Notice of Assessment of Mobile Home

Description: The last tax assessment of our mobile home before our house fire on November 14th 2005. The assessment was signed on March 10th. Story: The thing about mobile homes is they are like cars, they depreciate in value. Ours was a 14X77 1986 Kingsley model, a single wide that had been passed from one seminary family to another, often sold at cost, and so it was with us. The assessed value according to Allen County was $7,140. There was a housing glut in Fort Wayne and homes with a foundation were abundant and cheap, further driving down the cost of mobile homes. At the time the blue book value of the Mazda Millennia that we drove was greater than the value than our home (not by much, but there you go). For the money we paid each month, it solved a lot of problems, and was also the most spacious home we ever had. Came with two sheds and two parking spaces. Great for having gatherings. We had some truly wonderful parties there, the first being a house blessing. It was on that occasion that Dr. Judisch entered our home and looked around and declared “This isn’t nearly as dreadful as I thought it would be,” causing several guests to fight back laughter. We had good neighbors in the Moyers that became such good friends that we meshed our names and called the giant puddle formed between our properties the Moyba or the Gamoyer depending on how you wanted to play it. If it was wet outside we'd talk about crossing the Moyba (or the Gamoyer) to visit. It was, for its time, a good home, but I in no way regret it being gone.

First Grade Leaf Art

Description: 

Sheet of dark construction paper, might have been black or a very dark brown. My name is written in crayon the top. There are the impressions of six leaves, three maples in orange and three oak in yellow, made with tempera paint.

Story:

It was another first grade art project with Mrs. Kemp. We took leaves and sat them carefully in tempera paint and then applied them to the paper and lifted up the leaf. The trick was to have enough paint that you can see the shape and some of the vein work but avoid blobs.  I think I did OK. The white crayon at the top with my name looks like my own first grade handwriting. My mother kept it in a file for years and then somewhere in my adulthood gave me the file with the art work and all my report cards and some other bits she kept. I know it was pre-fire because there is some soot marks on the edge. I’m guessing it was in a file folder still when I pulled it out of the house. There are old tape marks on the back. I don’t think I ever hung it up, but I think we had a large display of these on our classroom wall for a parents night event.  

Geometry constructions

Description:  

Typing paper (that was a thing) cut to squares with black and white stars: one six-point, one five-point. Made using a compass and a straight edge. I also have a few papers ripped out of my geometry notebook explaining the basic method to make them.   

Story:

The notebook pages are mine, and while I really enjoyed that unit of geometry in high school, I was not nearly as talented as my sister Sarah who made a lot of these drawings and carefully inked them in. I liked to fill my bedroom wall with all sorts of things (the bulletin board was not enough), and so I put them up with masking tape -thus after thirty plus years the acid has bled through. Even the coloring in with the black fine point pen is more carefully done than I have patience for. My sisters and I all had the same teachers and from 7th to senior year at St. Thomas math was taught by Mrs. Hollis. 

Most of the geometric art you can see in the picture is Sarah's work. If you can zoom in you can see that the big orange poster is a spiral of a rectangle. It was an assignment to pick a polygon and make a spiral. Sarah had suggested I do the rectangle, so that is the one bit of geometric art on my walls that was mine.

Coca-cola can

Description: 

Coca-cola classic can with original formula seal.  Under the ingredients “CANNED UNDER AUTHORITY OF THE COCA-COLA COMPANY, ATLANTA GA. BY COCA-COLA BOTTLING COMPANY WEST, INC., BISMARCK, N.D.58501 AND GREAT FALLS, MT. 59401. The copyright is "1986 THE COCA-COLA COMPANY”  There is some soot damage on it.

Story:

When I was in the fifth grade I was in a group called Acro.  We were an acrobatic tumbling group that would perform halftime at high school boys basketball games.  Not as impressive as a gymnastics team or the Fargo Acro team that used mini tramps and looked to be flying.  Ours was much more rudimentary and, to be honest (most of the others started in the 1st grade and I started in the 4th) I was not really good at it. But we did not compete and were not scored and so my lack of talent did not offend anyone and I felt free to keep trying.  However, I was naturally flexible. 

In the 5th grade our coach, Mrs. Barker, challenged us to develop the ability to do the splits and offered to buy a can of pop for anyone who learned to do the splits before she did.  Pop was not a daily feature of my life. (Being a Wisconsin girl now I want to type "soda" but in my Dakota days it was "pop" so I’m writing "pop" for this account.) Once a week on Friday we were given the privilege of having one glass of pop from my Father's supply.   Apart from that and from visits to grandparents in Winnipeg, if we wanted a can of pop, we had to spend our own money.  I think in 1983 the cost was 35 cents out of the vending machines by the gym.  My weekly allowance was 25 cents. Anyway the promise of a pop was enough to encourage me to work on my stretching each night and well before our first performance I was able to do the splits.  The thing is, I never got my can of pop.  She kept forgetting to get it for me. 

Now St Thomas Public School was a small school in a small town, so my grade school acro coach was my junior high language arts and phy ed instructor.  She also taught girls high school physical education.  I would, on occasion, remind her that she owed me a can of pop.  We would get dressed for gym class in high school and she would tell us to warm up by stretching and I’d slowly slide into the splits in front of her and say “you know, I’m kind of thirsty.”   No one else had taken her up on the challenge or at least no one ever made a point of expecting her to make good on her promise.  My senior year in the spring she asked me what my favorite pop was. I told her it was Coca-Cola Classic. (New Coke was still a thing.)  She filed that away and on awards night my senior year she added one award that was not in the program and presented me with a 12 pack of Coca-Cola.  

My classmate, Terry Mattson, asked if he could have one and I refused. Well, he asked for one and I offered to trade him for one of his many sports trophies, so technically he refused. For years I had lamented the fact that all my awards consisted almost entirely of certificates and ribbons and I had earned this.  Metals and trophies elluded me. My plan was to save the first can and make a base for it and fashion my own trophy out of it.  I cleaned it and left it on the counter, but Mom figured it was trash and tossed it out.   I was angry, but it's not like I didn't have a replacement for it, so the can pictured here is the second one from that 12 pack. I never mounted it.  Not sure where it was in our spare room, but it survived my house fire and here it is part of the only award I ever received for a sports-like activity.  

Section of an Original Cookie box

 

Description:

Side if a cardboard box with logo for The Original Cookie Co, from a box large enough to hold a large pizza sized cookie.  There is a bit of soot damage.

Story:

Mr. Gaba.  My Mr. Gaba, when were were dating, lived and worked at home in Milwaukee during the summers while I lived and worked on campus at Concordia University Wisconsin in Mequon.  The thing was he didn’t have a car and neither did I.  So for us to visit each other he would take a Milwaukee County Transit bus as far has he could and then walk a few miles into Ozaukee County to visit me. (In those days there were no buses going into Ozaukee county let alone any routs that would take you to campus)   He liked to bring me gifts: Candy, flowers, the usual guy wooing a girl things. On one hot Friday night I knew he planned to visit, so I and sat out in a common area on a Friday until he showed up. (Concordia has set hours for when you can visit the room of someone of the opposite sex) I sat in a little alcove area where a few dorms intersected that had stairs and a desk and some dying plants that we called “the jungle”  After 11:00 pm on Friday he came carrying what I thought looked like a pizza box.  I remember thinking  “Oh, that’s nice.  I could go for a slice of pizza.” But it was not a pizza.  It was a large pizza sized heart shaped chocolate chip cookie--really two cookies; a cookie cream filled sandwich, that was decorated with chocolate frosting around it's top edge and inside that border in cursive frosting it read “I love you.”  It was a lot of cookie. 

I asked if he had eaten supper. He had not, so I offered to share some of the cookie and he said, “No, it’s all for you”  It was a lot of cookie.  The cream filling was quite sweet.  I only had a friend or two living on campus that summer and not wanting to waste it and knowing it would get stale in my tiny unairconditioned dorm room that only had a cube fridge with a footprint the same size as the cookie box, I took most of it to the campus library where I worked, and shared it with the staff.  They teased me.  One fellow student worker was a senior business student named Charlie and he would laugh at me every time I came in the library office and say in a sickly sweet voice “I love you.”  I’d laugh, blush, and get what I needed and head back to the stacks.  

Latif was surprised that I kept that bit of the box all these years.  He bought it at the Original Cookie store in the now defunct North Ridge Mall on Brown Deer Road and from there he walked to campus.  That's about 9 miles.  Google says it would take 2 hours and 53 minutes to walk (perhaps a bit longer walking in the heat while carrying a large pizza sized cookie sandwich). No wonder he got to campus so late.  I was impressed with the gesture.   I was happy with the sentiment, but let us be honest, that was an awful lot of cookie for one girl living alone in a small dorm room.  

His efforts and adventures to visit me did not go unnoticed by others. I had a suitemate named Kari my junior year who had a friend whose boyfriend would complain about going out of his way to pick her up for things. Kari, when she heard her friend's story said, "He isn't willing to drive a few miles out of his way to pick you up? My suitemate has a boyfriend who will walk five miles in the snow, in worn out shoes to visit her. [That did actually happen once.] That is what love looks like. I'm not sure that guy is worth your time if he can't drive a few miles to help you once in a while without complaining."

What can I say, My Mr. Gaba is a keeper.

Earliest Jigsaw Puzzle

 

Description:

Six piece jigsaw puzzle of a ballerina tying her laces.  It seems to be on wood.  The back side has crayon scribbles on it and remnants of old grey modeling clay. 

Story:

Most of my life I thought this was made in Japan even though the main girl depicted is blond.  I  assumed that because I’ve owned this puzzle as long as I can remember, and I was born in Japan.  But in the lower right corner it says “Printed in the U.S.A."   It may have been sent as a gift, or given to me after we moved state side.  I was two when we came back; about the right age for such a thing.  I don’t have any real memories associated with this puzzle, but like I've said I love jigsaw puzzles and this would be the one I’ve owned the longest, simple as it is.  When I was little I wanted to be a ballerina. I remember thinking that my favorite girl in this picture is the one in the red leotard, in part because red is my favorite color and also because she had dark hair with a little curl to it.

I figure it may have been in a storage box in our shed since it has no soot marks and I can't think of any other reason why I would have salvaged it after the fire.

Marble Art of the Letter R

Description: 

9X11 dark pink poster board with streaks of blue, black and white paint tempera paint making an R out of the clear space.  There is fire soot damage on the left hand side that could have been cut off, but wasn't.  The back side is blank except for the pencil line of part of a flamingo.  You would have to know it was a flamingo.  Just the base of the neck and part of the body are outlined.

Story:

Let's talk the paper first.  I was, for five years, a student manager of the St Thomas Public High School volleyball team.  I was one of four who had the job each year.  During the season I kept the official score book and assigned the points to the player who last touched the ball for a score.  I would also help set up before the games but two of the managers were always two guys and they did the heavy lifting.  I could go on at length about the poor quality of our net the first year or two and what it took to set it up, but that goes beyond what this is all about.  Anyway the job I did for five years started well before the season.  The basketball cheerleaders would make large posters for each player and the coaches and the cheerleaders and the student managers and put them on the wall.  The cheer squad had five people, so even while it was a larger group of posters there was a lot of help.  I had me.  Sometimes Peggy, another student manager would help, but it was pretty much up to me.  I’d come up with a design and get approval from the coach, and then have to make the posters -which in the day of dot matrix printers meant finding an image, tracing it on a transparency, then borrowing the overhead projector in the library, finding a place (back room in the library) where you could tape up a poster board, and project and trace the image and then paint it and cut it.  Lots of times there was a lot of painting, but one year I decided to do tropical birds.  The coach was a macaw.  The student managers were toucans and the players were flamingos and thus I didn’t have to paint much if I used pink paper.  It was by far my most popular design.  

Second in popularity was the year I just made letter T (our team was the St Thomas Tommies) using marble art.  I cut squares. To get the font right I borrowed a school letter for the T.  Coach and managers were on white paper.  The players were on yellow with purple and white streaks.  

I had learned to do this kind of marble art in the first grade when we did a Valentines art project.  That was in LaPorte, IN and my teacher was Mrs. Kemp.  We made hearts on white paper with red paint.  The process was to figure out the curve of a sheet and make sure it curved down.  Then we had a heart that was taped down onto the paper.  The paper was set in a box and a marble was dropped in red paint and then set in the corner of the box.  From there it was a matter of rolling the box around so the marble streaked across the page.  Do that until the page was covered with streaks.  Carefully take the paper out of the box.  Let it dry a bit and then remove the taped down heart leaving an image made with (what I learned in college was properly called) negative space.   It was fun, made an impression and I really wanted to do it again.  It was in high school that I finally found an opportunity and explained it to Mrs. Kappel, She was OK with it, so I got poster board and paints from school and set up shop in the basement letting posters dry on the ping pong table.  I'm guessing the R was a sample I made with scraps right after the flamingo project (which would explain the colors of paint) and might be the example I used to sell it to the coach. 

Mrs. Kappel was impressed enough by the concept that a few weeks after the posters were up in the gym, I got a phone call from her daughter's Girl Scouts leader in Grafton, who wanted any advice and tips I had for doing such a project because she wanted to try it out with her troop.