Vigilance and Vigilantes

Preacher Harder fought a more than thirty year battle after arriving in Canada with the Russian Mennonite immigration wave of the twenties to preserve an old communal way of life. The principal fortress for his battle was the Mennonite Brethren Church at Yarrow in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. There he found his niche and became not only the “High Priest” of his family as this book indicates but the High Priest and Chief Enforcer of the laws of the village theocracy his church created during my time there. Directly or indirectly he also sanctioned certain brawnier church members as vigilantes to mete out appropriate discipline in the church basement and elsewhere to backsliders among children of church families they sought out in late evening hours. Some of my village friends of the early forties described them to me as the Gestapo.

In spite of all those efforts, even in that seemingly isolated village of the 1930’s and 1940’s when I grew up, Yarrow became the graveyard of that way of life. In retrospect it seems to me that Preacher Harder in his search for a congenial congregation after arrival in Canada ought to have associated himself with the Holdeman Mennonites, a sect founded by John Holdeman in the State of Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century, about at the same time as our Mennonite Brethren sect separated from the mainstream Mennonite Church in Russia. When I visited my Holdeman cousins in Kansas in 1985 they continued to be more successful at keeping the strict culture of their church than any of the MB churches I have known in recent years in Canada.

The book is A Generation of Vigilance, the biography of Johannes Harder and his wife Tina, written by retired Saskatchewan University history professor and author, T. D. Regehr and published by the CMU Press of Winnipeg at the behest of the Yarrow Research Committee and the editor of its Yarrow history, Leonard Neufeldt. After advised of the book’s publication I picked up my copy of the book, glanced at it briefly and found it somewhat hard to revisit those Depression days again.

The reason for that ambivalence lies in the differences between my family’s personal and church relationships and those of so many others who have written generally positive histories and memoirs about those early Yarrow days and the heyday of the Mennonite Brethren Church there under Harder’s leadership. I grew up and went to school with the two oldest of Harder’s sons and experienced his invasive influence on our family. I remember him as a stern but approachable gentleman of the old school. I was not one of his fans. Still, any resentment I may have had about the treatment of my parents by the church in the Harder days has never stayed with me. Harder and his fellows in the church were no more able then to accept the changing culture, than I am able to accept much of today’s overly permissive culture.

Those differences went back many years. Firstly, my father’s family still had German citizenship after several generations in Russia. Being of military service age Dad was interned as an enemy alien from 1914 to 1918 and our family patriated to Germany as Red Cross refugees in 1919/20 with 4 Russian born children. Later, after correspondence with my mother’s Holdeman Mennonite cousins in Kansas they emigrated to Halstead in that state with travel assistance arranged by the cousins (thus their later dispute with the Yarrow Church about its levy for a share of the CPR reiseschuld), arriving in that community in December 1922. After four upwardly mobile years there but with differences between my parents continuing as it had almost since their marriage in 1910, my family again became what I have called “Footloose and Rootless in America”, eventually arriving at Yarrow by car on December 7, 1928, some 14 months before the younger Harder family arrived there in January 1930.

Until my reading of Vigilance I had never made myself familiar with the detailed and restrictive rules and regulations insisted on by Harder and the closed committee he led for those who wished to maintain Yarrow MB Church membership. It explains much about the trauma experienced by our so frequently non-conforming family members with the incompatibility between my parents and the already Americanized ways of my three surviving Russian born brother and sisters, in their late teens in those years. The following excerpts from the first edition of my memoirs as I tried to write them more than 20 years ago, will illustrate the differences.

We moved into our new 14’x20’ shack on the 4 acre Yarrow farm at the dyke in 1934, starting bare bones scrambling for food and shelter in the depths of the Great Depression. The advantages of our “great American dream” experience, already lost in five short years, left us as “poor white trash” among our contemporaries of the closed religious society of Depression Yarrow. Many of the more recent CPR and MCC sponsored immigrants who found their way to Yarrow during this period were hungrier, in the sense that they were more anxious to recover the lost glories of their pre-revolutionary villages in Russia. Many were more aggressive, harder working, more cohesive and less sensitive to the express or implied criticism of the larger English speaking community all around.

Most Yarrow adults in that time had no wish to be absorbed in the surrounding English-Canadian culture. Even Yarrow’s geography conspired to isolate its closed society from the surrounding community. The closed triangle created by the Sumas prairie, the BC Electric Railway tracks and the Vedder Canal, allowed the church centred immigrants to drop their spoor around the village like a badger around its hole. Those few of the original “Canadian” settlers who stayed on, whose homes and farms hugged the old Road along the lower slopes of Vedder Mountain, like the Siddals, the Eckerts, the Belroses, and the Knoxes, (Mr. Knox, not a fan of the Mennonites or their settlement, had been heard to prophesy, “they’ll all drown down there, and I hope they do!”) were tolerated as outside functionaries or adopted as resource people. Most had well established homes and orchards, and were a source of free fruit, tree and shrub cuttings, berry plants, employment and credit for the new settlers.

Some of the new settlers had natural advantages, though I never heard any of our family concede even at their lowest ebb, that some of their neighbours might be their “betters” with both physical and intellectual advantages that Mom and Dad had never acquired. Some had been proud owners of large estates in Russia. They were not simply run-of-the-mill villagers who had a house and barn on a small village holding with a “destine” or two of grain outside the village. There were those whose private holdings had rivalled those of the lesser Russian aristocracy, and some lived in Yarrow. Others were better educated in the old country than any of the Nickels. Most were prepared to use any available means to rebuild what they had lost because of the Godless red tide that swept away their riches and their independence.

Above all, though, almost all the villagers had an advantage the Nickels by now could not aspire to. That was the advantage of being unified in their families and in their church relationships. There was a great deal of hypocrisy, though no greater than that found in other social groupings, but publicly the large majority of the villagers accepted the sanctions of the church without question and the church took them to its bosom. Such was not the case with the Nickels. Though women could be dominant in the privacy of the home, they were “untertan” ruled by their husbands, in public. Families worked as units and children of large families most often put all their work and earnings in the family pot. Such togetherness did not work for us even though my oldest brother and sister helped Mom and Dad keep bread on the table.

Some five years after completing that memoir I wasted my time on a series of short stories about a fictional town, most of which turned out as poorly disguised autobiographical experiences. One I called A Tale About Differences: A story about Poplar Village. The following short excerpt may further explain my ambivalence about revisiting my Depression Era upbringing at Yarrow.

Years of attempted mediation by the preacher and other elders soon followed. The episodes of argument and prayer in that Depression shack when I was ten or eleven did more to turn me against religion than the rational influences of college training. The preacher rarely came alone. With one or two of the senior elders he often arrived at our small spread after we completed our evening chores. They invariably greeted me as fond uncles and talked to my parents most congenially; a neighbourly call to pass the time of day. They were never in a hurry in those days but we all knew why they were there.

During those visits, Mother sent me up the ladder to my attic bed as soon as she could and told me to go to sleep. When my rattling around stopped, what amounted to an attempted exorcism began. I never slept and the walls and attic floor were thin shiplap. The exact words, which by then had switched to the more formal High German of their Bible, were not all understandable but I knew exactly what was going on from scraping chairs and voice modulations. The preacher gently work his way around to Bible readings at the table and meditations. He always ended by relating those readings to the problem between my parents. Invariably a dialogue with my mother followed. Mother lacked formal education except for a few elementary grades of the church school in the old country. In spite of that handicap years of reading and thinking made her what I consider an exceptional Bible scholar for the times.

“Listen to the words of the Apostle,” Brother Martel intoned in his best pulpit manner. He was particularly fond of quoting from the fourteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. In his best High German and all the sonorous majesty he could muster, Martel read, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”

The story of the Harders, their backgrounds and their troubles and migrations after the Russian Revolution is by now a familiar one. Except for their generational connection to the Mennonite preaching ministry, their story is not unique. Nor is the story of their poverty stricken beginnings in Yarrow. It was common to many through the whole of the Depression era, except for the demands of Harder’s devotion to preaching and church leadership. Nevertheless, for those efforts the Harders were often rewarded when “God provided” in the form of gifts from grateful church members. Regehr also describes such hardships as cycling to the hop fields and the need to work away from home. That was true of many of the villagers. For many years my own father started out early in the morning after farm chores to ride his two-wheeler along the gravel mountain road to Vedder Crossing and on to the foot of Promontory Hill to work a full day at Bowman’s Sawmill, then back home for more chores, all the while suffering from a debilitating asthma condition. All able hands got as much year-round work as they could at the hop yards either on Sumas Prairie or at Sardis and everyone picked rhubarb when that crop was for a time in vogue, berries, tobacco and hops in season. At age 12 I biked five miles to the tobacco fields on rough gravel roads and often worked 12 hours for twenty cents an hour before biking home.

The religious governance instituted by Preacher Harder was another matter. From my very first memory of Sunday school experiences at the MB Church I had difficulty accepting the biblical mythology as presented in the church basement by Petrus Martens, one of the many preachers in residence who taught there when I was around seven. Except for a long period of rationalized association with the United Church, which I again relinquished many years ago, my conscience has not permitted me to speak a faith I can no longer even rationalize. Preacher Harder’s insistence on his interpretation of scripture requiring such MB Church rites as baptism by immersion strikes me as picayune and unreasonable rather than a reason for him to wish that he was young enough to start his own church after he failed to persuade senior conference councils to accept his urging in the matter as mentioned on page 193 of the book.

Generally speaking, I found the Harder story sad. In the end the preacher turned out to be more adaptable than his wife to the integration of his church and his people into the mainstream Canadian culture. Preacher Harder died too young and I cannot help but think that the emotional effect of his failure to stop the Canadianization of his church and his children had something to do with his deteriorating health. The absence of any contribution to his parents’ story from my one-time elementary school classmate, Siegfried Harder, called Fred in the book, is especially noticeable. Of the older boys when I knew them so long ago, I thought him the most like, and the most likely to emulate his father in his evangelical zeal.

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A Quick Aging Fantasy

What is the old man to do? The Quick Aging Syndrome (QuA) will have its way. Ever more rapidly this spring the wear and tear of the years exert their influence. March, I thought at the end of February, would be a productive month. The early onset of spring would return the spring to my step, enhance my observations of nature, people and affairs, and brighten my outlook on tomorrow.

Now the Equinox has been and gone, the month nearly done. Week after week I lag behind, caught up in this and that, starting new and frustrating computer projects, getting caught up in crossword puzzles and always more puzzling reports on the television news. The old man’s legs get weaker, stairs become pitfalls and the body refuses to follow his orders. He must choose. Will he laugh or will he cry? He elects to succumb to a chortle, mixed perhaps with a tinge of resentment, as the only way forward, accepting the inevitable and enjoying his general freedom from pain and sorrow in the independence of a comfortable home with his wife of sixty years.

All the projects are still there. The computer still responds. Current dreamscapes have become less notable, and the old man resorts to the occasional scribble from old journals. Here is one from January 4, 1991, now nearly 20 years ago.

We met quite by accident. Both of us were late for the movie and we dashed for the ticket centre at the same time. We bumped into each other but she immediately turned to me, beamed her slightly lop-sided smile, insisting, “You first, sir, you were ahead of me.”

She had me. This had to be the most appealing Julie Andrews of my movie-going experience. Neither of us was that young but she had obviously taken good care of herself. She was wearing a rich looking fur and wore her darkish blonde hair in a soft sensibly curled short style and moved so vivaciously she could be none other than the movie star.

I could not believe my luck. “Why don’t we settle it be letting me invite you as my guest?” I said, hoping she wouldn’t misinterpret my offer as an unwanted affront. To my surprise she accepted. I bought the tickets, she took my arm and we had the doorman show us an unoccupied back row so as not to disturb the other patrons.

She inspected me carefully with smiling sidelong glances for a while, then relaxed to enjoy the show after I helped her drape her fur coat around her shoulders so she could be more comfortable.

It was a new movie being previewed in one of the theatres participating in Vancouver’s now well-established International Film Festival. She appeared to take a professional interest in the production but soon lost some of her initial interest as though she found it not up to standard. Could this really be Julie Andrews?

As she continued to relax she became drowsy and even apologized with a smile that left me weak when she leaned her head against my shoulder. I was her unresisting slave. After closing her eyes for a few minutes she turned those great big eyes up at me. They were widely set apart in that perfectly shaped face and when she spoke the generosity of her mouth came into my focus. “Do you like it?” she asked. I turned sideways to answer. She was so close. Her slightly parted lips were so inviting. I simply couldn’t resist. I gently leaned further and kissed her softly. She didn’t resist. She smiled at me again when I leaned back. Not a word was said but she took my hand from the seat beside her and placed it around her shoulder. I pulled her gently closer and she reached for my other hand …

What brought about the presence of the lady in my dreamscape that long ago morning was a mystery then, as she had been farthest from my thoughts and I had not seen any of her movies for some time. Perhaps she was just an early symptom of my already developing QuA Syndrome some 19 years ago now. Anyway, it will give Post readers, if any, an opportunity to amuse themselves at the old man’s expense as he offers it as what is likely to be the only issue for the month of March 2010.

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To Dreams ...

Each day that is left is a bonus for the old man. I treasure it and my amazing fortune in sharing that day with my chosen spouse. I sing this song in a personal card for her collection as she begins her 84th year in a week.

At the same time I want to make it public in my last issue for February as a token of my appreciation to her for sharing 60 plus generally peaceful years with me through thick and thin.

A day to remember
that stays and then grows,
When a boy meets a girl
and all at once knows
his life has new roots
for a budding tree,
To plant by a stream
that roars wild and free.

We hang on its branches
a shining new dream,
And watch it grow strong
By the watering stream.
As dreams load the tree
and life moves along;
We are free as can be
with the memory strong.

And now we are old,
but the tree is still strong;
I remember that day,
and I was not wrong.
We still have room
to hang up more dreams
And the memory will live
even should I change streams.

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"The Law is a Ass"?

With apologies to the presiding appeal justice hopefully showing up at left, the old man’s title today, once again courtesy of Dickens, came to mind when I re-read portions of The Unnamed reviewed in my last issue.

In that story one “funny” episode during his compulsive walking spell involved his inability to conduct the defence of one of his wealthiest commercial clients on a charge of murdering his wife. One of his senior partners, with other associates, was three weeks into the trial when Tim, who had prepared for the trial for months, decided to surprise his colleagues by appearing in the courtroom ready to participate.

He was wearing a bicycle helmet specially designed to monitor his brain waves to detect changes before and during the walking attacks, head shaved for proper sensor contact. The judge noted Tim’s presence when court was called to order, informing him that he had indeed arrived and should remove his helmet if he intended to stay. Tim immediately stood and stated his intention to participate with the judge’s permission. Then in the midst of the statement he suddenly turned and walked out without turning back, saying, “On the other hand I think I’ll leave.” His walking attacks often started the same way, no matter what he was doing or where he was.

That episode reminded me of the awesome power judges have over the lives of barristers who appear before them. Experienced lawyers sometimes go to great lengths to avoid certain judges whose displeasure they may have incurred in previous appearances as they well should do for the sake of their clients.

Soon after admission to the bar I was briefly partnered with a more senior member of our local legal fraternity, which then held but ten or so members. He was widely known in the community for wicked and acid comments and sometimes sharply rude wit about his legal colleagues, the court and the community in general. Yet he always appeared as counsel properly robed when called for and bowed to the bench as required, all in the “best traditions of the Bar” as they say. One afternoon as he argued a case on a sunny, drowsy spring afternoon before one of the touchier and more irascible members of the county bench, he noticed the judge looking dreamily at the sunshine through the windows drifting off. My friend lowered his voice and gently dropped a case book on the table. That startled the judge to attention, demanding to know what had been said. Our witty member muttered to himself, “I don’t think you heard a word I’ve said for ten minutes, you old fart.” Well, the jurist’s hearing apparently had sharpened for he immediately pounded his gavel and ordered opposing counsel to attend his private chambers. My friend tried to put a different twist on his muttered comment but nevertheless apologized profusely for any lapses he may have been responsible for thereby avoiding further penalty.

I had a few experiences with disgruntled judges as well. Once I had a chamber application for which I had to appear in a larger centre, where I faced a whole courtroom full of lawyers making a variety of applications in cases they were handling. The fearsome jurist assigned to hear them all seemed in a foul mood from the beginning and as I knew I was likely the most junior of the lot I expected to be the last to be called. Even with senior counsel appearing early he was picky, surly and embarrassingly demanding for every particular, even asking one chap to point out in his own mouth where the lawyer’s infant client’s dental problem was located. After the usual lengthy lunch adjournment, I sat waiting to be called for most of the afternoon. When I came to the front I hesitantly stated my credentials, then made a point of expressing my thanks to His Lordship for his patience through a long and difficult day, presented my application as filed in the material he was given. Whether he took pity on my obvious inexperience or whether he was too worn out to be difficult any longer I don’t know. Still, he appeared to accept my thanks as if it was intended just that way, dealt with my matter quickly, and everyone went home happy.

Some years later I had a rare success in a personal injury case, but the insurance company lawyer filed an appeal, to which I was forced to respond. It was heard in Victoria before a panel of three appeal judges. Only the judges, the clerks, and the two lawyers were in the courtroom. At one point during the appellant’s presentation standing at the podium on the counsel table he was scrabbling around his appeal book and other files for a particular reference, which I knew I had right at my finger tip. I sort of half rose from my chair and offered their Lordship’s the citation. Instead of thanks I heard a rap of the gavel and a stern reminder from the judge in charge that “Counsel is expected to stand when addressing the Bench!” Of course I rose immediately and offered sincere apologies to the court for my errors and omissions.

I must say that particular judge, whose name I do not recall, ever after reminded me of that 1925 cartoon above. My learned friend already had some 15 years of experience with one of the prominent Vancouver law firms by then and many years later became British Columbia’s Chief Justice as well. As I never appeared before him I have no idea whether he became as stuffy and pompous as the chap we appeared before those many years ago.

May all our learned jurists receive their just rewards!

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Am I Nuts?

The Old Man did not find the answer to the title question in the novel I want to review here. Nor did the character in the book, whose story it is. I will not call him the hero or the protagonist because basically I do not find him a sympathetic individual. Furthermore I find many of the people in the society depicted by the story equally unsympathetic and that is sad as it is very really the society in which we North Americans are living today.

The book is The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris, published in January 2010 by Little, Brown and Company of New York. The copyright particulars list the book under 5 fiction categories including lawyers and psychology. The author is a young appearing man who, in his jacket publicity photo, looks something like one of those boyish computer nerds who became overnight millionaires in the 1990s.

He seems too young to have the experience or depth of understanding I found in his writing but in an interview about his first novel found on his personal website some explanation can be found. He cites his youth in the Florida Keys, college in Iowa, a stint working for an advertising agency (a subject of his first novel), a MFA degree in California during which he started that first novel, scrapped it, thought about it for some three years and finished it in fourteen weeks. It won numerous awards.

Many of the book reviews for this second novel call it a comedy, acidly funny, and Stephen King found it “Hilarious in a Catch 22 way, but with an undercurrent of sadness that works counterpoint to all the absurdity.” Personally I found nothing really funny about the story except perhaps in the way that satire can sometimes by funny. We can certainly laugh at some of the ridiculous things that happen in the character’s love story, in the story of his absurd compulsion to walk till he falls asleep, and in his lawyer’s story.

The story begins with the short sentence, “It was the cruelest winter.” It then plunges the reader into the first episode of compulsive walking that forces him to leave his office. It is the physical or mental condition that dominates the story. In this case he left his law office only lightly dressed and continued until he finally managed to get into a cab to take him home before falling asleep on the back seat. There we meet these main characters as Tim Farnsworth and his wife, Jane, as well as their only daughter, Becka, in what becomes a strange but touching love story.
Money appears to be no problem for this family and even when he is found sleeping in an alley or in a park flower bed, he always seems to have enough cash and access to his investments when he needs to prove his independence. Threading through the whole is Tim’s high intelligence and his twenty years as a successful attorney, making partner in one of New York’s largest and most prestigious law firms. He brings in millions of dollars in fees every year. His attempts to keep his affliction from his partners could be considered one of the comedic aspects of the story.

I found Tim’s mental process during the progress of the condition (one of the many doctors he had consulted had dubbed it benign idiopathic perambulation) quite fascinating and my need to continue from one page to the next of this novel almost as compelling as Tim’s inability to stop walking and hypnotic in its effect.

Being somewhat inclined to rely on chronological and geographical markers in my thoughts and scribbling, I was somewhat challenged to follow times and places as the tale proceeds, with somewhat sudden flashbacks appearing from time to time and never being completely sure where Tim is in his current walking exercise or how long the story takes to the end, in terms of Tim’s life. I was never sure whether the things and people he saw or talked about were real or part of his hallucinations.

It all ends sadly of course. Still, as you read you will find meaningful discussions about the American Dream and its consequences, about nature itself and our place in it, about the nature of God, about the existence of body and soul as separate entities and about the amazing abuse the body can take before it destroys itself.

Tim’s walking compulsion ends in a tent, during his last sleep, in a bedroll in an unnamed northern American mountain pass in the midst of a roaring blizzard, and I found the ending recounted on the last page strangely comforting:

He thought he might open his eyes to see if the silhouette of the falling snow continued to dapple the skin of the tent, but he decided not to exert himself unnecessarily. Instead he chose to do as he had done the night before: settle deep inside himself and listen to the strange, subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside the bag. But listen … listen … listen was gone. His quiescent nerves gave no signals and received none. He detected nothing but an enormous, gentle stillness from the things he could name and those he couldn’t inside him, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again, the silence informed him. never had to walk, never had to seek out food, never had to carry around the heavy and the weary weight, and in a measure of time that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity, he realized that he was still thinking, his mind was still afire, that he had just scored if not won the whole damn thing, and that the exquisite thought of his eternal rest was how delicious that cup of water was going to taste the instant it touched his lips.

If you are not easily put off by a modicum of sex and the occasional f… word and are otherwise intrigued, I think you should give the book a try.

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1985 Kansas Trip Revisited

Since my last issue I have been thinking a good deal about a project I had started then, dealing with our trip to Kansas City in 1985. My intention is to copy into my computer a selection of slides and prints of the pictures I took during our trip and prepare a series of some 5 narrated slide shows with a Photo Story program from Microsoft.

That means I have been avoiding current events more than usual partly because here so near Vancouver, everything including newscasts has centred totally on the Winter Olympics, for which the opening ceremonies are to begin this weekend. I have discussed in a previous issue my lack of enthusiasm for the whole idea of the Olympic movement and though I hope for a good outcome, it is impossible for me to adopt the enthusiasm for it now evident all around me. It also means I will try one more issue on the subject of that 1985 trip across the great western plains and mountains of the United States.

The daily papers I picked up at some of our stopovers for a flavour of opinion in the local areas stayed in storage for lo these many years and now become a reminder of those times. Ronald Reagan was just five or six months into his second term after a resounding victory in 1984. By June Reagan was having trouble getting his budget through Congress, reports were abroad about a White House connection to both overt and covert support for the Nicaraguan contra rebels, columnist George Wills, who 25 years later is still a talking head on television, was writing about trouble with the liquidity of some of America’s Savings and Loan institutions. He pointed out the complexities of the banking system requiring the populace to trust the bank system mostly on faith and surprisingly for one on the right side of the political spectrum, he said “modern society requires government that looks over the shoulder of, and occasionally nags, the makers of the many networks of institutions on which we depend.”

Weather was hot during the whole of four weeks on the road. Our car, a diesel, was not air conditioned and most of our driving days were long. On May 22^nd we drove some ten hours from Yakima, Washington to Boise in Idaho, much of it following the path of the old pioneer Oregon Trail. In my journal that evening in Boise I remarked,

“Another thing that impressed us was the mile after mile of arid, semi-desert country so well connected up with super highways. The few places that are tamed for human use are really only oases in a vast desert.

It strikes me too, in driving those many desolate miles today, how narrow is the margin between life sustaining growth and extinction of our kind. Amazing as it is to see what wealth has been wrought by our technological exploitation of available resources, we are always near the brink. There seems no security to our existence. In this arid country fantastic quantities of food are produced in the few tamed oases where water from the rivers and deep basins can be used for irrigation. But imagine how quickly this would all turn to dust if the taps were turned off. All it would take is one serious interruption of power sources to stop the pumps and the flow of water. That is only one example. ”

It took us three more days across the emptiness of Wyoming and Nebraska to reach Kansas City and our reservations for the Rotary International Convention. Vice president, George H. W. Bush, was scheduled to speak for ten minutes to the last plenary session, and though we had arranged an alternative tour to follow that afternoon, I was totally astounded with the vast amount of security abroad all that morning in preparation for his short attendance. It irritated me to be stopped and checked repeatedly to get into the hall and by the obvious cost of all the staff and equipment to enable him to make what I suspect was nothing more than a political gesture on behalf of then Senate Majority leader, Robert Dole, of Kansas.

We left the convention on the morning of May 31 and took another couple of weeks to get back home via visits in Kansas, several days in Salt Lake City and stops across Nevada and California along the coast through the redwoods to Portland and home. It was a memorable journey for us in many ways but we soon settled back into our stay-at-home ways.

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The Old Man Looks Back

The Old Man's Post has been flagging so far this year! January is never my best month. So in order to keep the blog going, I will mention that much of my computer time was spent poking around with my photo albums and trying to deal with some of the mementoes kept for many years. Somehow I will have to be brutal about disposing of the stuff, and hopefully be a bit more careful than my successors will be about deciding what goes in the garbage, what gets shredded and what is given away.

In the last week or so I came upon a box containing a bunch of notes and memorabilia from a driving tour of the States after my retirement a quarter century ago. It was in the spring of 1985 when my wife and I used the Rotary International Convention in Kansas City as an excuse to see some of the country of my birth and to touch base with cousins I had never met in the Mennonite region of eastern Kansas.

Among my notes in that box was a steno pad containing a sort of handwritten daily journal, from which I will copy a few lines for your consideration. We had started out from Vancouver at 2:30 PM on May 21, 1985, stopped at Bellevue, Washington for supper at Denny's, getting a full course senior's turkey dinner at $2.99 each, and reached Yakima about 8:30 PM where we booked into a Motel 6 for $23.66 including tax. After nine in the evening I went for a walk, then wrote the following as part of my first journal entry for the trip:

I took a walk to downtown Yakima and found an all night Arco market. It had been hot all day and by 10:00 PM it was still 75 degrees F. The town was pretty well shut down. A few taverns, card rooms and eateries had some activity and young people hung around, drove around downtown, restless, having no apparent respect for or fear of institutions or older people. They didn't bother with me at all as I walked along minding my own business, but I felt a certain uneasiness in the strange place. At one point a convertible with five teenage girls in it was stopped by a patrolling police cruiser, lights flashing, and the girls were questioned. When they finished the girls pulled away and drove slowly around the corner while I waited for the light. They were beautiful young ladies but were giggling among themselves about the cop and when they got just out of sight of the police car the girl driving turned around and thumbed her nose at the cops. I also walked past several clusters of boys just hanging out, yelling and generally looking for trouble. This was before ten at night and I'm sure they found it later. I saw some long hairs, some shaved heads, some normal, but the pit of my stomach told me it could be one of those "long hot summers" for the young. They obviously haven't enough to do, and perhaps too much money to do it with. They seem to be looking for something. They won't be cowed and disciplined as the youngsters of the thirties were. Today they are not awed, much less over-awed, by wealth, position, or power, and I think they have a good idea of their own power. Let's hope they don't hold the rest of us to ransom with it.

So that is the first issue of the Post for February 2010. Perhaps I'll find something new and more interesting to say in the next issue.

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