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The Power of the Unconscious: A Personal History
The Power of the Unconscious: A Personal History
The Power of the Unconscious: A Personal History
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The Power of the Unconscious: A Personal History

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By the time I graduated from high school, I had so many things buried and tucked away, so much anger, rage, hatred, fear, sorrow, grief, and pain, that I could not dare to get close to anyone, including myself, as I could not tap into my emotional and intellectual potential. As the years went on, I had to build armor plating around these feelings as if they ever got out, I would be overwhelmed, and I do not know what would have happened to me. So they stayed buried, but that doesn’t mean they did not influence my behavior. These feelings produced some completely unconscious motivations that affected my decision-making, if you can call it that, regarding career and marriage. The problem was that I kept making decisions and pursuing fantasies that did not work in my best interests and thus I was mired in a life that had reached its end when I was almost 40 years old.
Something had to change, and I eventually sought out psychotherapy that brought those feelings to the surface and the unconscious motivations that went with them, and only then did I have the capacity to make decisions about a career that I made something of a success of and married a person for love rather than some other neurotic reason. It took three years of therapy on two different occasions to get this all out and deal with those feelings that I thought I had buried but in reality were determining the decisions I was making. The power of the unconscious is real and is not something to be ignored.
This this book is my story of how I came to have all these buried feelings and fantasies and how eventually I was able to bring them to the surface and lead something of a normal life. Hopefully, this story might inspire others who feel they are at a dead end in their lives and can’t seem to make decisions that work for them. While I am not a professional in the area and thus can’t give a professional opinion about people’s psychological health, it also is hard for me to believe that my experience can be all that unique. It may be that others to are under the power of the unconscious and have buried feelings that therapy can help uncover and give them greater degrees of freedom over their lives. If this book can help even one person to experience a more fulfilled and rewarding life it will have been worth writing.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAuthorHouse
Release dateJul 12, 2022
ISBN9781665563833
The Power of the Unconscious: A Personal History
Author

Rogene A. Buchholz

Rogene A. Buchholz is currently the Legendre-Soule Chair in Business Ethics Emeritus at Loyola University New Orleans. He held this endowed chair at Loyola for thirteen years until his retirement in 2002. Prior to this position he taught at various business schools as a full-time faculty or visitor. Dr. Buchholz received a B.S. Degree from North Central College in 1959, a M.S. Degree in Economics from the University of Illinois in 1960, an M.Th. Degree from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in 1964, and a Ph.D. Degree from the Business School at the University of Pittsburgh in 1974. In 1995 he received the Summer Marcus Award for outstanding contributions to the field of Business and Society and outstanding service to the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management. He is the author or co-author of 15 books that were mostly textbooks while in academia and has had four scholarly books published by Routledge since he retired. Dr. Buchholz currently lives with his wife, a former philosophy professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, in Denver Colorado.

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    The Power of the Unconscious - Rogene A. Buchholz

    © 2022 Rogene A. Buchholz. All rights reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

    transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

    Published by AuthorHouse  07/11/2022

    ISBN: 978-1-6655-6385-7 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-6655-6384-0 (hc)

    ISBN: 978-1-6655-6383-3 (e)

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912326

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

    and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

    this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

    expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

    views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    CONTENTS

    Introduction

    Chapter 1     The Setting

    Chapter 2     Early Life

    Chapter 3     High School

    Chapter 4     The Military Years

    Chapter 5     College

    Chapter 6     Seminary

    Chapter 7     The Clergy Years

    Chapter 8     Alcoa

    Chapter 9     School Again

    Chapter 10   A New Career

    Chapter 11   Another Divorce

    Chapter 12   Life Begins at Sixty

    Chapter 13   Reflections

    Selected Bibliography

    INTRODUCTION

    By the time I graduated from high school, I had so many things buried and tucked away, so much anger, rage, hatred, fear, sorrow, grief, and pain, that I could not dare to get close to anyone, including myself, as I could not tap into my emotional and intellectual potential. As the years went on, I had to build armor plating around these feelings as if they ever got out, I would be overwhelmed, and I do not know what would have happened to me. So they stayed buried, but that doesn’t mean they did not influence my behavior. These feelings produced some completely unconscious motivations that affected my decision-making, if you can call it that, regarding career and marriage. The problem was that I kept making decisions and pursuing fantasies that did not work in my best interests and thus I was mired in a life that had reached its end when I was almost 40 years old.

    Something had to change, and I eventually sought out psychotherapy that brought those feelings to the surface and the unconscious motivations that went with them, and only then did I have the capacity to make decisions about a career that I made something of a success of and married a person for love rather than some other neurotic reason. It took three years of therapy on two different occasions to get this all out and deal with those feelings that I thought I had buried but in reality were determining the decisions I was making. The power of the unconscious is real and is not something to be ignored.

    So I was 42 when I started a new career that I was suited for and found intellectually interesting enough to keep me going and pour all my energies into and find ample personal rewards in the process. But it took more time until I was 60 years old to finally marry a woman who was right for me and be rewarded with many personal experiences as we worked and traveled together over a good part of the world. It was again therapy that gave me the capacity to do this as I made two mistakes prior to this marriage and wasted a lot of my time pursing fantasies from buried feelings about the past. It was again the unconscious doing its thing without me having any inkling about what was going on in my head.

    Thus this book is my story of how I came to have all these buried feelings and fantasies and how eventually I was able to bring them to the surface and lead something of a normal life. Hopefully, this story might inspire others who feel they are at a dead end in their lives and can’t seem to make decisions that work for them. While I am not a professional in the area and thus can’t give a professional opinion about people’s psychological health, it also is hard for me to believe that my experience can be all that unique. It may be that others to are under the power of the unconscious and have buried feelings that therapy can help uncover and give them greater degrees of freedom over their lives. If this book can help even one person to experience a more fulfilled and rewarding life it will have been worth writing.

    CHAPTER

    1

    The Setting

    The town of Kingston in which I was born and raised is located in central Wisconsin, a land of rolling hills and lots and lots of lakes carved out by the glaciers than once covered the country. Kingston is 50 miles north of Madison, the state capital, and about 100 miles northwest of Milwaukee, the largest city in the state. There are a good many woods in the area with maple and birch trees that created a splash of color in the fall when the leaves changed. The weather could get very hot and humid, particularly in August, and the winters were most often very cold and snowy. But by and large the weather was pretty decent compared to other places I have lived since then. Spring and fall were, of course, the best seasons as they are in many places.

    The Countryside

    Kingston is located in the middle of some good farmland, but the quality of the soil changes dramatically depending on which way one travels. Eight miles to the east is the town of Markesan, a booming metropolis of 1,000 people where I went to church and high school. The town even had a movie theater and an industrial section that contained canning factories and other small businesses. Markesan sat in the midst of incredibly rich prairie soil that stretched further east for some distance, farmland that had about 12-18 inches of black topsoil that was so rich in nutrients that it produced decent crops even in a dry year. Consequently, the farmers around Markesan were very wealthy and the town that serviced these farms shared in this wealth. There was a rumor floating around when I was growing up that Markesan at one time had the highest per capita wealth of any town in the state.

    If one traveled west, however, the story was quite different. Five miles to the west of Kingston was the town of Dalton, where the soil began to turn quite sandy. Decent crops could still be grown as long as there was ample rain, but in a dry year farmers suffered. The land also was wilder with huge marshes, what would now be called wetlands, of several square miles, and lots and lots of wooded areas. While around Markesan every square inch of land was producing something, west of Kingston there was a good bit of land that had not been plowed and was left in its natural state. Dalton had hoped to prosper and outgrow Kingston because the old Chicago and Northwestern railroad went through the town, but this did not turn out to be the boom that everyone there expected.

    Dairy farming was the main business throughout the state and one needed good land to grow crops. The small towns like Kingston existed to service these farmers. Around Kingston, practically all the crops that were grown went to cattle feed, including hay, oats and barley, and ear corn as it was called. Milk was the staple, and every farm had a big barn or two that said something about the prosperity of that farm. Some farmers had hogs, chickens, sheep, and even goats on occasion, and some raised beef cattle for slaughter. Many also raised peas and sweet corn to be canned by the local canneries in Markesan. Around that city, more cash crops were raised because of the richness of the soil. But dairy farming was the big industry, and the size of the farms ranged anywhere from 80-200 acres or more.

    There are, of course, many lakes in Wisconsin, and Kingston was fortunate enough to be surrounded on one side by a big lake called Grand Lake, named after the river that flowed through the lake. The river started further east somewhere and flowed through Markesan on its way west to Kingston, where a dam was built to create the lake. Why the dam was built on that spot I never did know, but nonetheless that lake was a great asset to the town. It was well stocked with fish, and just about everyone fished at one time or another. Those properties that bordered the lake, as ours did, had a pier and one or more boats. It was a beautiful setting, what with the lake and rolling hills that surrounded the town. It was far from idyllic, particularly in the winter, but it was a good place to grow up and learn about nature.

    Grand River eventually flowed into the Fox River which emptied into Lake Winnebago. About five miles north of Kingston was a town called Marquette, named after the famed Jesuit explorer who supposedly traveled down the Fox River that went through Lake Puckaway that bordered the town. It was a huge lake good for duck hunting and fishing. The town itself wasn’t much, however, which was surprising considering the number of resort cottages bordering the lake. About 22 miles from us, however, was a lake called Big Green Lake which had a number of fancy and expensive resorts where wealthy people from Milwaukee and elsewhere had summer homes.

    There were several woods around the town where I spent a lot of time. About a mile or two from town was what was called Knight’s woods, named after the owner I guess. The woods stretched for miles and miles to the west, and contained some bluffs where one could stand and look for miles to the north out over the landscape. The view of Lake Puckaway and other landscape to the north was awesome. To the immediate west of town was a big hill called Dickerson’s bluff, that contained an open spot on top where one could get a view to the East over miles and miles of farmland. Near this bluff was another lake called Spring Lake, aptly named because the lake was fed by springs. Hence the water was very cold even in summer and quite deep in some places.

    There was a big gravel pit about a mile out of town that provided no end of fun for kids like myself. When it wasn’t being used, it was a great place to explore, as there were some pretty big holes where the gravel had been dug out of the ground. It was a great place to play war and other games. During the summer months, I spent a great deal of time in that area. And when the county moved in their rock crusher and actually used the pit to dump new gravel on the roads in the area, I spent practically every afternoon there. It was great fun to ride along with the drivers in the big diesel trucks and pull the lever to let the gravel out the back end of the truck.

    While we did have a doctor in town, there was no hospital. The nearest hospital of any size was 24 miles to the west in a town called Portage, so named because fur trappers and explorers had to portage between the Wisconsin and Fox Rivers at that point. Eventually a canal was dug to connect the two rivers. We occasionally went to Portage to do some shopping, but the hospital we used was in a city called Fond du Lac, some 40 miles to the east at the bottom end of Lake Winnebago. For some reason people went to that city rather than Portage for their more serious shopping and medical care. In fact, I was born in the Catholic hospital in Fond du Lac, although my sister, who is fourteen years older, was born at home.

    It is a truly beautiful countryside as I experienced again in the summer of 2006 when I went back for a short visit. The lake in Kingston has gotten weedy so isn’t quite as attractive as when I grew up there. Several years ago the lake was drained to build a new dam and weeds took hold before the dam was finished, and apparently no one can think of a way to get rid of them. Markesan, however, was as beautiful as ever nestled in a small valley with lots of trees. The surrounding country is beautiful in June as everything is a rich deep green color. And the area is as prosperous as ever as can be seen from the way the barns and farmhouses are kept up. It was a good area to grow up in, at least from the perspective of natural beauty.

    The Town

    The town in which I was born and raised was a small one by anyone’s standards. The population number that I remember on the sign at the entrance to town was 333, a number that had grown to 354 when I went back for my 45th high school class reunion, but had decreased to 288 on my last visit. It was one of those towns that during my childhood years was very independent and diversified. When I was growing up it had two general stores that sold groceries among other things one of which was owned by an uncle, one store devoted solely to groceries that was owned by another uncle, two gas stations one of which was also connected with a Ford dealership, a local paper that came out once a week, two hardware stores, a drug store, barber shop, blacksmith shop, post office, a bank, a cheese factory, a creamery that made butter and other milk products, two taverns, and a butcher shop run by my father.

    When I went back after a long period of absence, it was a totally different town. Like many other small towns all across America, it was decimated by the Wall Marts of the world. Because of better highways and cars, people could easily travel to the larger towns that were 20-30 miles away where they had a better selection of merchandise to choose from and better prices. Consequently, a town like Kingston could not compete, and stores closed their doors. All that was left was one general store, a bank, post office, one gas station with no car dealership, and two restaurants as I recall. Pretty much everything else had closed, including my father’s butcher shop. The cheese factory and the creamery were the first to go, as I remember, and the rest closed their doors after I left town.

    There was a state highway that ran right through main street, highway 44 that went southwest to northeast across part of central Wisconsin. It was built during the depression years as part of a work project sponsored by the federal government. When I was growing up most of the other roads in the area were gravel, including those in the town itself, hence the need for the county to work the gravel pit every few years to put new gravel on the roads. In later years, almost all of the roads were paved with asphalt, a definite improvement in terms of travel and environmental conditions, as gravel roads produced an enormous amount of dust that floated in the air for some time. My mother emphasized cleanliness, hence the dust which covered everything in the house bothered her a great deal. She took it upon herself to circulate a petition around town to get the roads paved with asphalt, an effort that was ultimately successful.

    The streets had no street signs even though there were street names. When strangers came to town they had to ask directions if they were trying to find someone. Of course, everyone knew where everyone else lived. The town also had no water or sewer system. Everyone had outhouses and wells. We had a dug well for drinking water and a cistern that collected rainwater that thus provided soft water for washing. Our outhouse was a two holer, somewhat of a luxury in those days. It had the traditional Sears Roebuck catalog to be used when the toilet paper ran out. In the wintertime, one did not spend much time there as one could literally freeze your you know what. We took a sponge bath once a week whether we needed it or not, and we washed clothes once a week, on Monday as I remember. My Dad would come home from work to help my mother hang the clothes on the clothesline, which was quite a job in itself. In winter, the wet clothes froze stiff as a board, and would actually break if one wasn’t careful.

    The school was a four-room schoolhouse where students were bussed in from the immediate area, so it serviced not only the town itself but a larger area around the town. The school was located on the other side of town from where I lived, so I biked to school when I was old enough weather permitting, and otherwise walked even on the coldest days in winter. Very few parents, as I remember, drove their kids to school. They were too busy making a living. So it was either walk or bike, and the school was a good mile from my home. On cold winter days, it was a challenge to brave the cold, particularly if was also snowing. We did have snow days, but only on the worst of blizzards where no one could get around. It was a far cry from modern days where driving the kids to and from school is accepted practice.

    The town had three churches, a Lutheran church that had a full time pastor living across from the church, and a small Methodist and Catholic church that was serviced by pastors from Markesan. My Dad grew up Lutheran, but he changed when he married to my mother’s church in Markesan. It was called Zion Evangelical Church, part of a denomination that was called the Evangelical Association that merged with the Church of the Brethren in 1946 to become the Evangelical United Brethren church, and then merged again in the 1960s with the Methodist Church which was renamed The United Methodist Church. The history of these churches and their mergers is an interesting story in itself, but not the subject of this book.

    The Culture

    The town and the surrounding community was settled mainly by Germans, with some English and Polish families and a scattering of Welsh people. There was a definite superiority on the part of the German people, as they thought they, and only they, could farm and run businesses as they should be run. The English were by and large lazy and the Poles were too dumb to know what they are doing, so thought the German people. There was definite prejudice against other ethnic groups that had religious connotations. The strongest prejudice, by far, was against the Catholics. There were no Jews or Blacks in the community, so these prejudices were not evident. But the Catholics were another matter, and I grew up wondering what all the fuss was about. When I walked by the Catholic church building it seemed sort of mysterious and I was curious as to what went on in that building that had people so upset. But I dare not go in or have anything to do with the members of that church.

    Thus it was a Protestant community by and large, infused with the Protestant Ethic as I later learned when I went to college and studied these things. People worked hard in very disagreeable conditions. It’s hard to imagine a more disagreeable task than getting up at 5:00 in the morning and milking the cows on a cold winter morning, and then having to milk them again in the early evening. And when I was very young, milking was done by hand as milking machines came along later and even then not everyone could afford them. Nor could it have been fun to plow the fields in the spring with an open tractor as tractors with air-conditioned cabs were not yet available. Some farmers even plowed with horses. It was hard work indeed.

    The work ethic was evident in other ways, as people saved their money to buy things rather than buy them on credit. My parents, for example, saved all their lives to build a new house. They would never have thought of taking out a mortgage and building it earlier in their lives. If one couldn’t afford something, then one shouldn’t have it was their thinking. People either saved the money they made or spent it on productive items like new tractors or farm machinery. My uncle, for example, waited several years before he bought his wife a refrigerator even though they were available. Deferred gratification was the term that referred to this kind of behavior as I later learned, and it was exemplified all throughout the community. There was very little conspicuous consumption that went on, as people who had money to spend either spent it on needed items or saved it to earn more money.

    The town and the community were very religious and everyone went to church as I remember. Those who did not suffered ostracism. The church was the center of social life for a great many people as it sponsored dinners, picnics, and what not throughout the year. So it not only served a religious function in providing people with meaning and purpose, but also a social function in providing opportunities for people to get together and have a good time under church auspices. The schools also had social functions and there was a women’s group in town, but the church seemed to be the most prominent institution in this regard. People were proud of their church membership as it gave them a sense of belonging to something and they liked to be officers in the church as it gave them a sense of importance.

    One thing that surprised me, however, as I think back on the culture that prevailed, is the role women played in families and the community. One would expect it to be a highly patriarchal society, with males dominating everything and females knowing their place as subordinate members of the family and community. Such was not the case, however, as there were a great number of strong women, which one could sense when you met them with their husbands. It was clear that they ran the show as my mother did in our family. Many women made the important decisions about running the farm or business, or at least participated equally with their husbands. Women were active in the church and in schools and most of them were certainly anything but the weaker sex. Some of them could outwork most men in the community and even drink them under the table in the local tavern. Thus I grew up in a culture with many strong women who did not fit the stereotype.

    The community was, or course, very Republican, in fact, I can’t remember anyone voting for the Democratic party. My parents were staunch Republicans and hated Franklin Roosevelt with a passion. Every time we went to Portage they had to point out a sewage plant that had been built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), an organization that sponsored public projects throughout the country to put people back to work during the depression. This sewage plant was a symbol of socialism or government meddling, I guess. When Roosevelt died, I heard the news on the radio at home. My parents were off somewhere, and when they came back I told them the news, which they had already heard. Since I fully expected them to be overjoyed, I was totally surprised by their attitude. They were griping about having now to put up with that idiot Truman. As I remember, I was sort of crushed.

    The people in the community were largely outdoor types, spending a great deal of time hunting and fishing. Farming, of course, is largely an outdoor activity, so this is not surprising. People fished all summer long, and the lake that bordered the town seemed to keep itself well stocked with Blue Gill, Sunfish, Bass, and even larger fish like Northern pickerel. With the coming of fall came the hunting season, first squirrels, rabbits, quail, pheasants, ducks, and later on deer. Deer hunting with rifles was not allowed in the surrounding counties as there were too many people. One could hunt deer with bow and arrow and shotgun slugs. Several of the men in town got together and went into Northern Wisconsin to hunt deer with rifles. One of the men had a flatbed truck on which he loaded what passed for a house, so those who wanted to go to the northern woods piled in and off they went.

    It was not much of a place for intellectual life, and there were few people who made their living by using their minds. There were a few doctors and lawyers, of course, but physical labor was the order of the day. It was not a great place for a kid to grow up in who was curious and wanted to use his mind to think about things. People accepted what the ministers said from the pulpit as gospel truth, and never gave a second thought about some of the claims that were being made. When I dared to question religion, as I sometimes did, it was a no-no, and I was quickly reminded to mind my manners. But people were pretty decent, by and large, and helped each other out when it was necessary to rebuild a barn because of a fire, when it was time to harvest the wheat, and other such occasions. There were some who were kind of cutthroat, but such behavior was not looked upon favorably.

    Many people drank a good deal, in keeping with the image of Wisconsin as a beer drinking state. There were two taverns in town, and they were the busiest places on a Saturday night. There was an occasional fight in the street outside the taverns, as some would drink too much and say the wrong thing or whatever. There was a town about 20 miles from Kingston on the other side of Lake Puckaway called Princeton, that had a population of about 1,000 people. It’s greatest claim to fame was that it had 13 taverns. Every other business on its main street was a tavern. There was a town in the northeastern part of the state in the mining district called Hurley that had even more taverns. Basketball teams from that town that occasionally made it into the state playoffs and were composed of some pretty tough cookies.

    Education, however, was a highly valued commodity, as it is in most of the Midwestern states. Every kid was expected to get a high school degree, but college was not encouraged. After high school, the graduates were expected to take over their parent’s farm or business and remain in the community, and most of them did just that. When I went back for a class reunion, I was amazed as to how many of my classmates stayed in the vicinity. Higher education was something mainly for the women like my sister who wanted to become teachers. Most of them went to state teacher’s colleges, which are now branches of the University of Wisconsin, and those few who had the money went to the University in Madison which seemed to be valued mostly for the social life it provided. At least this was what appeared in the local newspapers, the sororities they belonged to and their social activities. What they were studying seemed to be of no importance.

    The University, however, was supported for the benefits it provided to farmers. It had an Agricultural Extension Service that taught farmers about crop rotation, plowing in a different manner so as to minimize soil runoff during rains, and other such techniques. Farmers could see some tangible benefits from the University, and thus higher education in general was looked upon favorably, not just for their kids who were expected to take over the family farm or get farms of their own. This began to change in subsequent generations, as more and more high school graduates did go on to college. Farming got to be less profitable and many small businesses disappeared, thus getting further education became more and more attractive.

    The Business

    My father had been a hired hand for some local farmer when he married my mother, but she was not satisfied to be married to such a person. So they bought out the town butcher shop and he became a small businessman. Their timing was terrible, however, as they bought it out just before the depression hit. They survived by buying a truck and carting meat to the work camps as the highway I mentioned before was built across the county. This highway was part of the Roosevelt administration’s project to put people to work, and this saved my parents from going bankrupt. When I later learned this, I thought their hatred of Roosevelt was somewhat hypocritical to say the least. Nonetheless, they were Republican to the core.

    The butcher shop took up only the front part of a rather large building. Thus we had some renters who lived in the back part of the building and also upstairs on the second floor. The people on the second floor also ran the telephone switchboard, which in those days consisted of manually inserting plugs into holes to connect the proper lines together. They could, of course, also listen in to conversations without anyone knowing. It was kind of interesting to watch them do their job and make the proper connections. The town fire alarm was also on top of this building, thus in some ways, this was the most important building in town.

    Across the side street from this building was a barn and a shed where we parked the truck. In addition to meat and such, my dad also sold feed which was kept on the second floor of the barn, and bought chickens from farmers which were kept in pens on the first floor. My Dad also took in eggs from farmers, and these chickens and eggs were picked up every so often by a trucker who eventually took them to Milwaukee and other cities in the state for resale. We ran two egg routes on two different mornings to actually pick up eggs from the farms themselves. It was always fun to go along with the hired man on these egg routes and help pick up the eggs.

    My parents made a decent living with this business and we never wanted for anything. We always had plenty to eat, decent clothes to wear, and a relatively late model Chevrolet in the garage. Then they got lucky due to my mother’s technological genius. Frozen food locker plants began to appear in the larger cities, and somehow my mother got wind of this development. Exactly how this came about I don’t remember, but before World War II began my parents began to get serious about this technology. There was an outfit in Green Bay that built these things, and they visited our business several times to discuss and evaluate the possibility of building such a plant in our building.

    Actually, our building was quite suited to this technology. By that time the renters in the back part of the building had moved and it was empty. It was a perfect place to build steel lockers to hold frozen food for people who wanted to rent them. There was ample room to build a fast freeze unit and a large cooler to hold meat to be processed. My mother recognized the potential of this technology and decided to go ahead with the project. She borrowed money from her father who was skeptical of the whole thing but gave her the money anyhow. While I have no idea of how much it cost, I’m sure it was a substantial amount of money for those times. We put in about 250 lockers of all steel construction. In addition, there was all the technology related to keeping the place below freezing including several large motors in the basement. It was a major building project by anyone’s standards.

    The technology allowed farmers in particular to butcher their own livestock like pigs and cattle and have them processed and frozen and placed in their individual locker. They could then come into the store whenever they wanted and go into their locker and take whatever meat they wanted. We also froze fruits and vegetables, and my parents supplied information to people relative to these possibilities. It was a booming business particularly during the war years when no new plants could be built because the steel and motors were not available. So my parents had a monopoly during those years being the only plant in the entire county. Talk about timing. It was a boon to farmers who did not have to limit their meat consumption because of rationing. They could butcher their own stock at will and not worry about coupons.

    My parents made a good deal of money during those years, although I don’t know exactly how much because I was not privy to that information. But they saved a good bit towards a new house that was my mother’s dream. Of course I had to work in the business, especially during the summer when there was no school. Fortunately for me this was the slow season so I still had plenty of time to go fishing and

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