Part 10 was published December 24, 2023, and can be found here.

Some activities in the last sixty years:

COLORADO

Moving to Colorado was not exactly an accident, but close. My senior year, I stopped at the high school in La Crosse, Kansas. I asked the superintendent what the starting pay for a beginning teacher would be. I have not forgotten, my starting salary would be $3,700 a year. At the same time, Melvin Hogsett, who was taking care of dad's 12 quarters of ground in Colorado, discovered he had MS. He was soon going to have to stop farming. I naively thought that it wouldn’t take a whole lot of wheat to beat $3,700 per year. But boy those first 10 years were tough. Getting frostbite while working on equipment outside in the winter and trying to fix my pickup because we didn't have a good enough pickup to drive to town triggered the desire for a new shop. But during discussions Sherell and I had on what we were planning to do next, the shop wasn't first. A little better house was to be number one. Number two project was a shop where I could work inside. Number three was, then, an airplane.

Naturally, everything got turned around. The airplane came first, the shop second, and the house, thankfully, third. The boys were still in high school, at least but my original house plans that I drew up in 1969 wound up on the front page of the High Plaines Journal in 1969. The reporter was doing a story on the farm and the shop that we were building. It was rare, in those days, because it was to be insulated and heated, with a restroom and a small office. We didn't have the money to start building a house at that time, and the High Plains Journal told us that many people had contacted them wanting to know where they could purchase the octagon floor plan for the house. I was told that one had already been built, and one was at Paradise, Kansas. By looking at a map, we could see that Paradise was a very small town, and we thought we could probably find the house if we went there. So, we did. In touring it, I decided that my mental picture of the bedrooms was not quite that small. l thought that we needed to alter the plans by making the diameter of the octagon 4 feet greater to increase the size of the bedrooms. I have been so glad ever since. After a number of foster kids and exchange students, we have come to the point now that, for Easter 2022, we had 34 family members for dinner. We had as many as 43 adults for a sit-down dinner. The old house has served us well.

MUSIC

In the 1980s, on a trip to my parent's home in Kansas, my mother asked if we could watch to see if a pianist that she had been seeing on television would ever come to Denver or Colorado Springs. She wanted tickets. She gave me the name - Dino Kartsonakis. l told her we would watch. Later, Sherell and I were in a Colorado Springs Bible bookstore purchasing gifts for high school graduates. The gifts were to be presented at a special senior dinner that our church puts on for them. Sure enough, we saw a poster on the wall. Dino was coming to Colorado Springs. And to be honest, I didn't know "Dino" from "Drano” at that time, but we soon learned. Tickets were acquired. My folks came out the day before and went to Rush, where my sister, Jenean, and her husband, Dave, lived. Sherell and I followed the next morning. Dave had no intention of going to some silly piano concert. Dad said, “if Dave don't have to go, I don't have to either."

Dad lost. Dave lost. Mom won. We attended the concert and, frankly, heard the best piano music I've ever heard in my life. Dad, being a product of the 1930s, had never in his life purchased a record or a tape of music. When the concert was over, dad stood up and said, "Where do I buy the record or tape?"

That next summer, I had nothing to do except think while driving a tractor back and forth across the field. I wondered how one person playing the piano could be so powerful as to encourage my father to buy the very first music recording in his life. It was something special. I got to thinking that there are so many people out here in the country that never ever get to hear anything like that except on their television. I wondered if it would be possible to bring Dino to Lamar for a concert.

Next: Will Dino come to Lamar?