Normally I don’t get up at 4 a.m., at least not on purpose. But I did this past Saturday. It was necessary to be in Wichita by 6 a.m. to leave for Greensburg with my cousins to help their brother and my cousin, Paul Unruh, erect his new machine shed.
I didn’t know it would be harder than I thought to find my cousins’ house just off of 53rd Street in the dark. And I left the piece of paper with his phone numbers at home on the kitchen counter.
Then it occurred to me I could get arrested for driving slowly through these neighborhoods in the dark of night.
Finally, I found the right street and house—but no one was up, so I waited until the lights came on.
It will be 40 years this fall since I last attended school full time. It was my senior year at Kansas University. Little did I know then that it was my last real vacation. That doesn’t mean I goofed off. It was just that work wasn’t the main focus of my waking hours.
This week as school begins in earnest around these parts, we need to watch out for the kids—on foot and on bikes. They have other things on their minds than looking out for us.
This week’s edition of the Free Press marks the end of our ninth year of publishing and next week begins the 10th. To celebrate, maybe we’ll start giving them away next year. Wait, we already do.
Last week when I wrote about the “Ice Road Truckers” TV show I was going to segue into a little story about life in a mobile home in our early years of marriage. I didn’t have room, so it goes here.
When we lived in Lawrence in the late ’60s, early ’70s we didn’t feel we could afford to buy an $11,000 house so opted for a $5,300 mobile home, which many young couples did in those days.
Seemed like we always had problems with something. Plastic faucet handles would strip out, and then it took a pliers to open and close the faucets.
Ours had a kitchen in front and the bathroom and laundry were in the back. That made for a drain line from the kitchen sink that was about 50 feet long.
One weekend the kitchen sink plugged up and I thought I would take a garden hose and force out what was stopping it with water pressure. I unhooked the washer hose from the faucet in the back and ran the hose to the front and packed it in the drain with rags.
I then told Nancy to turn on the faucet full blast. The water was really coming fast for a while and then all of a sudden it sounded like it was raining.
Later I learned the drain was plugged because it was frozen solid. The only place the water could go was up through the drain vent and out on the roof.
