Walk This Way

By Raymond E. Kaufmann

The title of the book, Walk This Way, was taken from a joke that Ray and his good friend, Boris Boskovich, used to tell each other over and over again as they traveled together on Honeywell business. The punch line of the joke has the guy saying to the nurse, "If I could walk that way, I wouldn't need the talcum powder." The title also is a double entendre referring to the advice given in the various opinions the author presents, which he believes can lead to a healthier and more productive life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637109601

Book preview

The Beginning

I, Raymond E. Kaufmann, was born October 17, 1931, in the back northwest bedroom of 4432 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Phone number Colfax 2873. The birth was not an easy one due to the size of my head. The cause of the traumatic birth was attributed to the doctor. As a result, they refused to pay his fee of one hundred dollars. At that time, I had one older brother, James Reynold Kaufmann, who was born on March 8, 1928. I ended up with two brothers and two sisters. Jacqueline Dolores was born in the same room on March 23, 1933. Jeanette Myrlie was born at General Hospital in Minneapolis on December 3, 1938. Frank John Kaufmann Jr. was born September 21, 1944, at Victory Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale. He was born when we lived on the farm between Anoka and Osseo. Our house in Minneapolis was quite small. The 1940 census has it value at three thousand dollars. When we moved to the farm in 1942, the house brought 3,800 dollars. Over the years, Dad put on a second floor, put on asbestos siding, replaced the flooring on the first floor with refinished maple, and added a coal bin made out of bricks. Mom and the kids went to Hills, Minnesota, to visit our maternal grandparents when he redid the floor. We had a coal-burning furnace in the basement, and he added the coal bin underground in the back, the outlet being very close to the furnace. During the build, I threw down the bricks, and one of them hit his hand. I thought that might result in him at least mean mouthing me, but for once, he contained himself, evidently needing my help.

In the back, bordering on the alley, was a good-sized garage. He overhauled cars at night to earn a few extra dollars. My job was to wash parts in gasoline, hand him wrenches, and cut gaskets among other things. He could look at a nut and know what the size was and ask for the wrench: box or open-ended. I never did develop that skill of knowing the size wrench required by looking at the nut. He planted several fruit trees around the yard: apples and plums. He put iron bolts, nuts, etc. in the bottom of the hole when he planted the trees. The trees did very well. We also had a vegetable garden. It probably was about twenty by thirty feet. He dug out the dirt to a depth of about three feet and filled it back in with black dirt. He had an endless amount of energy his whole life. My first crop in that garden was peanuts. I had a spot about two by two feet. They did well, and I got a lot of peanuts. But I was disappointed in how they tasted. I didn’t realize that you had to roast them in oil and salt them to make them taste decent.

I seemed to have more illness as a child than most kids I knew. I had pneumonia, ear infection, a broken collar bone, and other ills. I was small and developed rather slowly. The pneumonia was a big deal. They set up a bed in the living room and made a tent to keep the humidity high. The neighbor lady who was a nurse helped, which was about a twenty-four-hour-a-day affair. I also had meningitis. This was the most painful disease I have had in my entire life. Any motion of my head would result in unbearable pain. No wonder drugs in those days; had to gut it out and hope for the best. As kids, we worried about disease, especially polio. In the summer, they talked about dog days and advised us not to go swimming. In about 1938 when I was six, I had an eye infection for about two months that left me totally blind for the whole period. The treatment involved washing the eyes out with boric acid several time a day. It was just before World War II, and we had many military planes flying overhead. The neighborhood kids were very nice to me. Since I couldn’t see the planes, they would tell me what type they were. As time went on, I would try to tell the type of aircraft by the sound.

We entertained ourselves from morning to night with most activities not involving adults: no TV, no internet, and not a lot of other stuff. We did enjoy movies at the Parkway Theater on Chicago Avenue. We all smoked anything, including cigarettes and weeds (sometimes butts we would find on the street). There was a small grocery store on Fourth Avenue South. Before school, Junior Barkley would listen on the wall outside the store for the owner to crank the furnace. Then he would run in and steal several cartons of cigarettes. That would keep us going for a few months. Stealing was a way of life then. Some kids were worse than others. We used to go to church every Sunday. Junior Barkley would take money out of the collection plate as it went by. That was what he considered his weekly allowance. I was too chicken to steal anything and did not need to anyway. Jim and Junior kept us well supplied.

Jim and I had a Shoppers News paper route. You would deliver to every residence. People did not want you walking on their lawn, so you had to walk up their sidewalk then back to the sidewalk that went around the block. The route had 490 papers. That meant a heck of a long walk. The route was three blocks long and four blocks wide. We did the route once per week. I forget how much we earned, but it wasn’t much even in that era. I don’t know how long we did the route, but Jim got tired of it, and one day, he threw all the papers in the dump. Of course, everyone complained about not getting their paper. I don’t know what happened next. Whatever it was, it did not affect me.

We had several what we called dumps in the area. Some occupied about one half of a block. All were within a couple of blocks of our house. People and businesses threw everything imaginable in the dumps, and we used to page through all of it to see what we could use. We spent a great amount of time in the dumps. We all had BB guns, and we would shoot rats, bottles, and most anything else. There were a few pheasants in the dumps. In the winter, we would try to get one. There might be four or five of us at one time. When a pheasant got up, the air was full of BBs, rocks, can covers, etc. We finally got one and that is all we got in about five years of hunting them. One time, we found an empty bottle of apricot brandy. It was empty but had a few drops in it, and we loved the odor of it.

The Farm

We moved to the farm in the fall of 1942. The farm was comprised of eighty acres of land, a house, barn, corn crib, milk house, garage, granary, and an outhouse. I don’t know what the farm cost, but it must have been around six thousand dollars, no electricity or plumbing. It was heated by a kitchen range, which burned wood and space heaters that burned kerosene. The barn was heated by the cows in the winter. Lighting consisted of Coleman gas lanterns. The farm was located 5.5 miles west of Anoka adjacent to the Sunnyvale District 36 two-room schoolhouse.

Dad worked at Northern Pump during the war and that was our main source of income. Eventually, we depended on a herd of about forty milk cows for income. We lived at the farm for six and a half years, and somewhere along the way REA, electrified the area. A neighbor, Adlor Leger, wired up our house. He could do most anything. I talked to his son, Stanley, a few years ago and asked him how his dad learned to be electrician. Stanley said that he took some course in Anoka. I remember the first night that we had electricity. We broke out our electric trains and the toaster. Toast never tasted so good.

Dad worked nights at Northern Pump. He would cut orders for what Jim and I were supposed to do during the day. One day, we were to clean out the chicken coop using the horses hooked to the hay rack. Jim was probably about fifteen, and I was about twelve. We had never harnessed horses or driven them and had no idea what we were doing. We tried to put the collars on upside down. Of course, they did not fit, so we adjusted them and somehow got the hames on. Then we hooked the bridal straps to the horses’ halters rather than the bridal. That made it impossible to control the horses when we got going. Jim let me load the chicken straw and manure on the wagon while he sat in the corner and tried to figure out an easier way of doing the job. That was typical of our days. When we got going, the horses ran away and tore down the clothesline. Relating what happened to the old man that night did not improve our day.

The farm had forty acres on one side of the road and forty acres on the other side. The east side had the bulk of the tillable land. The west side had a swamp in the middle and was mostly pasture. We used Minnesota thirteen seed corn for our first crop, and the yield seemed to be good, but it all went down and was difficult to harvest. Dad, when in his twenties, was a champion corn picker. He could pick about one hundred bushels of ear corn a day. After a couple of years, we got the corn to stand up. He and I used to pick the corn by hand, throwing into a wagon pulled by horses. He would pick two rows, and I would pick one. After a while, I would lag behind, and he would start picking in my row in addition to his two. I tried to figure out how he could do it so fast. I watched his hands, but I never figured it out. It must have been that his hands were much stronger than mine.

There was very little money around in the thirties and forties. We came up with all kinds of schemes to make money. Mom decided to raise chickens and sell the eggs. She took a loan out on her insurance policy, about 350 dollars. She raised about one hundred hen chickens, and they produced a lot of eggs. She sold the eggs to the grocery store in Osseo. After maybe a couple of years, Dad got short of money and without telling anyone, killed all her chickens and sold the meat to fellow workers at Northern Pump. Mom ended up with a loan on her insurance policy. Jim had a go at raising chickens for meat. He managed to get them about half grown. They were beautiful. Then he forgot or whatever to water them for an extended period, and they all died. Gedney’s pickle outfit came around one winter and offered us a deal. They would give us the seed and buy all the cucumbers that we raised. Mom, Jackie, and I accepted the deal. Come spring, Dad let us use a small plot of land by the house, bordering on the road, probably the worst soil on the farm. But we got a great harvest of cucumbers and would pick them about twice per week and haul them to Anoka. The mosquitoes and other insects would harass up unmercifully. Mom and Jackie would cover their whole body and head with old clothes to ward off the bugs. When a car would pass on the road, they would hide down in the weeds so nobody would see them. We trapped muskrats across the road in the swamp. This was our biggest moneymaker of the year. One year, we earned ninety dollars. We would skin them and put them on stretcher boards that we made from shingles that we stole