My Parents, William and Cozette Bentz
My Mother, Cozette Royer Bentz, was born in Coshocton
County, Ohio in 1913. She grew up on a
farm off Route 83 south of the city of Coshocton. Her father, Charles Royer, was a farmer,
school teacher, land abstractor, and County Recorder. Her mother was Nora Sandel Royer. She had an
older brother, Cecil, who became a civil engineer. You
can read her family history in the blog post entitled History of the Adam
and Susan Royer Family (REF #1). She
was proud of the fact she was educated in the one-room Wills Creek school house
through 8th grade; and she graduated as valedictorian of her class
at Coshocton High School. She went to a
local Business School in Coshocton; and then she worked as chief clerk at the
USDA North Appalachian Hydrologic Research Station near Coshocton until my Dad
returned from World War II. After they
married and had children, she stayed home to raise her three sons until they
all were in school. She returned to work
at age 44 as purchasing agent at Universal Cyclops Specialty Steel
manufacturing near Coshocton; her desire to provide her sons the higher
education that was highly valued in her family was her motivation for returning
to work. So my Mother prepared meals, kept
house, did laundry, and did the grocery shopping while working a full-time job. She retired from her job at age 65.
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| Mother, Cozette Bentz |
Every Saturday afternoon, my Mother went to her Cousin Cleo
Royer’s beauty shop to have her hair done and to visit with her. Cleo grew up in the “Royer Home Place” (REF
#1) that their Grandparents, Adam and Susan Royer, built, and my Mother grew up across the road in the
frame house on my Grandpa Charles Royer’s farm. One
of the family’s greatest heartbreaks was to see these and other farms wiped off
the face of this planet by a mammoth coal strip mining shovel, circa 1960. These gently rolling farm lands were among
the most productive and breathtakingly beautiful in the world.
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| Royer Home Place |
The great tragedy was that increasingly debilitating conditions
of Alzheimer’s began to appear in my Mother even before she retired from work;
she spent her last five years in a nursing home, did not recognize anybody, and towards the end could not talk. She died in 1990 at age
77. The day my Mother died I was sitting alone in my cube at work when I clearly heard her voice call “Jim” as in old
times; I looked all around and didn't see anybody nearby; a half-hour later my
Dad called and said she had died.
My Dad, William (Bill) W. Bentz, was born in 1913 in
Norwood, Ohio near Cincinnati, and grew up in the small rural town of Racine in
Meigs County, Ohio, along the Ohio River.
His Dad, John L Bentz, was a carpenter and his Mother, Bertha, was
school teacher at one time and a homemaker. My Dad had a younger sister, Helen, who
became a school teacher. You can
read his family history in the post entitled the Michael and Mary (Polly) Bentz Family Story
(REF #2). My Dad grew up during the
depression, and he liked to tell us he worked for $1 a day picking tomatoes
during high school. After graduating
from Racine High School, he worked at a government Civilian Conservation Corps
(CCC) camp in Southern Ohio during the Great Depression. He then worked at the USDA North Appalachian
Hydrologic Research Station near Coshocton.
He enlisted in the US Army Air Force in World War II and rose to the
rank of Technical Sergeant where he specialized in repairing Bomb Sites for the
planes bombing Germany, a very high-tech
job for the time. He was stationed at an
airbase in Northampton, England. After
the war, he returned to work at the USDA Research Station and married my
Mother. He used the technical skills he
learned in the Army to become a “Hydrology Engineering Technician”, where he designed
and built instruments to measure the underground flow of water.
The work ethic my Dad inherited from his ancestors was more
relaxed: one should work and do one’s best to fulfill life’s obligations, but
not at the expense of not taking enough time along the way to enjoy some
hobbies or recreations that bring enjoyment to one’s life. He took time to go hunting with the hound or
fishing occasionally which he of course also engaged his sons in; see blog post entitled Hunting Rabbits (REF
#3). He was a Boy Scout leader for several years. He appreciated the lifetime benefits of his career
in government without begrudging the financial ceiling that it imposed. The balance of what could be entered into
with one’s life was also important; and he enjoyed a beer in the evening.
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| Dad, Bill Bentz |
One benefit of his government
work was that he was able to retire at age 55; in retirement, he had many
hobbies to keep him busy, including wood carving, wood working, investing,
genealogy, antiquing, and wine-making.
My Dad cared for my Mother through her long decline with
Alzheimer’s with all the generosity of heart.
It’s sorrowful to experience what none of us could help. My
Dad died at age 87 in 2001.
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| Mother, Dad, and Granddad Bentz |
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| Grandparents Bentz, Parents, and Boys |
My Mother and Dad married comparatively late in life at ages
32, after the Great Depression and after the Second Great World War, and they
must have done a lot of thinking on how to raise children. They could pinch a dime until it squealed and
focused on what they felt was important; we were comfortable but there were no
luxuries. My parents tried to infuse
“good” ethical and moral values into our lives.
The transmission of these values was largely through their living examples
of them. They both came from strong
Christian families, and from the earliest time
I can remember, our whole family went to the Lutheran Church and Sunday school
every Sunday almost without fail; we had to shine our shoes and put on our good
clothes for church. We prayed children’s
prayers before meals and before we went to bed.
We always ate meals together, and we only ate out a couple of times when
visiting my Granddad Bentz after Grandma Bentz died.
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| Ready for Church |
My parents demonstrated the values they expected of us –
work hard and a “just do it” attitude reinforced by physical discipline. My Dad, as
many people at that time, believed in the old adage “Spare the rod and spoil
the child”, and administered spankings to us boys whenever he felt we needed
correction, which led us not to be totally open and forthright in what
we told our parents. Also, did we have not topical
discussions around the dinner table; we focused on eating only. My parents seldom verbalized that they loved
us, but we knew it from their actions. These non-verbal tendencies may have come
from their rural farming heritage where there was little need for “refined”
verbal skills and where working to provide for the essential needs of life was
the greatest need, but these tendencies inhibited development of our verbal
skills. I learned much later in life
that my Dad was a good conversationalist.
Since neither of my parents had college degrees, an
important aspiration for them was getting their children through college; they
communicated to us early on the importance of education and helped provide the
means to attend college when the time came.
My Dad started us working at an early
age by getting us paper routes to deliver newspapers so we could “save for
college”. They left it up to us to pursue whatever our
field of interest was, as long as it was a field where we could find a job
after college.
Growing up in the 1950’s
My brother John was born in 1946, I was born in 1947, and my
brother Joe was born in 1950. The doctor
injured my older brother’s eye nerve using forceps during his birth, and it
always affected his vision but he has adapted remarkably well and led a
successful life. Although my Mother had been working for years, she now
stayed home with the children until all three of us were in school.
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| Early Family Photo |
We bought a two story
house in a slightly lower middle class neighborhood on Chestnut Street in
Coshocton, Ohio for $6000; the house was built in 1910; my parents moved in 1947 and lived
there for the rest of their lives. It
had three bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs, and a living room, dining room,
and kitchen downstairs. When I was
little, I remember my Dad shoveled coal into the furnace in the basement every
day in the winter and that our town was dirty because all the houses were
spewing coal smoke. There was a
“coal room” in the basement into which the coal truck dumped coal through the
window in the fall. The coal furnace
made spring cleaning more meaningful because the walls had to be cleaned in the
spring to remove all the coal fire dust that accumulated during the
winter. Eventually, all the old houses
were converted from coal heating to gas heating. Much later, after he retired from work, my
Dad converted the “coal room” a “wine room” where he kept his homemade wine. Our air conditioning consisted of opening all
the windows and, eventually, my Dad installed a large fan in the window in the
upstairs hallway; but our house got very hot on summer evenings, especially,
upstairs in the bedrooms.
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| Chestnut Street House |
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| Inside house with Skippy |
We burned the burnable
trash in the brick fireplace my Dad built in the backyard.
The refrigerator was very small
so you couldn’t store very much food in it and the freezer compartment was only
large enough to make a couple trays of ice cubes. The Meadow Gold milkman delivered milk to the
house every day. My mother would send
us to McConnell’s Store, a small neighborhood grocery store two blocks away, to
buy a loaf of bread for 20 cents.
My Mother washed the
clothes in the wringer-washer in the basement.
In the summer, she hung the clothes on the clothes line outside to dry;
in the winter, she hung them in the basement.
When I was very young, my Mother made me take a nap in the afternoon in
my parents’ room. I remember she would
often be sitting in the room resting and watching me when I woke up. My Mother had a part-time job at home typing
land abstracts from Dictaphone recordings that my Grandpa Royer had made; she
would type them at the kitchen table. My Dad called my Mother a good country cook;
food I remember she prepared were meat loaf, Canadian bacon, fried chicken,
chicken pot pies, corn on the cob, green beans in the pressure cooker, and
mashed potatoes and gravy.
My Dad had a large
vegetable garden in the backyard when we were young; he would get mad at us for
hitting the baseball into it. He
eventually turned his garden into a flower garden for growing Gladiolas and
then, much later, a vineyard for growing grapevines for making wine. He would take us to the local PBF farm in
West Lafayette to pick strawberries in June.
Many nights, my Dad read us a chapter from one of his Horatio Alger
books before we went to bed; these stories were about poor boys making good
through thrift and hard work; one title I remember is “Sam’s Chance”. My Dad cut us boys' hair himself in buzz style in our kitchen.
There were families with children about our same age living
on both sides of us and other families with children nearby, so there were
always my brothers and lots of other children to play with, and we spent a lot
of time outside playing with the other kids in the neighborhood. The
games I remember playing were baseball,
football, basketball, sledding, throwing snowballs at cars, catching lightning
bugs, running, climbing trees, playing with our dog Skippy, shooting at birds
with a slingshot, building a treehouse in our big apple tree, and wrestling in
the yard with my brothers. There was the
old abandoned Pope-Gosser Pottery a couple blocks away from us that we explored. On bad days when we could not play outside,
my brothers and I played inside; we built all kinds of building with “Lincoln Logs”;
and we played with a Lionel Electric Train set on a table my Dad had built in
the basement and with an Electric Football game. We would walk a block and a half to
McConnell’s Store to buy a pack of Topps baseball cards. A pack contained five or six cards and a piece
of bubblegum and cost 5 cents; we usually threw away the bubblegum. My brothers and I each had large collection
of baseball cards, and we traded cards with each other and the neighbors. My Dad built a plywood full-size ping pong
table for us in the basement, where my brothers and I spent hours learning to
play until we played reasonably well.
My Dad brought the dog we
named Skippy home; he had found him on the USDA station where worked. He was a mixed-breed, medium-sized red
hound. My Dad thought he could make him
into a rabbit-hunting dog, but Skippy never have the nose for it. We kept him tied up with a chain that he
could pull along the length of the clothes line outside so he had a good long
place to run, and he had his box to stay in, and a cherry tree to lie under
when it was hot. Skippy stayed outside
most of the time, but when there was thunder and lightning, he would bark and whine
until we let him inside. He had a place
in the kitchen where he was supposed to stay when he was inside and generally
he stayed there, but occasionally he would come into the living room to be
petted. He was always trying to run away;
sometimes we could run him down; one time he got away and was gone for a
month. We had given him up as gone for
good, but we were surprised when he eventually came back looking very skinny
and bedraggled, and scratched at our front door. Another time he got away and ran down the
aisle in our neighbor’s church at Sunday services. Our neighbor recognized him and brought him
home to us.
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| Boys with Skippy |
When we got older, we
played sports in Hall’s Lot with the boys from “Hardscrabble Hill”. Hall’s Lot was a vacant lot near our
neighborhood when we were growing up; but later Coshocton made it into a City
Park with tennis courts, basketball courts, and playground equipment. It lay between our neighborhood and
Hardscrabble Hill, a run-down neighborhood
filled with boys whose families didn’t have much money but some of whom were
very good athletes; they went to Washington Grade School with us but didn’t
have a lot of interest or success in education.
So on many evenings in the
spring, summer, and fall, my brothers and I would walk up to Hall’s Lot to play
pick-up games slow-pitch softball or baseball, or football. The games would last until dark. There would usually be 10 to 15 boys, sometimes
more, and sometimes a couple of adults would show up to play; there was no
formal organization or rules; we just chose sides and played. For softball equipment, we
had a couple of wooden bats that everybody would use, enough gloves that we
could share so that those playing in the field had a glove, and a couple
balls. Often, the bat handles were
cracked so we had to tape them to hold them together. Sometimes, we decided to play without gloves,
not out of necessity but just for fun to do something different. Sometimes, we would only have one or two outs
per inning, instead of three, before changing sides to speed up the game. There was septic tank run-off in right field,
so we tried not to hit the ball there; but, if we did, we would have to wade
through muck to get the ball back; we never thought about how unsanitary this might
be; we lost a few balls there.
If nobody else showed up,
my brother John would hit long fly balls to me and I would shag them either with
a glove or sometimes without a glove. I
got to be pretty good a catching fly balls in general, especially running
catches, and also in catching them without a glove. The trick to catching without a glove was
catch the ball with two hands and to quickly move your hands back on impact
with the ball so your hands didn't have to absorb the full impact of
the ball.
To play football, all we
needed was a football. Generally, we
played two-hand-touch, but on rare occasions we played tackle without helmets
or pads; we played mainly a passing game.
I liked to play quarterback and on many occasions got to play it because
I could throw the ball pretty well. I
guess I learned to throw when playing with my brothers in the back yard where I
threw because my older brother John always liked to catch. When playing at Hall’s Lot, I learned to put
some “touch” on the ball because there were sometimes little kids playing with
us. All the bigger kids would be
covered, but nobody would cover the little kids. If I threw it hard to the little kids or threw
it a little bit away from them, they would not be able to catch it; so I threw
it as easily as I could right to them. I
also learned to put some “zip” on the ball because there were some good
athletes defending the receivers; I especially liked “zipping” it to a receiver
between two defenders.
From the time I was in 4th
grade until I graduated from High School, I had a “paper route” where I
delivered the Coshocton Tribune. My Dad helped
me and my brothers each get a route when we were young in order to save for a
college education. I guess it was an
early education in working. I started
out with 40-some customers a day and finished my career with 120 customers a
day. When weather was nice, we rode our
bikes and other times we walked our routes; my route was over two miles long with
some hills so it was good outdoor exercise. We folded the papers so we could throw them
onto porches instead of walking up to each and every porch, and I became an
expert in both folding and throwing them; some of the porches were up on a hill
a good ways from the street so it took a good long throw to get it onto the
porch; so this helped me develop my throwing distance and accuracy skills
because if you missed the porch, you had to walk up the hill and pick the paper
up. The Tribune prided itself in being a
seven day a week newspaper, so we never had a day off. On Saturday mornings, we had to go to all our
customers and collect for the week; the paper at that time was 40 cents a week,
of which the carrier got 10 cents; so if you had 40 customers, you got $4.00 a
week; if the customer didn't pay us, we still had to pay the newspaper for the
papers. Sunday mornings in the winter
were the worst time, because the Sunday paper was by far the heaviest to carry and
we had to get up at 6:00 am to deliver it in the snow and cold; afterwards we
had to go to church where it was then hard to stay awake during the sermon. In high school, we also worked in the
circulation department at the newspaper office; I took papers off the press and
pushed a big cart loaded with newspapers up Main Street to the Post Office
before I delivered the papers on my paper route. Some of the boys from Hardscrabble Hill
worked in the office too. I think after
nine years of working, I had saved $5000 for college.
I never regretted or
begrudged doing the paper route and even liked the activity, but years later I still
regret that I never had the opportunity to try to play high school football
because I was always had to deliver papers after school; I still believe that I
could have made the football team. So,
my brother John and I played Sousaphone in the High School marching band. My brother Joe gave up my paper route 2 or 3
years before graduating from high school. At one point, the head football
coach, Jerry Ipp., encouraged him to try out for the football team. Naturally, he asked Mother and Daddy if he
could do this. And in their inimitable way, they were clearly discouraging to him
about doing that. The gist being that in football sometimes you get injured,
and then you have to live (suffer) with the limitations from those injuries the
rest of your life. So he quickly dropped
the idea.
My parents always emphasized the importance of education. We walked to Washington Grade School, which was about a block away from our house on our same Chestnut Street. My brothers and I all naturally did well in school. I enjoyed the schoolwork and wanted to learn. I felt very contented working in the classroom, especially when it was raining outside. At the time, I never thought about how I was doing in the schoolwork compared to other students; I did well, became mildly upset if I didn't do something right, and worked to correct mistakes. I was the youngest kid in my class, being born on the last day for the year’s class, and this contributed to my feeling that I was somehow below the other kids. I was surprised one time when another kid asked me how to do something.
My parents always emphasized the importance of education. We walked to Washington Grade School, which was about a block away from our house on our same Chestnut Street. My brothers and I all naturally did well in school. I enjoyed the schoolwork and wanted to learn. I felt very contented working in the classroom, especially when it was raining outside. At the time, I never thought about how I was doing in the schoolwork compared to other students; I did well, became mildly upset if I didn't do something right, and worked to correct mistakes. I was the youngest kid in my class, being born on the last day for the year’s class, and this contributed to my feeling that I was somehow below the other kids. I was surprised one time when another kid asked me how to do something.
We listened to Cleveland
Indians baseball on WTNS our local radio station and knew all the player’s
names, positions, and statistics. The
Indians won the American League championship in 1954, but lost the World Series
to the New York Giants with Willie Mays.
The Indians had a strong pitching staff with Bob Lemon, Mike Garcia, and
Bob Feller and some outstanding position players with Al Rosen, Bobby Avila,
and Larry Doby. The next year, rookies Rocky
Colavito and Herb Score joined the team.
One year, WTNS had a contest where they would ask a question and the
first person to call in with the right answer would win two free tickets to an
Indian’s game. My brothers and I
developed a scheme where John and I would listen to the question, and Joe would
dial the phone just as question was done being asked and talk to the radio
announcer. John and I would get the
answer and give it to Joe just in time so he would be the first with the right
answer. We won enough times so that our
whole family got to go a couple of games.
My Dad drove us up to the game and our Grandpa Royer went with us. The old Cleveland Municipal Stadium was a
huge stadium holding 80,000 people, but less than 10,000 went to the games, so
we got free seats down close to the field.
We took our gloves but never caught a foul ball. We loved it!
I like to tell my grandchildren and other youngsters, who now
have to continually watch TV, XBOX, and cell phones, that we did not get a television
until I was 10 years old. There are also
many young adults who have to continually look at their cell phones. I think we were better off for not having TV
because we spent more time outside playing with other kids and were forced to
use our own minds and imaginations to entertain ourselves. We were one of the last families in our
neighborhood to get a TV. Our TV only got
3 channels; we had to get up from the couch to change the channel; we had a
tall antenna in the back of our house with a rotor to turn the antenna in the
direction of the station we wanted to watch; but many times there was a lot of
“snow” on the TV screen because of a poor signal. The picture was in black and white only. All stations shut off at 11:30 pm with only a
“test pattern” on the screen for a half-hour. Then, all you would see was snow on the
screen; I have read recently that 20% of this snow is background radiation created
by the Big Bang. The whole family sat in
the living room and watched the one TV. As kids, we liked to watch Howdy Doody, the
Mickey Mouse club, big-time professional wrestling, and Cleveland Browns with
Jim Brown running the football. My
Mother liked to watch the Lawrence Welk show, which we also had to watch
because there was only one TV.
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| First TV |
At first, our telephone did
not have a way of manually dialing but when you picked up the phone, the
operator said “Number please”, you gave her a 4-digit number, and she connected
you; we were on a “party-line” with 3 other houses so you had to wait if
another house was using their phone. Eventually, we got a private line
and a rotary dial phone.
My Dad bought a used 1949
Lincoln car; I remember when he brought it home; he said he bought it from on
old lady for $800; and that was the only car we had for a long time. I don’t remember what car we had before that. My Dad would buy $1 worth of gas at the
Shell station just down the street and the price included checking the oil and
cleaning the windshield. We stored our
bikes in the garage next to the car; and we would sometimes scratch the car
with our bicycles that each had a large basket for delivering newspapers, so
the side of the car became pretty scratched up. On Sunday afternoons, my parents someitmes took us for trips in the car into the surrounding country-side.
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| Painting my Mother commissioned from an old country photograph from one trip |
We took periodic visits to my paternal grandparents’ home and small farm, at
least, every summer. We always looked
eagerly for to those trips to the small rural town in Southern Ohio along the
Ohio River – especially us boys. These trips often meant an exhausting time for
us in endless outdoor fun and adventures: of simply going for rides in the old
children’s wagon; exploring the root cellar and all the interesting rooms in my
grandparents’ house; exploring all of the various outbuildings – my Granddad’s
woodworking shop, storage sheds, smoke house, chicken coop, hog shed and
outhouse; watching my Granddad working his large garden, milking the cow,
gathering the eggs, slopping the hog, or killing the chicken for dinner;
playing for hours building dams with my brothers in the stream at the bottom of
the hill; climbing to the water tower at the top of the next hill; going
swimming at “Bailey’s Lake”; going fishing; going down to the Ohio River; and
visiting Uncle Dane’s house. See
separate blog posting entitled Uncle Dane’s House (REF #4). Bailey’s Lake had three high diving platforms
– the ten foot, twenty foot, and thirty foot.
We would jump of the ten foot platform again and again, and tried the
twenty foot platform a couple times, but never jumped off the thirty foot
platform. These visits also meant
positive interactions with our grandparents, and often included get-togethers
with my Aunt Helen, Uncle Russell and Cousins Dauna Lee and Dale as well. My Grandma always prepared delicious meals with
most of the food produced directly on the farm.
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| John and Jim in wagon at Granddad's house |
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| Cousins by Granddad's garden |
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| Granddad making boat stems |
Visits with my maternal Grandpa Royer in my memory were
associated with visits with my Uncle Cecil, Aunt Margaret, and Cousin Ann’s
home. My grandmother Nora had died from cancer before I was born. He moved in
with my uncle and aunt not too many years after I was born. What are most memorable to me again were
visits to my uncle’s home in the country along Wills Creek near Coshocton where
there was outdoor space, room, and even a spring house. These visits were different, however. They
still lived in a rural setting but the visits were more for just visiting –
mostly indoors. By 1960, they had moved
into town and into a new ranch style home. With that move the transition of my
nearest relatives from rural settings to town life was completed.
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| Mother, Dad, and Grandpa Royer |
We would go to three family reunions – Bentz, Royer, and
Sandel - each summer; each of our Grandparents had lots of brothers and sisters
and so our parents had lots of cousins, aunts, and uncles that they would get
to see once a year. They would hold the
reunion at the fairgrounds, or a grange hall, or a cousin’s farm on a Sunday
afternoon. There would be lots of good
food, everyone brought potluck, but nobody wanted to go first so it would be up
to my brothers and me to go first. After
eating, all the adults would sit around and talk, which was pretty boring to
us. There were usually some other young
kids around and we would play a game of baseball, play on the playground equipment,
or explore the surroundings.
Health Care
Our family was generally pretty healthy then. We had the usual colds and flus; and I
remember my Mother telling me that my health got better once I started my paper
route that required me to walk two miles every day. As children, we all had the childhood
diseases of mumps, chicken pox, and measles that every child got in those days
before there were vaccines for these diseases.
You were pretty sick, were out of school for a few days or a week, and
then got well. In the post-war US, polio
was a devastating disease among children, and we knew people who had been
affected by the disease. My Mother’s
cousin-friend, Opal, walked with a conspicuous limp from the disease; when I
started my first job after college in 1970, my boss had to get around in a
wheel-chair as result of polio in his childhood. Our Washington Grade School principal called
the whole school into an assembly in 1954 or 1955 to announce that Jonas Salk
had developed a vaccine for polio; at the time, I believed that this was
important, but I definitely didn’t understand the significance of it.
My older brother John clearly remembers that the doctor came
to our house to check on him when he had the chicken pox. I vaguely remember the doctor visits to the
house, but what I remember in later years was going to the doctor’s office,
sitting in the waiting room for what seemed to be an interminable wait, and
then finally seeing the doctor on a first-come-first-serve basis. I don’t think that the office visit cost very
much; I’m guessing maybe $5. I was only
in the hospital one time then, to have my tonsils removed when I was six years
old; it was a common practice to remove your tonsils whether you needed it or
not.
My brother Joe went to the hospital after he accidentally
jammed a pencil down this throat when we were chasing him around the living
room. Joe remembers
walking-running-trying-to-cry his way out to the kitchen sink with pieces of
pencil falling out of his mouth into the sink amongst all the blood. Mother and Daddy rushed him to the nearby
hospital as Mother held Joe with a towel to catch the blood. The bleeding stopped, and the hospital just
gave advice on how to keep from aggravating the hole in the back of his throat.
The doctor said that had the pencil hit a little differently from where
it did, it could have punctured a primary artery to his head and that would
have been his end. Our parents were so shocked and grateful, they never
made too much of it in terms of the further punishment that we all
expected. We felt pretty fortunate for
these strokes of providence.
My brothers and I were listening to a debate on the 2017
topic of Trump’s “repeal and replace” of Obamacare. We tried to remember if our parents had health
care insurance when we were young, and we couldn’t remember ever hearing or
seeing anything about it; at any rate it was not a big deal at our house. According to a Wikipedia article, 75% of
Americans had some sort of health insurance by 1958. Since it would be decades before computers
were commonly used, health insurance then must have been a balky paper system.
Denouement
I am happy to say my brothers and I all graduated from
college and have had successful professional careers. John has started and managed some successful
businesses, notably, one that assisted couples in adopting children from Russia. Joe had careers as project manager in a
diesel engine company, where he successfully developed ceramic parts for diesel
engines, and as a marriage counselor;
and he has pursued a calling to spiritual inquiry. I
have been a computer programmer/project leader for three companies, developing
an artillery fire control system for the US Army; point-of-sale systems; and
weighing terminals for truck scales, batching systems, and factory
automation. We are all now at least
semi-retired.
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| Jim, Joe, John in 2017 |
Reference
Some of the words and ideas in this blog post came from a
college paper written by my brother Joe in 2006, entitled Individual
Development and the Family Life Cycle B – Family Genogram.
Appendix 1: Genealogy Chart
William Bentz developed this genealogy chart in the late 1980's/early 1990's.
