War Stories

            In 1943, at age seventeen, Dad joined the Navy. He spent the next couple of years aboard a battleship that routinely traded gunfire with the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese Air Service.

            Dad served on the Washington, one of our nation’s premier battlewagons. As kids, my siblings and I would pester him into sharing a few of his war experiences but often found his stories hard to swallow. A ship with decks that were made of 16 inches of solid steel! Guns that could hurl one-ton projectiles 25 miles! Waves that towered as high as our windmill! Did he really expect us to believe any of that?

            Dad passed away 20 years ago, so the stories about his time aboard the Washington are lost forever. Or so I thought.

            Some random connections recently put me in touch with Al Colton, who was a friend of Dad’s and one of his shipmates. Al turned 90 in June. He and his wife, Loretta, have been married for 67 years.

            I asked Al about his time aboard the Washington.

            “I was in the Navy Reserve when Pearl Harbor happened and joined the regular Navy as soon as war was declared. I spent the entire duration of the war on the Washington. At first we were assigned to convoy protection in the North Atlantic, but then we were sent over to the Pacific.”

            How did you meet Dad?

            “When Leonard came aboard, he was this skinny little farm kid from out in the sticks. There were some older sailors who liked to pick on guys like him, so three other old salts and I took him under our wing. Leonard was a wonderful guy. The four of us became the best of friends.”

              Were the storms as bad as he described?

            “Nope, they were worse. Sometimes the waves would be so high, they would break over the bow of the ship and flood the deck with three or four feet of water. A guy could easily get washed overboard.”

            Dad had a souvenir bullet that was the size of a bratwurst. What could you tell me about that?

            “Your dad was a forward gunner in Battery Four. He operated a 20 mm automatic cannon, which was the smallest gun on the ship. I was Gunner’s Mate Third Class and was in charge of his battery. The 20 mm cannons were antiaircraft weapons that opened up whenever an enemy plane got to within a mile or so of the ship.”

            Was the Washington ever attacked by a kamikaze?

            “Not really. Our battleships were so well armored, the kamikazes pretty much left us alone. They went after our aircraft carriers and it was our job to protect the carriers.”

            Dad said he once saw a Japanese plane fly by so close, you could have hit him with a potato.

            “I remember that! The plane flew past just off our starboard beam and maybe ten feet above the water. As he went by, the pilot turned his head and looked at us and grinned so big you could count his teeth. Seconds later the plane got hit by a shell and turned into a fireball and tumbled into the sea.”

            What was it like when they touched off those humungous 16 inch guns?

            “We weren’t allowed to be topside when they did that, it was simply too dangerous. The muzzle blast was tremendous. It shook the whole ship.”

            What is your most memorable experience from your time on the Washington?

            “That would be the battle of Guadalcanal. Most of the battle took place at night, so we had to depend on our radar. Japanese naval forces had sunk a couple of our destroyers and damaged several other of our ships. We snuck around and got a bead on the Japanese battleship Kirishima and raked her with our big guns. The Kirishima went to the bottom a few hours later. They say the outcome of that battle changed the course of the entire war.”

            It must have been awfully scary with all that shooting going on.

            “I was too young to be fearful. I think that was true for a lot of us, including your dad.”

            What can you tell me about the anchor tattoo Dad had on his left forearm?

            “I had nothing to do with it! All four of us ended up with similar tattoos. Let’s just say that we liked to have fun when we got shore leave.”

            I deeply appreciated the opportunity to speak with Al. I thanked him for his service and for bringing history – and in a small way, my father – back to life. 

                       

           

           

           

           

           

                       

           

             

           

           

Listen to me on the Minnesota Farm Network!

Cow Tipping

The doctor pressed her stethoscope against the cow’s flank and thumped her finger against the bovine’s belly as if she were checking on the ripeness of a gigantic, hairy watermelon.

She had big brown eyes and weighed perhaps 110 pounds. The lady vet, that is; the cow, a Holstein, clocked in at about three-quarters of a ton.

“She has a displaced abomasum,” murmured the lady vet. Like any good dairy farmer, I knew that cows have a multi-chambered digestive system that is more complicated than the seating arrangement at a royal wedding. It had never occurred to me that a cow could somehow lose track of one of her stomachs.

“Not misplaced. Displaced,” explained the lady vet patiently. “Her abomasum has floated around to the wrong side. Nothing can get through, like when you twist a garden hose.”

Wanting to assuage the suffering of my unfortunate ungulate, I asked about options. “We could operate,” said the lady vet, “Or we could roll her.”

It pained me to point out the obvious, namely, that the cow likely didn’t own anything worth stealing. Lots of cowhide, but no wallet.

 “What I mean is that we would lay the cow down and roll her over. Sometimes when we do that we can get the abomasum to shift back into place.”

I replied that this plan sounded excellent except for the “lay the cow down” and “roll her over” parts. My experience was that it’s extremely difficult to tip a cow, urban legend notwithstanding. Did I mention that the lady vet weighed perhaps 110 pounds? And I’m no Hercules.

 “Not a big deal,” she replied. “We’ll just use the lariat.” The lady vet produced a lariat and looped it around the cow in several places, employing some mystical rope-tying technique that must have been handed down to her by a sage old cow shaman. In any event, when all was ready she grabbed the rope and hauled away and the cow responded by gently laying down. Then came the exciting part.

Cows do NOT enjoy being grabbed by their legs and rolled back and forth. Much cursing and sweating and grunting and dodging of flailing hooves ensued. Did I mention that the cow weighed three-quarters of a ton? And I’m no Hercules.

At length the lady vet called a halt to our labors. She again thumped upon and listened to the cow’s flank. Breaking into a grin, she said, “I think we did it!”

 And so we had. We let the cow rejoin her herd mates and she moseyed over to the bunk and commenced to munching hay. I was deeply pleased. The cow had dodged the surgery bullet and I had learned that cow tipping is a real – and useful! -- activity.

I asked the good doctor what types of animals had come under her care. “Snakes, rabbits, birds, you name it,” she replied. “If it was on Noah’s ark, I’ve probably treated it. Lizards. A camel. Water buffalo.”

 Impressed by her repertoire, I decided to put the lady vet to the test. I pointed to a nearby mother cat who was zealously grooming herself. The cat did this a lot; her life seemed to be an unending stream of bathing emergencies. “Probably has fleas,” said the lady vet. “Stop by my office and we’ll give you a special shampoo for your cat.”

Hearing the words “shampoo” and “cat” in the same sentence evoked emotions akin to hearing the words “nuclear” paired with “bomb.” Even so, it seemed like an astute diagnosis.

 Our farm mutt had been hanging around this whole time, observing the goings-on like a furry, unpaid supervisor. I showed the lady vet a spot where the canine’s coat had become thin and patchy.

“Could be ringworm,” she said. “Stop by my office and we’ll give you a special ointment.”

I asked the lady vet if casual exposure to said ointment and/ or shampoo would be hazardous for humans.

“No,” she replied. “But it would likely clear up any fleas or ringworm you might have!”

Striving to hide my sudden feelings of deep gladness, I asked the lady vet about some other symptoms. They included foul moods and intestinal bloating and cramping, which were inevitably followed by explosive eruptions that, reportedly, were loud enough to be heard in the next county.

“What species are we talking about?” she asked. I admitted that the symptoms described were actually mine.

“It would be totally unethical for me to treat a human,” she said. “But I could probably do a quick exam. Here, let’s loop this lariat around you and we’ll get started!”

You Stinker!

There is a group of people who are disdained for the way they smell. Not so much for the methods they use to smell, but more for the aromas they exude. This downtrodden demographic is commonly known as “guys.” The subgroup of this group that suffers the most is known as “husbands.”

Let’s face it: women have a much more acute sense of smell than men. Females can detect a single malodorous molecule at a hundred paces. Guys, on the other hand, can’t tell if a baby needs changing until the diaper’s odor has become strong enough to stop a charging water buffalo. This is just one reason why women are generally better mothers than men.

 It’s nearly always news to a guy when his wife informs him that he stinks. Certainly he may have noticed how those vultures fainted as they flew overhead. But that didn’t necessarily prove anything; after all, the vultures, being guys themselves, were probably playing it for laughs.

 Skillful husbands can intuit when their impending personal odors might be offensive to the female olfactory system. As such, many husbands have perfected the tactic that is known universally as “silent but deadly.”

“Oh my Lord!” a wife may suddenly exclaim in the middle of a gripping episode of Breaking Bad, “What did you eat? Week-old road kill?”

 “What?” the husband might protest. “I don’t smell anything! It was the dog!”

“We don’t even have a dog!” This is why the marriages that last the longest are those that involve household pets.

Foot odor has long been my personal albatross. Taking my clodhoppers off at the end of a long, hot day could empty the house. It was often broadly hinted that my socks would qualify as an EPA Superfund site. I, on the other hand, didn’t think that my feet smelled all that bad. But then again, that’s also how I feel about lutefisk.

Once, when I was a teenager, I acquired a blazing case of athlete’s foot. Just taking off my boots and peeling away my socks was pure agony. A search of the medicine cabinet yielded a small bottle of a liquid athlete’s foot remedy. Ignorant regarding such things, I doused my toes with a generous squirt of the stuff. I was later told that my bellowing could be heard several miles away. My toes felt like they had been thrust into a vat of molten lava! It was as if a miniature Fukushima were taking place between each little piggy.

 I shared this tale of woe with an uncle who replied that he obtained a wicked form of athlete’s foot while serving in the Merchant Marines. Upon returning home to the farm, he was able to cure the malady only after he cut the toes off his boots, thus exposing his tootsies to fresh air and sunshine. He was a tough guy, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he did this even though it was the dead of winter.

Then there is the issue of B.O. This can be a tricky topic, as there is no objective standards regarding what passes for “a little funky” and what constitutes “a stink that would scour the rust off a plowshare.”

 For instance, I was recently yakking with an elderly bachelor dairy farmer when he asked if I could give him a lift to his pickup which sat on the headland of a nearby field. I said of course.

 He climbed into the car and the air instantly filled with the choking aromas of dried dairy cow manure, diesel fumes and old guy B.O. These odors intermingled with a level of bad breath that can only obtained by washing down a cud of smokeless tobacco with a quart of stale coffee. I rolled my window down as we slowly bumped our way to the field.

“Something wrong with your eyes?” asked the old guy.

 “Must have got some dust in them,” I replied as I frantically gulped fresh air.

“Well, they sure are watering a lot. You should probably get that checked out.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said between deep tokes of outside air, “What’s up with that car air freshener hanging from the back of your cap?”

 “That’s to keep the skeeters away. Might look silly, but it works pretty darn good!” “What about the smell?”

 “That there’s a bonus feature. Wearing a air freshener all the time cuts way down on body odors. I bet I take only half as many baths!”

 Wow! It was hard to imagine how he’s still single!

The Frog Assassin

So I was mowing the lawn the other day when it occurred to me that I’m a frog assassin.

This was not a goal I had set for my life. It’s not like I went to a special ops school where I and other fresh-faced cadets were drilled about the habits of hoppy amphibians: the places where frogs tend to vacation, which bars they are most likely to frequent after work, their favorite brand of shampoo. That is, if frogs used shampoo. Which I’m pretty sure they don’t.

A highly-trained cold-blooded James Bond-like frog killer I am not.

But there I was, rubbing out numerous frogs as I piloted my lawnmower across our front lawn. Well, not exactly rubbing out. The process was actually more akin to hitting the “liquefy” button on a blender.

Perhaps I should have felt guilty about mowing down the hapless hoppers, but what could I do? The silly frogs weren’t getting out of the way quickly enough! And some of them actually leaped toward the mower, as if they had a death wish or were vying for a spot in a Jackass movie.

In any case, I felt not the slightest bit of remorse. I saw it as natural selection via gas-powered lawn care equipment.

We seem to have an overabundance of frogs this year. You see them at night in the headlights, tiny liquid green arcs that erupt randomly from the road. You would never see any self-respecting toad behave so, tempting fate in the inky asphalt darkness.

Maybe the profusion of frogs can be explained by this year’s weather. Up until several weeks ago, the road ditches near my house held ponds of water. Judging by the amphibian chorus that serenaded us each night, there was a megalopolis of lovelorn frogs residing in those ponds.

But summer wore on and the water gradually disappeared. Imagine it from the frogs’ point of view. You and a bunch of your buddies are living it up in a virtual palace. One day, you notice that your mansion has shrunk considerably; in less than a week, your digs have completely evaporated!

What’s a frog to do? One of your pals points out that yonder lawn is green and inviting, a jungle of damp grass. Let’s move in there, urge your buddies. What’s the worst that could happen? It isn’t like that lawn ever gets mowed.

One of those Lilliputian frogs somehow found his way into our basement. We know this thanks to the loud chirrups that are emitted by our downstairs squatter. I have searched for the little bugger, eager to serve him an eviction notice, but he somehow knows to shut up if I so much as think about going to the basement.

I don’t know what he’s living on, but hope it’s cobweb spiders. There certainly seems to be a plentiful supply of those things in the cellar!

Sooner or later, everyone who drives a car will visit automotive mayhem upon some furry or feathered or slimy creature. You might even see the critter at the roadside, debating over whether or not to cross. It’s easy to imagine what’s going through their head:

“Should I go? No, that car’s coming too fast! Wait! It’s slowing down and swerving to give me more space! I bet I can make it! Here goes! Hey, he’s speeding back up! AIIEEE!!”

Some of us country folk -- myself included -- will actually try to take aim at these jaywalking varmints. This is only happens on roads where there’s no traffic and the critter in question is clearly a pest, such as a mouse or a gopher. Sadly, I have yet to see a traveling salesman standing at the roadside debating whether or not he should go for it.

I am by no means the only person in our family to commit motorized mayhem. My wife recalls the carnage that once followed when she drove the lawnmower over a nest of baby mice. And she’s especially adept at “grilling” deer with our car, a particularly expensive method for obtaining fresh venison.

Our sons remember an incident that occurred when they were yet too young to drive. They were riding in the car with their grandma when a striped gopher scampered across the lonesome gravel road.

Grandma suddenly swerved -- toward the gopher! “Darn!” she muttered, “Missed the little bugger!”

The boys were taken aback. This was a side of their kindly grandma that they had never seen!

Later, when they told us of the event, they ended their tale with, “Who would have thought that Grandma is a killer?”

I could only grin. It runs in the family.

Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning can be a hazardous voyage for me.

It happens nearly every time I try to neaten things up. I launch into the cleanup project under full sail only to find myself run aground on Memory Lane, shipwrecked upon the rocky shoals of the past.

The most recent spring cleaning of our basement is a good example. I was making tremendous headway when I paused to consider the fate of a large wooden box. Should I simply chuck the entire box and assign its unknown contents to oblivion? I opted to paw through it first to see if it held anything of value.

A mistake.

The early decisions were easy. I have always thought that the term “artificial Christmas tree” was an oxymoron, so goodbye synthetic tannenbaum! I then hit a major snag in the form of a lath basket hauled up from the grungy depths of the box.

My gosh! I had totally forgotten about that basket! I dimly recall rescuing it some years ago from my grandparents’ old house which sits slowly moldering out in my grove.

The basket held clothes and other items Grandma Nelson had saved. In order to examine its contents, I dumped the basket out onto the basement floor. Its newspaper liner was dated April, 1961 -- exactly half a century ago! It suddenly became imperative that I study this time capsule.

The clothing Grandma had saved was rotted to rags, but other items were worthy of scrutiny, including a hardcover book titled “Tom Swift and his Sky Racer.” If that title sounds quaint, there’s a good reason: the tome bears a copyright date of 1911.

Apparently, Tom Swift was a teenaged genius, adventurer and inventor extraordinaire. The book breathlessly relates the tale of Tom and his homebuilt “aeroplane”, which, judging by the book’s lone illustration, was constructed from plans drawn up by Leonardo da Vinci.

Another extremely interesting item is a 1961 Sears catalogue, which contains everything the modern consumer could ever want.

Sears offered baby chicks, Smith-Corona electric portable typewriters, and those jiggle-inducing belt massagers. A “huge 23-inch TV” was priced at $200. Monochrome, of course; the widespread broadcast of color TV signals was still a few years off.

Also sold by Sears was a “Famous Enfield .303 Rifle, Pride of the British Army” for the princely sum of $11.88. Rebuilt automatic transmissions started at $99.95, about the same as a new Kenmore wringer washer. A pair of ladies shoes cost $3.33, while foundation garments that resembled self-propelled underwater weaponry could be purchased for 87 cents.

The basket next yielded an item that really grabbed my attention: a Successful Farming magazine that was dated August, 1957! Just two months before my birth! My recollections of that time are somewhat dim, so I thumbed through the publication to see what sort of world had welcomed me.

Among the top traits that stood out was the large number of articles and ads that were aimed at the homemaker -- a reminder that this was an era before farming had transmogrified into Agribusiness.

There were numerous ads for such things as mounted corn pickers, although one blurb was peddling equine liniment. It seems that not everyone had yet made the jump to mechanical horsepower.

One ad featured an image of a 1957 Chevrolet station wagon. Normally, a station wagon would be considered stodgy, but the ‘57 Chevy model somehow managed to look cool.

Amidst the cookie recipes and the ads for spark plugs and Kool-Aid and Terramycin is a full-page advertisement touting an exciting new innovation called “atomic-electric power.” Wonder how that whole thing worked out?

A bank statement from December of 1945 reveals that Grandpa had nearly $500 in his checking account, a sizeable sum for that time. Also in the basket was Grandpa’s husking hook. Its leather straps are still in pretty good condition, and slipping it on reminded me just how huge Grandpa’s hands were. I am definitely hanging onto that husking hook.

A letter from Grandma’s cousin Pauline in Jewell, Iowa is dated February 4, 1908. In the first third of the letter, the writer divulges that she regrets having not written sooner and that she’s now finally getting around to it. The second third is commentary on the chilliness of the weather, and how are you folks, and we’re just fine down here. The third section of the letter bemoans the fact that writer is now out of space and that she had best close.

Not real riveting stuff, which just goes to show that they weren’t all wordy Wordsworths back then.

My wife eventually called down the basement stairwell to see how things were going.

“You’d better call the rescue team!” I replied. “It’s happened again! I’ve become marooned in the past!”

Mandolin Man

Drive onto Larry Groon’s farmyard northeast of Arlington and you won’t see much out of the ordinary. The farmstead sports the typical assortment of outbuildings, along with a majestic farmhouse.

But step inside Larry’s workshop and things begin to take a turn for the unusual. The unremarkable array of woodworking tools share space with an extraordinary assortment of stringed musical instruments. Here hangs a banjo; there sits a stylish mandolin. A shelf holds a partially assembled guitar.

All of which were built by Larry.

“My son Steve and I milked 60 cows in a stanchion barn until it burned down in 2000,” said Larry, who will be 72 this year. “We talked about getting back into dairying, but eventually decided against it.”

Larry and Steve rebuilt the milk house, which Larry now uses as a woodworking shop. Larry has since constructed numerous pieces of furniture for his wife, Joan.

About 5 years ago Larry began to toy with the idea of building a stringed musical instrument.

“I’ve always wanted to do art, but lacked the skill,” says Larry. “I thought that maybe building something musical would satisfy my artistic impulses.”

Larry found plans for a mountain banjo in the pages of a Popular Mechanics magazine.

“It’s the sort of banjo they would traditionally build as a first instrument for a kid in the Appalachians,” says Larry. “I followed the plans to the letter. But the neck is out of proportion to the body, so it sounds out of tune when you play the high notes.”

Undaunted, Larry next purchased plans for building a mandolin.

“I figured that a mandolin is small and would take less time to build than something like a guitar. But I soon learned that building a mandolin is fussy work.”

Larry recalls how he felt when he first installed the strings on his first mandolin.

“I was so nervous, my hands were shaking,” he says. “I finally had to leave it and come back later.”

But the results of his hours of fussy work exceeded his expectations.

“It sounded good. Certainly I made some mistakes on that first mandolin, but that’s how you learn.”

Larry denies possessing any special musical abilities or artistic skill.

“I’m a three-chord wonder; I can play three chords and wonder how I can even do that. I learned that constructing stringed instruments is mostly engineering and that if done well, engineering can become a thing of beauty. Building mandolins is my way of creating art.”

As Larry built more mandolins -- he has now produced a total of 19 -- his skills grew. He gleaned advice from an Internet forum for luthiers, and the UPS truck began to bring exotic wood from across the globe to the Groon farm.

“I like to use local wood whenever possible,” says Larry. “I’ve made instruments from a felled ash tree that grew on our farm and have used black walnut that I bought from a guy at Milbank.”

Larry was soon hankering for new challenges. He began to construct guitars and has built ten so far. He just put the finishing touches on his first hollow neck lap steel guitar and recently completed an Irish bouzouki made from native ash.

Larry has added some of his own tweaks to his purchased mandolin pattern. So it has been with his guitars.

“Our daughter Linda likes to play music and we got started talking one day about designing our own guitar. After a good bit of debate, we came up with something that we thought would work.”

A twinkle in his eye, Larry unfolds a large sheet of paper that has a guitar outline drawn upon it. Flipping the paper over reveals that it’s actually the outer layer of a seed corn sack.

Like all farmers, Larry improvises whenever possible. For instance, he uses a homemade rig built of scrap iron to heat the wood that will be formed into the sides of his instruments. Beef bone is used in the bridges of his guitars.

“Bone is traditional, plus most agree that it produces a superior sound,” says Larry.

Asked how many hours it takes to build an instrument, Larry replies, “About a month.”

The musical instruments produced in Larry’s workshop are a wonder to behold, with intricate inlays and a silky smooth finish. Art has truly been achieved through engineering.

Larry has now reached the point where he has begun to instruct others in the craft of lutherie.

“I would like nothing better if more people came to my shop so I can pass on what I have learned,” he says.

Asked if this is a hobby or a passion, Larry replies, “Neither. It’s a gift from God. He just waited until this time of my life to give it to me!”