, it was more local routes. Mom has told me that he was about to quit that job. I don’t know how long he did it. He had the opportunity to go back and farm on the Hanna Farm just south of Mount Pleasant. And he was thinking—he was sort of planning to do that, I think Mom said. Had he farmed before? Yeah, he’d been raised on a farm and familiar with farming. I think he maybe wasn’t too jazzed about doing that. I don’t know a whole lot about him other than what I’ve learned from my mom and my aunts and stuff like that. But he’d rather read than go out and plow the field. I’ve seen his report cards, mostly A’s, some B’s. He was very bright, avid reader, a fun-loving guy. Everybody I ever talked to said, oh yeah, Benny was really fun to be around. He liked to play pool. Mom tells some stories sometimes about after us kids were born that she’d have to sit in the car with us three boys while Dad went in and shot some pool. Was there a pool hall in Mount Pleasant? Well, I think it was in Salem, Iowa, actually. It was a little town nearby. Do you know how your mom and dad met? Yeah, they met. They were both members of the Methodist Church in Salem, Iowa. So they had a youth program there, and that’s where they met. They would be playing ping-pong and stuff like that. My dad was kind of a natural athlete, I think, because he was a really great ice skater, roller skater, ping-pong player, pool player, all that sort of stuff. So they both grew up in Salem-ish? Yeah, Mom in Salem and my dad outside of Salem on the Hanna Farm east of Salem. So when Dad died, then Mom, of course, a single mom, and her dad, Grandpa Jay Long, he was a carpenter. He had a house partly completed in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. It was what we called the Little Gray House. He and my uncle, Robert Jay, finished up the house so that the four of us could move in there. So we lived there for, I think, about five years until Mom remarried. It was real close to the Midwest Old Thresher’s greening grounds, so during that season we could hear the steam whistles blowing and the coal smoke all came over and got on the laundry and all that stuff. We were pretty close to that. Did they take you over there? I don’t remember that we did that. It’s not that I remember. We went to school. The school was also close to there, so we just kind of would walk to school. So the school you went to, is that still standing? Yes, it is. I haven’t been by there for decades, but I think it’s still being used, yeah. So we were there for about four years. I remember that as kind of a fun time. Some of the stories from back then. We lived right across the street from Dr. Diehl. He was a physician, and he had a daughter named Nancy. So Nancy would come over and have pictures of Nancy and I in the playground. We had a sandbox, so she’d come over and play with us and that sort of stuff. A lot of running around, a lot of outdoors. Yeah. But in town. In town, yeah. Were you guys hiking to creeks or anything? No, not at that time. Grandma Hannah lived in Mount Pleasant also, so we’d go to her house, and there was a big pond, Crane’s Pond, that was nearby, and sometimes we’d go over there and horse around, chase the frogs, that sort of stuff. So what are your earliest school memories? Oh, you know, I don’t really have a lot of school memories. They’re more, it’s kind of weird. One of Mom’s memories that she’s told me was that somewhere during that era, I think it was probably second or third grade maybe, at the end of the school year the teacher told Mom that little Jimmy’s having reading problems, and so Mom’s solution to that was that she began having me read to her every evening during that whole summer. And over the course of that summer, not only caught up in everything, I actually was ahead of my grade. Oh, nice. So your earliest childhood, you had electricity, you had running water. Yeah, we were in town. You had town water. We had all the utilities, yeah. So when I was about eight years old. You never had an outhouse growing up. Not there, no. You had toilets. Yeah. When I was eight years old, we moved out just a few miles from my stepdad, Gelmer Munson. His parents lived near Trenton, Iowa, which was, oh, about ten minutes from Mount Pleasant. And we rented a farmhouse there, and we lived there for a couple years. And then we eventually moved into what’s called the Munson Farm, which was like 120 acres where my dad, stepdad Gelmer, was raised. So we lived there. So during that whole era of my life and all through the latter part of grade school and high school, I was a country kid. And as a matter of fact, I even went to a country school for one year during that time. But you had electricity there. Yeah, we had electricity. Well, in the rented farmhouse, we had electricity and running water. When we moved to the Munson Farm, they had electricity, but they didn’t have running water. You had to pump the water. We had an outhouse there, so I grew up with an outhouse primarily. When you were eight for however many years. About ten, yeah. But then eventually they got running water in the house, and we had a bathtub and all that sort of thing. It was well water, but it was pumped by electric pumps. And at that house on the Munson Farm, the way we heated the house was by burning firewood. And so one of the things that we did as all the guys, my brothers and I, we would go out and cut trees and saw them up and bring the wood up by the house. So that was kind of a weird thing, because Dad had an old tractor, a Ford tractor. We call it a garden tractor now. It’s not a big tractor, but it had a hydraulic drive on it. And then on that hydraulic drive, you could put on this big belt, which was about eight inches wide, and make a loop, and then that would hook up to this buzzsaw. This buzzsaw blade was about three feet across. It had huge teeth on it and that sort of thing. And so you’d hook that up to the tractor, and that thing would go on and it would start whining. It was going so fast that you could take a log, let’s say eight inches in diameter, and just go zoop, zoop. So is he cutting lumber planks or is it just for firewood? No, just for firewood, yeah. A three-foot blade for firewood? Yeah. Crap, that seems like overkill. Well, you didn’t have to stand around and wait for it, that’s for sure. So it had kind of a shuttle device that you’d just go back and forth, so you’d put the log up on the shuttle and you’d pull it back, move it forward, push it. But I think sawmill, when I think blades three foot, I’m thinking sawmill. Yeah, it was a sawmill blade. Right. Was that normal at the time for firewood? I don’t know. I didn’t know it was normal until we did. You just had it. If you got it, I guess you’re going to use it. So one of us would be, or maybe two of us would be going out and grabbing the big logs and loading them up onto the— The boys. Yeah, us boys. Dad always ran the shuttle. But one of us then would be near the saw blade as the wood fell off. Well, you couldn’t just leave it laying there because it would build up and then it would be in the way of the blade. So somebody had to go there. Again, there were no safety guards on this thing at all, like none, like zero. So one of us would be down there grabbing the wood and throwing it into the wagon. Well, and that belt would be dangerous as hell, too. Oh, yeah. There were no guards on the belt either. It was just like ocean. So did you guys have a lot of chores then? Did you go fetch water twice a day every day as one of your chores or something back before you had electric pumps? Well, yeah, we had a hand pump close to the house. But you didn’t have to bring it. Early on, we had to go pump, run the hand pump and drag the water in a bucket. But that didn’t last too long. Before too long, we got an electric pump and just pumped the water into the house. So did you have animals, chickens or whatever? Yeah, we had the whole—at one point we had milk and cow. Dad raised quite a few pigs that he’d take to market and sell for income. And then we always had chickens, a lot of chickens, because that’s what we ate a lot of, eggs and chickens and stuff like that. Did you feed the animals? Yeah. We didn’t have a whole lot of chores. That’s something I didn’t really—like a typical farm kid, have a lot of chores. But we didn’t have a lot of livestock. 120 acres is a pretty small farm, and probably half of it was wooded. So you were really only farming maybe 60, maybe 80 acres, something like that. So they were mostly leaving the boys to run around? Oh, my gosh, yeah. Our summer times, when I was younger, were just terrific because we’d basically just get up early in the morning and just be gone all day, just roaming around in the woods. And Brother John was the oldest brother. He was very interested in insects and just everything, you know, botany, biology, everything. So we just spent days upon days just messing around with the bullfrogs and looking for snakes. It was just idyllic. About a half a mile south of the Munson Farm, there was this sandy lane, which was overarched with trees. So it actually was like walking down a canopy. And because it was sandy and there wasn’t any gravel on this road, it was just a dirt road, dirt and sand road, you could kick your shoes off and just walk. It was glorious. The sun was dappling through the trees, and there were monarch butterflies and swallowtail butterflies, and there’d be green tiger beetles. And they had a habit of—these tiger beetles are bright, fluorescent green, and they would sort of walk in front of us. So we’d be walking, and they’d be like the advanced color guard, you know. It was fabulous. We had dung beetles that were rolling around, a little ball of dung around, and antlions where the ants fall in there, and these—

pincher things there, grab them. It was, we raised floors of monarch butterflies. That was, they were easy to raise, easy to find the caterpillars and bring them in and raise them. John’s pushing 80 now and he’s still doing bugs like he can’t, right? When he was young, was he like book studying insects and stuff? Like was he going to the library and getting the books and then finding the critters? Exactly, yeah. And he was so bright. At that time they still taught Latin. Like I’ve had four years of Latin at the high school level and he did too. And so he got into it so far that we actually were collecting the insects. We’d go to the drugstore and actually buy cyanide, if you can imagine that. Powdered cyanide, put in the bottle of peanut butter jar and put a, put a, like a piece of cardboard and poke holes in it, you know? That’s what we used to actually kill the insects. And then he actually got the pins, the little skinny pins that you pin them. And then he, he got a India ink pen and India ink. And he made these little triangular things to identify the insects by their Latin name. That’s how much he was into this stuff. That’s India ink? I don’t know what that is. Well, it’s just a black permanent ink. So yeah, it’s just, and you can write real fine with it, you know, like with the quill. So the best specimens, was he putting them in the little glass whatevers? Yeah, yeah. So eventually we had boxes with glass sliding lids on them, you know? I mean, it was like the sort of thing you’d see in a museum. He got that stuff. I don’t know how he got it, you know? I think his high school teachers probably encouraged him in this, you know, and helped him get the stuff that he needed to do it. And so our, it became such a thing that several times we had some of these cocoons, or it was a hatch out in the house. And so mom would be walking along and she’d see, oh my god, there’s like a Cecropia moth or a Luna moth, you know? They’re like, like six inches long, you know? And she didn’t like that, you know? She, she did not appreciate having insects in the house, you know? Even the beautiful ones, you know? So she talked dad, Jommer, into dragging up an old chicken coop. And he, he drug it up close to the house so that mom could look out the kitchen window while she’s cooking or doing the dishes or whatever, and she could see us out there. But we were out there, dad ran electricity to the, what we called the bug house. That was, that was really, that was dad’s, that was his dad’s little joke. He had a real wry sense of humor, Jommer did. So he called it the bug house, you know? That’s what they called the insane asylum back in our day, you know? Yeah, so we’d be out there and we had a radio, you know? So we’d crank the radio up full volume and we’d have all the music blaring. Mom didn’t have to put up with that. And mom didn’t have to put up with the insects in the house because, you know, they were out at the bug house and she could see us, you know? So you knew we were okay, you know? Everything was, everything was cool. It worked out great. Then we’d go out in the fields and the monarch butterfly was really into the milkweed, you know? So we’d go out and find the milkweed that’s everywhere. It’s like a weed, you know? And so we’d find the caterpillar, bring all the milkweed in, and then we’d watch this whole process of the caterpillar just voluminous at day, you know, all day long, munch, munch, munch, munch. And the next thing you know, they’d turn into this beautiful jade with a gold rim, chrysalis. And then over time, I forget, 10 days maybe or something like that, it becomes translucent. You can actually start to see the orange and black wings inside this thing. Then it’d start twitching the next thing, you know? And then it was so wondrous, you know? And then the butterfly would emerge and begin to slowly pump fluid into its wings, you know, just hanging there, just going, you know, this takes time, you know? But it was so fascinating. And then eventually the wings would dry and then we’d release him into the wild, you know? But it was so, it’s just awesome, you know what I mean? The whole, being introduced to the wonders of nature, just the big gift that John gave to me and to Steve, we were just, it was mesmerizing really, just so fascinating to see how nature worked and so awesome. You weren’t parked in front of a television or an iPad? Oh, no, we didn’t get a, we got a black and white TV with about a 12-inch screen sometime when I was sort of high school, almost high school age. And we would watch TV together as a family, but it didn’t run all the time. It was just certain shows. So Mom and Dad, it was like the Lawrence Welk show, you know, with all the soap bubbles. On a 12-inch, black and white? Well, yeah, I don’t know. It might’ve been a little bit bigger than that, but you know, yeah. Maybe 15-inch on the side of the diagonal. Was it like in one of those big cabinets with the speakers? No, no, ours wasn’t, but that’s, a lot of them were, yeah. And how many radio stations were there that you could receive? Oh, probably about three. There, what was it, KCMO, I think, came out of Des Moines. So there were a couple, three stations that you could listen to, yeah. I think the main thing we watched, as I recall, other than the Lawrence Welk show, was, were Westerns. And so we watched Bonanza, we watched Have Gun, Will Travel, we watched, that’s Paladin, I think that’s the same thing. Yeah, Paladin’s the guy, Have Gun, Will Travel. Anyway, the Big Valley, I don’t know, I don’t remember the names of all, but it’s kind of ironic. That’s mainly what I grew up with, was Spaghetti Westerns. Yeah, that’s all on YouTube. You can just go watch all of Have Gun, Will Travel on YouTube now. I’ve watched most of it, it’s great. Yeah, yeah, some of it’s pretty good. Well, some of it’s problematic, but. It’s a good show. Right, yeah, so anyway, I suppose the message always was that the good guys prevailed, you know, that’s why we were allowed to watch all this violence, was because you knew in the end that the black hat guys were going to get it and the white hat guys were going to prevail. So when you, I don’t know if you’re going to remember this, but in Livonia, Boy Scouts, when we took our trips, the other kids would sing Paladin, Paladin, He’s the Card of a Man, Paladin, Paladin, something, something, whatever it was. Have Gun, Will Travel, He’s the Card of a Man, Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam? They would bring that up and I thought the lyrics were cool and I was like, oh, that’s kind of a neat tune, but I had no idea what it was. Yeah. Did you, do you remember that? I remember a bunch of 90s rap and then things like that from the 50s. Yeah, from Boy Scouts, I mean from doing that. In Boy Scouts. Yeah. Yeah, but no, this wasn’t an official sanctioned event. This was just a song they thought was cool, which I thought was like Dungeons and Dragons reference or something. Oh, yeah. Because in Dungeons and Dragons, Paladins are. Oh, okay. Yeah, this is a reference to Spaghetti Western. I was just curious if you, because I don’t remember that ever being clarified to me, that that was like a TV show you watched. Oh, probably not. Long before any of the Scouts were born. Right, probably not. Yeah, I didn’t discover it until like three years ago. I’m like, what is this? I’m like, oh my crap, look at this TV show. What is that? Yeah, so I did that one year of country school and the one year during that year, that was also. Did you like the country school? Was that a? It was really, it was kind of interesting. You know, my mom and dad had resisted me going there. They wanted me to just continue in town, which where I’d been going, and they wanted me to not be disrupted. They actually went to court to try to see if they could force the issue and get me to go there and kind of alienated them from the neighborhood. And so we never really had any contact really with the neighbors as a result of that, which was kind of a bummer. So as far as the experience itself, I was quite advanced academically over the kids that were in the one room country school. And so in that sense, I just, you know, cruising, you know, which was, which was okay. Um, and I liked the teacher, Mrs. Messer. She lived just not too far away. So one room, that’s a one room schoolhouse in all grades. Yeah. How many kids were in that school? Oh, I don’t know. Probably 20, you know, not a whole lot. Of all different ages. Yeah. And they started to consolidate, of course. And that’s, that someone lives there in that schoolhouse now, you know, smaller schoolhouse. Yesterday, mom was telling me about, she had two rounds of school consolidation. Yeah. So you were already a city kid, used to city. Right. And then you went to the country. Right. And then they consolidated the country. Well, it was because I was, I think it was between seventh and eighth grade or something like that. So it wasn’t because of another consolidation. It’s because I hit the right grade to go into town. So all the kids went into town at that point, but they wouldn’t let me do it a year earlier. So did a school bus come all the way out there to get you? They did eventually. Yeah. Well, yeah, the school. Yeah. Even the country school. Yeah. I rode a school bus to go to the country school. And then later on, I rode a school bus to go into Mount Pleasant, about 15 miles away. So were all three of you kids pretty studious or? We were all bright, you know, and didn’t have any trouble with academics or anything like that. So yeah, we did okay. Do you guys play any sports? Like organized sports, I mean? John went out for track. He also played in the band. Steve, I don’t know that he did any sports. I tried out for basketball, but I found out pretty shortly that because I was a country kid and didn’t live in town, I hadn’t practiced with all the other kids who were on the team and so forth, that I wasn’t up to speed to do that. So I was there for, I think, a season maybe or something. I just basically sat on the sidelines, except for one time at the very end of a game, and we were like 20 points ahead. I think I got out there for about 30 seconds. Yeah, I know that feeling. It’s kind of funny, you know, Dad, Jommer, he always had this kind of a class thing that I think it’s kind of passed down to some extent, particularly to Lynn. So he always said, well, yeah, all the doctor’s kids and all the superintendent’s kids and all the professional kids, they’re going to be the ones that are going to get the lead, athletic possibilities for football and basketball and everything else. And so I didn’t really expect that I was probably going to do too well. I always had this sort of attitude, OK, I guess I’m probably screwed from the beginning. So I never really tried out. Well, it’s a bummer that Jommer put a glass ceiling on you that taught you that that thing exists, whether or not it was real. Yeah, I think it’s hard to understand a little bit, but we lived very modestly and we were very low income. I’m kind of like a poor white kid, you know, in my background. We were rural, so I wasn’t that much different than the other kids that I rode with. So it wasn’t particularly an issue. The city kids were more up to speed, you know, they got the cars earlier and they dressed better and, you know, they went to better colleges and stuff like that, probably. So I don’t know, that wasn’t really a big deal to me, I don’t think. Except I do know that when I had the opportunity, when I turned 16, I got a job right away because I wanted to buy better clothes, you know, than I had to go to school and stuff. And so I started at 16, I had my first job in a supermarket. And so I started out stocking shelves and then before long, they had me go into the meat department. And so I was cutting up meat and making hamburger and sausage and stuff like that. How did you get in there? Well, I rode back and forth with Dad, so he was at that point working for Blue Bird Midwest Bus Company. And so he was a painter, so it was his job there. And had hoped to become a foreman, but never did. And again, he always attributed that to being passed over in class and all that stuff, yeah. So Gelmer, the first part was Gelmer is a carpenter, but- No, no, he never was a carpenter, he was always a farmer. Oh. And then because our farm was so small, he couldn’t make it as a farmer. Your grandpa was a carpenter. Yeah, Grandpa Jay Long, my mom’s dad was a carpenter. Yeah, built the house that we first grew up in. Okay, so what did Gelmer do for work? Well, he was a farmer, so his dad before him was a farmer. So they were farming the Munson Farm. And at that point, you know, like back in the day, you could make it on 120 acres. That was a pretty good-sized farm, you know. But as time progressed and farms consolidated, you couldn’t really make it at that point. So he started working in town. And his first job that he had was working for Bluebird Midwest Bus Company. They came into town, started a whole new factory there in Mount Pleasant. So he worked there, I’m not sure how many years. I know that I worked there two summers myself. I’m trying to think what years it would have been, but it doesn’t matter. Okay, so before we get to when you were 16, let’s back up when Lynn comes along. Oh, yeah. So I was about nine years old when Lynn came along. We were still living at this first farmhouse that we were renting at that point, called the Nicholson Place. And it was just west of Trenton, near where Gelmer’s mom and dad lived. And yeah, so all of a sudden, I was no longer the baby in the family. So I was kind of displaced. So how old, sorry, how old were you? I was about nine. Nine, okay. Yeah. And of course, this was like, he was the apple of the grandparents’ eyes, because he was the only Munson son in the family, in the lineage, the Munson lineage. You know, so. Of all the cousins or whatever. Right. He was like the Munson. Right, okay. So I don’t know how much consciously I was aware of all this, but I think it’s, I remember I nicknamed him my little bother. We still laugh about that, Lynn and I, because, you know, instead of my little brother, my little bother. And I think that’s kind of the way, when there’s that much of a gap, like nine years, you know, so he’s coming along, which he’s, by that time, you know, I’m in high school, you know, and all that. So then, the way that worked out was that then, when I left for college, not too long after that, mom and dad and Lynn all moved into Mount Pleasant. And so, Lynn really grew up as a city kid, so much as a farm kid. Well, okay, so you’re nine, Lynn comes along. Right. Let’s jump back to you’re 16, and you got your first job, because you wanted nicer clothes. Right. So you’re riding in with Jelmer. Yes, yeah, so Jelmer was working at Midwest, at the Bluebird Bus Company. Yeah. And so, I would ride back and forth with him. So after school, I would walk up to the library, and I’d wait until he was off, then he’d come and get me. Or, sometimes, I stayed at Grandma Hannah’s, because I could walk from school over to Grandma Hannah’s, and for quite a while there, I actually stayed during the week with her, rather than, you know, going back and forth with dad. So I became kind of independent fairly early on. While your two older brothers were doing what? Well… Because they hadn’t gone to college yet. No. If you were 16. Well, yeah, by the time I was a senior, of course, they were gone. But, as a matter of fact, by the time I was a junior, John would have been gone, and Steve would have gone. Well, Steve would have been gone when I was a junior, I guess. John would have gone when I was a sophomore. Yeah, so they were kind of starting to be out of the picture. They were off to college. So how did you like your first job? Oh, I liked it. Yeah. I have some kind of fond memories of the meat cutting thing. So there was a guy there, he was a butcher, his name was Lefty Denton. Lefty Denton. And he and I would get into meat cutting competitions. So you can take a chicken, like a whole chicken, you grab it by the legs, and you go whack, whack, like that, and that cuts the… So it’s already plucked. Yeah, it’s already plucked, yeah. Just like you’d buy it at the grocery store, a whole chicken. But we wanted to cut it so it would already be pre-cut and packaged. And then you’re saran wrapping it and jacking up the price to make a profit, okay. Right. So you could… Because I’ve never worked at a grocery store, so I don’t even know how it works. So the truck comes, it drops off a jillion whole chickens. Right. And you sell whole chickens. Yeah, they’re kind of in a wooden frame, or wooden crate, packed on ice. And so you go grab one and… So the customers can buy a whole chicken if they want. Yeah. But they can pay a premium to have it cut up. A little bit, yeah, a little bit of premium. Right. But that’s what covers your salary, that’s what makes it profitable to… Right. Okay. So you ended up butchering. So had you done butchering of the chickens on the farm or anything before that? No, I never had killed any. We raised chickens, but I wasn’t involved in the killing them or… They were done with the eggs, you ate them. Oh yeah, we went out and gathered the eggs all the time. And one of my fondest memories would be that every once in a while, one of the hens would get out of the confined area. They’d go out and make a nest out there in the grass somewhere. Well, then when you found one of those, usually they were rotten. And so we had great rotten egg fights. Oh no. We had to amuse ourselves any way we could. I mean… If they laid outside the… Didn’t they turn into baby chicks? No, for some reason they were abandoned by the hen or we’d… Really? Put the hen back in the coop or something. Oh, but didn’t know there were eggs out there. Yeah, so we’d discover these rotten eggs. I didn’t realize, you can throw an egg and a lot of times it’ll just skip. Like, they’re pretty… You think they’re real fragile, but they’re not. They’re shaped in such a way that when you zing them, they don’t necessarily break. Unless, of course, if they hit you, they break. But if you missed, they just go skip along the ground. I don’t know if you’ve tried this trick, but if you take an egg and you put it in your palm and you wrap around it, you can’t break it. You can’t break it. Yeah, it’s a pretty great container. We had… When we were still on the Munson farm, we had to entertain ourselves. So we just spent these long days out doing the woods thing, which was great. Bending over the hickory trees and riding them to the ground and all that sort of stuff. And we’d sneak off and there was a farm pond where we weren’t supposed to go. And of course, we went there and swam or waded.

I never was a swimmer, or we’d go clear down the Skunk River, which definitely we’re not supposed to go down there, you know. Why? We’d go down there and skip rocks. Why? Just because it’s there, you know. No, why weren’t you supposed to go down there? Oh, just safety reasons. Too far or too big? Yeah, both. Yeah, okay. Yeah, just to… So a couple days ago on the phone, Steve was telling stories where you’d be halfway up a tree and then somebody would be chopping it. Yeah. Well, we found that the hickory tree in particular is kind of limber, so if you pick one the right size, you can just kind of ride it. You can climb clear to the top and just kind of ride it. Close enough to the ground, you can just drop from it, you know. You can’t ride it clear to the ground, but you can ride it close enough. That’s great fun. And jump. And just let go of it, you know, because then you’re, you know… The tree goes twang. And that was the, my most memorable event of that was I got on one of those hickory trees that was a little bigger than it should have gotten, you know. Like, and so I climbed up the top and John had an axe and he says, well, hey, yeah, I couldn’t get it to bend over, you know. He said, well, look, just let me cut it part of the way through. It’ll come down easy, no sweat, you know. So he hacks away at it and I’m up there like an idiot, sure enough. He cuts it through and it goes crack, you know, and I’m going, boom. And of course, it came down on top of me, which wasn’t too cool. And I landed flat on my back and I took my breath away and I thought I was going to die. That was a bad experience. So we had to amuse ourselves, you know. We played horseshoes a lot, you know. Like, you know, so we had the horseshoe thing. We had a basketball hoop up on the granary, you know, that we’d shoot baskets and stuff like that. We did things like we had pissing contests so that we could see. We have these things, weeds called horseweeds. They grow about 12 foot tall and we had competitions to see who could pee the highest on the, because that kills the plant up to a certain level, you know. It kills it? It kills the milkweed? Well, yeah, not the whole plant, but, you know, it kills the part that you piss on, you know. Really? You wouldn’t think it’d be fatal to the plant immediately. Well, I don’t know. There’s something acidic about all that that does the trick. Sometimes we had things that we had to do, you know, like when Dad was raising the pigs, we had to, like, he wanted to soak the corn because it digested better. So we’d have to put it in five-gallon buckets and soak it and then go feed it to the pigs. And we had to milk the cow, of course. I never did that. The older boys did that. There was one milk cow? Yeah. Did you guys make cheese and stuff like that? No, no, just milk. Just to drink milk, yeah. But that’s great, right? Like, fresh milk. Yeah, yeah. Did you have cereals from the store, from the town? Yeah, not much, though. Mostly Mom made oatmeal and cream of wheat and, you know, stuff like that. But you bought that stuff in town? Yeah, yeah. But we had some, like cornflakes. That was kind of the one I remember having the most. Yeah, Mom was a good cook. Okay, so 16, first job, butcher. What did you say his name was, Lefty? Lefty Denton. And you had contests? Yeah, we had speed contests, you know, chop up a chicken fast. Okay, so a whole chicken? Yeah, so you take the whole chicken, you grab it by the two legs, and you go, quack, quack. That’s the wings. So the wings fall off, right? Yeah. So then you spin it around, and you go, quack, quack. That’s the legs and the thighs. And then you have to separate the legs from the thighs to go, quack, quack. And you have legs and thighs. And then you have to take the breast and split it open, you know, bang in the middle like that. Then you have to put it all back together and make it look like a chicken again. Why? So, you know, you don’t want them all just parched. You want them to see that the whole chicken is there, you know? Oh, but in modern stores, they sell them in parts. I know they do, but that ain’t the way we did it back then. And you didn’t have Saran Wrap, right? Yeah, we did have Saran Wrap. Oh, you did? Okay. Pretty much like you see today. But it’s a whole chicken that’s been cut, but it’s back in the shape of a whole chicken. Yeah, you put it in a little tray, and you put the Saran Wrap on it. The rib cage and everything is gone, right? The bones are gone? No, no. No, we didn’t bone them. That was just the whole. Oh, you didn’t bone them? No. Oh. You’d be amazed if you get a knife sharp enough and you put enough force to it, you can do a lot of things. So people are still buying whole chickens. They’ve just been pre-cut. Yeah, they’re cut into parts. Right, yeah. Okay. Oh, I see. And that’s what you did. You didn’t have, like, a whole section of just legs and a whole section of just wings. That’s kind of how they marketed stuff. Yeah. I don’t know why. So if you wanted 50 chicken wings, tough. You’d have to buy 50 chickens. That wasn’t a thing. Chicken wings were a thing back when I was growing up. I mean, who would want chicken wings? That was the throwaway part. You know, you want the drums, and you want the thighs and the breasts, but the wings. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. No one cared about chicken wings. Oh, fascinating. That’s probably why we didn’t sell parts separately. I don’t know. No, that wasn’t the thing. Of course, restaurants weren’t a thing. Like, when I grew up, I know. I don’t. There was a Dairy Queen in town, and there was a real nice restaurant that people go to on special occasions. Was that the Blue Iris or something? But there wasn’t any McDonald’s. The Green Iris? It’s called the Iris. The Iris. We ate there. Yeah, back in the day. Yeah, it’s gone, right? It’s gone now. Yeah. There were no fast food restaurants, period. When did fast food get invented? I don’t know. But it wasn’t when I left Mount Pleasant. It’s all there now. What year did you leave Mount Pleasant? 1969. So in 69, fast food still hadn’t changed, except Dairy Queen. And that was just ice cream, right? And it was a tradition. I mean, it had been there, like, all my life. The Dairy Queen? In the same location. And that was a franchise. Yeah. They didn’t do food, right? They just did ice cream. They just did the ice cream, yeah. You could go to a cafeteria. There’d be some cafes, and you could go. We never did that because we were indigent. I never ate in a restaurant until… College? College, I guess. And even then, you know, that’d be cafeteria. Right, right. Four years, you know? And nowadays, cafeterias are all restaurants. Right. School cafeterias. Choices of salads and all kinds of stuff. What I’m saying is, it’s all franchises. Right. Right? A lot of it on college campuses, current modern college campuses, it’s a Qdoba. And it’s a blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Which is interesting. So franchising has taken over everything. That’s totally different than when I was growing up. We hardly ever went to a movie. I mean, we really were really… It’s really a wonder how… I’ve asked Mom many a time, How did you do that, Mom? How did you sustain us when, basically, when my dad died, there was enough money to bury him, and that was it? And they tried to get the trucking company to pay something, but they didn’t. They wouldn’t do it. And so Mom, if you can imagine this, she basically had nothing. And if it hadn’t been for Grandpa providing the house for that four or five years, we’d have been homeless. But it never occurred to my mom that she would do anything other than look after us boys. Did she work? Well, she did some. She worked up in Spurgeon’s, which is like a department store, a clothing store. But I don’t know how she did that, because the lady next door, Mrs. Church, she would look after us sometimes. But I think what Mom told me was that it turned out that by the time she’d paid the babysitter, she didn’t make enough money to make it worth her time, and she figured, well, she better just raise the boys. So I honestly don’t know how she did it. I think probably Grandpa Long, who was very generous, the one you’re named after, J. Long, he probably provided a heck of a lot of support other than just the house. Was his carpentry business going okay? Yeah. He had some money? Yeah, he always had a crew of three or four guys. It never got to be a big thing. Well, not a huge thing, but I know of a lot of houses and barns and outbuildings and stuff like that. So he was very good at what he did. And I don’t know, I think maybe Grandma Hannah might have helped a little bit, but Mom never talked much about that. She didn’t. Her and Grandma Hannah, I don’t know, they had sort of a rivalry thing going or something. I don’t know what the deal was. But she did it, so I give her credit. I don’t know how. So there’s three of you in high school, close to high school or whatever, and Lynn’s nine years back. And you guys are thinking about college, talking about college. What are you thinking? What are you talking about? Right. Well, that’s the weirdest thing, because I don’t remember that Mom or Dad ever said to us boys, you guys really need to go to college or whatever. But it was somehow or another kind of in the mother’s milk or something. Did she go to college? She went to Ivo-Westland, and she was in the first graduating class of the secretarial school. So she had a certificate, a secretarial school. Did she type? Would she have typed that stuff? Yeah, she could type. She typed a lot of recipes. Did she have a typewriter at home? Yeah. Oh, cool. She had one of the manual ones, and eventually she got an electric one. So she did that. Did boys play with a typewriter? I don’t remember doing that. Did you use it for homework or anything? I don’t remember doing that. I remember the Humphrey house having an old typewriter. Do you remember that? Well, I remember what I remember about the Humphrey typewriter was that Maureen used it, and then we thought, well, this will be great. Let’s get her an electric typewriter because it’s so much easier to use. Yeah, you don’t have to push the button so hard. So we bought her an electric typewriter for Christmas or something like that. You can check this with Sharon’s memory, but what I remember was that it still stayed in the box. Never used. Never got used to it. It was too modern, too fancy. So your folks weren’t pushing college. Well, that’s the funny thing. It was kind of like an assumption somehow or another. Unspoken, but? Sort of. Yeah, I don’t remember them saying, you boys need to go to college. But I think because Mom had done college. Of course, Jelmer, he just had a high school education. He went to the military right out of high school and then came home to farm with his dad. Jelmer did Army or something? Yeah, he served in the Pacific War during the Second World War. He was in the Pacific. I don’t know anything about Jelmer’s service. I know so much about Earl’s service. I don’t know anything about Jelmer’s service. Well, Lynn would be the one to ask about that because he has all the records and all that sort of thing. Oh, darn. Does he have a boat over there I can scoop it out? Not in the Army, I guess. No, nothing that glorious. All I know is that when Jelmer came home from that day forward, he just never had any use for Japs, as he would call them. He never got over that prejudice. Unlike Earl, who also went and did four years as a POW under Japanese atrocities, he came back and didn’t have that spirit of hatred, really. But Jelmer never was able to overcome that. They both saw horrific things you and I can’t even imagine. So college, who do you remember talking about college? Well, one thing I remember was that my Aunt Florence, who lived in Mount Pleasant, Florence Williams, she had been a teacher, and she encouraged me to help me through the process of getting a national defense loan and the whole process of getting that sort of stuff done. I don’t know anything of what’s a national defense loan. Well, yeah, that’s a low-interest loan that the government provided for people who were more or less indigent, like we were. For college? Yeah, for college. Okay. So that’s how I got to go to college, was I got a couple scholarships, like small scholarships for some of my writing skills and stuff like that. And then I worked assignments all the time. I went to the University of Iowa at Iowa City for a year and a half, and then I transferred to Graceland College. So John went first, right? Yeah, John went first. Both John and Steve went to Iowa State University in Ames. I went to the University of Iowa in Iowa City, which was only 50 miles away. Well, John wanted to go to Ames partly because our cousins were there. Mark Kamek and Larry Kamek were both there, and partly because it’s more of an agricultural college, and so his interest in botany and biology and all that stuff, that was a really good school. And so he wanted to go there. He didn’t finish his college there. He ran into financial problems, and Steve did, too. And so neither of them, at that time, finished college. They both got their draft. They were called up on the draft. They got their papers the same day. John looked up Steve. For the Korean War? No, no, no. For the Vietnam War. John and Steve were a Vietnam-era, as was I. The Korean War. Oh, boy. Wow. My history has totally failed me. Yeah, you’re thinking about Uncle Conrad in that era. This was the Vietnamese War. When did the Vietnamese—what year did that start up? Well, I think it was about 64, 65, it started. And Korea was before that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was—yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, anyway, they were both at Ames, Iowa State. They both were having trouble keeping their grades up, even staying in college and all that sort of thing. You had to be—if you were enrolled in college, but once you weren’t enrolled in college, you were liable to be drafted. So they both received their paper. John went and looked up Steve and says, Guess what I got in the mail today? And Steve says, Well, guess what I got in the mail today? They both got the letter from Uncle Sam telling them to report for active duty. To some Army base in Alabama or whatever. Yeah, I forget where it was. You’d have to ask them, but anyway. So as it turned out, John actually went to Nam, but he was more like a secretarial guy in Saigon. He didn’t actually do the— So you didn’t get that letter the same time your two older brothers got the letter? No, that’s a whole other story. Steve went through the whole guerrilla training thing, I think it was in Florida, and thought for sure everybody was going to Vietnam, but they actually sent him to Germany, I think it was. So he didn’t actually go to Vietnam. He got drafted and sent to Germany? They were both drafted, yeah. They were both drafted. I would have been drafted, too, but in the process of going to Graceland, then I met some professors. Well, not Graceland. You said Iowa State University of Iowa. Yeah, I went there for a year and a half. So what was your plan? What did you want out of college? Your two older brothers are off to Iowa State University because they’re interested in agriculture and stuff. You’re not interested in agriculture, you’re interested in writing. No, I was interested in journalism. So my major at the University of Iowa was journalism. So what was your dream? Well, I thought I’d be a newspaper guy. Like in Chicago, some big city somewhere? Well, at the time, the Des Moines Register was like a world-class newspaper. It was really highly regarded, so I would not necessarily have to even leave Iowa to have a really great career. So you were dreaming of, oh my gosh, I could land this job in Des Moines, I could move to Des Moines, and I could become a journalist. Yeah, that sort of thing. I don’t know that I ever got that specific about it, but I was still in my sophomore year, so I was basically having to take basic courses like French and stuff like that. Wait, did you have a dream before you went to college at all, or not? You just went to college because… I went to college because I wanted to improve my income capacity. Okay, so journalism as a goal gelled when you were already at college. When I was in high school, I worked on the Tower High School paper. Student newspaper. Yeah, student newspaper. And that piqued my interest. And like I said, I got a poem published in Lyrical Iowa and stuff like that. You still have that? Yeah. Oh, nice. Did you guys have the newspaper growing up? Were you receiving the newspaper? No, that’s the weird thing. No, we didn’t have any newspapers. We didn’t have the National Geographic. We had a set of encyclopedias at home. But no, I think we had the Reader’s Digest, and so I always did Word Power, you know, these ten vocabulary words. Can you guess what those are? I was good at that. I used to sit around just reading dictionaries. I loved words, you know. So yeah, I mean, I declared a major of journalism. So while I was there, I was exposed to the idea that there’s this other form of journalism called electronic journalism. And I remember going to the School of Journalism and talking to some guy about that in a studio. And I asked him, he said, I asked him, do you think I would have what it would take maybe to be a news broadcaster or something like that? He says, yeah, I think you would. He had the voice, you know, and he says, I think you’d need to thin your eyebrows out a little bit. For TV? Like you wanted to be a TV broadcaster? Yeah, like a TV broadcaster. So that would have been a possibility. I think I could have, I might have stayed at Iowa City close to the folks. Because the journal school there was really strong, they had a, of course they had a lot of journalism professors. I could have become a journalism professor. And they had a writer’s workshop that I went to as an adult later on in my life at Iowa City. So I could have been part of that. And I could have probably been published and things like that. So that was kind of my seed thinking about all that. And really the thing that kind of intervened in all that was Sharon.

So how’d you meet your mom? Yeah, so I was extremely shy throughout high school. And when the junior prom came, you know, that’s the little prom you have at the end of your junior year, everybody, they have a big dance and all this stuff, and so everybody asks somebody to go take them to the prom. So one of Sharon’s friends, Jerry Glassford, said, oh, well, maybe you should ask Sharon Humphrey. Oh, okay. I’d sort of seen her in class or whatever, you know, but I didn’t really know who she was. I said, oh, okay. So I went and asked Sharon if she’d like to go to junior prom. She said yes. And so this friend of mine named Jack Cowan, he had a car. I certainly didn’t have a car. And he and I went out with his to pick Sharon up and all this stuff. It was kind of crazy because she lives down this dirt lane, you know, basically, and it had rained, and so, like, there’s mud and this crap. Oh, no. Yeah, for sure. And I’ve got the rented tuxedo thing, you know, going on, and I’ve got this corsage. So you didn’t know her at all. Not really. You were taking her to junior prom. Yeah, really total stranger. Okay. I don’t even remember. We hardly even talked. I don’t think so. This is one of the stories that Sharon and I really enjoy because when I got there with my little corsage, I always got a pin on her, you know, to go to the dance and everything. She shows up, and she’s got this dress that’s kind of cut across here, and she’s got these two straps. And in my mind, these straps are like spaghetti straps. I’m thinking, I’m not going there. I’m not touching this. She says the straps. She says she still has the dress, and the straps are about that big. She’s still got her junior prom dress? I think she says she can prove it to me that I’ve got this story wrong. In my mind, I’m thinking, you know, like Mama’s standing right there, and I’m thinking, you know, I’m not going to go fondling around there trying to pin it. So I was just, no, I don’t know what to do, you know. And so her mom took pity on me, and she pinned the corsage on Sharon, and I was eternally grateful. And she was always impressed at all. What a nice, clean, methodist boy. I was so innocent and naive and shy. I was so painfully shy, you know. So she knew that I wasn’t going to be taking advantage of her daughter. So she loved me instantly because Sharon had always been dating these guys a couple years older to her than her that had the cars and hot rods and had bad reputations that she’d heard about when she went to get her hair done. So I was always like, in her mind, I was always, wow, what a great catch, you know. So anyway, so we took her to junior prom, and then we dated throughout her senior year in high school. Then she went off to Graceland, which I’d never even heard of before. It was a church-sponsored RLDS college, and that was hours away. I didn’t see much of her, and I did that for about a year and a half, and I thought, you know. But you went to college the same year, right? You were both juniors. Yeah, we both went. Oh, you went to Graceland? No, no. Oh, you went to Iowa. Yeah. So when we both graduated from high school, I went to Iowa City, University of Iowa. She went to Lelona, Iowa, Graceland College at the time. And so that went on for about a year and a half, and then we’d see each other once in a while. We’d be back at Mount Pleasant. She’d be visiting her folks, and I’d be visiting my folks, see each other and all this stuff. Anyway, I was just head over heels, you know, and screw the career, although I didn’t just give up on it. Like when I went to Graceland, I was involved on the newspaper staff. How’d you get from Iowa to Graceland? You were at Iowa City. Yeah, Iowa City. Tell me about how you switched to Graceland somehow. Yeah, well, I don’t know exactly how I pulled that off, to tell you the truth. I mean, you can transfer to another college, and I had good enough grades that I was just fine to do that. I didn’t have the money, because it was more like a private school instead of the public school, so that was a problem. But I had a 14-hour-a-week work assignment, so I was doing pots and pans for 14 hours a week in order to earn my way through Graceland, which you could kind of do at the time. But I think Sharon’s folks, the last year, loaned me some money that we paid back so I could actually get, you know, finish school. So you transferred credits from University of Iowa. Right. Journalism. So when you walked into Graceland, were you still journalism or something else? No, they didn’t have a journalism degree. But they had mom. But they had mom. I wanted her more than I wanted a career in journalism. So what did you think you were going to do at Graceland? Like study, what are you studying? Well, I ended up getting the same degree she did, which is social studies, which is kind of a generic degree. Bachelors of art. Bachelors of science, I think, in her case. I don’t remember why. Mine’s a bachelors of arts, but hers is bachelors of science, because she had more science stuff. I had more English stuff, you know. Anyway, yeah, so that was an interesting chapter, because Sharon had had a religious experience, and she wanted me to have a similar religious experience when I came to Graceland. She had a religious experience at Graceland? Well, she was having one at Graceland, but earlier she’d had one at Nauvoo Campground in Nauvoo, Illinois, and stuff like that. Several summers there on the staff, youth camps and stuff. So anyway, so she thought, well, Jim’s not going to have his own encounter or experience if he’s just hanging around me all the time. So she broke up with me. Sophomore year? Yeah, right. So you moved college, and she dumped you. Dumped me. Like a hot potato. All I can say is like off and on then for the next two and a half years, until then we were married right out of Graceland in 1969. Well, how did you transition from off and on to let’s get married? It’s hard to say. I’m just stubborn. Stubborn. So what was the plan after college? So now you’re both looking at being out of college. Right. What’s the plan? Well, the plan was that we had this minister in the community of Christ who had inspired us to think that we could actually be a part of establishing the kingdom of God on earth sort of thing. And the headquarters of the church was in Independence, Missouri. And that was kind of what was called the center place of Zion. So that was kind of, if you were going to be part of the action, that was the place to be. So was this before the auditorium was built? No, no, it was all finished. Auditorium was finished, and that’s the headquarters, right? Right. There wasn’t a temple there yet, but the auditorium was finished, yeah. And I had some good experiences, spiritual experiences in between, like being baptized at Nauvoo between my junior and senior year. Were you baptized at Graceland? No, I was baptized at Nauvoo, Illinois, at the reining grounds. I worked there all that summer. Right, so Graceland University, okay, and then summer camp in Nauvoo, Illinois, the church’s summer. Yeah, well, I was in Nauvoo because I was working at a steel foundry. I had the midnight shift at a steel foundry in Keokuk, Iowa. So I worked a summer there, working from 12 midnight to 8 in the morning, and I stayed at the reining grounds. And Sharon was at the reining grounds being a staff person and a cook and whatever like that. So we spent some time. I was training the junior and senior year, and that summer I was baptized. So somehow in college, hey, there’s this reunion grounds, and you can go get a job. Well, that reunion grounds is the one that Sharon grew up in. Yeah. And so I knew she was going to be spending the summer there between her junior and senior year. So you got a job nearby. So I got a job nearby, yeah. And you had a car, and you could just go back and forth. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard to explain how that, and I’m kind of hazy on how it all finally evolved. We made up and broke up several times between the sophomore year and the senior year and all that sort of thing. So I think Sharon just was really wanting to be independent. And if I had not been so just dogged and determined, you know, I think she’d have gone off and done the Peace Corps thing for a couple years, and that probably would have been better because it would have satisfied her independent streak, you know. So wrapping up college, you were talking about Independence, Missouri, and you’re going to be involved in church leadership, basically. Right. All their headquarters right there, yeah. So what we did was we thought, well, we want to be part of the action. Dick Hetrick’s now at Barry. He’s a part of the state presidency there, that place. And so we went down there. We both eventually found a job. She got a job in social work in Kansas City. I got a job being like the editor of a weekly newspaper called The Observer. Not a church newspaper. Well, it was owned by a church member, but, yeah, just a local weekly paper. Mostly a shopper. Oh, so you’re back in journalism now. Yeah, I was. You didn’t get a journalism degree. That’s the era when I got back into photography, you know, and started to have my own darkroom. And a house you rented in it? Well, we rented first, yeah. We had a $65 a week third-story walk-up. With a darkroom? No, that came a little bit later. So we actually lived in two apartments, and then we bought our own house. And in that house I had a darkroom. Oh, okay. Yeah. Did you like that job? Did you like your first journalism job? Yeah, I did. Yeah, I think I could have done that, and I’ve been real happy as a career, I think, doing that. What percent was photography and what percent was writing? It was mostly writing, probably reporting and writing mostly, and then I supplemented that with photography. So did you have a local beat, like they sent you to the city hall meetings or something? Yeah, I kind of picked my own stuff, you know? So, yeah, I did city council meetings, and I didn’t do sports. That wasn’t part of what we did. Do you have any of those original newspapers, like your first job out of college? I might have, I don’t know. Yeah, I’d be real curious if you have, like, a physical copy of it. Holy crap, look at that. That’s my first byline. Like, when did you keep that? Like, you’ve got bylines. I might have. I don’t know. Yeah, I would have had bylines. That’s a big deal, right? Like, my first job, you guessed it. It was more like a shopper, really, more than a, you know, so it was actually distributed free. And so they wanted to have… Mostly ads. Right. But they wanted to have some news in it. Interest pieces. To make it, you know, get people to read the thing, and maybe then run across the ads, you know? So I was like that, you know? Whatever it took to do that, I did it. So I’d go down and report on, where’s our water come from at Independence? So I’d go down and do a report on the water supply and all that sort of stuff, you know? Yeah. It was cool. I liked it. That’s an honest living. Oh, yeah, that’s cool. I liked it, yeah. But anyway, so Dick Kettrick was down there, and he had, at this point, he was very charismatic, and he organized the whole city into 44 neighborhoods. And each of those neighborhoods had about 20 elected representatives. So you had, in your neighborhood, you had a representative that would go to the police meetings, you know, meet with the police chief and learn about what’s the public safety stuff that we need to know in our neighborhood. And you had someone go to the streets department. Well, how do we get these potholes fixed, or whatever the street concerns are? We need a traffic sign here, or whatever. And on and on. You know, so there are 20 different aspects of community life. And he’d actually organized this thing, and the city got All-American City Awards for a couple years because of that effort. I mean, he actually got, it was mainly the church members that were kind of the nucleus of it, but it actually expanded way beyond that. So it was a really going concern. And at the same time, he was the church’s leadership in what they call the center stake, and he had this thing called the, it’s kind of the equivalent of the Peace Corps. So anyway, Sharon and I volunteered for that. So we were paid $3,000 a year each to do our thing. So Sharon did her thing with the group department, all that stuff. I did my thing with the newsletter, like the stake newsletter. And we both lived in a house owned by the church called the host house. And at that time, there were lots of youth groups who were coming to town, so this host house was set up to accommodate about 20 people or something like that. And we were the resident caretakers and greeters and all that stuff. So we did that for several years. So what was she doing while you were doing this journalism gig? She was doing girls’ work stuff. That was her role. What does that mean? Well, at that time, they had all kinds of girls’ programs going. It goes sky-large scenarios, and I don’t even know what they were, to tell you the truth. What were they doing? Well, you’d have to ask her. Okay. I’ll have to ask her. Because this is older than we got. I think Mom’s interview yesterday, we stopped. Yeah, we’re past that now. Young adult. We’re deep in the young adult stuff. Yeah. So I don’t know. We could halt here because after we sort of did all that stuff in Independence, then we started getting involved in high adventure youth camping, some of it first centered in Independence, then eventually working out of Dallas, Texas, and so forth. So we did all that sort of thing. But you didn’t move to Dallas, Texas. Before you kids came along. You were still in Independence, right? Or no? Did you move? No, we didn’t actually live there. We were down there half-time and back and forth. You were living in Independence, right? Well, let’s see. During the time that we worked in Dallas, we actually lived in Dallas for that time, which was about, as I recall, about a year and a half. You lived in Dallas? Yeah, we lived in Dallas. I didn’t know you lived in Dallas. Yeah. So we would be out taking this group of ten kids on high adventure backpack trips and canoeing trips. Yeah, I knew you did those, and I’ve heard lots of stories. Yeah. And then we lived there a month or six weeks or whatever. Then we’d go out for a month and back for a month. I think we did that for a year and a half. I’d have to check with Sharon. So when you moved, did you like it down there? You liked the Dallas thing? I enjoyed doing the camping part of it, taking the kids out and everything. It’s fascinating to see the way the kids interacted. They were all kids beginning to have emotional problems, not real serious problems, but maybe truancy or that sort of stuff. So it was interesting to see with small group dynamics what you could do and the way them influencing each other’s behavior and the change that happened in that one month between their attitude about life and stuff like that. It was pretty cool. But you were getting, for like four years or something, you were getting pretty deeply involved with the church. Yeah. And then you left. You’re like, let’s go to Dallas. Well, yeah. It was more gradual than that. We did a church couple, Gail and Donna Scaife, started a program where we did high adventure camping with them. So we did it in Texas and we did it here out of Kansas City-based. So we did both. And then eventually started pursuing other things. Well, so anyway, eventually I’m born. That put an end to the high adventure camping trip. And you went to go work for the church full time, right? Right. Like at about the same time. Yeah. Well, between there and then I worked for Park University. I was the public relations director for Park University. Which is owned by the church, right? At the time it was sponsored by the church. Okay. Well, actually they never did that. They was affiliated with the church. Okay. Public relations was sponsored by the church. Park College was affiliated with the church. I don’t know what that means, but that’s all right. Well, it has to do with how closely you’re tied in with the organization. So anyway, I was doing that and did that for a couple years. And then the church did approach me about going to work full time for the church. Oh, they recruited you. Yeah. Well, the way the guy put it, he calls me in and he says, we think you’d be just the right caliber of person to be an appointee minister for the church. I always wondered what that caliber was. Is that like a 45 or a 38? What they were looking for. Anyway, so we prayed about it and thought, well, yeah, that’d be kind of good. So our first assignment was taking you to Canada. Oh, that was, okay. So you weren’t in, they didn’t first give you something in Independence. The first thing they did was something. Well, I was in training for a year. So I went to a seminary, a Methodist seminary for a year. And we had some other assignments that we did. And then we went. Our first assignment was to Canada. But Brad was born in Independence, right? Yeah. I mean, he was only like a. . . You took both of us to Lethbridge, right? Right. You were both born in the Independence Sanitary Hospital, sponsored by, at the time, the RLDS Church. Oh, I didn’t know the hospital was also sponsored by the church. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Your church read through and through, man. All right. All right, can we leave it there? Sure, sure. That’d be great. All right. Awesome. It’s been so long ago, I’d have to sort of think, how did all that evolve from one thing to another? Well, since I was in high school, I guess, I’ve been so, what’s the plan? Like, my brain has been, okay, what is the plan?

of the plan since high school. And so for me, each of these transitionary steps is a very clear decision, milestone, failure, success, failure, success, failure, failure, failure, whatever, like to me, that’s how my memory is constructed is this building blocks of intention, action, result. That’s how I’ve got my whole history in my brain. My life has been more by invitation. People said, okay, why don’t you come work for the Observer newspaper? Oh, okay, I’ll do that. Or why don’t you come do the Girls Adventure trail? Oh, okay, how about going, why don’t you come over here and let’s have you go down to, we could use you down here in Texas. And so, and then, why don’t you go to work for the church full time? Oh, okay. In the meantime, I was a pastor a couple times. I did that sort of in my spare time, lay ministers, you know? In Independence? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But pastor is not just, hey, there’s 10 people that volunteer to give sermons. Pastor is, you were the pastor of the facility, right? Yeah, actually, I was pastor twice, once in Independence and once in Sioux City. Right, right. Oh yeah, I remember, Sioux City. Yeah, so it is, I don’t know, it just kind of evolved. You know, like, when I was in, still at Graceland, and about the time I got baptized, about my junior year, end of my senior year, there was a presiding evangelist, what they called the patriarch at the time, came to campus. He was a beloved patriarch. His name actually was Cheville, Roy Cheville. The house that I was in, the dormitory, was Cheville House. Oh, wow, no pressure. Yeah, so he comes, and I’m kind of, I’d heard about this patriarchal blessing thing. You know, I knew that, well, the patriarchs do that, you know, so I thought, and I didn’t know any better. I thought, well, what the heck, you know. I don’t know any patriarchs, but here’s this guy, he’s a patriarch, I’ll just ask him to do my patriarchal blessing. And so he was gracious and kind, and he said, oh, okay, I would do that. You spend a couple weeks in preparation, I’ll do the same thing. You come down to Independence, and I’ll give you your patriarchal blessing. So that’s what I did. And it was really one of the spiritual highlights of my life, because I don’t know how to describe it other than to say, like, this was at the auditorium in his little office, and there was a recorder. They actually recorded these things. I have the written document and a letter that he wrote me personally, a handwritten letter afterwards. And when he placed his hands on my head and he started to speak, it was as if I was ushered into the presence of the numinous, you know. I don’t know how to describe it. I remember afterwards for some time, I just was kind of like in a daze or something. Everything looked different, I felt different. It’s just one of those kind of once or twice in a lifetime things, you know. And the things he said were so true. He said, you know, you’re gonna hear of people whose life is laid out for them, you know, like that. And he said, it’s not gonna happen for you. You know, you’re not gonna see the future, but what you will see is as you look back on your life, you’ll see an unfolding pattern into wider and broader expressions of your life. And that’s been like, whoa, yeah, so true. And I just, and there was other things he said in there about the expansiveness that now as I’m studying cosmology and things like that, these were things that he basically revealed to me in 1968, you know, that I’m going to be able to see beyond just the normal ordinary and actually see the extent of time and the universes and stuff like this. You know, I mean, these were things he actually said to me. And so I don’t know, it was just one of those very hard to explain. Yeah, if you’ve got the transcript of that patriarchal blessing, we could put it in the show notes if you want. If you want to share that in the show notes of the podcast episode, like it could be written there. If you want, if that’s too personal, that’s fine. Yeah, I’d have to think about that. It is quite personal. Yeah. No worries. Tough luck, internet. Yeah, too bad. Subscribe. There are some things that you can’t have. For the Patreon, how about at the $50 tier, they can see it, $50 a month. You can see dad’s patriarchal blessing. Yeah. All right. Good plan, I like it. Well, thanks for this session. And we’ll do future chapters. Yeah, it’s interesting to reflect on your own life. You don’t normally do that. It’s been a good life. I’ve truly enjoyed it. Yeah, no, it’s been great. Raised a couple of pretty decent kids, I’d say. For sure. I’ll be in the next chapter, we talk about those kids. All right, thanks, dad. Goodbye, internet. Say goodbye, internet. Goodbye, internet. So long, farewell. I’ll be there saying goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye, you’re still flashing green. Goodbye. Okay. Oh, that’s the recording? Green just means it’s on. Red means it’s recording. Fuck the chest hair out of the super magnet. Whoops. Whoops. Yeah, that is a magnet, isn’t it? Oh, it smokes a lot. If you’d like to call into the show, you can leave us a voicemail at 1-402-577-0117.