Monday, January 17th, 2011
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Runges in California, kid's-eye view
My memories of California are so funny - about, what, age four? I have strong memories of riding on that cargo plane, but very little else about the move out there.
The most important event during that time had to be the arrival of a new brother, but I don't remember anything about that at all––self-absorbed little kid.
The house in Bellflower, the neighborhood was one of those derided in the song “Little houses on the hillside, all made out of ticky-tacky.” But the song does not take into account the housing shortage in a country that had not been building houses during the war. Those neighborhoods were desperately needed. When Mother and I visited the neighborhood back when Carmen lived out there, the houses where still there. But they no longer “all look just the same.” Each has been remodeled and upgraded according to later owners' tastes and, apparently, quite good incomes. Our house got its own unique southwest-style makeover.
You guys talked about living in that house and not having any furniture. I don't remember that––just hardwood floors, down at kid level. I also have a strong memory of a piano in that house, and I'm sure that memory is false, made out of a wish and not reality.
I remember the driveway on one side of the house and the roller skates. Of course I had those skates for years, so I would remember them. I remember sitting on a neighbor's porch, or maybe ours, and “helping” the poppy buds open, very carefully unfolding the immature petals. I'm sure whoever planted those poppies was thrilled about that.
I remember on clear days we could see the mountains, but there were a lot of smoggy days when we couldn't. I remember being able to see a busy highway, or the lights from it from the backyard. I remember seeing the searchlights in the sky from back there, and I knew they were somehow connected with Hollywood and the movies.
What a little kid notices and remembers is so different. I wish I remembered the orange groves and palm trees I see in the pictures, but I don't. The most important spot in this kid's memory was that driveway where I played. Weird. NJB
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| Saturday, January 15th, 2011
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California, here we come ...
The chicken coop was on NE 16th in OKieCity. Painting the ceiling with Kemtone, I stepped in the pan and was relieved from helping with the painting.
I was stationed at Tinker. [1944] That was before I was sent overseas. Vickie had an infected breast, and I took her to the hospital at Tinker where they used penicillin, a new medicine not available to civilians yet, and it saved the day.
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[1946] I was working for Asplundh when my application to the new air freight company Slick Airways came through, and I went down to San Antonio to start. Downtown SA was a disaster area from a hail storm the night before. Many of the tile roof buildings had a pile of broken tiles on the ground, and cars had broken glass. I was worried about what that meant about my job, but there was no damage at the airport.
My first trip was taking a load of cantalopes to Chicago where we were quartered in the Palmer House hotel.
Having free time, I took the train to Palatine to visit my folks. I was there when Martin Lobitz came to see Johanna for the first time. I was in the spare bedroom, and he was too. At one of the family reunions I told Janice Radtkie that I had slept with her father before her mother did.
After several days I got back to Okie City, and Vickie was frying bacon when Jane running wild with excitement because Daddy was home collided with her and got hot grease mostly on the face. That was a terrible time, and it was several days before we knew if her eyes were damaged.
Shortly after that Slick closed their OC station, and I had to choose New Jersey or California. So we moved to Long Beach where after a few days in the hotel we rented a room with kitchen privileges. That was in 1946.
The plane was a C46 Slick cargo plane, and we did get off in the cargo area.
And after a while we bought the house on Pepperwood. That was in a new addition which had the restriction that the houses be sold to returning veterans. So all of our neighbors were young with young children.
The cab got us to the hospital barely in time, and Howard was born in the labor room before the doctor got there.
Shortly after this the FAA made a new ruling that a flight mechanic was not required, so there went my job. I stayed with them as a cargo handler. Slick moved to Burbank, and I commuted for a while and quit them and took a job in a factory building airplanes. The pay was so low that I decided to go back to school.
Vickie had bought the house next to her folks so we moved into that and I did my freshman year at OBU
NJR
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| Thursday, January 13th, 2011
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Guam to OkC
World War II ended in Aug. '45 after two A bombs. It was not officially over till MacArthur on the deck of the battleship Missouri got the emperor to sign the surrender agreement.
It was shortly after this that I was asked to crew chief the C54 that was Gen. Curtis Lemay's staff car. After I turned that down, I was still there and the crew told me of the many places that they had been in the last two weeks, the other half of the world that I have not seen.
I continued sweating out when I could go home. Some of the guys with lower discharge numbers than mine had already gone. Shortly before Christmas I got my shipping orders to board the ship just like the one that had brought me to Guam. I had been expecting to fly out, so that was disappointing.
Christmas day we were west of the international date line, and during the night we crossed the line and had the second Christmas in 1945. Landing at San Pedro put me back in the USA. A long train ride got me to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and discharge. A bus got me back to Shawnee.
Vickie was walking in the pasture south of their garden, and when I saw her I ran and jumped over the fence and terrorized Jane. That was early in 1946.
That was when she and Lottie both worked at Tinker. Toodles was the baby sitter. [Vickie did mechanical drawing at Tinker.]
After a few days we went to Kansas City, and I put in an application at TWA, where they had such a stack of applications from guys who got out before I did I never heard from them.
The utility company hired me to be a foreman, but since we failed to find a place to live, we went to Jefferson City where the people at Missouri Power and Light remembered when Carl had worked there and was a star player on their baseball team, and said they would create a line clearing department and hire me. But we didn't find a place to live there either.
Next stop was Tulsa, and there we could not find a hotel. So on to Okie City where we checked into a hotel. I went to work for Asplundh, and Vickie walked the street till she found a third-floor walk-up. NJR
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| Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
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Grapefruit in Tuscon
Shortly after 8 I went in to turn off the TV and switched to NBC so that would be on in the morning when I turn it on again, and the president was speaking at the memorial service so I sat down and listened.
All this news coverage from Tucson reminded me that Tucson was such a familar name for me because Aunt Caroline having health problems was advised to spend the winter in a warmer dryer climate and suggested Arizona. She drove down to Lohman from, I think that it was Cleveland, to pick up Erica to be help driving and be her companion.
The next stop that I know of was Norman, OK, where they attended Trinity Lutheran church where the pastor was Rev. Hoyer who many years later in Chicago said, "O yes I remember meeting you when you visited us at Norman, OK." Erica was commenting on such a good memory.
They visited with the Henry Mappes family. Henry had been to our house at Blackburn, and with him was Otto Hansmeyer, his future son-in-law. Henry was best man at the wedding of Ed and Amalia. Ed and Henery had been classmates in grade school at Millstat, Illinois, before Steinbruecks moved to MO and Mappes to OK.
In Tucson they lived in a room and board arrangement, and Erica said that one morning there were no grapefruit on the table and she asked why. The landlady replied that they were too high. They were charging two cent apiece for them. I always think of that when I buy them these days. NJR
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| Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
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Norman Fischer
Jane said that I ought to write something about Norman Fischer, so here is my attempt.
Norman Fischer 12 12 1919 - 9 16 2010
I knew him before I started school at St John's Lutheran school because the school was just across the lawn from the parsonage,
and we had free range during recess, and he went there with Papa as his teacher.
He lived about one mile from the school walking through the fields and woods. His sister Celesta was older than him. She married a man named Fischer so she didn't have to change her name. His brother Mahlon was younger than him. Another sister Donabell was younger than him, and Alberta another sister was the youngest.
There was intense envy on my part when his dad gave him break-open 20-gauge shot gun for Christmas when he was 12 years old. Some time later he shot a fox, and then the men going hunting invited him to come along.
One day he drove up to the parsonage in a desperate hurry to get Papa because Alberta his sister was dying. So Papa hurried out to get in the car, and Mama having heard the report came out and jumped in the car to go along. When they got there, the baby was turning blue, and Mama grabbed her and blew the breath of life into her. I don't know if she still lives or not.
I didn't have much to do with him for many years. Much of that time I was at Ed and Amalia's, like junior and senior high school years.
He and Louise got married and lived on a farm at Noel, MO. I don't know what the deal was, but I think Uncle Henry Kammeyer had something to do with it. That didn't last long, and they were back living in a little shack on land joining the Fischer farm.
I went to visit Louise in the hospital with her first son Noel. Now there is a blank in my memory as I was more and more involved with Vicky and the Army and the arrival of my first daughter.
Their next child was Joy and then Mark, who as a teenager had a brain tumor which surgeons failed to get all of it out, and that left him quite disabled and caused his death. Miriam was born some time after Mark. Last address that I had for her was in the Houston area.
Norman tried several things including a filling station with a tractor dealership and a shop. He finally wound up in a garden center where he was the mechanic working on chain saws and lawn mowers.
For several years we alternated: one year he came here and we fished in Oklahoma, and the next I went and we fished in Missouri. Each year he called me on January 25, and I called him December 12.
Last year I called, and his wife Clara answered the phone, but my hearing aid doesn't like phones, so I just gave up. Later I wrote on a Christmas card telling him some of what I had planned to say, and after a while Clara sent me the obituary card with a note enclosed. NJR
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| Friday, January 7th, 2011
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Army appreciation and lack thereof
Back when I was stationed at Kelly Field I was sent to Burbank Calif. to the B 17 crew chief training school. When I got back to Kelly I told the first sergeant what they said before I left out there, that graduates were supposed to get corporal stripes, so I was promoted and made flight commander and lined the bunch of guys up and marched them over to the hangar, where the line chief assigned us to whatever jobs were to be done.
There I was assigned as crew chief of several planes. One of the others was a happy camper with a silly grin who was given a mop, and he was mopping the hangar floor. He told me that he was leaving to go back to Packard Motors to the job he had been doing when he got drafted and that the people there had found out what the army was using one of their engineers for and demanded his release.
There was a PBS show about Packard Motors on, and that caused me to remember Harry Steiner, who had been undervalued by the Army. NJR
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| Thursday, September 17th, 2009
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Bananas
When I was on Guam I often stayed while my assistant crew chief took a trip, and he stayed when I took the trip. That gave me time to walk out into the jungle to see what I could find. I had seen large bananas that others had brought in, but they were empty skins much as a lima bean pod before the beans grow. They had been picked way to early.
When I found some that were real fat but short, I took that bunch and not knowing better assumed that the reason they tasted so good was simply that they were mature and ripe. The taste was great.
The next time I saw some was in Colima Mexico and I heard them called apple bananas. If I remember correctly Madeline remembering them from when she was a little kid had another name for them. Here at the store they were called finger bananas. I had seen some several years ago but they werent good but these looked good so I did buy some. They were packed six to a bag and labled from Honduras. When I got home I ate one and it was good.
Back to Guam, instead of simply chopping the banana stalk down I took Jim Caves on my shoulder so he could reach the bunch, which he did. But as my face touched the dry leaf the wasps came off their nest and about nine of them rearranged my face.
When I went down to the flight line to meet my plane, wearing a clean uniform and a puffy face Hough Wragg the assistant, didn't recognize me. NJR
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| Monday, August 24th, 2009
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Remembering 1 and 2
Today Dick Prior was interviewing profesor Henderson, who had made news some years ago by being the first black man to buy and move into a house in Norman. That set me into remembering all the times that I had been aware of black people.
In Blackburn up to the time we moved to Stringtown, when I was five, there was Mary Jane who regularly helped Mamma with all those Runge kids, including me,Ortwin and Omar. She lived half a block East of the parsonage, with her husband Taylor Coons.
I don't remember hearing Mary Jane's last name but heard many years later when Carl and Ernest spoke of the profuse greetings from Taylor Coons when he saw them in Blackburn. I suspect that the name written would be Koonce, but the use of Coons was so prevalent in those days to refer to any black man. If I had made that connection while Floyd [Koonce] was alive I would have talked to him about that.
Well maybe I should give some background. Amalia worked as a clerk in the general store for some years, till she married Ed Steinbrueck and moved out to the farm six miles from town.
Johanna was born harelip, and Papa took her to the hospital in St. Louis for repair surgery. Her appearance being affected they decided to send her to business school, and when she graduated she went to work in the bank where she set up the bookkeeping system. She did so well that the other bank hired her to do likewise for them.
Most of her life she was employed as a secretary. I was in Palatine on my first visit with my folks,who were living with her, when Martin came to make his first visit to get her to marry him and be a mother to his daughter and son.
The Steinbrueck farm was three hundred and twenty acres, and Ed needed a lot of help to farm it. Carl worked there some time, and Ernest did too. Henry worked there till he was drafted into the army at about thirty. When he came out he worked there some and bought a house in Blackburn.
Teddy worked there while she taught at a nearby rural school, before she moved to Concordia and taught in the public school. Some years ago one of the old ladies who was here told me that her third grade teacher was Teddy.
Erica worked there between other jobs and working on her teacher training schooling.
Louise told of the time she and a black woman who came occasionally to help with canning and extra work were out in the summer kitchen gettin something ready to can. They were talkin about movies, and Mary said that she liked to see colored movies. This was when the technicolor movies were just coming out. Louise said that she had heard that they were hard on the eyes.
Mary bristled and said "I don't see why they should be any harder on the eyes than white peoples movies".
I wrote more but guess this is enough.
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This is the rest of what I had written in the first message but thought that I had reached a good stopping place then, so here is the rest of the story.
My time living with Ed and Amalia was part of the summer when I was seven, and Roland was born while I was away.
Again when I was eleven and at thirteen -- That year I was mowing the big pasture along the Salt Fork creek. I stopped to give the horses a little rest and became aware that we were on a bumble bee nest and they were stinging the horses. So I scooted down in front of the seat and said giddie up and got away from there without getting any stings, which lead me to believe that they wouldn't sting me. That theory was disproved several times somewhat later.
The year that I was fifteen I was driving a wagon for threshing crew. I was impressed by the thirteen-year-old black boy who was turning out as much work as I was on about half the food and water that it took for me.
Out there in the flat country I learned to make the load as wide as I could. And the next year I was at Lohman and they told me that I was going to loose a load, and I answered that if the load dumped the wagon frame would go with it. And on one of those sloping places in the farm road that is what happened. So after that I loaded much narrower and got along without dumping any more loads.
Even at age sixteen I was able to learn if the lesson was driven home strongly enough.NJR
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| Monday, March 9th, 2009
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Student of history
The PBS show American Experience was Lincoln and I was remembering an event in Shawnee about 1947 when I was in OBU.
I was doing some trimming for Sidney Clark who owned a furniture store. He said that he had something that might interest me.
He had a piece of parchment that he explained that his father had kept as a souvenir from when he was a US senator from Kansas, and the paper was a spoiled copy of the impeachment of Pres. Andrew Johnson that was spoiled by having some signatures more than once, so of course they had to start over and he got the keepsake. Senator Clark was one of the honor guards who rode the train with Lincoln's body to Springfield Ill.
When I was in Oklahoma history the prof had mentioned some rare books in the library, so when I went there I was having trouble finding something and when I told one of the assistant librarians what I had seen, he went all out to help me find things. My thought was that he was hoping that he might get his hands on that document. NJR
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| Thursday, February 26th, 2009
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Stories about employee X
[Name omitted to protect the writer :-) ]
The news from New Orleans caused me to remember when MrX was working for Runge Tree Service he had seen the news about New Orleans activities, and being a fun-loving guy he and some of his buddies decided to go. They got as far as Alexanderia and stopped to put in gas. The attendant asked where they were headed, and when they told him, he told them that they were a couple days late as this was on Friday and Wendsday had been Ash Wendsday. So they turned around and came back to Norman.
MrX was of about average intelligence, and one day he was up in a tree with the chainsaw running, and I noticed he was cutting off the stem that his climbing line was in a fork above the cut. With the saw noise the only way I could get his attention was to throw something to hit him. Several throws were ineffective and I was getting desperate by the time I did connect and get him to stop the saw so I could explain the problem
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