How Frugal was my Father?

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.

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.

How Hard Working was my Father?

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.....

Obviously long before the age of electronic office management and accounting software.

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.  

Needless to say this is a world of medicine long forgotten.  Although to put things into perspective a bit, it was a time when as I understand it there were price controls on what physicians could charge.  And, if you take his total profit on the year of $12,813 and multiply it by the inflation since 1953, you get just over $150,000 in actual equivalent purchasing power.  Everything was a lot cheaper back then.  He was still making about four times the average wage for 1953.

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.  

Remembering Dad- Ten Years On...

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.

Beans

In an era of TLDR I guess I won't try to explain the how and why regards getting 50 pounds of dried beans for Christmas.  Just accept this.  So, how will these work in our Hunting Land feed plots?

This is just one of a dozen or so bags.

There is a lot of information out there regards planting traditional stuff like clover and soybeans for the dining pleasure of deer, but Pintos, Navy and Black beans, not so much.  So this will be an experiment.

First step is to make sure they will grow........

And......here's the view about 9 days later!

Navy beans were the early leaders with Pintos catching up.  Germination rates are 90% even with my indifferent care.  Black beans are lagging a bit.

The matter of what to plant for deer feed lots is an arcane topic, one in which there are many strong opinions.  Sects and cults abound.  Soybeans, corn, peas.  What's the role for pumpkins?  Are you looking to just feed them or to keep them around and happily munching right up to hunting season?  

In the end it comes down to what the deer vote for.  Oh, and how much time, effort and thought you want to put into the project.  As this is primarily a learning experienced - with the secondary end goal of meat in the freezer - we'll likely have a bit of fun with it.  Different plots with game cams to keep the All Seeing Eye on things.   

Now, I could see how kind hearted people might look askance at this project.  I mean, it is a bit like having The DeScuzzi Brothers start a delightful neighborhood Ristorante with all you can eat fare and very low prices....then having Mafia assassins turn up one beautiful fall day.  But unlike The DeScuzzis, we have standards.  We won't be putting out big piles of food in front of our stands just before hunting season.  Likely what we plant and nurture will help the deer population* out to the extent that we may spare as many critters as we harvest.  Spring can be a hungry time for new fawns and their moms.  And that fall binge eating sometimes takes them far afield and across dangerous roads.

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* Oh, and planting all manner of edible stuff will greatly endear us to the other wild life, the ones we are not planning on putting into the freezer.  I spent a lot of time watching squirrels dance around our prototype food plots last year.  They will be Most Pleased, as will bear,  turkey and who knows what else.

Back Underground - Plus, Redneck Space Program

It had been a while since I'd made it out to Sandland.  If you've forgotten, this is the mad, marvelous, unique project that friends of mine are creating in rural Wisconsin.  For the past 13 years they have been tunneling in a hillside, creating a "playground for the ages".  There are mazes, a slide, rooms with a sort of mirrored layout designed to confuse you.  And this being Wisconsin, of course there is a bar.  The location is mostly a secret, to be revealed only to the worthy.  At least its X and Y coordinates are, on the Z axis I can say that most of these pictures were taken at roughly -80 feet from the surface.

I went out there recently, figuring it was a good way to work off some Christmas cookies.  

Usual digging kit.  Head lamp (turned off for photos, but I prudently carry a back up light), respirator, coveralls.  Sometimes I wear a helmet, sometimes not.  Nothing is going to fall on you but there are a few low spots in the tunnels.  Hard hat makes them less jarring.  But it also makes you an inch or so taller, so you hit them with greater frequency.

The goal by the way is to create something that people can enjoy - and perhaps puzzle over - for a thousand years.  Geologically it should work.

I leave the actual tunneling - there are power tools involved - to the more skillful.  My job is running carts of sand down the long winding tunnels and dumping it off a platform to later be moved elsewhere.  One of these wagons holds three of the orange buckets for a light load, four or five for a heavy one.  My rough calculation is that I personally hauled and dumped at least 1.5 tons of sand over six hours.

Time for a break.  The "Sand Bar" is a nice place to sit down and enjoy a (non alcoholic in this case) beverage.  The decor is eclectic to say the least.

Rats playing pool.  A reimagining of Dogs Playing Poker.

I do recommend volunteering at Sandland for anyone in Western Wisconsin or adjacent Minnesota.  I could make introductions.  But to be honest....I overdid it this day and my back complained for a while.  But sometimes whimsy and magic come with a small cost.

As I trudged back to my car at the end of the day I went by this sight:

It's the discontinued monorail from the Minnesota Zoo, now an implausible accommodation.  But hey, what's that sticking up behind it?  Uh, that's a Hillbilly Space Ship.  'Cause it would be...

Christmas Comes Early and Oddly

Sometimes the complexities of sharing your kids and grandkids with other tribes means that the Trad Christmas schedule won't work.  This was one of those years, so we got everyone together a bit early.  The grands are either old enough to know that Santa does not get 'er done in one night, and/or have grown up in a world where Amazon can supply anything at anytime.  So it was for most of the world still a regular kinda day.

We watched a grandkid play hockey.

We got together for presents.  The theme this year was "Hand Made or Hand Me Down".  This of course is us being environmentally conscious, NOT us trying to get the kids junk out of the attic and given back to them.  Among the hand made stuff was this clever game called "Smoorsh".  Not sure of the spelling, this was just invented last week.  It involved taking squiggly aspen trees cleared off our hunting land, cutting them up into various highly irregular sizes and angles, then stacking them as drawn randomly from a bag.  The youngest person in attendance - over on the left - had a particularly aggressive style.  Grab, Slam Down, Admire.

Not only a remarkably tall and serpentine tower, but he was actively eating Christmas cookies with the other hand.

I got some nice hand made stuff from the grands too.  Knit garments for Bill the Taxidermy Squirrel, and a wall mount for the silly little antlers from the spike buck I got this year.  Hey, it was a nice sized deer despite the.....teeny antlers.  

Of course there were also dogs.  This one is rather a bad influence on Hank.

She's brazen about Occupying human spaces.

And this is one ferocious rabbit chaser.  So after a bit, when things had settled down, I let the dogs out.  I did take the precaution of peering out into the yard first, making sure the gates were closed.  Oh, how well we remember the Great Dog Escape of 2022

(Only my wife and I remember the Great Dog Downfall of 1993 where our then elderly mutt walked right into the Christmas tree and knocked it over).

But I did not see the rabbit.

Out the dogs went, in hot pursuit.  The great huntress dog pursued it back and forth before the bunny zipped under the thankfully locked gate.  Hank on the other hand yipped and ran to the door, clearly shaken.  I figured, well he's a big creampuff, guess that bunny told him off.  Only then did a guest notice that The Hankster had a big laceration on his side.  Guess he ran into a projecting bit of metal on the fence, although a comedic Monty Python rabbit is an outside possibility.

So its off to the after hours vet for sedation, sutures and a very drunk and confused dog returning after the grands were in bed.  Not ideal, but would have been worse on actual Christmas....

A Feasibility Study

Looking ahead to 2026 I have to consider what is feasible.  Oh, not in terms of actually getting things done, but in the etymology of the word.  It has some interesting and relevant connections.

Feasible derives from the Latin "facere" meaning to Make, Do, or Perform.  The same very utilitarian source gives us Factory and Manufacturing, the latter being to make something by hand "manum".  Nowadays of course the hand is mostly used to click a mouse and push some buttons on the cnc equipment.

Doing things could also be considered a Feat, deriving again, from the same source.

I actually went down this etymological rabbit hole wondering if Fealty and Feasible were related.  I mean, my dog Hank is stupefyingly loyal and would probably jump off a cliff if there was encouragement reinforced by an appropriate Dog Treat.

But no.  Fealty derives from "fidelitatus" which means Faithful and as its most appropriate side branch gives us Fido as the archetypal dog name.

Feat and Feet are unrelated.  Like most terms relating to very basic concepts the latter is a very old word and comes to us via shaggy Germanic barbarians rather than Romans with sandals on their "pedes".