Name tag from the Weitzel Family Reunion

 

Description:  Needle point name tag with just the name and a border stitched into the canvas.  It is soot damage but you can see it was some sort of green.  The canvas was cream and backed with white paper and placed in a plastic sleeve with a pin on the back.

Story: I’m in the middle of writing and revising a book about my mom’s parents and there are a lot of stories to tell there about this event, but for here let me simply explain that my Grandma Schaefer had one brother and seven sisters.  In 1982 a great reunion was planned and all but four people were able to attend.  Each sister had a role to play.  Auntie Elsie made the name tags.  The great part is that they were color coded according to which Weitzel you were descended from.  I imagine she used up a lot of scrap yarn.  Auntie Teeny had no kids and her husband Micky stayed away so her tag would only need about a yard of yarn to stitch it. Larger families with lots of kids, like the Riegers or the Kosses, would need a lot more of the same color.  The Schaefers were green.  I think there were three different family greens.  Ours was neither the prettiest shade nor the ugliest.  To my eyes, it appeared that a lot of the yarn came from needle point projects she started in the 1970s.

Door to door sales goal sheet

Description:  Single white sheet with grid for making and tracking goals.  It is a mass produced sheet that is not particular to any business.  In my handwriting under weekly goals I had “have all materials for each day and Get pitch down completely. Under Tuesday is written:  "1. Smile going up to the house.  2. Get pitch down (don’t hesitate) 3. Do better on Intro. " In the bottom is the Juice with each letter written down in columns in my hand Join Us in Creating Energy.  There are some other words I can not quite read.

Story: This is the only evidence I have that for two days I was a door to door sales person--well a trainee.  It was in that "hey, I’m not going to be a classroom teacher, but I need money phase" of my post college life and I was applying all sorts of places and just looking for work.  This was after the three weeks I spent doing temp work assigned to a research company doing telephone surveys.  I answered an ad offering advancement and looking for a team leader.  I had almost zero idea what I was getting into.  I showed up with a few other recruits to an office park in Brookfield called Bishop Woods (You can see the sign along I94)  tucked back in the trees. I had a meeting with a man who said something about not worrying about doing sales. They were there looking for management.  But he was very vague.  Anyway I took the job and the next morn showed up for the "team meeting."  It was in a large open room with no furniture.  I’d say over 100 folks were in the room and with that we endured about an hour of what seemed to be a product brief, a motivational speech and what I was reminded most vividly a high school pep rally cheering kind of gathering.  I felt uncomfortable and that is putting it mildly, but we needed for me to work.  After the team meeting I was pared with a guy and spent a day driving around Port Washington stopping at houses and knocking on doors trying to sell a sheet of prepaid golf outings.  It was not the only product the company did.  They also would sell bundles of oil changes and other service things.  I picked up a few things about sales.  The importance of having the customer hold the product while you talked about it.  Give them a sense of having it and then feeling like they are loosing something if they don’t pay for it.    They guy who I road with that day was not much older than me.  I learned too much about his life, he had a girlfriend and a son and didn’t think he was ready for marriage.  We met up with other sales persons and their trainees for lunch.  It was a long day.  Lots of car time.  At the end of it we went back to Bishop Woods and all the sales folks were back in the big room yelling and loudly celebrating their successes and trading stories.  I felt very out of place.  

I came back the next day.  Was pared with another guy.  He was more reserved and professional.  We headed south knocking on doors in affluent mc mansion neighborhood around Delevan or some such.  It was another long day and by the end of it I knew I was not cut out for this kind of work, nor was my 84 Chevy Cavalier cut out for that much driving each day.  Lesson learned. On one hand I felt like a quitter on the other I knew I needed a job where I would not spend eight plus hours and more than a tank of gas and come home at the end of the day with nothing to show for it.  

I took what lessons I could from the experience and went and signed on with another temp agency the next day.  They had free training on Microsoft products so I sat in a room for a few hours and worked though some tutorials on managing electronic files, word processing and using spreadsheets.  With that I was able to get work updating the inventory lists of Sears repair vans.  Eventually I got a full time job at an expired pharmaceutical return company, but that is a whole other story.  

Drawing of the front of my 4th grade classroom

 

Description:  white letter paper drawing in pencil of the front of my 4th grade classroom

Story: The details are a bit fuzzy on this one.  I think there was a thing where stuff from the school could be submitted to the county fair.  I don’t know if I got a ribbon or certificate, but I recall it won some sort of prize.   I obviously had not learned anything about perspective and only knew a tiny bit about drawing three dimensional shapes.  Mostly I sat at my desk with the paper and tried to draw what I saw in front of me.  I left out some details and drew it all free hand without using any kind of straight edge.  I really wanted to fill the page and in that it was a pretty good effort, though even when I drew it I was bothered by the fact that you can’t see where the floor ends and the wall begins.  I had a lot of issues with the teacher's chair.  Part of the reason the floor is so dark under the desk is that I was covering up my light pencil attempts to get the wheels right.  I was never happy with it.  They hardly look like they match the back of the chair that I also had issues with.  I do rather like the effect of having the PA system box with sound lines coming out of it.  I also played a bit with texture on the bulletin board.

You can tell it got pinned up a few times with the holes in the upper corners and there is some soot damage at the top again.

Pamphlet about Tourette Syndrome

 

Description: 

Light blue tri-fold-out pamphlet with questions and answers about Tourette Syndrome from 1991.  

Story:

My earliest memory of a motor tic was in my high school English class.  My head seemed to move on it’s own and I went from looking at my textbook to looking at the clock on the wall.  It was weird.  Did I really want to look at the clock?  I’d move my head slowly back to my book and be thinking about it, trying to decipher if I had chosen to look at the clock or if it just happened on it’s own.  Then I’d do it again, but I was thinking about it, so that was my conscious choice...wasn’t it?  Tourette is weird that way.  It is like it is it’s own impish thing, knows when it’s being talked about, so as I write this I’m having symptoms that I have not experienced in some time.  Anyway it was a very infrequent thing, and I didn’t give it much regard.  Then I started my sophomore year in college.  I was taking some intensive courses.  I was writing long letters to Mr. Gaba who was in basic training and there I sat on my college bed trying to read Candide by Voltaire and my head kept turning to the side and I kept losing my place.  It came to be an ongoing issue with reading.  It didn’t hurt, it was just annoying and more persistent than my sudden odd high school clock watching.  My roommate who was a nursing student noticed it.  I looked up a few things in some medical books in the library, figured out what I was doing was called a tic. 

Finally I went to see the campus doctor.  There is this Loony Toon cartoon of Tweety taking a Jekyll and Hyde formula. Every time Sylvester looked at Tweety he looked normal, but then Sylvester turns his back and Tweety becomes a monster.  My visit to the campus doctor reminded me of that cartoon.  Every time the guy looked at me I was perfectly still.  He’d look down to make a few notes and my head would tic.  He checked out what he could about balance and interviewed me and suggested that I see a neurologist.  I didn’t have a car and know what to do, so I called home, and Mom set things up for me to visit a doctor during spring break in North Dakota. 

I was tested for various things. Tourettes is a diagnosis of elimination.  If no other cause can be found, it must be.  Well it wasn’t Tourettes, I was told it was transient tic syndrome.  If symptoms went on past a year it would be chronic tic syndrome.  In reading up on it as best I could in the days of pre-internet, the only difference between chronic tic syndrome and Tourettes is that Tourettes has both physical and verbal tics.  I had no verbal tics.  So life went on.  I had no interest in trying to treat my condition with medication.  My tics, while at the time annoying and bothersome, were not debilitative, and knowing some girlfriends with epilepsy and how the medications messed up so many other things and had to be counteracted with other meds, I reasoned that any medication that would help the tics would cause me other problems.  Things stayed pretty much as is.  Got married, graduated, eventually ended up working at Todd Wehr Library at the Medical College of Wisconsin where I did a second shift that ended at midnight five days a week.  In was on a drive home that I started to have verbal tics.  A really loud ear piercing "HA!” I could feel it coming, and couldn’t stop it.  Well that cleared it up.  I have Tourette syndrome. '

What I have learned over the years is the number one thing I can do to reduce my tics is to make sure I get enough sleep at night.  I’ve had a few times when I was prescribed medications for other things and found my tics got much worse.  If it was a direct cause of the medication or simply that the meds messed up my sleep cycle I can’t say, but in both cases I simply stopped taking the meds and things got better.  Now things are pretty stable.  The only time I really have any issues is when I’m under a lot of stress (another reason why I’m a librarian and not a high school history teacher) or when I am visiting someone who has tics.  If we are together and one person tics and the other sees it...well, like I said, I’ve been ticking like a clock as I write this.  It’s an odd compulsive condition.  It is somehow related to obsessive compulsive disorder and I have some of those tendencies too, though much less than before.  I drove my roommate in college crazy with not being able to go to sleep unless all doors and drawers were perfectly closed and latched.  This I got over after getting married, and living in old houses where almost no internal doors latch, and in the case of the bedroom door it needing to be unlatched so the cat can get in and out during the night. 

Anyway, I don’t remember the doctor's name, thought I think he was a graduate of the Medical College of Wisconsin where I ended up working for a bit.  He gave me that pamphlet and it was in his office when he wasn’t looking at me, and was making notes, that my mother first noticed what I had been complaining about, because prior to that she had never seen me tic and had set up all the appointments not quite understanding what was going on.   My mother upon learning that my condition was somehow hereditary felt terrible and perhaps guilty that I should suffer with such an odd condition.  I assured her that unlike with the genetic time bombs of heart disease, diabetes, & cancer, Tourettes didn’t hurt and would never kill me.  I’m glad it didn't become a real issue until college, when I was much more self confident, and did not have to deal with it around people who would tease me about it.  

Years later, I went to a doctor in Fort Wayne and a nurse was taking my medical history. I mentioned it, and she stopped and looked at me and seemed choked up.  Turns out her teen daughter had Tourettes and she was very concerned about her.  I explained that my symptoms were relatively mild and I was never medicated for them.   The woman said, “But here you are, a married woman with a college degree, and you’re OK.”  I didn't quite know what to make of that exchange.  I never thought of myself as a positive role model, but this woman found some comfort in my ordinary life. 

String Art on Paper--Bunny

Description:  8.5x11 sheet of colored paper with white reinforcement sheet on the back.  Using string thread is stitched through the paper to create images using a precise method that gives the impression of an image made with a spiral graph.

Story: In 5th grade Miss Hanson had us doing various string art projects.  We were give a grid sheet with numbered and lettered holes and directions with where to put the needle each time to make the right pattern. There were the usual frustrations, knotting thread, getting a few ahead and realizing you were in the wrong hole and having to pull it out to fix it.  I deeply enjoyed this project.  

Sixth graders at St Thomas Public school made more elaborate projects of string art that involved nails and black cloth and three dimensional effects.  They were made to give to our parents at Christmas.  Mr. Stuberg, the 6th grade teacher, didn’t change it up, but he did have a selection of patterns you could choose from (train, snail, ship etc,).  Families with a lot of kids ended up with several forms.  It was not unusual for younger siblings to say “Well, Mom said I need make this one."  The joy of small town life.  There were never too many surprises.  The 5th grade projects were seasonal. We all did the same project at the same time.  I think we did three of them all together,  One was just circles, There was a heart for Valentine's days that we were to give to our parents. The bunny was by far the most complicated one we made as an Easter project.  The fire was not kind to this work and some of the strings on the back broke so it no longer has the tight neat look I produced. 

I wrote about all these archived objects in November of 2020. At that time I was asked to decorate a hand turkey for a display at work. I did it free form so there isn't the geometric precision of the fifth grade work, but I was inspired by the memory of the fun I had with those grade school projects.

Page 10 from my senior year memory book

Description: 

A page taken out of my fire-damaged senior year memory book. This page originally was filled with questions about what I thought about my future.  I covered that page completely, covering it with pink notebook paper and then glued a maze of school pictures of myself snaking up and down the page starting with one of me at age 4 and ending up back at the top with one of my senior pictures taken when I was 17 sitting next to my 4 year old self.  I made little black lines between the pictures so you can follow to know exactly what order the pictures are in.  

Stories:

There it is, a one page summary of my childhood.  Each picture I remember for various reasons. 

4 years old: The 4 year old picture is the only one in which I am not smiling.  I’m wearing one of the dresses that would never die.  My mother sewed clothes and like to make us matching dresses. As the youngest that meant that you kept growing into the same dress over and over.  The good news is that by the time I was four, Sarah and I were very close in size so I only had to grow out of that dress twice.  Mom took me to the public school in Westville, IN to have this picture taken.  The only way to get my hair to cooperate was to have it freshly washed, so I took a bath just an hour before the picture was taken.  The pony tail on top was really tight and I remember it kind of hurt.  I remember Mom being very pleased that my ringlets turned out so nice. "you just wind them around your finger and they make nice sausages." I also remember that the light the photographer aimed at me was very bright and he was a total stranger. That is why there was no smile.

Kindergarten:  St. John's Lutheran School LaPort IN. Red happens to be my favorite color (though there was a bit of the 80s when I preferred lavender) but in Kindergarten it was all about red.  This dress was a hand-me-down from someone--outside our family.  By that year my mother had determined that longish hair was too difficult to deal with and always cut it short.  It frustrated me to no end because short hair (if you couldn’t have a Dorothy Hamill style bob was very unfeminine.  My sisters both had long hair and how was I going to become a ballerina if I couldn’t put my hair in a bun.  

1st Grade: By first grade I had given up my ballerina dreams. (The only lessons Mom could find were on Monday evenings and that was Dad's day off so we'd have to give up family time--that's what she told me. They probably also cost more than my folks could afford.) Now I wanted to be a nurse.  I liked the hats they wore.  I don’t know where this dress came from, but I thought it looked like a uniform and thus I wanted to wear it for my school picture.  Rebecca, my eldest sister, did not like the looks of it and begged Mom to have me wear something else on picture day, but Mom told her it was my decision.  I was unaware of that conversation, until I heard my mother discussing it over the phone after we got our pictures back.  The photographer made some comments about the amount of girls in my class wearing sleeveless dresses and how it made them look cold against the wintery backdrop he had brought.

2nd Grade: In second grade I had a store-bought dress that I remember picking out at the store.  My classmate Stacie also owned the same dress and we kept trying to wear them on the same day and kept failing all year to get it coordinated. 

3rd Grade: St. Thomas Public School, St. Thomas ND. The summer between 2nd and 3rd grade, we moved to North Dakota.  For some odd reason school pictures in St Thomas were called pony pictures.  Not even the photographer knew why and once explained we were the only town who called them that.  Rebecca approved of my blouse with the embroidery.  

4th grade: Rebecca came into my room, pulled out of my closet the sweater I have on in the picture, and informed we that we were all wearing sweaters with big collars for our pictures and I should use the pin that a family friend had sent us from Japan.  I had no strong feelings about the outfit one way or another, so I didn’t argue with Rebecca’s choice.  My hair was a bit longer.  Mom let me grow it out, but I didn’t really take care of it. Late in the year Mom offered that if I agreed to get it cut and folks could see my ears she’d let me get my ears pierced.  

5th Grade. Princess Diana’s wedding dress had big puffy sleeves and high neck blouses were a thing.  This white blouse was bought during back-to-school shopping.  It was a nice blouse.  The thing about me is that I was very short-waisted and as a kid kind of chubby.  Then as I matured I sort of grew at the ends. My waistline in the 5th grade was the same as my senior year. I’m not sure if my ears were pierced yet. I wore very small earrings so it’s hard to tell.  All I had for the first year were studs with my birth stone and later little blue stars.  My hair in this picture was the result of a hair cut that my grandmother had given me.  Mom was furious.  Somehow she cut it so all the curls sort of curled into my head.  “You could just shave my head and paint it black” I would complain.  

6th grade. Rebecca was a high school senior and in our small town that meant she worked on the year book, in fact she was a year book editor, and thus was onsite for all the pony pictures as the classes came through.  The sweater was new, but the blouse under it was the same one I had on for my 5th grade picture.  Rebecca was upset that I had not put on any jewelry and she thought my hair looked bad, so she grabbed a comb out of my classmate Margo’s back pocket and combed my hair and then took her necklaces off and put them on me.  I'll admit it, this is one of my better pictures.  After the picture was taken she took the jewelry back.  Big sisters, what can you do?

7th Grade: Over the summer I decided I wanted long hair and started to really grown it out. (the story I tell is that I could finally outrun my mother) For a year I used flexible combs to deal with the bangs until they grew out.  I’m wearing the same blouse for the third year in a row, this time with a purple vest.  After three years, I was rather tired of the blouse and it actually fit Rebecca so she took it.  I had some growing to do vertically but Rebecca who was five years older wore the same size tops I did starting in the 5th grade.  If she wanted something different to wear she would wander into my room and help herself to items in my closet.  I’d protest and she would argue that I wasn’t wearing it. (Mind you, at this point I’d still be in bed.) When I’d suggest that I should be able to wear some of her clothes, she argued that she earned money and contributed to buying her clothes whereas Mom and Dad paid for all of my clothes, so they were family property.  

Eighth grade: I stopped wearing flexible combs.  Most days I did a pony tale but for picture day I pulled my hair back with a single long barrette.  I got a new blouse and I took to wearing a silver chain almost every day.

My freshman year Rebecca sent me a vest and blouse. She had started giving me clothes as gifts.  I generally preferred to have high neck lines, (in part because of my modesty complex and there was a certain classmate who liked to try and shoot paper wads down girls shirts, and I didn’t have any interest in giving him a target). But it was a nice combo and I figured Rebecca would be happy to see it, so I wore it on picture day.

Sophomore year I was back to embracing red as my favorite color.  In the late 80s bold colors had pushed out the pastel trends of the early decade. Mom was using her knitting machine again and she made me the sweater.  There are wide bands of different knit patterns but it is all made of the same red yarn.  It had wide sleeves.  Much to Rebecca’s dismay I paired it with a blouse that didn’t match.  If you look really close you can see that the strips on the blouse are bright pink.  

Between my sophomore and junior years we vacationed in Winnipeg and did a week of Folklarama.  At the Hungarian pavilion mom bought me a hand stitched blouse done with traditional Hungarian style embroidery.  A more traditional form would have the flowers in bright reds, pinks, and blues, with green leaves. Those were available, but I asked for the white-on-white figuring it would be easier to pair with things. I wore it for my picture that year.  By then I was very happy with how my hair looked and it seemed with the length, to curl even more than when it was shorter.   Almost every girl in my high school had permed hair and tall hair-sprayed bangs, aka mall hair.  The highest compliment someone could give my curls was to say it looked like my hair was permed.  I liked how I looked as a teen.  I was blessed with mostly clear skin and I finally had the long hair I could put in a bun or a braid or a pony tale.  

The last picture was my senior picture.  There were several to choose from but for my official portrait I like the contrast of the black sweater and pearls. It seemed timeless to me.  I believed that in 20 or 30 years I wouldn’t look and have to explain, “that was the fashion at the time.”  I remember laying out all the proofs, trying to select which one to have prints of.  I gave them names as I considered them.  This one I dubbed “I’m pretty and smart too.”  

One final story about this page.  When I was a freshman in college I was assigned a roommate from Japan, Shoko Honda.  I was sharing my senior book with her and when she got to this page she pointed to my 2nd grade picture and exclaimed “You were FAT!" Then pointing at the next five pictures in turn said “Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat,”  Um...yeah.   I could have been offended, but I chalked it up to cultural differences, and was happy that at least she had put it in the past tense.  

Shopping list

Description:

A portion of a tear-off shopping list with things filled in by both my parents and me. The note identifying this list as being from March '90 was made by my mother.

Story:

Sarah had a boyfriend (now husband) who did his best to impress his girlfriend's parents and remembered things like birthdays, or maybe it was Christmas, anyway Bob (now my brother-in-law) gave my mom a shopping list holder. It was a wooden thing you hung on a wall that held a roll of receipt paper. The paper pulled down under a serrated cutter and had hooked sides to hold a pen.  The idea was you writer your items on the paper pulled down and then when you went shopping you just ripped off the paper and there was your list. It was handy and Mom put in on the kitchen wall by the dishwasher. 

She made it clear that Dad and I (the only kid living at home at the time) should add items to the list and that way she would remember to get them. We had some fun in those days and Dad played with language and fonts. I doodled pictures and Mom found the whole thing amusing, so she saved the list and a few years later sent it to me in a letter. The handwriting for "red rose tea" is my natural handwriting. The "Ice Cream" and "Grape Juice" I was making an effort. (Had to make Mom feel like the money she spent on my calligraphy course was worth it.) The cursive is all Mom's. I’m pretty sure the Sucrets is Dad's contribution, as is the light bulbs, and of course he wrote, “The preparation of the letter “H” when it is obtainable at a bargain.”  A little 30 year old slice of life.

The three of us had our own way of being together (still do when I visit them alone) that is very different from when my sisters are around. It was not unusual on evenings for the three of us to be in the living room, Dad in his Lay-z-boy, Mom in the other Lay-z-boy, and me in the flowered chair that rocked and spun around, and all be reading our own books.  Dad would occasionally give me one of his books to read.  On one occasion it was a science fiction book called Dreadful Sanctuary  (the cover had nothing to do with the story--or so Dad explained to me, adding that he thought I'd enjoy it. The premise was that earth was thought to be an insane asylum for the other inner planets.  It asked again and again the question "how do you know you are sane?" Anyway, I was reading that, Dad was reading The Tempting of America by Robert Bork and Mom was reading a light romance book.  We were all enjoying our books. Then Mom laughed out loud and felt the need to share what she was laughing at. There was an informal house rule--mostly applied to the Readers Digest, that if you laugh out loud at something, you are obliged to share.  So Mom read a paragraph or two out loud, and I personally didn’t think it was that funny. Dad didn't laugh either, so I read out loud the paragraph I was on and turned to Dad who then read aloud the paragraph he was on. The two of us looked back at Mom, and Dad said, “Your turn.”  Mom was not amused...at the time, but we've all laughed about it later.