[I write this not to gain credit or accolades, but as an attempt to inspire others who may have been blessed by similar good fortune or have been more successful than expected in saving for their futures to consider what to do with their “excess”.]
My dad once told me that he was planning to “spend his children’s inheritance”. It was his lighthearted way of saying that he was not going to restrict his spending during retirement. He intended to pursue his passions for inventive projects and for philanthropic activity, especially for educational causes. And that his children should continue saving for their own financial security. None of us expected any different.
Well, he failed. Despite his efforts to create the ultimate ham radio station, and to support his grandchildren through college, he left a surplus. Not a Warren Buffet or Bill Gates level of wealth, but certainly more than we expected from a man who worked for a salary and who, while we were growing up, paid the mortgage by keeping our daily expenses to a minimum.
1968 was a big year for me. I turned 15 and I went on a date, my first, with a girl who would later–45 years later, become my late-life partner and constant companion, road trips included. But that is another story. Earlier in that big year I experienced my very first road trip adventure.
My uncle Bob had completed his medical school training and had been accepted for the next stage on his path towards becoming a practicing physician: an internship at Oakland Medical Center. In 1968, Oakland California was a long way from Minneapolis Minnesota. Yes, an expensive plane ride could get you there in three hours, but if you needed to bring more than a weight-limited suitcase, a three-day overland drive was required.
And Bob was fully ready for it, having recently acquired a 1968 model year Ford Mustang convertible, into which he packed the possessions that would support him for the next year in a remote setting. The car was symbolic, a vehicle to take him to that next phase of his career. It was freeing. With the top down, the wind in his hair evoked that sense of traveling to far off destinations holding unknown new experiences. It was a big year for him too.
My mother managed a large household in a small house on a tight budget. She had five children within a decade during the 1950s. Armed with her Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, she prepared dinner every evening for a table of seven and had it ready by the time Dad came home from work. Diet and meal recommendations in the US at that time were meat, starch, vegetable. The food pyramid was yet to be invented, but family traditions provided the same guidance.
Our family dinners were always accompanied by a green salad: iceberg lettuce, carrots, celery and tomatoes, tossed into a large bowl and passed around the table for us to fill our individual plates or salad bowls. My mother’s care in stretching her self-imposed grocery budget resulted in a few interesting dinner rules, one of them being that no one was permitted to take more than two slices of tomato in their salad portion. (Another consequence of her frugality was that frozen orange juice was diluted with an additional measure of water, permitting us all to have a full juice glass at breakfast).
There was only one option for dressing the salad. My mother would never consider buying those expensive bottled dressings because my dad could make a French-like salad dressing at home. We would often watch him do this just before dinner. A bottle would be fitted with a funnel, into which he would deliver various amounts of spices from the small spice jars kept on a lazy susan in the cupboard. It was quantitatively uncalibrated; he’d just shake some into the funnel, give the lazy susan a turn, and see what else was available to add to the mix. He would then add ketchup, followed by vinegar, oil, and water. On occasion he would add drops of Worcestershire or lemon juice. The bottle would then be capped and vigorously shaken to mix the ingredients into a tart and flavorful concoction that would eventually separate back out to something clearish floating over something reddish. Shaking to remix the dressing before putting it on our salad was part of the dinner ritual as we passed the bottle around the table.
We all grew up with the understanding that dinner was always accompanied by a tossed salad, and there was only one dressing for it—Dad’s. Over time of course, we grew up and left home and were forced to explore the commercial options for salad dressings. They always seemed to come up short- too sweet or too thick or not enough tang. There was always some deficiency compared to Dad’s. Later on, at extended family gatherings we would insist that he bring his dressing to provide an option at the salad station. At some point, we pressured him to write down how to make it so that we could, in principle, reproduce it.
He yielded to that pressure. To somehow quantify the arbitrary shakes into the funnel must have been an interesting exercise for him; it took a few iterations before he was satisfied. He recorded his measures and supplemented them with an elaborate procedure to put them together. This is not the technique I watched as a kid (which was quite simple– just shake the bottle), but the recipe at least gives a glimpse of how he thought it should be done.
I recently encountered that recipe and made a few batches of Tod’s Homemade Salad Dressing. It was close, but did not match exactly my long-ago fond memories of it. On the other hand, there may not be anything that would match those memories.
Realizing that perfect reproduction was impossible, I made an adaptation that scales the recipe to fit a standard size bottle and utilizes only two distinct measuring tools. I invite you to try it. Feel free to make any modifications you think might improve on it. Dad would.
Tod’s Homemade Salad Dressing Thor’s variation, using only two measures and fitting in a 16-oz bottle.
Ingredients: 1 tsp celery salt/ground celery seed 1 tsp onion salt/onion powder 1 tsp paprika ½ tsp salt (fill the tsp measure halfway) ½ tsp black pepper ½ tsp lemon pepper 1 cup vinegar, in two ½ cup parts ½ cup ketchup ¼ cup oil (fill the ½ cup measure halfway) ¼ cup water
Directions: Add the spices to the bottle. Add ½ cup of vinegar and shake to dissolve spices in the vinegar. Add the ketchup, probably using a funnel. Shake to mix. Add the oil, rinsing the ketchup through the funnel. Shake. Add the remaining vinegar, rinsing the oil through the funnel. Shake. Add the water. Shake. Shake. Shake.
Lower calorie option: omit the oil, increase the water.
Other optional ingredients to consider: Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, garlic…
This is adapted from a tribute that my father made at the memorial of his father, Theodore Olson, after whom we are both named, who died in 2002 at the age of 97. I post it here for the online access of posterity, and to provide a portrayal of the scientific mindset of a family patriarch that influenced not only his students, but his entire family and several generations beyond. Here is my father’s rendition of our family history.
The start of this story goes back almost 150 years. In about 1860 in Norway, Hans Opjörden left home and went to Oslo. Hans had the misfortune to be the second son in his family, and that meant that his older brother would inherit the family farm. Hans left home and headed off to Oslo, where he went to work in a shipyard building boats. After a while he decided he really wanted to sail on the boats instead of just building them. At this time Norway was a province of Sweden. Shrewdly, Hans changed his name from Opjörden to Olson (with a Swedish spelling) and got Swedish sailing papers.
He went on several voyages and along the way befriended a shipmate named Peter Magnus Peterson. We can imagine a conversation between them based on what subsequently happened. Hans confided that he’d really wanted to be a farmer but had no prospects of getting land—and that being a sailor was not his “dream job”, but was good paying employment.
The Vibroplex Deluxe Original telegraph key, first manufactured in 1939.
I was moved recently by an unexpected item encountered while clearing out my parents’ home. They both passed away in recent years leaving, as we all will, a lifetime of accumulated possessions. Perhaps it is a rite of passage that we all mark our parents’ passing with tributes and shared memories, and then respectfully distribute their earthly possessions.
Those possessions usually include home furnishings of a previous era, and clothing that might fit but doesn’t match anyone’s current style or fashion. Many kitchen utensils will find their way to donation centers. Easy items to dispatch are those for which there are few memories. The more difficult are those with sentimental attachments.
My dad was an amateur radio operator, a “ham”, which is a term for the enthusiasts across the world that participate in this form of communication, ever since Marconi sent his first wireless message. There is a broad and varied number of these practitioners of a discipline that requires technical expertise and skill, and a desire to share their experiences “over the air”.
I grew up in this culture, listening to the chirps and squawks of my dad’s radio receiver late into the nights. One of the essential ham skills was to tap out Morse code messages with a telegraph key — the first level of an amateur radio license (“Novice Class”) required proficiency at five words a minute. My dad was extremely skilled at this and could signal at much higher rates. As one improved in this skill, the limitations moved from brain-hand coordination to the mechanical key itself.
This limitation was recognized early on, and various ingenious adaptations of the simple momentary contact key were invented. Some worked better than others. Over the course of my dad’s ham career he acquired various makes and models of telegraph keys with which he competed in amateur radio contests, to see who could make contact with the most other hams in a weekend.
His amateur radio station equipment will find homes with other ham operators, but his set of telegraph keys were distributed to his children, all of whom have those memories of dot-dash Morse code beeps in the night. This is the item I received: on a beautiful chrome-plated base, the key itself is a delicate collection of mechanical components, carefully balanced and customized to the hand of the operator. I am told that operators have a distinct “signature” that can be recognized when listening to the delivery of Morse code, each hand having its own rhythm and style.
This identifies the manufacturer, Vibroplex, and proudly displays its serial number and patented status. The logo is a lightning bug, carefully anodized or painted red on the brass plate, a feature maintained even on current models. This may be a collector’s item as there are many similar to be found at http://www.vibroplexcollector.net.
The ham community has an endearing term of respect for their fellow amateurs who have since passed away: Silent Key. It is a reference to the early days of telegraphy where the letters SK were sent to designate the end of a transmission, and then the station would become silent.
There is a national silent key registry, the cumulative obituaries of the ham community, where you can look up life accounts of past amateurs, including my dad, K0TO.
His station is silent now, but my memories of it will remain until I too become silent.
Eight years later, we re-create a photo given as a Christmas gift to our parents in 2011.
Growing up in a home headed by a “ham” (an amateur radio operator), we often would hear my dad’s radio conversations with remote, distorted, and static-filled voices. In one such contact, the usual exchange of technical banter was augmented by a personal one. Dad mentioned that he had a “full house”, the poker hand, in describing his children: three boys, and a pair of girls.
We all overheard such over-the-air dialogs, as well as evenings
filled with the clicks and beeps of Morse code. Such are the experiences of the children of a zealous
radio amateur.
But it has been a very long time since we were all together for any extended time under the same roof. My dad’s Morse code telegraph key went silent a few years ago, and it is the second passing of a parent that now brings us together to figure out the final disposition of their possessions.
The last time we spent this much time in such proximity we
were on a family backpacking trip in 1972.
It was a wonderful and new shared experience, but as teenagers there was
always plenty to bicker about. Some
things never change.
And although we still sometimes act like squabbling
siblings, the things we argue about are no longer the outrages of personal
space violations (“Mo-om, he’s looking at me funny”). Instead, they are the banalities of politics. On the things that matter, we all seem to
agree!
Over the course of four days we came together under the roof
of the house our parents enjoyed at the end of their lives and we applied our individual
strengths and skills to the task at hand.
We unearthed familiar artifacts, discovered old photos, revived faded
memories, and re-told family stories as the contents of a very full house were
processed by the “full house” of siblings.
Jackie’s Last Moonrise. A view from her home in Idaho Falls where the landscape is shared with her late husband’s ham radio towers.
I am sad to announce the passing of my mom, Jacquelyn
(Jackie) Olson, who lived a full and active life until becoming limited by the gradual
but inevitable decline of health from COPD.
I remember her most as the central figure of a busy family;
her five children had diverse interests, and she encouraged all of them. She was the family manager, in charge of
feeding, clothing, coaching, logistics, cheerleading, and enforcing bedtimes. She set the house budget and found many innovative
ways to stay within it, becoming a do-it-yourself expert before DIY became a popular
acronym. She was fearless in tackling
new skills as needed, providing an example for all of us: that we could learn and become skilled at just
about anything.
As kids, we knew that she was quite talented; she could play
piano, operate a sewing machine, program a loom, make leatherwork, and ride
horses. I was surprised to find out that
she even had a darkroom, and at a time when my interest was aimed in this
direction, her equipment became my equipment, and I learned to develop film and
make prints.
Perhaps the strongest example of her brave approach to
learning was when she decided to go back to school and get a nursing degree. She was a student again, and despite the twenty-year
hiatus from her earlier coursework, she completed her first semester with an A
in chemistry, and all her other classes. My brother Eric and I were at the University
at the same time, neither of us quite matching her GPA. I recall meeting her for lunch sometimes at
the student union, along with some of her classmates. She was a generation older, but they all seemed
quite pleased to be hanging out with her.
She became an RN and worked at Waconia Hospital where she was liked and respected, confirming and adding to her sense of independence. She started applying her income to new hobbies: ceramics and upholstery, and one of her favorite activities was attending estate and yard sales, to find antique or underappreciated furniture, which she then restored.
In contrast to my dad, who offered explicit advice, boiling
down life lessons to memorable phrases, Mom taught by example. And not just how to hang wallpaper, but how
to be considerate to friends and respectful to non-friends, how to persist in
the face of obstacles and setbacks, and how to speak up when someone is not
doing the right thing. From her I
learned the skills of patience and persistence, and acquired the values for, if
not the skills of, being kind and attentive to others.
In 1997, she decided that Minnesota winters were no longer to her liking. The more arid climate of the West suited her better, and so she moved to Idaho Falls, acquiring Eric’s original house there as he built a new home for his growing family. (My dad reluctantly followed, never completely pulling up his Minnesota roots).
She has been happy there for these last decades, gardening
and landscaping and able to read as many novels as she wished, solve the daily
crosswords and keep up with neighbors, friends and family. In the last few years she has had to slow
down on her interests as her disease gradually overtook her body and
breath. It has been an unpleasant time,
and she has claimed that she has been ready to go for a while, but life is a
strong force and doesn’t give up without a fight.
The impact of her examples was not limited to her
children. She made friends all along the
way, from lifelong childhood friends, through college and sorority sisters, to neighbors
that had the fortune to move next door, and their children who are just now
becoming young adults. Many people will
miss her.
I will miss her.
With my mom Jackie, and her mom, Theodora Pankratz, on Theo’s 90th birthday (1994).
Postscript
In an odd cosmic or spiritual coincidence, my mother took her last breath at 3:11, the time indicated by the stopped antique clock in her bedroom. It was the exact complement of the old song about the grandfather clock that stopped short when the old man died.
