Selling my car last week ….
Selling my car last week opened a big question about all my cars. I can really remember the first two; then it gets hard to get the rest listed in the right spot. My first was a 1934 Chevrolet.
I paid $150 for that, but that was just the beginning of spending, which just went on and on. To put it mildly, it kept me broke or making car payments the rest of my life. My brother Carl warned me about buying it in the spring of 1949, just a year out of high school.
I guess you could say it had seen better days. It was one of those with something called “knee action.” Whatever it was, it was long past what it was supposed to do. It did wear out front tires at an alarming rate.
Then came a 1938 Pontiac. A great car, but one of the first Pontiacs with the shift lever moved to the steering column. For some reason it would jump out of second gear.
About that time Uncle Sam asked me to join the Army, in which I quickly became a driver in the 652nd Heavy Truck Company. That was fine, but we didn’t have any trucks, just a bunch of old World War II 6x6s. Needless to say, we kept busy with rebuilding brick sidewalks, KP (kitchen police) and guard duty.
I discovered a typing class which would put me in school half-days and not much the rest of the day. It was just a beginning class, so with two years of high school typing behind me, I managed to graduate with distinction – something that made one of the sergeants in headquarters company a little jealous. It did pave the way to become company clerk and I got to make out the duty roster, which listed all my buddies on KP and guard duty.
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Coming back from Goose Bay in Labrador, Canada, I ended up in Fort Eustis, Va. Seeing that having a car would be nice, I took a short leave, went home over Christmas and bought a car – I’m assuming another Pontiac, another two-door model. I bought it in Comstock, famous for selling Pontiac cars and Allis-Chalmers tractors. That started a long list of cars, vans and pickups up to the beginning of the Malibus, which included an ‘06, ‘09 and ‘14 models.
The one that still stands out is a 1951 Dodge, of which I still carry a picture – a picture 10 minutes after I had the misfortune to hit a Black Angus steer on K one rainy night on a blacktop highway.
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The Turtle Lake Times newspaper came the other day. In it was another list of people who have given to the Scholarship Fund I started years ago. Among them this week is another 1948 graduate. We had joked at our 50th reunion what it would be like at our 75th. Someone suggested we’d probably hire a bus and go around and visit fellow class members in nursing homes. So there I’ll be waiting comfortably in what I call the “penthouse.”
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I sure enjoyed the stories about Roger Ellison and Art Petke. Brought back memories and made me aware of another side of military duty that was certainly different from what I experienced.
I guess the greatest experience on the flight is captured in a photo I keep up. It is a picture of a young girl and me, taken at the World War II Memorial. The sign reads, “Thank you for your service, Robert Berglund.” I guess the school had been furnished with a list of names on the flight. But why pick me? I wasn’t going to argue.
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I found this in a magazine and thought to myself how true it is. It is a picture of a lady by the name Lauren Hutton and she said, “Whether it’s beauty or fashion, there’s an obsession with youth. But if we’re lucky, we’re all going to get old.”
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I got a chuckle reading the caption under a cartoon recently. This one was Hägar the Horrible and his wife was scolding him about something he’d done. He claimed she was always saying bad stuff about him and wondered if she didn’t have something nice to say. She answered, “I like your choice of women.”
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I mentioned seeing one of my fellow graduates from high school in the list of donors to the Turtle Lake Scholarship Fund. I decided to look her up in my high school yearbook. Under her picture was the caption, “Remember the Pipe Lake School Bus.” Riding the school bus was one of the fun parts of going to high school.
There was one incident that really stands out in my mind. County Trunk T is fairly straight from Highway 8 north to the junction with County Road G near the Pipe Lake Lutheran Church, except where it dips down to cross the Apple River.
Then there was a slight jog around the corner of Horseshoe Lake. This one morning we had stopped at the Horseshoe Lake School to pick up a girl who lived there in a mobile home with her mother, the teacher there.
As the driver got started again on the icy road, the road made a turn going around the corner of the lake. The land was level so there was a fairly good banking on the road so traffic wouldn’t have to slow down completely. About that time someone yelled, “Everyone to the other side of the bus.” That was enough to swing the back of the bus around and we gently backed into the ditch.
The joke was really on us who had figured to miss the first class of the day. Seems they were waiting for us so the whole school could take some sort of a state test.
