Redgranite – Welcome

The Formative Years: Pt. 3

Welcome back. We made it through another week in these uncertain times. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get into that. That topic’s been run into the ground on every social media and news outlet in the world. I know I originally said it would only be two parts, but I keep coming up with stuff to talk about. If you remember, last week I spent a lot of time talking about some of the fonder memories with me and my cousin. Today we do something different.

It’s time for school. I think I mentioned before that we only lived a block away from the elementary school in Redgranite. In those days, it was normal for kids my age to walk to school by themselves. For sure not out of the ordinary. Mom would usually watch as I crossed Highway 21, but once I was passed that, I was pretty much on my own. Our school building at the time was very old. It had been the high school back in the days when the town was bigger. It was actually built in the 1800s. It has since been torn down and a new modern style school has taken its place. Not going to lie, I was pretty sad the first time I went there and saw that it was gone. I stopped in front of the empty lot in my car for a while and reflected on the memories I had.

I don’t remember much of first grade as it was mostly spent getting to know everyone. I do remember coming home and telling my Mom about the girls in class and which ones were going to be my girlfriends. Ya, I was a six-year-old player. But much like my later years in life with women, none of those plans came to fruition. I think I just heard a collective “awwww.” Don’t feel bad for me. There were a lot of bullets dodged by those plans not working out.

Second grade was a big one. I turned eight in February that year, and in March, my sister gave birth to her first child. I was the only uncle in my second-grade class. I asked her, and she agreed for some reason, to bring him into my school so I could use him for my show-and-tell one week. He was a hit, even though many kids were confused because their uncles were “really old.” Granted, back then we thought sixth graders were “really old.” This was also my “dinosaur” phase. If you’ve had kids, especially boys, I’m guessing they all had a dinosaur phase. Every picture I drew, every report I did, every book I read, dinosaurs.

Third grade was one of my favorite years. I had a great teacher, who’s name escapes me because I absolutely suck at remember people’s names. Math, which was my favorite subject at the time, got a little more challenging. We learned a few basic Spanish words like gato, roja, and verde. These come in handy when Spanish speaking people are looking for their cat or you want to know what color the salsa is. I was put into a gifted program for a while to do even more advanced math because I had picked up on everything so quickly. This ended when I realized none of my friends were in there with me. I sort of sabotaged the situation until I went back into general population. I was also reading a lot more and loved it. I feel bad because that has changed as I’ve gotten older. I may need to reunite with books soon and try to reignite that flame.

My dinosaur mania switched to cars. We started going to Jefferson and Iola. Dad would take me to just about any car show in the area and I would study the differences between the years. The headlights, taillights, roof lines, grills, bumpers, and anything else that distinguished them. It started with Mustangs because my dad loved them. I always struggled with the ’64 ½-’66 but could nail everything after that up to the ’74. Then it went to Corvettes and I’ve kind of been obsessed with trying to know the year, make, and model of just about every older car I see ever since.

I think fourth grade is when a long-term crush on a girl in my class started. Of course, I never had the guts to say anything to her, and we moved before we were at the boys and girls “hanging out” stage of our lives, so that never happened. It’s also the year that I became really close friends with who turned out to be my best friend for the last three years I was there.

He lived in that subdivision that I had mentioned my Dad and Uncle developing outside of town. He had an Atari, I had a ColecoVision. I had my little Kawasaki; he had a Honda ATC three-wheeler. We got along great. His back yard was woods. We’d be outside all day together just doing kid stuff. Climbing trees, building forts, and avoiding his jerk of a brother. We’d race our bicycles around the block of the subdivision. The road was all loose gravel, so that sometimes didn’t end well and in one case required a trip for some stitches in his hand. His Dad did taxidermy, so it was always fun to go into his shop and look at the mounts he had on the walls. Deer, elk, a moose, a string of bluegill, a sturgeon, and he even had a full black bear standing on his hind legs in the corner.

Fifth grade was when art and music started to pick up and we got to do more stuff there. I think that was when the recorder made its evil presence known, and my personal favorite at the time, the autoharp. I liked it because it was kind of like a guitar laying down. Or at least that’s what I told myself back then.

In most places, sixth grade means moving up to middle school, but in Redgranite, it was your last year before being bussed to Wautoma. I don’t know why they did that as I think the Wautoma kids started middle school in sixth. I guess we just weren’t mature enough to roll with those big city kids. Sixth grade could almost get an entire post to itself, but I’m going to boil it down to just a few high points. This was my introduction to personal computers. We got ourselves a Tandy TRS-80 computer in the classroom. I was drawn to it like a magnet. It had some educational games for it that took a while to load. I believe they were math based, so of course I was all over that. We didn’t get a lot of time to play around with it at the time because most people just looked at personal computers as simple toys at the time. If only we’d known.

Do you remember being asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Well, we got an assignment to do a report on that and explain why. People in my class did the usual, Doctor, Nurse, Veterinarian, Policeman, Fireman, Astronaut, Farmer, or whatever their parents did for a living. Then here’s Bart over in the corner of the room putting the finishing touches on a picture of his future-self jumping a big pile of dirt on his green Kawasaki dirt bike as he wins the Motocross Championship. I always liked to add an illustration to my reports for that little something extra.

Sixth grade was also the start of band. I loved music, so I was all in for band. However, being the small unwanted stepchild of Wautoma, their kids got first pick of instruments. When it got to us, all that was left for us to choose from was French Horn, Clarinet, Oboe, Flute, Piccolo, and I think Bassoon. No drums, no guitar, no sax, and no keyboards. Well, I had agreed to do it already, and my Mom played the clarinet in high school and still had her extremely nice 1950s instrument, so I played the Clarinet. For that one year only. I’ll speak more on this when I get to Ripon.

Of course, I must mention the dreaded broken chair incident of 1983. One of my favorite female classmates had a chair that was different than pretty much every other chair in the room. We all had that thin flat plywood type seat with the curve at the front for your knees to wrap around. She had an older chair that had a thicker solid wood seat with a sort of butt indentation in it. Well, during an especially heated round of musical chairs, (probably to see who was first in line at lunch, and this guy loves him some lunch) I made a move to sit rather aggressively on her chair and broke the seat right down the middle. Now, I felt a little bad at the time, and she could have just gotten a different chair, but instead she kept it so she could remind me of how I had wronged her the rest of the year. At least I’m pretty sure that’s why she did it.

That’s going to be it for elementary school. Maybe one more post next week to finish out general life in town and we’ll move on to teen years in Ripon. Got a lot to talk about there too. I hope you enjoy my stories as much as I enjoy writing them down. It’s very therapeutic for me and I thank you for sharing in this with me.

Until next time, we’re all in this together. Luv luv.

The Formative Years: Pt. 2

Welcome back everyone. I’m glad you decided to read on. Today I’m going to delve a little deeper into my time in the small community of Redgranite, Wisconsin between the ages of six and twelve and one person in particular who made that time special.

I’ve mentioned my cousin before, and she’s part of a lot of memories and experiences from that time, so I’m going to start with some of the experiences that she and I had over the years. One of her favorite stories to tell involves ice cream. I have mentioned the restaurant that my Mom worked at, Griff’s in my previous post. Griff’s had a side window in it that you could walk up to, ring the bell, and someone would come and server you ice cream or drinks out of it. It was primarily for the people swimming in the quarry so they wouldn’t have to get dressed to get some refreshments.

Quite often throughout the summer, my cousin and I would walk up to get a couple of twist cones. With everyone working there knowing who we were, those cones quite often ended up being far taller than they should have been. On one particularly warm summer day, we left with our cones and headed off down the street. In front of Elmer’s Pizza was a stone wall that had some lower sections that were in the shade. We decided we would hop up on this wall and enjoy our treats. Right before this happened, her ice cream slid off her cone and onto the ground. I of course, thought this was quite funny and started laughing as any kid would. She did not think it was that funny at all. Before I could offer to share mine with her, she grabbed my ice cream off my cone with her hand and threw it on the ground.

After my initial shock, I started laughing again and told her I would have shared. At this point, I can’t for the life of me remember if we went back and said our ice cream fell and got more, or we just dealt with it and enjoyed our cones. There’s obviously a lesson in there about patience, sharing, and friendship, but I’m sure we learned nothing that day. For some reason, when the two of us got together, our IQs seemed to drop a few points.

I also remember when we first heard the word “puberty.” We didn’t know what it meant, but we thought it was one of the funniest sounding words ever. We would say it over and over, focusing on the first syllable and stretching it out, “puuuuuuuuberty.” It drove her Dad and Stepmom so crazy, I thought they were going to kill us. Her Dad asked us what it meant, and I said, without missing a beat, “A stinky bird.” Oh, the childish laughter that followed that.

For a few years, she lived in a house by Pearl Lake. Across from her house was a tree filled hill down to the lake. One winter, after the lake had frozen, we decided we needed to sled down to the ice. After scoping out the hill for a while, we decided that there was a spot where it was a straight shot to the lake in between the trees. Out came the plastic saucer, and I was going to be first…of course. About halfway down, and after picking up some decent speed, the saucer veered off course causing me to lean to one side and slam into a tree saucer first. The saucer broke and my tailbone hurt a bit, but we were determined. A decision was made that we just needed to be able to steer. So, we grabbed the plastic canoe and some paddles. Needless to say, that didn’t end much better. At least we didn’t break the canoe in half.

When we were may be eight or nine years old, we decided to do a local bike-a-thon. I don’t remember what the charity was that we were raising money for, but we went around town and got pledges on a per mile basis. The route was about fifteen miles. We showed up on ride day on our BMX style, one speed bicycles. The only two people not on ten speeds. It was at that time when a small amount of doubt entered my head as to whether or not we would make the full fifteen miles. We started off and all was good. The route took us past Pearl Lake, and I’d ridden out to that lake many times, so that was a walk in the park. But this route kept on going, and going, and going. At about the halfway point, I believe she started blaming me for getting her into this stupid ride, and I was blaming me too. But we kept pushing. I kept telling her that at least we weren’t at the back of the pack because surprisingly, we weren’t. There was a car following to help anyone with mechanical issues, and it wasn’t right behind us, so there had to be more back there. About two hours later, we made it back to the start/finish line. Extremely tired with legs on fire, but we did it. And there were some older kids on ten speeds that finished after us. That garnered us a certain amount of pride, but we agreed to never do that again.

Speaking of two wheeled vehicles, I’ve been riding minibikes or motorcycles since I was five years old. They’ve been a huge part of my life. In my early years, I started on a Honda QA-50. A relatively small and slow minibike. Dad had even changed out the sprockets so mine only topped out at maybe fifteen or so miles per hour. Well, one day, she and I were taking turns riding my minibike on a small farm my Dad had bought. It wasn’t really a farm, but it had an old barn, silo, and a couple out buildings. She was riding along and decided that she couldn’t turn or stop as she was heading straight for my brother’s car. She got it to turn a little and ran right into a shed. I freaked out a little and she justified it by saying, “hey, I didn’t hit the car.”

She’s probably going to get a little mad at me for this, but I told you that story to tell you this much funnier one. When I was ten, I upgraded to a little Kawasaki KM-100. This one had a clutch, five gears, and would do almost fifty-five miles per hour. One day, I brought it out to her Dad’s farm, and we began riding it in the cow pasture. This was her first experience with the clutch, so I was teaching her and trying to keep her no higher than second or third gear. Well, she was doing pretty good for a while, then she came in a little hot, panicked, and yanked on the front brake. It just so happened, the front wheel hit a somewhat fresh cow pie, locked up, and caused her to lay the bike down. Not a pleasant landing for her as you can imagine. A quite humorous one from my standpoint though.

At around age twelve, we had our first alcohol experience together. We snuck some wine coolers up to her room and proceeded to giggle and drink them. Things went pretty good for a while, but then her gut started churning. Before I get to the inevitable conclusion to this story, I’m going to preface it by saying that part of our delicious dinner that night was peach slices and cottage cheese. At the time, one of my favorite little side dishes. I’m not going to get into the gory details of what happened next, but have you ever seen a whole peach slice come out of someone’s nose?

I’ll give you a minute to scrub that image from your mind. I’ve probably been a little mean to her in these stories, but come on, some of that stuff is golden. But I do love her dearly and don’t know what my life would be like without her. We aren’t as tight as we were back then, but we always know we can turn to each other for anything. Her daughter is my Goddaughter and I love her as if she were my own.

People say that your cousins are your first friends. I’d have to agree with that. The stuff you read today is only some of the highlights of a lifetime of friendship. We’re to, how should I put this, experienced to do many of these things today, but we’ll always have these memories to look back at. We’ve had some highs, and for sure some lows, but through it all, we know we will always be friends.

Looks like I’ll be turning Redgranite into a sort of mini-series as I spent this whole post on my cousin. Oh well. Now I don’t have to think as hard about what to write about next week.

So, until then, we’re all in this together. Luv luv.

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.