high school – Welcome

Ripon: Junior Year

Sorry for the missed week. I was fighting an illness and didn’t feel my brain was working well enough to write something coherent. I’m back this week to continue my original timeline and talk about the time of my Junior year and the summer leading up to it. This was a little bit of a strange transition year for me and the family.

Dad had quit his job as Maintenance Director out at the Conference Center due to “political reasons,” and began working at Ripon College in their Maintenance Department. Without a license or a family member out there on a regular basis, that would have made it difficult for me to continue working there myself. Plus, I was looking for more of a year-round employment instead of just a seasonal three to four-month stint.

So, a decision was made for me to get a job at McDonald’s in Ripon. Over the summer I would take any shift and any job they asked me to do. I had a goal to reach. At that time, I still wanted to go to culinary school and knew I was going to need money to make that happen. I was constantly being scolded for being on overtime to which I simply reminded them that they called me in to cover those shifts. Heck, I’d even be the one who came in on his day off to mow the lawn. Seventy-five to eighty percent of every paycheck went into my savings account with the remainder being for fun.

Working that many hours, and not having a driver’s license at the time severely hampered my ability to have fun though. I still would manage to walk uptown on the weekend nights I wasn’t working and hang out with friends. Usually hitching a ride with them to cruise around and listen to music. The nights would normally end with us heading down to Country Kitchen, Hardee’s, or of course McDonald’s to eat. Occasionally this would lead to me jumping back into the grill area and cooking our food as it was close to closing and I knew what a pain it was when you are trying to get everything done for closing and someone comes in.

I worked with some interesting characters there as well. The managers all had very different personalities. Everyone’s favorite was a female who primarily opened. She’d go from manager to Mom to friend in quick progression. She did her job well, took care of her flock, and ripped on them mercilessly when they did something dumb. There was the confidant and slightly arrogant store manager who seemed really nice, but something about him made you question his motives. The assistant store manager who felt he was better than everyone and that he should be store manage already. There was no pleasing that guy. Your crew could set a record for quickest average drive thru times for a shift and he’d complain you wasted two more cheeseburgers than yesterday.

I spent almost five years working there, so I’ll have a few more stories at time progresses here including the acquisition of my nickname. But that’s further down the pipe. As far as my first year goes, that is pretty much it. I worked hard and as much as possible. So, let’s get back to school.

Junior year for me was a pretty uneventful one, but one that would also change my direction in life. As I chose to focus on work, sports were pretty much dropped all together. After taking typing and realizing how important computers were going to be going forward, I decided to take word and data processing classes as well as computer programming classes. At the time, this was Basic and Pascal programming languages. I seemed to take to it rather quickly, however programming was a bit too boring for me. Far too much work for such little return.

Then came career week. They had speakers come in and talk to classes about what they did for a living to see if there was any interest. I was a bit excited to hear a chef was coming to talk. Unfortunately, he was very underwhelming. I didn’t feel he wanted to be there. I asked him questions on his schooling and he told me he had gone to a Culinary School in Chicago and graduated near the top of his class. He then went on to tell us he was working at Old Country Buffet.

That was not what I expected. I’m not sure what I expected, but when you have spent several years focused on what you wanted to be when you grew up, you have a certain image in you head. You don’t think about for every five-star chef in a fine dining establishment, there are thousands of chefs running buffets. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but my dream was to make new and innovative dishes, not meatloaf and fried chicken every day for the rest of my life. Doubt began to set in. I started questioning my own dreams. I didn’t know what I wanted anymore.

Then I heard a guy speak about being a Computer Engineer. He had a two-year Associate Degree. He got hired within a month of graduation. He worked in Milwaukee. He was making six figures. I was sold. Less school, more money, an industry that was growing in leaps and bounds, and still something I was interested in. I had my new career path. Although, mine would not quite follow the same path as his as we will learn in later installments.

Outside of this, school progressed at a fairly gradual pace the rest of the year. Just normal stuff. Walking the halls in the morning. Taking all of study hall to collect attendance sheets. Boombox in my locker playing Metallica and Megadeth on a regular basis. Skipping school to go to concerts or to just go fishing with friends. Normal stuff.

I know this is a very short one, even though I missed last week, but not much happened this year in my life. The next installment is going to be a tough one. I’m not looking forward to typing it up, but I owe it to myself as well as you guys to put it out there. I’m probably going to start writing it tomorrow just because I feel I will need to re-read it about a hundred times to make sure it fully conveys what I need to say before posting it.

Stay strong my friends, and Covid is no joke. It sucks.

We’re all in this together, Luv luv.

Ripon: Sophomore Year

Welcome back folks. Today we’re going to talk about my Sophomore year and the summer leading into it. This was a very enjoyable summer for me. I made some great friends, got into a bit of shenanigans, learned a lot, and thought I figured out my career path. The school year became far more interesting as driver’s licenses began being earned. This one’s going to be one of my longer ones, so prepare yourself.

The summer of my fifteenth year on this planet found me doing a different job out at the Green Lake Conference Center’s Hotel. I moved into a kitchen position. I was in charge of opening up in the morning and getting the ovens and grills fired up, getting breakfast started, assisting with cooking throughout breakfast, and helping prep for lunch and dinner. This meant I was in at three in the morning and done by eleven. It sucked getting up that early, but it was awesome to have my afternoons free.

Due to me having to start that early, and not being able to drive legally yet, it was decided that I could live in the dorms on the Conference Center grounds through the summer. I ate for free at the Hotel, so food wasn’t a problem. I had my Dual-Sport motorcycle there for transportation. Being private property, it wasn’t illegal for me to ride it down the big hill to the hotel in the morning and back up after work. I also shared the dorms with several people that were much older than me, so my parents were ok with it. Besides, my Dad was the Maintenance Director on the grounds, so he was there every day during the week anyway.

The building we stayed in doesn’t exist anymore, but it was just inside the front gate and just past the golf maintenance shop. Our back door opened to the eighteenth tee on the golf course. Being employees, we could golf for free. I would occasionally grab one of the extra carts by the maintenance shop and just start on the eighteenth, stop at the pro shop to check in, and work my way through back to the dorm. I wasn’t supposed to take those carts, but then they shouldn’t have hidden the shop key where I could see them putting it away in the afternoons.

The group of people that I lived with that summer were a blast. It was almost like a sitcom. You had the jock twin boys who worked out a lot, the quirky lovable girl with the southern drawl, the mother hen who tried to look after us, the shy quiet girl with glasses, the lovable geek who also played guitar, and me, everyone’s little brother. They were a great group of people and never looked down on me for being the young one. Even the night we all piled into the boss’s truck and went into a local bar. I cannot confirm nor deny that I drove us back that night being the only sober one.

I thoroughly enjoyed working in that kitchen. Being that we served cafeteria style, we would make up a ton of food to run down to the line for the start and just keep replenishing at time went on. We recycled the bacon grease by straining it through a coffee filter and putting it in a metal pot on the grill. I had a five-gallon pail of eggs mixed up in prep for scrambled eggs or omelets. Scrambled were fun because it was just ladle on some bacon grease, dump a bunch of egg mixture out of the bucket, spatula in each hand and start mixing. When it was all done, slide it off into a big rectangular pan, sprinkle on some shredded cheddar (my addition,) a little parsley flakes for color, and off it went.

We cooked mostly for the conferences that came through. Some of the biggest were Boy Scouts of America, The Southern Baptist Conference, and Math Teacher’s Conference. We did a lunch for the Boy Scouts once of burgers and hot dogs off the grill. How do you do that for a conference of over two thousand kids you ask? Well, your maintenance department builds you a twenty-foot-long charcoal grill out of old metal barrels for starters. Then you run and assembly line on both sides of the grill with all available cooks on hand. First one lays down the patties and dogs, second one flips or turns them, third one pulls them into the pans that the runners are carrying. We were a well-oiled machine. The kids loved it, and so did I. The non-stop movement made the time fly by.

Occasionally one of the conferences like the Southern Baptists would request a plate serve dinner for one night. These were tough, especially for larger conferences. We would give them two main options and a vegetarian option to choose from ahead of time. We couldn’t do made-to-order and get hundreds of people in and out in an hour or so. As it was, all employees had to be on hand for those nights. It was tough but rewarding to make it all come together. Plus, then we got to peek through the doors and watch service that followed. I had never experienced a church service with so much singing and dancing in the aisles. I find it interesting how things work in other areas of the country. It’s almost like experiencing another culture without leaving the United States.

The head chef was a retired Navy chef. His skill set made him perfect for this environment. It also helped that he always had a plan for the leftovers. The soup of the day was what he referred to as “five bucket soup.” Meaning we would go down in the morning, look at the leftovers from lunch and dinner the day before and come up with a soup idea utilizing those. It kept our waste down and taught me to think of leftovers as more than just what they are, but what they could be. I still utilize this in my cooking to this day.

I did have a couple of “incidents” in the kitchen that I’m not proud of, but I guess I should mention them. The first was a little minor but involved a burned foot. One of the cooking devices we utilized were steam cabinets. These were metal cabinets that would seal and lock and cook the contents with steam. Worked well for veggies keeping them firm, colorful, and delicious, but it also worked well for hard boiled eggs. You’d fill a deep pan with some water and eggs and throw them in the steamer. One day while making said eggs for the salad crew, I pulled the pan out to check the eggs. After doing the spin test and realizing they weren’t done yet, I went to put the pan back in the cabinet. I caught the pan on the door of the cabinet and dumped the boiling hot water on my left foot. I immediately took my shoe and sock off to see it blistering already. The lunch cook was already there doing some prep work, and breakfast was over, so the head chef told me to go see the nurse. If anyone has ridden a motorcycle, you know that you shift with your left foot. With the top of that foot burned, I couldn’t shift out of first gear. I was also barefoot on that side which didn’t help either. It was a long slow ride to the nurse to get some ointment and even longer back to the dorm.

“Incident” two involved the preparation of ingredients for club sandwiches. The cooking of the bacon went fine. The slicing of the tomatoes went fine. The slicing of the turkey…well not so much. After finishing the second turkey breast and going to set up the third, somehow the ring finger on my left hand dipped low enough for it to touch the blade. I immediately wrapped it in a towel and threw the turkey in the garbage. I then told them to clean the slicer and called my Dad. Now I’m ok with movie blood, but my own is a different story. I passed out on the way to the hospital and again when they started cleaning the wound before dressing it. I only missed one day of work with the foot, but this finger thing cost me a week and it was still hard with a big glove on my hand after that until the main bandage came off.

I occasionally would work the snack bar that we ran on the weekends. This was for people coming in off the lake and was basic bar food fare. Burgers, chicken sandwiches, deep fried everything, hand scooped ice cream, and soda. I didn’t enjoy this as much because there was a lot of downtime. Not many people knew we were there, so it was usually the same handful of people coming in. I did make some outstanding burgers for myself at times back there though. My favorite I think was the Philly-ish burger I did with two patties, sautéed onions, peppers, and mushrooms and a couple slices of provolone on a toasted hoagie bun. Great, now I’m hungry.

My brother and I had bought a boat prior to this season, and he worked at the boat house just down from the hotel that summer. This meant that our boat was docked in the unused slip at the end of the piers. So, when I got done with work at eleven, I would quite often go grab the boat and head out on the lake for a while before heading back up to the dorms. It was fun being the fifteen-year-old anchored in Norwegian Bay with all the much nicer boats and much older people. I’d get into some frisbee or football toss with some of the college kids hanging out down there. I would be offered adult beverages quite often, but of course I turned them down. I was underage. Did that sound believable? I tried.

So, you can see why this was one of my best summers. It’s one I wish I could relive for sure. It’s also what made me think that I wanted to be a chef for a career when I was older. At that time, I had planned on going to the tech for Hotel and Restaurant Management and then maybe to a culinary school. Those plans changed as I got older which I’ll talk about in a later installment. Now back to school.

As you know, Driver’s Education is two parts, classroom, and behind the wheel. Classroom was easy and I had it knocked out right away. However, there was a backlog for behind the wheel, and they were going alphabetically. I know “K” isn’t that far down the alphabet, but there were still Juniors taking behind the wheel when school started, and I likely wouldn’t have gotten in until almost the following summer. So, I made the decision to go with an outside source and went through a driving school out of Fond du Lac. I believe it cost me three hundred dollars, but I didn’t care at the time. I “needed” to be able to drive. Not the best choice on my part as I got my license on the first try, but after three accidents and a speeding ticket in the first five months, I lost it. I wasn’t allowed to get it back until I graduated from high school and needed it to go to college.

My first accident happened out at the Conference Center when a person stopped in the middle of the road to take a picture of a deer at the edge of the woods. I came around the corner messing with my CD boom box, not fully paying attention, and rear ended their car. My second one was in the school parking lot. I pulled into a stall and flung my door open without looking, directly into the fender of the car pulling in next to me. The speeding ticket happened when going to lunch and driving behind the middle school. I was going thirty in a fifteen mile per hour school zone. My third accident and the final straw occurred leaving the school parking lot. I looked to my left to see a minivan with its blinker on, looked right, and hammered the gas. The van did not turn, and I plowed right into the side of it. Because two of my accidents ended up not being point violations, I wouldn’t have lost my license that way, but the insurance company was going to drop my parents if I remained a licensed driver. So, I surrendered it and had to wait until I was eighteen and had to have my own insurance.

Most of my friends fared better than I did, and I unfortunately leaned on them to get me everywhere. The two friends that I was walking to school with were now picking me up in the morning to drive to school. Instead of stopping at The Breadbasket for donuts, we now would make runs out to Hardee’s or McDonald’s before school. Cranking out eighties metal music and smoking cigarettes on our drive in. We had an open campus, so lunch runs began every day too. McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Dairy Queen, A&W, and the occasional run to Fond du Lac for Taco Bell. That last one got us a few detentions because we never made it back in time. We also found out we could go to Jim’s Liberty Inn downtown, come in the back door and get bar food while playing pool. They had the only thirty-five cent pool table in town and I can still remember that Guns N Roses – Sweet Child of Mine was A2 on the juke box.

On the weekends, I would either walk up town and watch the people “scoop the loop,” or get a ride down to Double R Lanes to shoot pool. Scooping the loop, I feel needs a post all its own, so I’m just going to explain what it was to those who don’t know. It was basically just cruising. Our main street (called Watson Street) had a double drive at the start of it that lent itself to driving down one side, turning around, and back up the other side to head back down the street. Three blocks later, you could turn left and there was a triangle shaped block that going around would bring you right back to the main drag. Pretty much everyone did it and it was the place to be on a Friday and Saturday night.

Double R Lanes was obviously the local bowling center. It’s changed hands a bunch of times since I hung out there back then and looks nothing like it did inside. I would quite often get a ride from my brother down there to shoot pool. Several of my classmates as well as kids older and younger would go down there either to bowl, play video games, or shoot pool. I feel like I was a better shot back then than I am now, probably because I was down there multiple times a week and shot all night long.

There was really only one or two times I can remember there being any trouble down there and one of those times was because of me. This situation started in school. I was in shop class working on a lawnmower engine with one of my friends. This class had some Juniors as well as Sophomores in it. Due to a theft, we only had one set of metric sockets and due to me getting there a little early, I had that set. A couple of Juniors decided they wanted that set and tried to take it from me to which I did not relinquish said sockets. After using my sarcastic wit and intelligence to make them both look stupid, it ended with the larger of the two holding my arms and the other one grabbing me around the neck. The teacher broke it up and one of the two said, “I know where you hang out. I’ll see you Friday night.” I laughed him off and went about my business. I mentioned this to my brother, who also hung out at the lanes with his friends, and he said, “if it happens, it’ll be fair.” That Friday, this gentleman showed up with one of his friends and got in my face while I was shooting pool. I agreed to meet him outside. Once him and I walked past my brother, my brother stepped in between this guy and his friend telling him that his friend was staying inside. After much back and forth, and me waiting by the door, he said, “You’re not worth my time,” and left. So technically, it wasn’t actually trouble.

Now that some of us had licenses, this is also when concert time started kicking off. Kiss, Ratt, Motley Crue, Poison, Tesla, you name a big hair band, and we saw them. One of my friend’s family had a fifteen passenger Plymouth van that was quite often the transport bus to and from the shows. Many good memories of very stupid things being done. One that I feel I can talk about now involved a spotlight, some colored filters, and another vehicle in our group. We were coming back from a show in Green Bay, and we passed the other vehicle for whatever reason. The driver of that vehicle decided to pass us back. This back and forth continued most of the way home. Between Pickett and Ripon, we came up with a brilliant idea. I pulled a red and blue filter out of the bag that had the spotlight in it, held them up by the windshield, and someone from the next seat back took the spotlight and moved it from one filter to the other and back again. Now before we did this, we had dropped back a bit and then came flying up on the other truck with these lights going. He of course pulled over and we passed him laughing hysterically and came into town first. I know, that’s extremely illegal, but we were dumb teenagers, it was pretty funny at the time, and not one got hurt.

You’ll notice that I didn’t talk much about classes, homework, tests, and all that school related stuff. That’s because it’s not really what I cared about at the time. School was a social thing for me. The learning was secondary. I know my parents would be upset to hear me say that, but I made it work for me in the end.

I think that’s more than enough for today. You’re probably sick of reading this stuff anyway. So, until next week, you know how this goes:

We’re all in this together. Luv luv.

Headed to Ripon Senior High School

Hello friends. Today I’m going to get into the high school years. High school, a time we all remember fondly…or something like that. Good times, bad times, and just ok times. But we can’t argue that high school may have been the single most important time in forming who we would eventually become.

The summer before my Freshman year, I worked out at the Green Lake Conference Center at the Hotel as a Dining Room Orderly and dishwasher. They served food cafeteria style, so as a DRO, my job was to bring the food in the warming cabinets down from the kitchen to the dining room as well as bring the empty pans back up. Plus, stock all the beverage dispensers, ice cream, cereal containers, plate carts, silverware stands, and general cleanup after meals. Grunt work, but I was fourteen, what else is there at that age. Once school started, I was done out there for the season, but I still helped my Dad on his side jobs on the weekends.

Freshman year was a pretty good one. I had lockers next to one of my good friends, and I knew some of the upper classmen from early football practices, so that helped a little. Almost all my classes were on the same side of the school which kept late to class detentions to a minimum. We also started a tradition. A couple of my friends, including one of my best friends who lived near by me, would walk to school together. When we got there, we’d drop our stuff at our lockers and just walk laps around the halls talking stupid and saying hi to our other friends. It doesn’t seem like much, but you’ll learn in a later post just how awesome that was.

I was far from the model student, and I may have had acquired a detention or ten here or there, but hey, I showed up most days. And that’s something, right? I had a knack for making teachers a bit upset with me because I wouldn’t do the homework most of the time, but consistently got As and Bs on the tests. I understood the stuff, I was just a bit lazy. I heard that “if you would only apply yourself” speech so many times I should have gotten it tattooed on my chest. I was even accused of cheating by the biology teacher once, so I told him to give me another test and I’d sit alone in the room with him watching the whole time I took the test. I ended up getting a better grade on the second test.

Shop class got a whole lot better. We got to start welding. I enjoyed this immensely, except for maybe that day a classmate set himself on fire with the torch and proceeded to yell, “I’m on fire, I’m on fire” while trying to put himself out with the hand that was still holding the lit torch. We did finally get him to drop the torch so we could put his arm out. He suffered very minor injuries, but we were done welding for the day.

How many of you remember the trick of jamming two pennies into the bottom of your locker door so it wouldn’t lock? I couldn’t remember the combination to save my soul, so I did that on week two and it stayed like that almost the whole four years. Almost. One morning during second semester, I came in to see my locker partner standing by the locker with his backpack in his hand. He said someone had taken the pennies out and he couldn’t remember the combination. I couldn’t either, but lucky for both of us, I had scratched the combination into the metal above a locker three lockers away from us. I know, destruction of school property, blah blah blah. But smart. Wasn’t above our locker, so we wouldn’t get blamed for it, and it saved us that day.

I wasn’t much for study hall. I usually just sat there listening to Metallica’s Ride the Lightning on my Walkman (Walkman is a registered trademark of the Sony corporation, I don’t know if they’ll see this, but better safe than sued) the whole time. I found out a good way to waste time was to volunteer to pick up attendance sheets. At a normal pace, this would take maybe ten minutes to complete. Our school wasn’t that big. You just had to grab them off the door and drop them in the office. I managed to make this task take forty-five minutes. Now that’s talent. I also knew which classes my friends were in so I could slowly walk by the door making faces or gestures to make them laugh. I only got in trouble a few times for that. One of the English teachers stopped me one day as she had witnessed my sluggish retrieval of said sheets. She proceeded to tell me how much potential I had, and that she really loved my imaginative stories I came up with for my writing assignments. I blew it off like most speeches I got back then, but in hindsight, it was really nice of her to say.

I had two after school activities. The first was football. Football was fun because you get to hit people and not get in trouble for it. I liked defense better than offense because there seemed to be less rules and less plays to remember. I wasn’t the best at it, but I enjoyed playing until a knee injury my Sophomore year put a damper on things. I’m sure I would have lost interest in it anyway because most of my friends stopped playing after Freshman year.

The second was weight club. This one I enjoyed even more. Mostly because if you start lifting weights in your early teens, your strength gains are quite rapid. Plus, we got to go on a river rafting trip. Most of this trip was like tubing. Tying off with each other and drifting, although the Freshmen were in charge of keeping the raft city off the banks. Towards the end there was a stretch of rapids and my partner and friend fell out of our raft almost at the start. He rode the rapids down with one arm over the front of the raft and the paddle in the other hand while I tried my best to steer away from the rocks. I can’t remember if he broke anything, I don’t think he did, but he was pretty bruised and scraped up after.

Speaking of football, sometimes when it rained, Coach would have us run laps in the halls. A certain janitor, who lived across the street from me and had two lovely daughters (I don’t know if either of them read this, but if they do, brownie points for me,) used to give us grief when we did. It was a friendly back and forth with him. One time I grabbed his garbage can on wheels and took it with me for a lap. Hey, at least I didn’t leave it in the opposite hall. Of course, then he tried to trip me with his dry mop the next time around. He was my favorite janitor.

Let me tell you a little story about Freshman Algebra. I was always a fan of Math. I even took four years of it in High School including the ones where you had to write out proof of how you came up with your answer. But myself and the teacher of Freshman Algebra did not see eye to eye on things at all. First thing we didn’t agree on was me sitting next to my close friend in the back of the room. Something about disrupting those who were actually there to learn something. We also didn’t agree on me being the one who had to move to the front seat. She also didn’t like me doing the homework she hadn’t assigned yet. I picked up on the basic concepts of Algebra quite quickly, so while she was teaching the next chapter, I was doing the problems at the end of it. This apparently was “not the way we do things here.” Let’s just say the time spent with her was very unpleasant and may have netted me a good chunk of my first year detentions.

Oh man I just loved school dances. Ya, I don’t believe me either. So, I went to some winter dance in the cafeteria because a few of my friends said they were going. After opening the windows, reaching down, and bringing snowballs in to throw, we were asked very politely to never come to any more school dances. I was happy to oblige. Less pressure for me to try and find a girl that would actually say yes without having a full-blown panic attack in the process. I believe my friends ended up going to at least one of our proms, but I think they were drunk when they did.

Well my mind isn’t coming up with anything more to talk about this week, and it’s past my bedtime. I know because the dogs are giving me “the look.” So, I’ll close this week out and we’ll start next week with the summer before Sophomore year. The year of living away from home for a few months and starting to drive legally, for a little while at least.

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