[What was the best moment or period in your life?] I think that’s a pretty easy question for me. I think right now. You know, I’ve had a good time all my life, never had any real problems to speak of, got a pretty decent education I thought, and I grew up in basically a small town farm community in Iowa–in O’Brian County. So I mean, it was a free life. My parents didn’t worry about where I was. You couldn’t…
1. Did you know parents didn’t worry about you then? We were never told to be home from school at a certain time. We would meander a different way home from school all the time. We knew every way. And we went outside to play. We knew to be home for supper, we better be there for suppertime. 2. We did the same thing. I lived on a farm and we just played. We went out in the woods, we…
Is anyone familiar with persimmons? [I have a friend in Indiana and they go to persimmons festivals and stuff.] The ones in the store are from California, and they’re big and round and perfect, but that’s not the way they are in Indiana. And you don’t eat a persimmon until it falls off the tree. If you eat a green one, it’ll pucker your mouth like nothing you ever—anyway, when we were little, the woman that lived next door had…
My favorite thing to do in the summer when I was growing up was that my parents would take me from Ishpeming to Minneapolis where my grandmother lived. My mother’s mother. She was a little bitty woman who had had red hair. She had come down from Winnipeg for what reason I have no idea, I wish I did. Her name was Sarah Mable. In the afternoon in the middle of the summer, when it was hot in Minneapolis, every…
1: I grew up in the plains in western Iowa. Something I really miss when I hear about a storm coming: I have to wait for it, and then it happens. I can watch it on TV, of course. The thing about living out on the plains was that you could see hours ahead that the storm was on its way. You knew it was happening, and you would even see lightning out in the distance. So you knew what…
I don’t know if anyone remembers this storm just the other day, you know that real loud lightning we had—thunder and lightning. Well, there was a lighting strike, must have been within a block of my house because the flash and the sound came at the same time. That reminded me when I was a kid back on the farm; we had this big old tree. I can’t remember what kind of a tree now. A cottonwood, probably. Every time…
Speaking of childhood beds, we had bunk beds. I got this bright idea that I was going to take my pants and take the belt loop on the back and tie it up onto the post of that bunk bed and get onto the top bunk and jump into my pants. It worked, my legs went right down in it, but my center of gravity was up. So I got into them, and I spun around, and I was hanging…
I had a grandfather that was more the father figure for me. He was a salesman—he sold tombstones just to make it interesting—but he would always come when he had free time. We’d go fishing together. We were close to the great lakes of Iowa in Dickinson County. He knew all of the people up there, and we’d go up there, and he knew all of the better places to fish. And I kind of grew up in that area…
Does your mother ever spank you? Well, my mother hardly ever did, but she started to one time, and I ran to the backyard. And the dog was MY dog, and the dog comes RRRRRRRR! So she didn’t! Stopped her in her tracks.
Did you ever make a skate scooter? No? Do you know what I’m talking about? Maybe you’d use one of your roller skates. A skate scooter was just one board like this, another board like that, and you make a handle, and you’d take a skate apart and put half of it on the front and half of it on the back. And now they buy them.