Just for fun, at the joint teams kickoff of the FIRST season, we threw together a mock up of of the playing field made out of cardboard, cafeteria chairs, etc. And put kids on rolling chairs to be "robots". A once a year exception to the general rule that we expect them to build robots, not become them.
Dad grew up on a farm. One that still was doing things the way they'd been done, well, forever. There were still a few horses. The language spoken at home was German. That's also what was used at the nearby school house for younger kids. My memory is telling me this was referred to as "The German School".
Maybe some people thrive on the daily routines and the long repeating cycles of farm life. Dad, not so much. He had the motivation to get off to the big city and do something different. And the ability. He was Valedictorian of his - admittedly small - high school class. I never asked him, but its my assumption that the student body got smaller as kids decided, or were told, "Enough of that nonsense, we need your help at home." (Google Translate would put this roughly as: "Genug von diesem Unsinn, Zeit, nach Hause zu kommen und zu arbeiten", but that would be classic High German, they spoke a sort of rustic dialect called "Plattdeutch"
Going through the detritus of my parent's house I found many artifacts. Lots relating to my own academic career. These are sobering. I clearly thought I was smarter than the record indicates. Also, a few fascinating things from my father, who appears to have been smarter than I thought. Or was he just an exemplar of a generation that valued learning more?
Here's a notebook from what seems to have been his sophomore year in college:
It was from some sort of anatomy and physiology class. There's detailed, hand written charts describing how frogs respond to assorted stimuli after various parts of their brains have been destroyed. Macabre stuff, but interesting.
It's interesting to see where our careers overlapped in time. I found a few examples of his hospital dictation work. All of it precise, detailed, and with perfectly fluent thought....
Now of course this is essentially a Lost Art. I've written in the past about the Pros (able to access and link to other information) and Cons (templates make doctors lazy) of Electronic Medical Records. As I've said earlier, my dad was never lazy. If he said - as in this summary - that a patient had "..an indurated saphenous vein in the right calf..." Then she damn well did.
What exactly makes one an excellent physician? Hard working helps. Smart helps. In the era my dad was practicing being "Old School" probably helped too. I remember one of his colleagues describing him as "One of the Great Gentlemen of Medicine".
It's probably the epitaph he'd be most proud of. If he probably had the intelligence to succeed in some other field he may not have had the instincts for say, business. The one mild regret I heard him once express really surprised me. Evidently when he was stationed in Germany he had the chance to travel around a bit. At one point he was interested in visiting Vienna, which was then the mecca of the new discipline of psychiatry. How my father, that smart but in many ways naive man would have dealt with the outer fringe of a crazy world is hard to imagine....
Well, here we go again. The "reveal" video for the 2026 game......
Time for a bit of mid winter tidy up. Boxes are being pulled out, rummaged through. Some things are being kept, others tossed. Never quite enough of the latter. Sometimes you find things that just are askin' for a bit of research. Behold:
When my Better Half was in college she spent a semester abroad. Not in Paris or any such fun location, in Haiti! This was towards the tail end of the Duvallier dictatorship, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, but before it descended to its current state of anarchy.
This beer coaster came back with her. She recalls that the drinks available in 1978 were Coke, beer and rum. All warm. She never tried the beer, but has always been a fiend when it comes to using coasters for drinks. So what's the story behind this, er, colorful item?
Prestige beer is, or perhaps was, a product of Brasserie Nationale d Haiti, or BRANA. This was founded in 1973 by Michael Madsen. Madsen was Haitian, from a Danish family of some prominence. Prestige beer was first produced in 1976. My wife was in Haiti a couple of years later.
BRANA's other lines of business historically were mostly soda. Pepsi, 7Up, and more recently their own products King Cola and an energy drink called TORO.
BRANA had some early investment from Heineken. In 2011 Heineken effectively took over the company by buying up 95% of the stock. So, how has that investment worked out? Well, there's still a nice looking website but it does not seem to have been updated in years. There's also a facebook page, similarly showing no recent posts. So, how about Google Maps? Well, its pointing me to a plant called, oddly, cocacola lachine canada. It claims to still be in operation, and the satellite view shows trucks there. I tried to get a street view, but no go. I guess the conditions in Port au Prince are such that driving around with a Google car is not practical. Someone did leave a review 3 months ago speaking highly of Prestige, so I assume it is still being made there.
This is apparently a picture.
That's a low bar considering it appears to be the only beer brewed there.
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* Regards sketchy status. In something current it might be considered offensive to show a black guy with exaggerated features and platform shoes. But this was the 1970's. All of us, black and white dressed badly. My college room mate was from the South Side of Chicago. Great guy, like me he became an ER doc. Alas, gone too soon. He had a big 'fro and shoes just like that. The 1970's, ugh.
Hmmm. This is a tough one. Frugality has been handed down from generation to generation in my family. When they came to Minnesota Territory in the late 1850's they bought their farmstead for cash from a guy who got it as a reward for fighting in the War with Mexico.
My dad grew up on that farm. My own early memories of the place were that everything needed a new coat of paint. It was old fashioned to the point that they were still hauling milk around in big round cans. Absent a modern, all sealed system they could only sell Grade B milk, for making cheese and such. I didn't realize it at the time, but the farm was locked into a Great Depression sort of mindset. When years later we cleaned the place out there were coffee cans with hundreds - maybe thousands - of buttons in Grandma's sewing area. When clothes got old they were used as rags, the buttons taken off for potential future use. As if your rate of button loss would use up this stash anytime before the 25th century!
That's how my dad grew up, and in most ways that ethos never left him. I have early memories of him shaving. Squeak! turn the faucet for a drip of hot water, turn it off, shave a little section. Then Squeak! get another teaspoon of hot water for the next bit.
But he was inconsistent. He loved cars, especially somewhat gaudy ones with extra chrome. He paid too much for them. When I was, oh, 17 or so I went with him car shopping. The salesman got him very interested in a yellow Ford Galaxy 500. Not a great car, as if the 1970's had many of those, and the asking price was a bit rich. "Dad, try offering him $______ instead". "Really?" He just had no idea of how the world worked other than charging a few bucks for office and hospital calls.
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| Yep, something like this. Ugh, what a pig. |
While cleaning out my parent's house we found various relics of fiscal imprudence. Stock certificates from, iirc, The Las Vegas Gold Exchange. Of course it, and several other companies whose fancy certificates we ran across, went bankrupt, taking the investors money down with them. Down to Mexico most likely.
Perhaps the charitable explanation is simply that money did not matter much to him. Not enough to spend time thinking too much about it.
Eventually all those dollars slowly generated by a solo physician practice did add up. You'd be surprised how much frugality helps in long term financial planning. I suppose when my mom passes a share of it will come my way. And I will immediately hand it over to my kids, his grand kids. Frugality is useful, and money comes in handy, But I also learned from him that some things are more important.
I've been looking over my dad's ledger book from his first year in private practice. Prior to this he was in an accelerated Med School track for the Army, then spent a few years as a base physician in Germany. On return he went back for a couple more years of training, then hung out the shingle. I still have that shingle btw.
Let's take a peek at this bygone era of medicine.....
This records not the actual appointment schedule, just charges and receipts. But you can fill in the gaps fairly easily. At this point in time I think my dad had not one but two offices, in different parts of town. And did house calls, nursing home calls, minor surgeries, etc.
It makes for fascinating browsing. Office calls were usually 2 or 3 dollars. Delivering a baby? $85.
He worked seven days a week. Saturdays were just as busy as Monday through Friday. On Sunday he took it a little easy, his office(s) must have been closed. But even on the Day of Rest there were Hospital Calls ($3) and Home visits ($5).
He kept very detailed records. In an average month he took in about $1500 and had expenditures of around $500.
Picking through a ledger book you find little details. His office rent was $50.50. As I'm only finding one such expense perhaps the second office came later, or perhaps I got that story wrong. At the start of the year he had one employee, a certain Marianne Peterson. She made about $190 a month. By the end of the year she was sharing the work load with a certain Mariel Hanson.
Interestingly, M. Hanson became M. Wolter and drops off the payroll in 1954. But by then I'm sure she was de facto Office Manager!
Dad's generation had a different attitude towards work. He grew up on a dairy farm, and an old fashioned one at that. There were still a few horses around when he was a young lad. He did chores. Oh, so many chores. Somehow he found a way to be Valedictorian of his high school class, so there must have been a fair amount of studying after all the work was done.
College-Med School compressed into, I think, 5 years instead of the usual 8. Then his Army doctor service, most of the time being the only post doctor on a base that was essentially a small town of GI's and their dependents. Maybe starting out in his own practice seemed easier, as he was nominally his own boss.
Eventually even he got tired. He had a well concealed literary streak. Once he wrote a lengthy poem entitled "And the Patients Lose their Patience". He got to where he felt as if the work was in charge of his life. And it was.
I did learn from dad, but sometimes learned what not to do. I worked hard, and was no slacker in my generation of physicians. But I spent more time with my boys. And I was a much better businessman. So when it came time to retire I could do so on my terms. It's been good years since I hung up the stethoscope. Dad, not so much. Work was his life. He eventually joined a group practice that had a mandatory retirement age of 70. He worked right up to the end, and so did not get the enjoyable decade I've had since 60. Sadly, after retirement he was idle, a bit lost. And what he'd lost was the thing that structured his schedule, his days and his nights. I think he genuinely enjoyed being a doctor; helping people. To some extent he also used work as his way to avoid difficult things at home.
As is sometimes the case I start out writing one story and end up somewhere unexpected.
It's that curious gap between the holidays and the swirling chaos of robotics season. There's not that much going on. Perhaps its time for a bit of reflection. Specifically on the subject of my father, who died ten years ago this month.
I remember a lecturer in Med School saying "It is a wise man who truly knows his father". Now, as it happens, he was being a bit of a smart aleck at the time. It was a Genetics course and he was alluding to the question of official vs actual paternity, one that vexed many who studied the field in early days. Now, heck, a simple swab will show you the twisty branches of your family tree on both sides clear back to Adam and Eve.
I didn't know it at the time, and maybe he didn't either, but he was quoting Homer from the Odyssey.
But I'm certainly not talking about knowing who my father was in the sense of DNA. No, as I get older, and as I pass the same way posts he did, I wonder if my image of him grows blurrier or clearer?
Obituaries are such terse summations. I have creative offspring, and do expect a better effort. In whatever format exists at that point. Perhaps I'll be in the last generation who will have eloquent obituaries and eulogies. It will just be easier to have AI write them all before too long.
Anyway, bear with me for a few memories of dad in the weeks ahead.
