With God As My Partner: An Autobiography

By Pastor Ronald A. Palmer

In 1972, I felt impressed of the Lord to write a book about my life and ministry. He even gave me the title, With God As My Partner. I voiced my objection in prayer by "reminding" Him that I had only been preaching for three years and pastoring for one. I had no experience in writing, but all I heard in return was, "Not now." I went through life with many "experiences" (both good and bad) piling up through the years. About four years ago, my wife said, "Ron, why don't you write a book about your life and ministry?" I didn't have any good answer for her; and since she is my best friend, my closest confidant, and my dearest prayer partner, I gave it some serious thought. In the following year, I came in contact with three or four others who asked me the same thing. In view of this, I went to the Lord in sincere prayer, and He said, "Now is the time." The book is not really in any chronological order but goes back and forth at times as I remember things. Again, the only way I could remember times, people, and names is With God As My Partner. I was not striving to produce any item of "literary art," but something that could be shared with others what God has shared with me through the years. It has been an interesting journey, and I look forward to continuing it. When I gave the book its title, it was with a sense of humility, and not arrogance. I am well aware of the fact that the only way I (or anyone else) can "partner" with God is by His grace, realizing that it is all for His glory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644929544

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With God As My Partner

An Autobiography

Pastor Ronald A. Palmer

Copyright © 2019 by Pastor Ronald A. Palmer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.

And then came me!

Part 1

The Beginning Years

Chapter 1

September 27, 1942, was when it all began for me. Anyway, that’s what I was told. I was a bit young, of course, and probably preoccupied with other things, so I don’t really know for myself; so there surely were no justifiable grounds on which to deny, or even argue, the fact. Nor are there any reasons to do so, because that works for me and has done so for over seventy-one years now.

God had a purpose for my life from the very beginning, I guess. I can imagine Him peeking into that swaddling blanket and speaking Jeremiah 29:11 to me. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. (I realize I have a vivid imagination, and maybe, that’s why one of my favorite verses, and one of the key verses for my ministry, is found in Ephesians 3:20: Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think [imagine], according to the power [faith] that worketh [continues to work] in us.)

God confirmed the fact that He had a purpose for my life by preserving it. Again, being a bit too young to remember, I was told that my folks thought for sure they were going to lose me. I had pneumonia once during my first year and twice during my second year. My mom said that it was because we were living in that cold, drafty tent during my second year. I guess they didn’t have the money to rent a house, so we lived in a tent, so they said.

I’m sure not complaining, though, since it didn’t bother me at that age. I just think it is great that the Lord preserved me and brought His plan to fruition, at least thus far. My earliest memory was when I was about three years old. It must have been in 1945 or maybe 1946. I remember being with Dad, Mom, and my siblings; and we were all standing out in the yard looking up at wave after wave of American bombers returning home from the war. They must have been heading to Rapid City, South Dakota, and perhaps air bases somewhere in Washington State. We were living in southern South Dakota at the time, and there were dozens and dozens of them flying over. I remember Dad explaining to us, Those are our boys coming home from the war. I didn’t, of course, know what he meant because our boys (my older brother, myself, and my younger brother, who was the baby) were all here. But that memory of all those big olive-green bombers flying over, and the terrific roar they made, was clearly etched in my little mind.

I don’t personally remember this, but my parents told me that when I was about four years old, I got ahold of one of Dad’s hammers and was evidently having a good time pounding nails in the ground when Mom found me. She said that she really fussed at me (which would be a very nominal word for her discipline) and told Dad about it when he got home. She said that all Dad said was, Don’t be hard on him. At least he’s learning to use a hammer.

As I said, I don’t remember the incident personally, but I have never forgotten the principle behind what Dad said, since I was told about it. I think the principle he was expressing, although he probably wasn’t even aware of it because he was a practical acting man, and not a philosophical thinking man, was this—the value of a four-year-old’s learning experience was far greater than that of a box of nails. That kind of thinking could go a long way in our modern society today (or that of any other day for that matter).

I started school rather late. I was seven years old (very close to eight) when I began the first grade. They didn’t have preschool or kindergarten in those days. My late start wasn’t because I was slow, but rather, because of my birthday. They required you to be seven years old to start school back then, and they started school the first week of September.

Well, I didn’t turn seven until the twenty-seventh, so they made me wait until the following year. It delayed my start in school; but because of that, school came easy to me; and because of that, I have always enjoyed studying and learning. Then, God gifted me with the ability to teach, and I enjoy that tremendously. In fact, I often say, I really enjoy eating, which anyone can see. But I would rather teach the Word of God than eat. The only thing I would rather do than teach Bible is to preach the gospel. That’s thanks to the calling of God on my life.

It was in March 1949 that we got the first really huge blizzard that I remember anything of. We lived about a mile or two out of town and about a quarter mile off the country road in an old farm house. Our car was broken down, and Dad needed to go into town for groceries. He harnessed the team to the wagon and told Mom he would be back as soon as he could. He started out down the farm road toward the county road, and this is what he told us when he got back.

He said, I was driving down our road to the county road, and everything was fine. It was warm and sunny, with the birds singing and a gentle breeze blowing. All of a sudden, everything got real still. The horses got real jittery, and there was a really eerie calm. I got spooked and turned the horses around at the county road. By the time I got back to the yard, it was a ‘whiteout’ blizzard, to the point that I had to let the horses have their heads to get back to the bam, because I couldn’t even see their heads.

What I personally remember was Mom tying a long rope to the doorknob, tying it around her waist, taking a lighted lantern, and walking out in the storm toward the bam, yelling Dad’s name. Dad had unharnessed the team and fed them while Mom was getting things ready. Dad said that he came to the bam door and couldn’t see twenty feet. He waited for a while and thought he heard something. After a bit, he said that he faintly heard Mom calling his name during a lull in the wind. Then, he saw the flicker of the lantern light, and after closing the bam door, he made his way to Mom; and they followed the rope back to the door of the house.

By the time the storm finished, us kids were able to ride our sleds off the snowdrift that went from the roof of the granary to the ground. It was a record storm for that area of the country, and nobody went anywhere for some time. I remember the county snowplow coming past our driveway about three days later, cleaning the county road. Dad went out and talked to them, and lo and behold, they ran their plow up the driveway to the house, so our road was opened.

The next major thing I remember, other than us moving about four times in the next two years (which wasn’t major to us), was the blizzard of 1951. That too came in March after a time of warm spring weather. Dad and my older brother had left to go about fifty miles from home to see about a job. They were supposed to be back that evening, but the blizzard caught them on the road, and they were snowed in for three days. They stayed with a farm family along the road; and even though they were total strangers, they were welcomed, housed, and fed for the three days, at no cost. (That was back in the day when hospitality was alive and well in Nation America.)

While they were gone, we burned all the firewood we had available, and when it was gone, we did the door and rope thing again. During the storm, my oldest sister and I tied a rope to the doorknob and around my waist. Then, we took the lantern and walked out toward the outhouse (outdoor toilet) where we had a stack of boards behind it. We would carry the boards back to the house and cut hem up with the handsaw, and when they were gone, we would go out and get some more. It was another one of those whiteout blizzards like we had two years before.

When Dad and my brother got home and found out about it, Dad hit the roof.

His concern was that we could have been separated or, had the rope come off during the whiteout, one or both of us could have gotten disoriented and ended up freezing to death in the yard. He said that if it ever happened again, we were to bum the furniture if we ran out of stovewood and, if that wasn’t enough, to tear out the insides of the house and bum the wood. That really impressed me as to the danger of going out in a storm like that. Later in life, I understood what Dad was talking about. I heard of several people who had lived on their places for years in north central Nebraska and south central South Dakota, where we grew up as kids. There were several stories of how these people, over the years, had gone out into that kind of a whiteout storm, and despite being so familiar with their farms, they had gotten disoriented in one of those whiteouts and had wondered around in circles in their yards until they froze to death. After the storms, they were found, with some just within twenty or thirty feet of their houses, but hadn’t been able to see them. Through hearing other people’s experiences, I learned some very valuable lessons for my own life.

I’m not superstitious by any means, but the month of March was often not a good month for my family. As I said, we used to move a lot, and the first of March was the day we had to be out of most places. Then besides the big blizzards of 1949 and 1951, there came another major crisis in our lives in March 1952. My parents got divorced then. That was tragic, but not that tragic because our house was a constant battle ground between Dad and Mom. They were not Christians and weren’t even remotely interested in church or religion of any kind. Our places of residence were houses instead of homes. They fought every day they were both home, I believe, and it wasn’t fussing at each other. It was screaming and cursing, name-calling, and blaming, with no regard as to how it was affecting us kids.

I don’t know how it affected the older two girls, but for the three of us boys, it didn’t seem to bother us much. That was the normal as far as we were concerned.

Our youngest sister was a different story. Mom gave birth to twin girls on September 29, 1946. Clara Mae died at eleven hours old. They said that she was a blue baby, caused by incompatible blood between Dad and Mom. That was back in the day before they knew about atrial septal or ventricular septal defects of the heart. (Those are holes in the walls between the heart chambers that some babies are born with.) Clara Mae was a classic case of one of those problems, from what was described to me later in life.

If it would have been a case of incompatible blood, it would have undoubtedly shown up in some of the rest of us six kids before Clara Mae. There was no evidence of any problem with Phyllis, who was our youngest sister who lived, the same as there was no problem with any of us older ones. Nowadays, those are common problems that are relatively easy to fix by a good open-heart surgeon. I have helped on many of them during my forty-eight years in the medical field, specializing in surgery.

Mom had a nervous breakdown after Phyllis and Clara Mae were born. I believe it was a classic case of another problem that is well known now, but scarcely known then, if at all—and that is postpartum depression. We have heard of several cases of it in the past few years. I believe it affected Mom for the rest of her life because there were some things she was completely irrational about. But, again, that was what we were used to as kids, so it was normal for us.

During the divorce, the judge called us kids into his chambers and asked us which parent we wanted to live with. We held a family conference and decided unanimously that we wanted to live with Dad. It was not because of Mom’s condition, because that was natural to us. Nor was it because we loved Dad more than Mom.

This was back in the day when being on welfare was a real enigma. It was looked down on, and the people who received welfare were often treated like trash in those small communities. So we discussed it all and decided to live with Dad because he could support us, but we did stipulate to the judge that we wanted Mom to have open visitation. Dad agreed to that, and the judge put it that way in the divorce decree.

Of course, Mom was devastated at the decision and almost collapsed in the court room. We all adjusted to the situation, however, and Dad used to go get Mom and bring her out to stay for a while with us. I am firmly convinced that they never got over each other, but were too proud, foolish, and hard-hearted to try to reconcile. They were never willing to get any professional advice or counseling. And, of course, religious help of any kind was out of the question. Counseling was rare back in those days, especially in those small rural communities where everyone knew everyone and everyone else’s business.

When we were growing up, both before and after the divorce, we were as poor as church mice. It didn’t bother us, however, because we never knew anything else. We were like the fellow who said, We were really poor when I was a kid, but I didn’t know it until I was in the third grade, and somebody told me. I can relate to that sentiment very well.

We didn’t have Tonka Trucks and the like. Our trucks were empty sardine cans, tacked to a piece of board, or piece of 2 x 4. In fact, I remember an incident when my older brother came into possession of a little red, rubber, store-bought car. I don’t remember how he came to get it, but it was the envy of all of us kids when we were little. I constantly hounded him to let me play with it, which he did sometimes when he wasn’t.

One day, he let me play with it, and I got a great idea to bury the car. I buried it somewhere in the yard and smoothed the dirt all over it to hide it from anyone who was seeking it. I don’t remember why I was called in the house (maybe for dinner, which came between breakfast and supper in our house, with lunch being something you took somewhere in a sack), and when I went in, naturally, I forgot all about the car. The next day when Roland wanted to play with his car, I finally confessed what I had done, and we went out and searched all over the yard for some sign of the burial place. I had done a good job of hiding it, and we never did find that red car again. The only red thing for a while was his face as my parents kept him from burying me in some fashion. But then, what are store-bought red cars for, anyway.

When we weren’t playing with cars and trucks, we were playing Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. Any straight stick was a rifle, and any curved or angled stick made a good handgun. There were no such things as video games or Xbox or in our house even a television. In fact, the first television I ever had in any home I lived in was during our first year of marriage when I was in the service in San Diego at age twenty-one.

Our kind of play, whether inside or outside, summer or winter, was active and enjoyable. It was just old-fashioned fun. We actually knew what it meant when someone would say, Go outside and play. We would play all the previously mentioned games other than marbles, ball games, kick the can, hide-and-seek, and a multitude of other games like cut the pie, fox and goose, 23 skadoodle, and numerous others, which no kids have even heard of today, by and large.

There were drawbacks to those type of games, however, like the time we were at some friends’ house, playing hide-and-seek in the dark. I was running across the backyard in the dark when I discovered their clothesline was hanging down too low. It took me a little while, lying on my back, to discover what had happened. After I got my breath back and my tears dried, I was up and right back in the game. I was having good, enjoyable, wholesome fun, which is an unheard of commodity in our current day and age.

Mom remarried two years after the divorce. Strangely, she married her younger sister’s brother-in-law, who was an alcoholic. (That meant a drunk in those days, rather than a condition as it is in our day.) The ironic thing about them getting married was that Mom had always felt sorry for her sister Helen being married to that no-good drunk of a Gayhart. When she and Dad were married, she used to fuss and holler every time he did any drinking and really hit the roof if he got drunk. Then, she went and married Hank, who was a drunk for years. Go figure!

They were married for two years until he was killed by a drunk driver as they were stopped to fix their pickup tire. The strange thing was that Hank was sober when he was killed. (Of course, that didn’t alter his eternal destiny in any way.) After Mom got out of the hospital from her fractured femur, she came and stayed with us for a while as she was recuperating.

I never knew much of Dad’s family. I knew two of his brothers and one of his sisters and never liked any of them. He had two other sisters that I knew about, but I never knew personally. We would occasionally go to his sister and brother-in-law’s house (Pearl and Vad) and visit them. His brother Everett lived in a very small, old trailer on their property. He had been sick with TB for years. One day, Aunt Pearl said that Everett came in and told them he was going to the outhouse (outside toilet) and thanked them for everything they had done for him. She said that he left, and a few minutes later, they heard a gunshot. Going outside, they found Uncle Everett dead. He had snuck their .410 shotgun out and waited until he could say, Thank you, and then went out and shot himself. Of course, none of the family on either side were Christians, and that gave me my first exposure to suicide.

Mom came from a big family of seven siblings, besides herself. They were of Russian-German descent and believed in large families. Grandpa and Grandma Schrader, her parents, had migrated from Russia years before. The family thought something was wrong with Uncle John and his wife because they only had two kids.

Uncle Bill and Aunt Dorothy had nine, and Uncle Manuel and Aunt Buela should have been arrested for littering because they had eighteen kids. We never had any interaction with, nor liking for, any of them except Uncle Bill and Aunt Dorothy and theirs.

We used to go down to their farm in the upper northeast comer of Nebraska by a little town called Jamison and visit them. The thing about their family was that everyone had a job, and everything was organized in their chores. When Uncle Bill spoke, all of them would get up and go out to milk the cows. Even their four-year-old daughter, Myma, had her job. While the rest were getting the cows in and getting ready to milk, Myma would get each one’s milk stool and put it in place. When they finished, she put the milk stools back where they were kept. (That is called a good work ethic, which, again, is almost unheard of in much of our modem give me society.)

Except when they went into town on Saturday afternoon, the whole family wore work clothes that literally had patches on top of patches. Aunt Dorothy and the older girls would spend evenings patching, canning food, or other such chores, while the younger ones did the supper dishes and cleaned the table and kitchen. The younger boys would go to the pump and bring in the water and cut and carry the firewood in for the night.

Uncle Bill always wore bib overalls. They were the striped ones with suspenders, like the train engineers and brakemen wore. The difference between his good overalls and his work overalls was the number of patches and how washed and faded they were. A lot of people used to make fun of him and talk about how cheap and tight old Bill Shrader was. Comments like He squeezes a dollar so hard the eagle on it shrieks and a lot of others were very common.

Uncle Bill wasn’t cheap (tight, maybe), but he was very thrifty. He made sure every member of his family was an integral part of the family workforce, and almost every dollar they earned went back into the family funds. When his oldest daughter, Mildred, got married, Bill said, Vell, Charlie and Mildred, have you decided where you vant to live?

They said, Well Papa, we were thinking of the old Zimmerman place (about seven or eight miles down the road).

Vell, let’s go talk to the banker about it, Bill replied.

They went into town and talked to the Banker. Bill asked how much the bank wanted for the old Zimmerman place, and the banker said that they wanted $46,000.00 for it. (It was a fairly large farm.) Bill said that was vay to much money; and when the dust was settled and the air cleared, they supposedly agreed on $42,000.00; and according to the story, Bill reached into his bib pocket, took out a worn book of checks, and wrote a $42,000.00 check for the farm.

I was too young to know all of that for sure, but there were multiple people who verified the facts, supposedly, including my mother. I do know this personally that in the late nineties, Stanley, the eldest son who inherited the headship of the family when Bill died some years before, was running a hog farm of over 450 prime hogs, other than the cattle, horses, and other stock they had. Besides that, they raised all the feed for them. Not bad for second-generation Russian-German immigrants. Grandpa and Grandma Shrader migrated from Russia and homesteaded in that area originally.

We never had that kind of money, and we never owned our own place, except during the last two years of my high school in White Sulphur Springs. In 1958, Dad bought a lot down on the flats, and we built a sixteen by twenty tar-paper shack with a nine-by-twelve-foot porch on it. We had no electricity, running water, or inside toilet; but it was home to us. But then, we never missed having the money and finer things in life either. One thing our lifestyle taught me personally was the value of a dollar. We never had much money to spend, and we appreciated what we did have.

We never did have much for Christmas, except for one year. Most of our Christmas occasions were very meager, with us being glad we had a Christmas dinner.

I don’t mean a big turkey dinner with all the trimmings and visiting family, but just a good dinner for Christmas. It wasn’t that we didn’t have money, because Dad used to work as far as I can remember. He drilled water wells with an old horse rig for many years; it paid fairly well; and when he had money, he spent it. He was never able to save money, and he didn’t trust banks. He said that his dad had lost several hundred dollars when the bank closed at the beginning of the Depression, and he never used a bank until he was drawing his social security at age sixty-five. The banker in the small town where he lived talked to him one day and explained it to him. Dad liked the guy and began banking with him, keeping his own checkbook until he passed away in January 1987.

While we were growing up, however, there was no banking or saving money. When the cold weather set in, and the ground froze, you couldn’t dig wells. Then, Dad would work at whatever he could get to earn a little to get by on, and that was that. I spent many a day growing up when our meals were beans, pancakes, and com meal mush, with occasionally some powdered milk and eggs that Dad would trade with the Indians he knew for some of their commodities. He would supplement that by helping someone butcher and getting the extra parts besides one or two good cuts of meat. A lot of people today would wrinkle up their nose and think that was horrible, but growing up and not having meat on a regular basis, we appreciated it. That, and whatever we could get with our .22s or shotguns. During those days, hunting season began anytime you could see something edible when you had a gun along (wild game and birds only, of course).

As I previously said, our folks were not Christian nor even remotely religious when I was growing up, but Dad did teach us a reverence for the Bible, a belief in the Trinity God, and the practice of saying the blessing over our food when we ate. He used to say, Animals eat without asking the blessing, but people aren’t supposed to. I took those lessons to heart and followed them even in my most sinful years. I had a belief of God, but not a belief in God, and I believe a lot of people are confusing the two to their detriment in our day. Even back then, in those conditions, God was gently dealing with me.

I had mentioned one good Christmas that we had as a family. When I say good Christmas, I speak from a child’s perspective regarding plenty of money and lots of presents. We were living in Winner, South Dakota, and Dad got a job digging seven wells at a new housing project in late fall. He finished the wells, and we had more money than we ever had at any one time. He and Mom went out and splurged on all of us kids because we had never had a big Christmas before. They also splurged on each other, and that was the greatest Christmas morning ever, as we all opened our presents.

The intense flame of joy quickly turned into the cold ashes of misery that day as Dad and Mom got into some kind of argument. It escalated into name-calling and then throwing the presents they had each received back at each other. Needless to say, the thrill of that Christmas was soon gone, and us kids just made an effort to be supportive of one another, trying to make the most of what we had. That was the Christmas of 1951, and the following March 1952, they got divorced. It was also that late winter that Mom got a letter telling her that her mother was dying of cancer. Maybe that contributed to part of it, but to a ten-year-old boy, it sure wasn’t a good answer. By the way, it still isn’t a good answer to this seventy-one-year-old boy!

We used to go into Gregory, South Dakota, for the fourth of July. We really liked that, not only because we enjoyed the great things (rides, sights, sounds, etc.) of the carnival there but also because it was an opportunity for us boys to make money. Dad would give us each fifty cents as soon as we got to town. He would then go to one of the several bars in town to play cards, drink beer, and talk business.

Us boys would go on a few rides and get a bite of food, and if we ran out of money, we would go back to see Dad, and he would give us another fifty cents apiece. During that time, however, we would walk around town until we each found an empty chewing tobacco box (Copenhagen or Skoal), and we would clean them out real good. Then, we would walk down the sidewalks where the farmers would sit on the benches and drink beer and talk; and their wives would usually sit and drink pop (it was out in public) and talk.

When we spotted some empty bottles, we would ask if they were going to keep them. Usually, the answer was, No, you can have them. We would take them to one of the bars (not the one Dad was in because we didn’t want him to see us making our own money) and trade them in for the two-cent deposit. We would put the money in our tobacco boxes until they were getting full and then cash it in for paper dollars, quarters, and dimes so we would have room for more. By the time we went home, we would have had all the rides, food, and fun we wanted and about $4 or $5 in spending money to use in the weeks to come. That’s why I say I learned the value of a dollar at an early age, and I thank the Lord for the lesson learned. My two brothers found it was much easier to spend than to save, however, and that led to some hot discussions when I refused to lend them some of my money after they spent theirs. More than once, I was accused of being just like old Bill Shrader.

When we got older, Dad sold the well rig and started working at numerous jobs. He had a lot of skills and was a quick learner and an excellent worker at whatever he set his hands to. He worked as a ranch hand, farmhand, welder, blacksmith, hay hand, and I don’t know what else; and he was good at all of them. I got my work ethic and my ability to think ahead on a job from him, and they have proven to be invaluable through my life. I have supported myself since I was sixteen years old, working at all kinds of jobs, and I have absolutely no time or sympathy for people who don’t want to work. It is one of the things that I really have to pray about when I meet some who want a hand out, rather than a hand up, and always expect others to provide for them. I remember what the Apostle Paul said in Thessalonians, They that don’t work, should not eat. I say a hearty Amen to that.

About three or four years after the divorce, my oldest sister Ruby moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, and got a job. I think part of the reason she did that was because Mom lived in Lincoln at the time, and Ruby thought she should have some of the family close to her, like Dad did. She never came right out and said that, but it was implied in some of our conversations. She was about eighteen at the time, and a couple years later, she got married. By that time, my second oldest sister Garnet graduated from high school and went to teacher’s college in Chadron, Nebraska. During the two years she was in college, we moved about four times. Dad was really fiddle-footed and couldn’t stay in one place for very long. I think that may have been one of the big problems between him and Mom. The grass was always greener on the other side of the fence, as the old saying goes. I found out long ago that there was a lot of truth in what the fellow said, when he said, The reason the grass is greener on the other side of the fence is because it is growing over someone else’s cesspool. Us boys never objected to moving, though, because not only had it become the form of life we were used to, but also it was exciting and interesting to go to some new place.

Of course, there are always some drawbacks in any situation. The main ones with us moving constantly were, first of all, the next place had no more to offer and was no better than the last place. Secondly, every time we moved to a new town, we were the new boys in town and had to establish our place in the pecking order in many a fistfight after school. Either you fought and proved yourself, win or lose, or you got picked on by almost every kid in school. So, needless to say, Roland and I learned to scrap pretty well at a pretty young age, but Russell not so much, because he was real small for his age, even up until he quit school as a sophomore in high school, and they didn’t bother him so much.

Roland had a great idea sometime during all of that and sent off for a self-instructing book on judo. He and I practiced judo over and over, day after day. I really was glad for that because it came in very handy many times in my disagreements in the schools that we entered when we moved. I remember one time, in particular, when I was in the seventh grade. There was this kid, Russell Biermier, who was in the eighth grade, and picked on me quite a bit. He had a habit of coming up from behind, grabbing me around the throat with his arms, and taking me down.

One weekend, Roland and I had been practicing our judo, and one of the moves we practiced was an over-the-head flip. Of course, we didn’t go all the way through with it, but practiced the approach and how to deal with it. The next week in school, we were out for gym, and Russell Biermier came up and started picking on me. I gave him fair warning and told him to leave me alone. (To be truthful, though, I guess I knew what he would do when I told him that. And he did!) I had no more than turned my back on him, when he grabbed me around the throat with his arms from behind. I went into our practice move; only this time, I took it all the way through. I hunched down a little, then reached up and grabbed his arms, pulled up and forward with one big heave, and the result was that he went over my head and landed full length on his back on the hardwood floor of the gymnasium.

The gym teacher was pretty irate, but with all the witnesses as to what had taken place, there was nothing he could say or do about it. Biermier was not seriously hurt, after he got his wind back, of course, and that ended his (and the other boys’) attempts to pick on me. I sure was glad for that book and my brother who had taken the time to help me learn. That was nothing unusual, however, because we always had each other’s backs. We could fight like cats and dogs between ourselves, but nobody was ever allowed to interfere, because if they did, they had both of us to face. We didn’t have much growing up, except for the family name and loyalty to each other. But, you know, that was enough during those years.

Roland and I had that lesson firmly etched in our minds one day during that year. Garnet was still home and was the boss when Dad had gone to work. He worked in the blacksmith shop down the street and would come home for dinner. On this one day, Roland and I were into it, and it got pretty rough. Garnet told us to knock it off, or she was going to smack both of us. We ignored her and kept at each other. She lost her temper and jumped in between us and pushed us both back. We had been taught from childhood that we should never gang up on each other, and there was nothing really intentional that day. When she pushed us back, without thinking what the other one was doing, we both attacked her at once (brother, what tempers) and pushed her back on the couch, just as Dad walked through the door for dinner. Now, I don’t know why it was there, but just inside the door was a rope about six or eight feet long, all coiled up. Dad never said a word. He just reached down, grabbed the rope, doubled it, and began to emphasize the lesson we had been taught all our lives. Today, people would surely call that child abuse, and perhaps, it could be rated as that. In that day, and in our home, it was simply a show-and-tell lesson on what we knew so well. You don’t gang up on family. We learned it well and never held it against Dad past getting it cried out."

Chapter 2

We moved to Montana in June 1956. We had never been there, and Dad made up his mind to move to either Montana or Wyoming, because he had been out to Wyoming when he was younger.