A Pipe Smoking Man

I never smoked cigarettes during my High School years. This was something you did when you got older, like drinking coffee. The only thing I smoked as a kid was rolled up fallen oak leaves in the autumn as I and other kids played outside after supper in Kasson, MN.

At Rochester Junior College in Rochester, MN in Fall of 1960, I was learning that the transition from Lourdes High School to college (even a Junior College) was not as seamless as I thought. Much more work was required in the college classes to keep one's head above water.

So about one-third into the school year I decided I should improve my image and perceived intelligence by smoking a pipe. Cigarettes would not do the job. If I just needed the nicotine, cigarettes would be fine, but smoking a pipe was not about the nicotine, it was all about image. Therefore, I needed to smoke a pipe.

It was well known that some great men (and some brave great women) smoked a pipe. The most notable men to me were the physicists Albert Einstein (of E = MC^2 fame) and J. Robert Oppenheimer ("Father of the Atomic Bomb"). A photo of them working together (but not smoking pipes)  is shown below.

[Note: I got this photo from Wikipedia which stated that : "This image is a work of a US Military, or the Department of  Defense employee, taken or made during the course of the employee's official duties. As a work of the Federal Government, the image is in the public domain"]

What I hadn't figured out yet, however, was that just because some great men smoked a pipe, smoking a pipe didn't make a great man!

None-the-less, I dove deep into the art of smoking a pipe, complete with leather tobacco pouch, various brands of aromatic tobacco, tobacco tampers, special matches, a special pipe lighter, and of course a variety of nice pipes. One needed a "man purse" to carry all the stuff around. At first I started out with one inexpensive pipe but soon added to my collection, pipes made of brier, clay, ceramic, corncob and meerschaum. I also got my friend Larry interested.  Below is a collection of pipes similar to ones I would be collecting and nurturing.

This photo is from Wikipedia released into the "Public Domain" by Daniel Halton on January 31,2009

Larry and I would make our way to the college "smoking" lounge between classes and go through the ritual of carefully tamping tobacco into the bowl of the pipe so it would burn evenly. Then after lighting the tobacco, and blowing the aromatic smoke into the surrounding air, we waited for another student to say "That smells like, cherries" or "What kind of tobacco is that? It smells great!" We were especially pleased if we got an affirmative comment from a female student. The pipe would always extinguish after several minutes and we needed to light it again and again. Also, the more tobacco that had burned, the more foul smelling was the smoke that would emanate from the top of the bowl.

One day Karl Dubbert, our much feared mathematics instructor came into the lounge, staying a while, maybe to smoke a cigarette and/or to talk to a student. On leaving, after watching Larry and me smoke our pipes,  he wondered out loud: "If you guys spent as much time studying instead of smoking your pipes, your grades might be better!"

Larry and I continued smoking our pipes and occasionally had "smoking contests" in which we each chose our favorite pipe, agreed on a specific amount of the same brand of tobacco, tamped our pipes, and allowed ourselves only 3 matches to see who could keep their pipe burning the longest. One such contest was around a campfire one day (see photo below) when we were out "hunting" crows. The hunting is in quotes, because we never killed anything (nor really wanted to) while hunting. It was just an excuse to get out into nature. 

Larry (Left) and Humble Blogger having a smoking contest.

In the 1965 photo below, your Humble Blogger is reading the news with first-born son John in his lap.  Smoking pipes collected thus far are shown on the fireplace mantel.   The water pipe to the right was not used for its intended purpose and was for display only!

Another photo below, shows your Humble Blogger smoking a pipe at a December 1967 graduation party in Minneapolis, MN after having received a undergraduate diploma from the University of Minnesota. Because of my extended time in earning a degree (while working at 3M), my younger brother Jim also graduated at the same ceremony and we celebrated together. Except for the glare ice on all the roads that night, we had a great time.

This bad habit stayed with me until 1980 when I moved into an apartment and didn't want to smell up the place. I smashed all my 20-30 pipes that I had lovingly managed for 20 years, and tossed them out with little consideration. Times were a changing. It was getting harder and harder to smoke at 3M Company and in other places around town. In addition, I was part of a Medical Products Division at 3M and I was getting more health conscious.  I could hardly justify smoking anymore.  This was all preparation for taking up running in 1984 when smoking would have been anathema to that activity.

Most important of all was that I finally realized that smoking a pipe had not made me great!

Carnival

In July 1981, I and my two sons, John and Joe went to the Carnival in North St. Paul, MN  (You guessed it.  A small town north of St. Paul, MN).     The annual event ended not too many years later and was replaced by another summer festival. 

We always liked to play the "Diggers", those crane devices housed in a glass cages with lots of prizes scattered beneath the crane to grab if the player was skillful enough.  After putting in a quarter, the player turned a crank, always clockwise,  to move the crane's jaws through a round trip which included a changing swing distance over the floor of prizes, a drop with open jaws, a closure of the jaws over the prize, a pull-up and a jerky swing over a drop hole. If a prize had been captured in the the jaws, the jerky swing usually insured that it was dropped before being delivered to the hole.

The "best" prizes were always placed just beyond the reach of the crane's jaws, but a skillful and observant player could get the jaws swinging to drop on the valued prize and navigate it to the drop hole.  The concessions operator behind the diggers either took money and started the game, or made change so the player could insert money into the coin slot.  The operator also handed out the won prize to the player (in the diggers we played) or the prize slid through a slot into the player's hands.

Below are two images of a digger I photographed at "Luther Auctions"  in North St. Paul, Mn (with permission) June 28, 2010 some 3 months after I published this post.  I was very excited  that I had finally found a Digger to photograph!  I still regret not snapping a photo of one at a carnival or county fair in the "old days"

$0.50 Digger with Prize Slot (left) and Crank (middle)

Closeup of Crane and Jaws

Imagine the carpeted floor of the glass cages filled with small trinket "prizes" 
The day I and my sons were at the Carnival, I was saddened to see a little girl behind the array of diggers taking people's money and handing won prizes to them.  I thought of how well cared for my kids were and how neglected this little girl looked.  I'd played many diggers in my life but had never seen this.  I wanted to capture the event in free verse:

             Carnival

Alone in a cage of "diggers."

She was barely ten, I guessed;
dirty face, soiled clothes,
disheveled sun-bleached hair.

Her smallness required a
soft-drink case (or was it beer)
beneath ragged tennis shoes.

Scrambling, she dismounted,
moved and mounted, reaching
over glass-walled machines
taking quarters from eager
faces on the other side.

Handles cranked wildly, swinging
steel jaws above worthless
trinkets positioned precisely
beyond reach. Some snagged
by luck dropped into a bin.
These she retrieved for the
skilled operators, passing
dice, glass mugs, and plastic
rings outside her cage.

Exchanging hands were of
similar size but neglected
ones stayed within and
attended ones without.

"I'll tell my dad!" she whined
when a player accused her of
causing his prize to fall
from the grip of a jaw. Tears
followed wiping clean a dusty
path down each of her cheeks.

Momentarily her hardness had
broken, transforming an adult
child back into a child.

Meanwhile, odors of fried onions,
pronto-pups, popcorn and stale
beer blended with the carnival din.
        ____________

White Mule

In 1961 (or 62) I and my friend Larry took a chemistry lab together at Rochester Junior College in Rochester, MN.  An example of  how the lab looked at that time is shown by the photo below scanned from the 1961 "RaJuco" yearbook for the college.

The "In Memoriam" photo is honoring Mr. Charles E. Singley who had recently died after teaching chemistry at the College for 37 years. Notice Mr. Singley is working a Slide Rule* to make calculations as two other students watch a third student titrating liquid into a beaker.  Larry isn't in this photo.

[* Since there were no electronic calculators at the time, Slide Rules made use of the fact that once numbers were converted to "logarithms" (powers of 10) , the numbers could be multiplied  by simply adding the logarithms together. One could find the resulting product by taking the "anti-logarithm" (a number) of the addition.    Numbers could similarly be divided by subtracting one logarithm from the other. All this was easy to do using the slide rule and the resulting calculations were surprisingly accurate.]

Over the course of the year, Larry and I were getting skilled in the practical art of using lab equipment to run our assigned experiments.  One day Larry announced that he was going to make some moonshine.  He had found a small, little used closet in the lab that was also vented.  This would be the perfect place to to hide a fermenting glass jug because the yeasty, alcoholic odor would go up the stack and not be noticed by anyone in the lab.  All one needed was  sugar, water, yeast and yeast nutrient to get a brew going. Other ingredients such as barley or wheat could also be added.  For Larry this would be just another non-required  "extra credit" experiment.

I wasn't so hot on this idea for fear of the consequences if  "we"  got caught.

Larry assembled all the hardware and ingredients anyway and started his fermentation in a glass carboy in the vented closet.  He showed me progress of the bubbling mash over the course of one week to 10 days at which time the carbon dioxide bubbles subsided because the yeast  had used up all the sugar in producing a liquid containing 8% to 14% ethanol by volume.  He let the mash settle for a week or two so he could siphon off the "wash" from the settled yeast dregs.

For several evenings, after school hours, Larry set up a glass retort still complete with a water-cooled condenser column, and proceeded to distill the "wash" .   As the liquid was heated in the round bottom flask, ethanol, boiling at a lower temperature than water, was first to leave the flask. Its vapor traveled through the condenser column where is became liquid again and dripped into a receiving flask as concentrated ethanol.

Once all the "wash" was distilled, the resulting ethanol would be distilled again to purify it from the non-ethanol (higher molecular weight alcohols) components responsible for hangover headache.   It was during this second distillations that the whole glass assembly caught fire!  Fortunately, the lab was well equipped with fire extinguishers and Larry was able to quickly put out the fire, thus protecting the lab and minimizing his loss of distilled brew.  I don't know how he later explained to the lab instructor that he had to use one of the CO2 extinguishers and that the lab would need a replacement for the next student's fire.

Larry called his brew "White Mule" ( because it kicked like a mule) and stored it in a couple flat, clear glass pint bottles he had carried from home.

On those mornings after the moonshine "experiment" when Larry and I met in the lab to brew tea, we occasionally added a shot of "White Mule" to the tea to get a good start on the day!

A Lucky Shot?

Between 1950 and 1953 ( I would have been 8 to 11 years old) It was my week to stay on my Grandpa Andrew's " farm" in Owatonna, Minnesota.  The time of the year was late summer to autumn.  The farm's location on this Google map, is marked by the red asterisk on St. Paul Road.  Today it is developed with apartments, townhouses and residential homes. The Owatonna Jr. High School just across St. Paul Road to the east.   Click the photo to enlarge, then click the "back" arrow to return here.

One night after supper, grandpa and I went outside to get a little fresh air before nightfall and our retreat back to the house for cookies, milk and bed (for me anyway).  We stood in the middle of the yard with the house to our backs (east), and a barn with a hay loft and attached slant-roof garage straight ahead (west), a utility shed with a metal roof to our left (south), and to our right was a pig pen, grain shed, chicken coop and dog kennel (north).

This Photo by Dave Kozlowski at http://dallasphotoworks.com/ is used with permission

As Grandpa lit a cigar, a swarming/migrating flock of grackles passed overhead. They were flying high. [Similar to the photo above by Dave Kozlowski taken in Fort Worth, TX January 22, 2010]  Grandpa Andrew quickly got out his bolt action .22 rifle and loaded it with a 22 Long Rifle rimfire cartridge.  He aimed the gun upward for 20 seconds or so leading the movement of the birds with the gun's barrel. He shot only once and about 30 seconds later, a grackle came fluttering to the ground several feet away from us!  The bullet had hit its wing. He dispatched it quickly by breaking its neck. I stood there in disbelief but also with great admiration for my grandpa's shooting skills!

Grandpa Andrew Kubiatowicz
Andrew spent his entire life in the nursery business, with the Mitchell Nursery Company, Owatonna Nursery Company, and the longest time with Cashman Nurseries Inc. He was an expert at grafting and one particular tree by the house contained 3 different varieties of apples!  He and his brothers were avid hunters and fishermen.

Andrew and his wife Margaret (Learch) Kubiatowicz, daughter (also named Margaret) and son Eugene (my father) , moved to the farm in 1939 to take care of Margaret's ailing father Charles Learch, who owned the farm. Everyone except Eugene would stay at the farm which Andrew regarded as a "Hobby" farm.  He kept a few cows (for milk), steers (for meat), hogs (for meat), and chickens (for eggs and meat) and butchered them at appropriate times.

My father Eugene left the farm after he married my mother Mary Bauman in May 29, 1939 and the two of them rented and  lived in Andrew's home on South Street in Owatonna. 

Andrew's house was between brother Steve and brother Martin's house on South Street.  This was because years after immigrating from Poland in 1886 with their parents (Joseph Kubiatowicz And Josephine Larokowski), the three brothers Steve, Andrew and Martin built their homes in a row on South Street. There was a fourth home built for brother Joseph, but that one was sold and Joseph lived on the other side of town.  I and my two brothers were born in a hospital that was just down the street from our (Andrew's) house.

The photo below shows Andrew Kubiatowicz's home under construction on South Street circa 1911.

The 1945 garden photo below (the house is to the left) shows Eugene (my dad), Andrew holding James(my younger brother), Margaret (Andrews wife) and Margaret (Andrew's daughter).  In the Front is my older brother Michael (now deceased) and behind him David (your humble blogger). Shown behind the group is St. Paul Road  (gravel at that time) it runs north and south.  If a car drove on the road from the left to the right of the photo, it would be heading south.    

The 1942 photo below shows Andrew with a firm grip on the halter of one of his "hobby" Steers while holding my older brother Michael.  They're in the pasture behind the barn (west of the house).

The 1945 photo below shows Andrew with older brother Michael to his right and David (your humble blogger) on his left wearing a kid's version of a US Army "garrison" cap.   Youngest brother James is in the center.  I don't remember the name of the beagle but Andrew did, at one time,  have a dog he kept in the barn with the name of "Rusty".  The backdrop is the farm's chicken coup which was north.

Softly and Tenderly (Jesus is Calling)

My loving wife Rose Played mandolin with the Gospel Choir at St. Odilia's 9 AM Mass Sunday morning (2/28/10).  Dan the director said that if there was time during communion (and there was)  the music group would play and sing "Softly and Tenderly", a great evangelical hymn composed by Will L. Thompson (1847-1909) Rose had been practicing "Softly and Tenderly" on her mandolin at home and the tremolo was simply beautiful!

"Softly and Tenderly"  reminded me of the wonderful 1985 movie "Trip to Bountiful" which stars Geraldine Page, and features this hymn.  I have a short summary of the film below The video clip shows opening and closing credits from the movie while Cynthia Clawson is singing. Also there is a short segment showing Page humming the song as she is sitting in her rocking chair contemplating Bountiful. 

The hymn also reminded me that from 1992 to 2004, I was part of the layman's  "Parish Vigil Prayer Service Ministry" at St. Pius X Catholic Church in White Bear Lake, MN.  In this ministry one of us would take turns to preside over the wake service of a deceased parishioner. 

The service usually took place at 7 pm, in the middle of the "showing" the evening prior to the funeral Mass the next day.   The services were never easy for me because usually I didn't know the person very well and thus I was an outsider (and a logical scientific kind of guy at that) entering into a sometimes very emotional setting!   It was a good thing I had help from above!! I would always have to explain in my introductory remarks that I wasn't a priest or a deacon, just a lay person helping out.  None-the-less I was often called "Father". 

We used  prayers and scripture from a Catholic book called "Order of Christian Funerals"   The entire service never lasted more than 15-20 minutes and we had a certain latitude to give a short teaching if we wished or play music and sing songs if we desired.  Sometimes I played a cassette tape recording of Cynthia Clawson singing "Softly and Tenderly"  The mourners on hearing the beautiful music became hushed.  How could any Christian not be touched by such soothing words of promise and haunting melody!

"Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me.

Chorus
"Come home, come home,
You who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home! "

Cynthia Clawson's singing was featured in the 1985 movie "Trip to Bountiful".  This movie takes place in Texas in1947.  An an elderly woman (Geraldine Page) lives in a cramped apartment with her loving son (John Heard)  and his bossy wife (Carlin Glynn)   The elderly Page, wants nothing else but to return to her (fictional) home town Bountiful, Texas before she dies. She doesn't know however, that over the years, Bountiful  has become a ghost town with crumbling shacks.   She "escapes" from the apartment and tries to take a train but none are running to Bountiful any more.   She does catch a bus and meets up with a young woman (Rebecca DeMornay) who befriends her and delights in Page's stories. The Sheriff (Richard Bradford) is ordered to find Page and catches up with her just 12 miles from Bountiful.  He relents and allows her to complete her journey resulting in Page feeling happy and at peace with herself for the first time in years. 

During the opening credits, Page, as a young mother is chasing her son (played as an adult by John Heard) over a wildflower covered field.

The end of the clip shows a quite satisfied Page getting into her son's (1947?) Chevy and leaving Bountiful for the last time.  The daughter-in-law is barely seen on the front passenger side of the car.



Link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EgJxPbS9ds

[Note that among You Tube's current "Terms of Service" requirements is the statement:  "If you use the YouTube Embeddable Player on your website, you must include a prominent link back to the YouTube website on the pages containing the Embeddable Player and you may not modify, build upon, or block any portion of the Embeddable Player in any way"   Thus, I've included the link for the above embedded video back to You Tube.]

Contacting UFOs !

I was 14 and in Kasson, MN in 1956.  I was interested in  UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) because of all the commotion about an alleged spaceship(s) crash near Roswell, NM in July 1947 and the alleged recovery of extra-terrestrial debris and alien corpses.  It was also alleged that the U.S.Goverment was involved in a giant cover-up of the entire operation.  The controversy has heated-up and cooled-off over succeeding years, but continues today in 2010.

I studied up on the subject, reading many of the publications of  1956 and decided that I wanted to contact a UFO.

I found instructions in a  magazine (probably Popular Science) for building a A"Light Transmitter" out of a 6 volt lantern.  The lantern contained a large 6 volt battery. The instructions called for hooking up a carbon microphone into the lantern battery circuit.  As one spoke into the microphone the resistance in the circuit would change slightly  and a "modulated" or perturbed light would shine out from the bulb reflector.   Think of a lantern with no battery (no light), weak battery (a little more light) and new battery (full light).  The modulated light would be so slight that the eye couldn't pick it up but a photo cell in an amplified receiver circuit could detect small changes in the light intensity and translate them back into voice sounds.

I built one of the transmitting devices but never constructed the much more complicated receiver, so I never knew if the transmitter worked.   None-the-less,   I beamed the light out my bedroom window into the night-sky and spoke into the carbon microphone to any passing UFOs inviting them to contact me at 530 on my AM radio dial.   I figured that they would certainly have the technology to receive my modulated light signal and also the intelligence to convert English into their native Alien language and the rudimentry ability to transmit radio signals back to me.

Shown below is our Kraher's Meat Marked that dad owned. Standing at the opened door in winter garb are my older brother Mike (now deceased) 9 years old at the time, and younger brother Jim standing behind, 6 years old. Our family lived in a narrow but long apartment above the Market. Dad closed shop in 1957  and moved our family to Rochester, MN.

Below is an April 5, 1980 photo of "Kraher's Market"  transformed into an Insurance Agency.  I took this photo on a "Down memory Lane" trip to Kasson that Spring day.  The upstairs apartment can clearly be seen.  Three bedroom windows are seen on the right, including the third window beneath a TV antenna. I shined my UFO light out one of the rear windows.

As far as I know, I never got any reply at my 530 AM radio dial, unless static was some sort of reply. 

I, therefore built a 2nd generation, more basic UFO contacting device consisting of a 100 watt light bulb inside an aluminum reflector (garage light), and mounted the reflector on our apartment roof near where the antenna is showing in the 1980 photograph.   Of course, the bulb and reflector were aimed up at the night sky.

Now, don't try this at home, but  I used a long extension cord to reach from the light through my bedroom window and into a 110 AC outlet.   I pushed the switch at the bulb end to "ON" to turn the light on.  Then I removed the plug from the AC outlet, cut one of the 2 cords , stripped the cut ends of the cord and screwed the ends tightly to the two terminals on my Morse Code key.  I plugged the light back into the AC outlet and in doing so, I could control the lighting of the bulb on the roof by pressing my Code Key. 

I had learned Morse Code as I was intending to get a Ham Radio license.  So on several occasions at night, I sent out code (sparks flying as my code key contacts touched)  to any passing UFOs, again telling them to contact me on the 530 AM dial. 

My light flashing da dit da dit | da da dit da ("CQ" meaning in Ham Radio lingo "Calling all others") into the night sky over Kasson, MN  [in the state of Minnesota in the United States of America, in the North American continent and on the 3rd planet from the Sun] on several nights in 1956, never produced any concrete replies! 

 Because I was concerned about getting electrocuted by 110 volts going through exposed terminals on my code key, I gave up trying to contact UFOs. I still dreamed of them however and even thought I saw one!

I would never forget about UFOs always believing in their possibility.  My last official UFO involvement was in the 1969 3M Company UFO Club.   My Membership card is shown below.

A Dart Between the Eyes!

The time was in the 1950's in Kasson, MN.  I suppose I was age 10-12.  I left my apartment above Kraher's Meat Market on main street to go to a friend's house to play.  I don't remember brothers Mike or Jim being there with me.  The friend had hung a dart board on the tree near his home and he and I and a number of other kids from the area were trying to hit the bulls eye with metal tipped darts.

Not long into the game, I walked up to the tree and leaned over to pick up some darts.  Just as I stood up and turned my head to face the kids, with my back to the dart board, I was hit between, my eyes (about 1/2 in above the nasal bone into the frontal bone) with a dart that one of the kids had thrown!!   So there I was, standing with a dart sticking out of my skull!

It took a few seconds to realize that nothing was damaged.  I didn't think the dart tip had penetrated my skull completely and there was no blood or pain.  I simply pulled out the dart to the wonderment of the staring kids, and we all breathed a sigh of relief especially the person who had thrown the dart.   Afterwards, we continued playing the game as before but with new rules.

The indent in my skin where the dart had penetrated, was still visible for years to follow.  Not enough for anybody to notice except me who was always reminded that I could have lost an eye that day!

Below is a photo of a dartboard against a tree that I purchased from dreamstime.com for use in this blog.  The photo is illustrative only as I remember our dart board being hung on a nail higher up the trunk of the tree.  The dart board itself was similar however, being made of concentric laminations so that the dart tips could easily penetrate the surface.

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