The Blogette of Dr. D

This is my dad/Grandpa Pete. I don’t remember the hat and I can’t tell what the pin says. I can’t even remember Dad ever wearing a cowboy-style hat, but pictures don’t lie. Or they didn’t in 1979.

Sticking with the 1979 cowboy theme, this is Ted’s Aunt Verna, his brother Gary, and his mom on our new front porch. (We moved into this house in July 1979.) I don’t remember Gary’s cowboy phase either, but it looks like Sheriff Brett Maverick has come to visit. Maybe he went shopping with my dad.

When we bought a bike for Jeff, he didn’t want to practice riding it. He told me he didn’t see any point in practicing, since all the kids who were six already knew how to ride. His plan was to wait until he was six and then get on his bike and go. It wasn’t easy to convince him that the six-year-olds could ride their bikes because they had practiced. He’s seven in this picture trying out his new, larger bike, and it looks like he’s happy to have mastered that skill.

This is Kathy in first grade. If I remember correctly, her class did a unit about Native Americans and she made this costume.

Thom (Tommy in 1979) is three years old and already in love with trucks. His career goal for many years was to drive an 18-wheeler, and he could recognize semi cabs from behind, as in “Well, only a Kenworth has a smokestack like that.”

Here’s one-year-old Kari with her Christmas doll, Kelly. Kelly came with her fluffy elephant friend named Elly.

It’s July 1979 and it’s hot outside. The building on the left is a day care center. Our house was the first residence built in this plat of the subdivision. See the swimming pool complex in the background? This picture must have been taken within the first two weeks of moving to our new house, because Ted and Jeff walked to the pool to buy a membership for us a few days after we moved in. After that, we didn’t use this backyard swimming pool. With nothing between us and the pool complex, we could sit in our back yard and hear the music blasting out of the concession stand to the accompaniment of the twang! of the diving board.

I think this must be the picture we sent with our Christmas cards in 1979. Check out Tommy’s colorful belt. All my life, I wanted to learn to play the piano. My early career goal was to play like Liberace (I watched his TV show every week), but my parents never had a piano. Ted bought this one for me for Valentine’s day in 1974 and I took piano lessons for five years. During that time, Thom and Kari were born and my practice time disappeared. That’s a 60-inch long console stereo against the far wall in the dining room. After a bedroom set and a kitchen table and chairs, that was the first piece of furniture Ted and I bought after we got married. It had a spindle that held six LP records, an AM-FM radio, and a tape deck to hold Ted’s reel-to-reel tape recorder to play tapes. And all in stereo sound!

I was looking for a particular photo that I wanted to print, but I couldn’t find it, so I started opening folders I thought I might have moved it to. I never found that specific photo, but I found an interesting folder. Here are some of the pictures from that folder.

This is the most boring one to look at, but it was fun to read.

I think I took this picture in LaCrosse, WI. Ted and I were taking a walk after checking into our hotel and, when I saw this, I thought of Shel Silverstein’s book Where the Sidewalk Ends. This is the place.

Here’s some grocery store art I saw several years ago. Obviously, during the Christmas season. Construction materials: Pepsi, Coke, and Sprite cases.

I found this cartoon.

One of my teachers had this clock in her classroom.

My class site at Pike-Lincoln Technical Center in Eolia had a major fire in 2012. While I was helping my teacher inventory what was left of her classroom, she showed me this. She had a a bunch of red rulers rubber-banded together in a file drawer and they melted down to form this sculpture, which she told me she was going to save as a memento of the fire.

The pile of rulers was lying on its side on the bottom of the drawer and against one side of the drawer, so two sides of the “sculpture” are flat. The large flat side (back of the sculpture) shows the rubber band that survived on the bottom of the pile (you can see where it was in the picture above). It also shows that the melted plastic ran over a pencil and a ball point pen. The markings on the rulers are visible in both pictures. Cool!

This picture was taken at Christmas 2005. The kids were here for my doctoral graduation and someone (probably Kathy or me) gave Thom a Beethoven figure. Kathy and I thought it would be fun to let Beethoven play his “Moonlight Sonata” so we set up this photo op. I still smile when I see it. Maybe Kathy does too. (Remember phone books?)

Continuing the Beethoven theme, I saved another cartoon.

When Ted and I (and Jeff and Kathy) moved to Missouri in 1973, Ted’s office was at Lambert Airport. We bought a house in St. Charles rather than closer to the airport because we knew the STL WSFO (St. Louis Weather Service Forecast Office) was already under construction in St. Peters, a few miles west of St. Charles. At that time, St. Charles was basically a bedroom community for McDonnell-Douglas and St. Charles County was rural, with nothing but farmland and very small towns west of MO Hwy 94. It looked like the pictures below. When the St. Peters WSFO opened in 1974, Ted climbed the radar tower and took pictures of the Cave Springs area around the office.

This photo looks to the northwest. The horizontal road near the horizon (barely visible) is I-70; the diagonal road going to the left side of the photo is Jungermann Road. We moved from St. Charles to St. Peters in 1979 and it was still several years before I met more than two or three cars driving between home and Cave Springs on the two-lane Jungermann Road. Now it’s a 5-lane road and has constantly heavy traffic.

This view faces northeast. In the right center, the black-and-white striped Venture store sign is visible. When Venture was built, it was “out in the country” about six miles west of our house and there were no city lights past MO Hwy 94–just the darkness of rural Missouri. The city lights now extend westward without a break past Warrenton, 32 miles west of MO Hwy 94. In the right foreground, you can see the shadow of the radar tower where Ted is standing with his trusty Pentax camera that he bought in Japan. The WSFO moved from Cave Springs to Weldon Spring in 1993 when it upgraded to Doppler radar.

Here, Ted is facing southeast. When we decided to buy a larger house in 1979, we looked at one in the subdivision visible in the picture. The large building on the left is Cave Springs Lanes. The road running from the left side of the picture toward the lower right corner is Mexico Road. It was a gravel road when the WSFO opened. It’s a five-lane main arterial road now (and paved), and has been for a very long time. Cave Springs used to be described as having three main commercial buildings: The WSFO, the Venture store, and the bowling lanes. Now it’s a major commercial area, offering just about anything you might need. The WSFO building is currently being used by a department of the St. Peters city government. The Venture store was razed, and the site now houses a strip mall with an Office Depot, Northern Freight, Hobby Lobby, and some smaller stores. The bowling ally is still open for business.

The last photo from today’s search was a mystery to me for a few seconds. I’ll give you a moment to look at it and I’ll describe it below.

Those are my sunglasses lying on the poolside picnic table with a lawn chair behind them. They are reflecting the umbrella over the table.

So far, the extra free time I’m finding with the COVID-19 lockdown is still fun.

After deciding to get back to scanning old photos, I remembered two boxes of photos in storage–one from Ted’s family and one from mine that we received after our parents died. We took our respective boxes and went to work last night. Ted had more pictures to sort because I had already winnowed mine a little bit many years ago. It’s really interesting to go back through family history and to remember things that happened in the way back.

This four-generation picture taken on my mother’s first birthday, is one of the oldest family photos I have. From the left, that’s my grandpa (Lorenz Lorenzen), my mother (Violet), my great-great-grandmother (Eliza Lorenzen, paternal grandmother of my grandpa), and my great-grandfather (Peter Lorenzen, father of my grandpa and son of Eliza Lorenzen).

Jumping to my dad’s side of the family, that’s my great-grandmother, Johanna (Josie) Dell with her three children: (L>R) Gladys, Philip, and Mabel (my dad’s mother). Great-uncle Phil had an apple orchard just north of Hingham, my hometown. Grandma Dell lived about a hundred feet up the street from us and I remember walking up to visit with her when I’d see her sitting on her porch. She always seemed to have a cookie for me. She died when I was six years old.

Here’s Great-grandma Dell with her great-grandchildren in 1950. I hope I live to see this many great-grandchildren. That’s me and my brother Denny in the coaster wagon. My cousin Carol is the oldest and is standing right in front of Grandma. Carol died two years later of meningitis. My Grandma Soerens buried two grandchildren before she died–Carol and my four-year-old cousin Lori, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver. My Grandma Lorenzen buried her eight-year-old son (who died of a ruptured appendix), a stillborn grandson, and my oldest brother (Denny, who died at 27 in an Air Force plane crash). Ted and I are fortunate that our children and grandchildren are all healthy and with us.

Grandparents (including Ted and me) love to have pictures of themselves with their grandchildren. Here are Grandma and Grandpa Lorenzen on their 35th wedding anniversary with their grandchildren. I’m the oldest, in the center, and my brothers are to the right of me in the photo–Tom, Steve, and Denny. Russ is the little guy on the right at the table.

There were some fun pictures of siblings in my pile. Here’s my dad (back center) with four of his five siblings. There was one more to come.

As the older sister, I tried to help mom with this photograph by turning Denny’s head toward the camera. He didn’t like it.

This is Denny, me, and Steve. That’s not our dog, so it must be an early photo-bomber.

My dad built this little shed to store our trikes, bikes, wagons, and other outdoor toys. “Hey, kids! Wanna paint the shed?” That’s Steve and me, hard at work.

My mom took this picture of Dad, Steve, Denny, and me, but she never liked it. I think it was supposed to be a “planting and greening of the earth” moment, but she always said it looked like we were trying to eke out a living on a hardscrabble farm. Those are our raspberry bushes and cherry trees in the background.

Maybe modeling runs in the family. Here’s Grandma Lorenzen, Mom, and me struttin’ our stuff.

In the 1950s, the majority of married women did not have full-time jobs. Apparently, our homemaking training started early. Here I am, at about three years old, ironing my doll clothes in the left picture. The iron has a cord and actually warmed up a little bit. That’s why I’m testing it with my hand. On the right side of the left photo, you can see my doll, patiently waiting in her buggy for freshly ironed clothes.

In the right photo, I’ve got my household set up on the front porch. That’s Steve in the doll crib. Note that there’s a dresser for my doll’s clothes, a cupboard with doll dishes in it, a table and chairs, and a buggy for the baby doll. The two boys in the center are our neighbors; the girls might be their nieces who lived in Florida and visited every summer. (The boys had a much older brother and sister.)

I joined the Hingham Wide-Awakes 4-H Club when I was ten years old. One of my “projects” that I worked on each year was sewing (still learning to be a housewife). I’m eleven in the photos below and I’m modeling the clothes that I sewed and entered in the County Fair. The pictures went into my 4-H Record Book that I completed each year to describe my year’s club activities.

Another 4-H activity was demonstrations. We gave them at meetings and there was also a county-wide demonstration contest with cash prizes. Here I’m practicing my demonstration on how to make a scarf. It’s more documentation for my record book.

Since this was a pile of my family photos and since I was my parents’ first baby, there are a lot of pictures of me. Here are a few. I’m probably under a year old and enjoying my first winter. If the baby keeps falling off the sled, put her in a cardboard box.

My mom (and everyone else) had a wringer washing machine when I was little, and I used to “catch” the pieces of laundry as they came through the wringer. On my third birthday, my hand got caught in the turning rollers of the wringer and they scraped the skin off the back of my hand. All of my third birthday pictures show a big splotch of mercurochrome over the injury. Mercurochrome didn’t sting like iodine, but it actually had a little mercury in it, so it’s no surprise it was later banned.

I tried out for and got a part in most of the high school plays. Here I am, hoopskirts and all, in Jane Eyre. The home ec classes made the play costumes; the shop classes made the sets.

The last picture from this batch of historic photos shows me in my band uniform. I played first chair clarinet and I was also in the pep band. Pep band got me free admission to all the home games. Good times! Knowing my mom and the way she tried to make her photos look good, I suspect she removed the corner table to take this picture.

I started scanning selected pictures from old photo albums and posted a few of them on this blog in August, October, and December 2018. Several months ago, one of my readers (name begins with “J”) asked when I was going to post some more old photos. With reader demand like that, I decided it was time to go through some more photo albums. Last night, I picked up where I left off more than a year ago. Let’s start with the big project of 1981.

Ted and I moved from Washington, D.C. to Missouri in July 1973, just six weeks after Kathy was born. Here’s where we lived in St. Charles.

We had a deck over the patio in the back of the house. We frequently used both levels, depending on whether we were looking for shade or sun. The patio included a gas grill / oven that was connected to the gas line for the house. I used it to cook roasts, casseroles, etc. and sometimes, when Ted came home after an evening shift, he’d grill hamburgers for the two of us out there after midnight. The galvanized watering tank was a popular style of backyard swimming pool in this area in those days. Question: how did we get it home with the Opel?

The back yard dropped sharply down to two drainage creeks. Ted and I built those two redwood bridges so we could access those parts of our yard. The swimming pool and swing set were in the “middle” back yard, and the garden was across the second creek in the “back” back yard. (The back yard against the house was the back yard.) This was a pretty view from the deck in the summer, especially when the garden was in full growth.

Thom and Kari were born while we lived in St. Charles and we needed a larger house. In 1979, we moved to St. Peters and bought our current house. The sale closing date was 7-9-79. The subdivision was very new and ours was the first house built on this plat. The house and the neighborhood were both undeveloped and stark when we moved in. I could wave to our nearest neighbor in the distance if we both got the mail at the same time and saw each other. For several years, we lived with constant construction noise as other families built houses in the subdivision.

The deck furniture and the watering tank swimming pool made the move with us. We used that watering tank pool for a week or two before we joined the subdivision swimming pool. Ted and Jeff walked to the pool (five vacant lots down the street) to see if we could buy a pro-rated membership for the remainder of the summer. I’ll never forget the look of pure joy on Jeff’s face when he and Ted came home with a family pool membership. We all put on our swimsuits and headed for the subdivision pool. Next question: How did we get rid of the watering tank?

In Spring 1981, we added a pergola over the patio so we could get some shade from the hot summer sun and sit outside. A local lumberyard had an architect on staff at no cost if we bought the lumber there. He came to our house and then drew blueprint plans (no computer plans in 1981) for us to use, including every detail down to how many lag bolts and washers we’d need. I remember showing them to someone once and the guy remarked, “You even have funny papers for your patio cover?!” In the photo below, the rough-sawn cedar lumber has been delivered and we’ve started working. Ted is admiring the good job we did affixing the first triangular support bracket to the brick on the house beside the back door. That took us an entire day! We finished the other two supports on the house in much less time.

It looks like we have sufficient bracing for the uprights. Except for lifting the three 18-foot 4 x 12 solid cedar beams projecting outward from the house, we did all the work ourselves. The beams weighed over 500 pounds each and it took Ted and two neighbor men (we had a few neighbors by 1981) to raise them onto the upright posts and the support brackets on the house.

One of our new neighbors had railroad clamps that he lent us. Those are the metal poles projecting above the top of the pergola, They made it possible to clamp the crossbeams to the layer below and hold them in place while we pounded in the nails.

Ted gave me the honor of putting in the last lag bolt. When we finished, the entire structure was solid. The architect told us that “sandwiching” the upright 4 x 4 posts with 2 x 6 boards would keep the 4 x 4s from warping. They never warped, and the pergola never wobbled.

The pergola is all stained and finished, and it looks good. After 30+ years, we had to replace the original, but we used the same blueprints because we like the design that much. The second time around, however, we could afford to hire a professional carpenter. I honestly don’t think his work was any better than ours.

Here’s how the house looked in August 2018, thirty-nine years later. When we bought it, it was at the top end of our budget, but we both loved it and decided to go for it. We’ve never been sorry and we still love it.