Category: Introduction

The Formative Years: Pt. 1

Many believe that the formative years are your life between birth and eight years old.  Although I can see what they mean by that as that is the time when who you are begins to take shape, I feel that what you remember and your experiences can affect who you are as a person just as much as what you are taught.  Yes, early years teach you the basics, walking, talking, feeding yourself, potty training, but I feel that you learn so much more between ages six to twelve that truly shape you.  You learn to read, basic math skills, socializing with classmates, communication skills, history, geography.  You start to understand the world outside of just your neighborhood.  You do kid stuff.

This is the period of my life where I lived in Redgranite, Wisconsin.  A very small town that only had about six hundred people living in it when we moved there.  At one time it had been a much larger community of over two thousand inhabitants when the granite quarries in the area were in full swing.  In the twenties, the change from paving block to concrete and asphalt for roadways began to put the dagger in the granite business there.  The great depression twisted that dagger and did even more damage to the community as a whole.  Not long after that the quarry began to fill with water.  With no one working it and pumping the water out, it didn’t take long.  I heard a lot of rumors of what’s at the bottom of the quarry growing up.  Everything from cranes and mining equipment to cars to campers to complete trains to mobster bodies.  Almost all of these have been disproved over the years by divers, but they were fun stories back then.

Living in a community of this size means that everyone pretty much knows everyone.  You’d go to one of the four local restaurants at the time and everyone greeted you by name and asked how your family was.  In some ways it was nice, in others, well let’s just say you get a speeding ticket, and everyone knows before you even get home.  My mother could have attested to that.  I believe her one and only ticket in her life was gotten when she was coming home from Oshkosh and was a bit distracted and in a hurry.  She got pulled over for speeding, and by the time she started her shift at the restaurant, they had a little toy police car with her name on it proudly displayed in the pie case for all to see.

We got to Redgranite the summer before I started first grade.  At that age and in a community that size, it was easy to make new friends.  My first good friend was a boy nicknamed Popcorn.  He shared my love of Matchbox and Hot Wheels, and he had a basketball hoop on his garage.  It was also nice that he lived right by the softball diamonds and the park and was only a block away from our house.  We had so much to do around there that we were never bored.

As the school year started, I got to meet the rest of my classmates and I latched on to even more people.  Even some of the girls in my class were fun to hang out with.  I didn’t really have that “girls are icky and lame” idea at the time, because my female cousin was one of my best friends.  Always has been.  I also think that being a small community and small class size helps boys and girls to interact with each other much better at that age, and I personally feel it lends to more respect between the sexes.  My Mom worked the day shift at the restaurant known as Griff’s and Dad was out doing his Real Estate selling thing, so when I got done with school for the day, no one was at home to watch me.  The solution was for me to walk from the school, that was a block from our house, down to the restaurant downtown and sit there doing my homework and watching Woody Woodpecker until Mom got off work.  I must have been a hit with the other waitresses there because one would always bring me a dish of twist ice cream with butterscotch topping when Mom wasn’t looking.  I wonder where those magical powers over women went when I got older?

About once a month or so, we got to go to Elmer’s Pizza for dinner.  To this day, I love their pizza.  So much so that it’s my go to for my birthday every year.  It’s become a tradition that means more to me than it probably should, but hey, you only turn….every year once.  My family and friends look forward to making that run too.  They just wish it wasn’t in February because it always seems to snow that day.  I’m saving a discussion on the day of my birthday for another day, but just know that I’m not super exited that it lands on the day it does.  For that purpose, I started doing what I like to refer to as an Un-birthday.  I share it with a close friend who also has a birthday at a cruddy time of the year, and we share it with all you people out there born during Wisconsin winter.  This Un-birthday is a floating day.  It happens some Saturday in June or July, when you know the weather will most likely be pretty nice.  We just celebrated this yesterday as I’m typing this, and we went to (drum roll please) Elmer’s of course.  Its pretty amazing the amount of memories that flood your brain just from the taste of a particular food.  I practically relive those six years there every time.  Almost all those memories are good too. 

As with my hometown in my last post, many things have changed over the years there, but a ton haven’t.  Our old house has been re-sided and changed very little.  Our old garage has been torn down and a new larger one fills the back yard.  The F/S Service Station kitty corner from the house hasn’t been in operation for years, but it still stands.  Our old church burned down several years ago.  The building that housed the arcade has been torn down.  The building my Dad ran his business out of still stands and I think is an antique store of some kind.  My Uncle’s Real Estate office is gone.  Griff’s hasn’t been Griff’s for a long time, and I think is closed completely now.  But that small-town feel is still in the air there.  And going back there still brings that good feeling in me.  Would I feel the same way if I had continued to live there through my High School years, or would I have gotten to that “I can’t wait to get out of this place and never look back” stage that so many do.  Who knows? 

That’s all for now.  I decided to split this up into two parts because I want to start telling some of the many stories of my years in Redgranite.  Many of them I find quite funny, silly, stupid, you know, kid stuff.  I felt if I did that on this post it would be way too long.  So, if you want to read about those, tune in next week.

We’re all in this together.  Luv Luv.

Welcome to my life.

Good morning… afternoon, evening, whenever you are reading this.  Welcome the “The Life of Bart.”  I know what you’re thinking, “Most blogs I read are about something specific. Something like cooking, camping, carpentry, technology, finance, or something like that. What’s your blog about?” Well, I don’t think of myself as an expert on any one thing in particular. But I do feel that I’ve experienced a lot of things throughout my life that some may find interesting. I’ve also learned a lot of lessons along the way due to the multitude of mistakes I’ve made.  I thought that I might be able to share those with others to potentially help them along the way, in case they run into the same situations I did. So, I guess you could say it’s sort of a narrative, self-help, cautionary tale with a bit of humor thrown in for good measure. I hope you enjoy it and continue to check it out for new content. I’m looking to try and add at least one post per week at the start. I’m new to this, so I’m feeling the water so to speak. Without further ado, here’s my first official post.

I’m going to start by introducing myself and giving you a background of my family and where my life basically started. I was born in Hartford, Wisconsin the youngest of four children. My sister being the oldest, two brothers, and myself. At the time, my father was a manager of a local welding facility and my mother worked as a waitress. Our house was on a quiet street, but on the back side of our block was the main highway that cut through town. We lived in this town until I was six years old.

A little bit about my parents as some have found this interesting as well. My mother was one of seven children. She was the youngest of the first five with two half-brothers.  Her mother passed away when she was quite young. From my earliest memory of him, her father was wheelchair bound as he had lost one of his legs from the knee down to an illness. Her grandfather was a Reverend although I’m not positive where he practiced. She was a wonderfully kind person. In my entire life, I have never heard one person say a bad thing about her. She was almost so polite it was scary. Profanity was not allowed in our house to the point where I can remember being scolded in my teens for saying the word “fart.”

On to my father’s family. My Dad is one of twenty-one children. I’ll give you a moment to process that. He is near the end of the first sixteen with five half-brothers and sisters.  His early life was a bit rough as the dairy farm and cheese factory were a no go, he lost his mother, and his father just walked away. He quit school in his early teens due to having to work to survive. He never graduated high school, but he had the work ethic of those of his generation and those before him combined. He was never tied down to one kind of job either. He tried his hand at a lot of things throughout his life. He swept the foundry floor, welded, ran a gas station, built houses, sold houses, insulated houses, sold cars, and worked maintenance at the Green Lake Conference Center as well as Ripon College. No matter what his daily job was, he always had side work going on. It also seemed like whatever house we lived in; it was never quite finished. He has an uncanny knack for being able to just figure things out. It isn’t so much book smarts as his mind just works in a way that he can look at something and just figure it out.  As most people, he was not without his flaws and had a knack for making people mad at him. A trait I learned from and do my best to avoid.

My sister is eleven years older than me, has been married twice (she got it right the second time), and had four children. My oldest brother is nine years older than me, has been married twice (we won’t discuss this one), and has two children. My youngest brother is seven years older than me, and like myself, remains single. Many of my life experiences and lessons learned involve these folks so we’ll get into them more as time goes on.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I was the “whoops” child. I was also spoiled rotten because I deserved it. At least I think I did. When I was six, we moved to the town of Redgranite, Wisconsin as Dad was “changing careers.” He started selling real estate with his brother. I was ok with the move because I was just out of Kindergarten and really only had one friend at the time. Plus, my cousin, who was the whoops of her family lived there and we were quite close. I’m sure you’ll hear some stories involving her as well. My older siblings were not quite as “ok” with the move as I was. My sister was about to start her senior year and now had to do so in a new school. At the time I didn’t realize how hard it was on them, but as I got older, I understood and felt bad for them.

At age twelve, some issues arose between my parents and I moved with Mom to Ripon, Wisconsin. Things got worked out in the end, and Dad moved in with us a few months later. Aside from a few years living in the local township, I’ve been in the thriving metropolis of Ripon and its eight thousand people ever since.

Well, that’s it for your introduction to me. I’ll have something a little more for you to sink your teeth into next week. If you enjoyed this intro to some of the main characters of my life story, great, I hope you come back for another taste and a riveting story. If you didn’t, well, that’s ok too. I just hope you give me another chance with my next post.

Remember, we’re all in this together, luv luv.