Passing It On

Saying goodbye to the brick and mortar of our past

The room was smaller than I remembered. The steps leading up to it were steeper, the light was dimmer and the slope of the ceiling in the attic made it more difficult to stand and maneuver. But this was my old bedroom and I was there to say goodbye.

For the better part of the 1960s, the room had been my “apartment at home,” through half of my high school years and college. After breaking loose from the tiny room I had shared with my two brothers, I eagerly assumed the role of teenage male interior decorator, dragging in a table, desk and television immediately and following with a steady stream of hi-fis, each something of an improvement over its predecessor.

I transformed the cozy space into what passed for a communication/entertainment center in those days with an extension telephone (at $1 a month), shortwave radio, comfy easy chair and covered the walls with posters of James Dean, W.C. Fields, Mae West or whoever was in vogue at the time. My tee-totalling, non-smoking parents uncharacteristically allowed me to smoke and drink (once I reached legal age) in my room, privileges I would not extend to my own children many years later.

Many of my memories from that era are tied to that bedroom. But my parents moved this week, out of the house they built themselves 60 years ago. I had the rare opportunity to spend one last night in my old room. This time, though the room was mostly empty, occupied by just a few boxes – some with memories to save, others targeted for an upcoming yard sale and the rest headed for recycling or disposal.

It wasn’t particularly comfortable, trying to sleep on a camping mattress, but it was an opportunity too rich to ignore. Besides the flood of memories that bind families even tighter in times of moves like this, it’s also a chance to say goodbye to another big part of our family histories – our former homes. If you have that opportunity, I highly recommend taking it.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Corner of Larry Lehmer's bedroom in 1965 (courtesy: Larry Lehmer)

Let the confetti fly: It’s Family History Month!

Today is the first day of Family History Month. That’s a big deal to personal historians and to a growing number of Americans. During a recent series on the family histories of its anchors, NBC’s Today Show recently proclaimed researching family history as the No. 1 hobby in America.

Family History Month began in 2001 when 84 U.S. Senators co-sponsored a resolution that sailed through the chamber, recognizing that 60 percent of Americans are interested in their own family’s history.

The value of saving family stories for future generations is sadly often realized only after a loved one has died and those stories are lost forever. But  even in families where stories are meticulously documented and preserved, new and unexpected material is often uncovered. Just this week, for example, I learned that my grandmother’s marriage to my grandfather wasn’t her first marital journey.

To mark Family History Month, a group of personal historians here in central Iowa has joined forces to present a free Open House from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 19, at the Urbandale Public Library. More information will be forthcoming in a few days in my newsletter. Send me an e-mail if you want to subscribe to the newsletter.

Meanwhile, Kimberly Powell lists 10 ways you can celebrate Family History Month here.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Calvin and Lillie Lehmer with their sons, Warren and Harry courtesy of Larry Lehmer.

Life lessons learned while working on the railroad

I learned a lot from the variety of railroad jobs I held while attending college, namely:

1. I wasn’t cut out for a career involving manual labor outdoors.
2. There’s a lot of wisdom to be absorbed while working with blue-collar mentors.
3. You cover a six-team parlay with one sure thing.
4. It’s a lot more fun to ride a train than work on one.
5. We lost a lot when the passenger trains died.

The Union Pacific Railroad has been very good to me, and my family. My paternal grandfather, a great uncle, my father and several uncles made livings working for the railroad, most of them for the U.P. Both of my brothers worked there and my railroad jobs pretty much paid my way through college.

I took my first job as a mail handler at Union Station in Omaha right after my high school graduation. As an on-call member of a group of students dubbed “the school board,” that meant mostly overnight work on weekends when a regular called in sick (or otherwise impaired). The next summer, I took a more-steady gig at a massive rail mail center in Council Bluffs, tossing bags of bulk mail headed to all corners of the United States. I also managed a couple of weeks during the Christmas rush.

For the last three years of college, though, I returned to Union Station where I worked as a coach cleaner. We didn’t actually clean coaches as much as we provided passengers with water. Since most streamliners passed through Omaha in the dead of night, that was when we lugged heavy hoses to each coach, filling them with water to last until their next stop.

One summer, though, I was lucky enough to have several weeks duty of driving an ice wagon throughout the station, icing down drinking fountains and servicing dining cars. For another summer, I was “set up” as a carman’s helper, oiling wheel boxes and bleeding brake lines.

None of my railroad jobs exist today, at least not in the fashion they functioned at that time. The work could be brutal, working in all types of weather and occasionally getting trapped between trains with no escape until one of them left.

The weather alone was enough to make me determined to never do this kind of work for a living, although most of my co-workers did exactly that. The life lessons learned from these hard-working, mostly uneducated, men was a welcome complement to my formal college training.

I joined my first unions on the railroad, placed my first bets on college football games there, became adept at an obscure version of mumbledy-peg and learned the value of punching in and out on time.

Working as I did in a once-ornate train station, complete with one of the area’s fine dining establishments, I witnessed first-hand the decline of passenger rail service. The restaurant had slipped badly before I started working there and the trains disappeared, one by one. Besides eventually losing my full-time job, it was a sad thing to go through.

Amtrak still serves the area with limited passenger service, but it’s nothing like the heyday. Fortunately, Union Station is still around, but as a museum.

Next time, I’ll write about my four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of  Rodzina.

Life lessons learned in a bowling establishment

I learned a lot from my second job, at Twin City Bowl in Council Bluffs, Iowa, namely:

1. Beer plays an important role in the fiscal vitality of a bowling center.
2. I have serious limitations in mechanical matters.
3. When a business is foundering, cash your paycheck ASAP.
4. Hard-working, otherwise sensible Americans often jump at an opportunity to gamble.
5. Nice guys don’t necessarily make the best businessmen.

My first experience in the world of steady paychecks came when I was just starting my junior year in high school when I was recruited to work at one of my town’s four bowling centers. Just a few years before, there was just one bowling alley in town and the sport was enjoying a huge growth spurt, cleaning up its image of being dark, smoky men-only retreats with sleek, modern centers catering to women and kids.

As something of a hotshot junior bowler, the proprietor at Twin City Bowl approached me about working there before I reached the mandatory age of 16. So, for a month or so, he paid me off the books while I learned the ins and outs of picking up empty plates and bottles, emptying ashtrays, sweeping floors and myriad other duties.

The hours weren’t so hot, working late nights several times a week, but the perks were great: bowling at a reduced (sometimes free) rate, free food when working, even a trip to the premiere of the professional Omaha Packers entry in the short-lived National Bowling League. I mostly loved it, at least for the first year.

I quickly learned that you don’t pick up a bottle of beer with a half-inch of suds left in it and that you didn’t allow any beer to be sold (or even be seen) during the Saturday night Baptist Mixed League. There were typically two of us teens working each night, one in the back to fix broken pin-setting machines and one to work the front where the people were. My brief stints in the back were disastrous as I had a tendency to replace broken belts incorrectly, sending pins flying in directions the Brunswick engineers never intended.

Our snack bar-dining area was a draw in itself since we employed a head cook who made pies from scratch and homemade pasta every weekday. The wait staff was bolstered each spring by the arrival of a wisp of a Southern Belle who accompanied her husband, an oddsmaker at the nearby Ak-Sar-Ben horse racing track, to spend a few months while the horses were in town, dishing up chocolate malts and cheeseburgers while dispensing her own brand of racing advice. It may be just my overactive, teenage imagination of the time, but it seemed like the flow of customers to the tiny snack bar was much greater when she was in town.

As good as business seemed to be to me, apparently things weren’t quite as rosy in the cash flow department. The front-back working situation was consolidated into one job more nights than I liked, forcing some of us into work we were unsuited for or uninterested in. Paydays became unreliable and reached a point where we had to cash checks on the spot rather than risk nonpayment at a bank teller’s window.

The easy-going, mild-mannered proprietor who had recruited me turned sour and surly and the pie-baking, pasta-making cook jumped to a rival bowling center. By the time I reached the home stretch of my senior year, I’d had enough, too. It would be more than a year before I worked steadily again but I spent that year occasionally filling in on my first railroad job, as a mail handler.

Next time, I’ll fill you in on the railroad jobs that carried me through my college years.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo of Twin City Bowl by lwlehmer.

Life lessons learned from a paper route

I learned a lot from my first job, as a newspaper carrier, namely:

1. Aluminum storm doors make an ungodly racket when struck by a well-folded brick of newsprint.
2. A person can eat just so many chocolate covered cherries.
3. Some adults “earn” their beer money by stiffing the paper kid.
4. Some minister’s wives would feel right at home on a burlesque stage.
5. That postman’s creed about delivering in rain, snow, darkness, etc., goes double for paper boys.

Oh sure, there were grand lessons of responsibility and financial independence, but the real nitty gritty came from the wildly unpredictable personal interactions and financial dealings with adults outside my family.

I was 13 when I assumed control of Route 60a of the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, about 75 subscribers over an eight-block area on the blue collar west side of town for which I would earn 11 cents per customer for delivering their paper seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, except for Christmas Day.

The Nonpareil was an afternoon paper six days a week, but shifted to mornings on Sundays. Those were the days I had to trudge nearly a mile in the predawn darkness, stuff preprinted sections and ads into the main paper and trudge back to start my deliveries. Obviously, this could be a brutal winter experience in Iowa.

Good service was the key to tips, which usually came a nickel at a time with the paper priced at 45 cents a week – except for Christmas, when roughly every other customer added a box of chocolate covered cherries to your booty. Good service meant not banging those aluminum doors. It was much wiser to slip the paper between the front doors, especially on days when lousy weather was expected.

Whatever the weather, customers expected timely, dry delivery of their paper. That made it doubly frustrating when customers just scratched their heads come collection day, usually on Friday night. It didn’t take long to realize who the deadbeats were, but the paper had a policy of not cancelling anyone less than four weeks in arrears and the carrier usually ended up eating the loss.

That sting was assuaged a bit by the kindly grandmotherly types who were generous with their praise and pocketbooks and the occasional floor show by a particular minister’s wife, whose collection-night attire (as filtered through the eyes of a 13-year-old) could best be described as “flimsy negligee.”

Being a paper carrier was hard, but rewarding, work. Having control of a few dollars a week at that time of my life was good training for the years ahead. I was able to start a savings plan for college, had a steady resource stream for my new hobby of coin collecting and learned plenty about dealing with adults I only knew on a business basis.

But, after a few years, it was time to move on. Next time, I’ll tell you about my working days at Twin City Bowl.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of ratigger76.

Time to dig out those high school yearbooks

Do you like class reunions? I thoroughly enjoy mine, although it took me over two decades before I went to one.

The first reunion I attended wasn’t even mine. It was my wife’s, 20 years after she graduated from Omaha’s Bishop Ryan High School. I had such a good time, I couldn’t wait for the next one, the 25th anniversary of Council Bluffs Thomas Jefferson’s class of 1963. We’ve been regulars ever since.

My class gets together again this month and I’ve been given the honor of speaking to the group about my work as a personal historian. My classmates and I are at that age of self-reflection where we look back on our lives, consider what we’ve accomplished and how it will matter to future generations.

High school reunions give us a chance to reconnect with an important part of our past, those who were at our sides during those formative years before we struck out into the unknown of the real world, to take our places among honest-to-goodness adults where our thoughts and actions truly meant something.

Stories are at the heart of every reunion. Stories of dreams fulfilled and promise unrealized, joy and heartbreak, life and death. Every story we hear or tell at a reunion matters to us. They are threads woven deeply in our life’s tapestry.

One point I hope to make to my classmates is that our family stories matter, too. Even if our kids and grandkids don’t care about them today, they will someday. It’s our job to make them available when they’re ready, even if that’s after we’re gone.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Thomas Jefferson High School logo courtesy of neoarcana1.

Think that vault is safe? Think again

Safety is a relative thing, for sure.

One of the primary goals of a personal historian is to save family stories before they’re lost. Many of those precious family treasures are too often lost before they can be captured. Once claimed, however, these priceless snippets of family legacy are generally handled with reverence and respect. Whether in print or in electronic form, we take all sorts of precautions to ensure that they’ll be available for future generations.

One of the most secure methods of doing this is the safe-deposit box at a banking institution. I use this method to preserve other personal and business records as well, figuring that locking items in a bank vault keeps them safe from fire, theft, tornadoes and just about any imaginable calamity.

But not floods, apparently.

We’ve been hard hit by flooding in Iowa this year and banks in a flood plain are just as vulnerable as anyone else. That’s a bitter lesson for the folks who had items in the safe-deposit vault at Guaranty Bank & Trust in downtown Cedar Rapids, where water seeped in through utility outlets to soak priceless artifacts.

A restoration company is trying to salvage important documents at a rate of $200 per inch-thick stack.

So, add this to your criteria when you’re seeking a safe place to store your stuff: Stay out of a flood plain, even if it’s in a bank vault.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Patricia Mc.

Bring me popcorn: It’s family history movie time!

I’m a big fan of family movies. Family history movies, that is.

For me it goes back to “Citizen Kane,” the Orson Welles epic about the life of a newspaper mogul told in a retrospective style as investigators try to solve the one lingering mystery of The Great Man’s final cryptic words: Who (or what) was Rosebud?

As I wrote before, I think the Tim Burton film, “Big Fish,” is the ultimate father-son movie. Although I try to watch this film every June, somehow it eluded me this year.

Now come a couple new must-sees in this genre: “Young at Heart” and “Google Me: The Movie.”

“Young at Heart” has been playing locally recently as fellow blogger Jann Freed notes. This story about a singing group of some thirty 80-somethings who cover everyone from The Clash to Coldplay, will be available on DVD in mid-September. I find it perfectly natural that music transcends the ages. It was a 20-something Paul Simon, after all, who wrote the memorable line “How terribly strange to be 70” in his poetic tribute to senior citizens, “Old Friends,” on Simon & Garfunkel’s classic “Bookends” album.

“Google Me” is a quirky extension of the practice of Googling one’s own name. Come on, everybody does it – a quick check of one’s cyberspace status. When Jim Killeen did it, he found 24 other Jim Killeens scattered around the planet. He tracked down as many as he could and six of them participated in this documentary, which is now available on DVD.

The best family movies, of course, are those of your own family. Now would be a good time to dig them out of their hiding place and give them a proper viewing. If you’re a generation or two behind the technology (film or videotape, for example), you might want to bring them up to date before the equipment necessary to play them disappears forever.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of    Firstposter.com Movie Posters Wall.

My Dad an old man? No way

Age is a relative thing.

I was reminded of this at a family reunion near Underwood, Iowa, this past weekend. Besides the grand potluck, homemade strawberry ice cream, cherry picking, balloon toss and clumsy volleyball games there was the opportunity to share family stories and catch up with the wide range of relatives, many of them unfamiliar, that make up the family tree begun in 1920 when Jens and Ellen Andersen left Denmark to start a new life in America.

Prizes were awarded to those who came the farthest (my Uncle Harold, from Florida) and the oldest (my Dad, Jack, 87). That’s when it hit me. My Dad will never be the oldest in my family, at least not in my mind.

Though he’s lived longer than his own father by more than 20 years and my other grandfather, Jens, by a few years, he’ll always seem younger to me than either of them. For whatever reason, I see my grandfathers as old men, probably because they carried the unofficial titles of family patriarchs for all the years I knew them. My earliest memories of my Dad, however, go back to when he was a relatively young pup in his 30s.

I suspect this skewed view of the aging process is common when evaluating people we’re familiar with. For instance, my view of former president Ronald Reagan is one of a senior statesman while I see John F. Kennedy as a robust, energetic young leader. But they were pretty much contemporaries, having been born just six years apart. My view of them is doubtless tempered by the fact that JFK was just 46 when he was assassinated while Reagan was nearly 70 when he first took office as president. Consider, too, that Martin Luther King was nearly 12 years younger than Kennedy and never reached his 39th birthday.

Do you see your family tree in a similar way?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Jack, Elsie and Liz Lehmer at Andersen family reunion on July 5, 2008. Courtesy of lwlehmer.

History Detectives back on the case

One of my favorite television shows returned to the air this week, just in time to offer a respite from one of the soggiest Junes I can remember.

The History Detectives began its 2008 public television season by reuniting a family with a long-lost journal compiled in the year before the writer’s death in a World War II bombing raid, taking a stab at identifying the author of a once-popular book about the Mormon religion and trying to substantiate a family legend regarding fabled sharpshooter Annie Oakley.

Anyone with an interest in family history will find something of interest in this show, just one of many informative offerings that make PBS the channel of choice in our household. On Sunday, our local PBS station aired another fascinating program, “Traces of the Trade,” a documentary examining the slave trade from the perspective of a Rhode Island family that bought and sold more than 10,000 Africans.

Researching family history, which trails only gardening as America’s No. 1 pastime, has been much in the news lately, especially in the flood-soaked Midwest where sad tales of lost family artifacts have dominated headlines for weeks. The CBS newsmagazine, “60 Minutes,” reran a piece on Sunday about the growing popularity of using DNA in genealogical research and the limitations of that science.

The common thread running through all this media exposure is that no amount of science and wishful thinking can replace the deliberate thought and effort that is necessary to preserve our connections to our family’s legacies. The sooner the better

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo of two early television performers with a 1933 Bush/Baird mirror drum Televisor courtesy of TVteam.