Dick has written this book basically in his own words and all events and stories contained herein are factual and actually happened. He has been involved in so many situations that is almost unbelievable. He has exposed and dealt with so many well known people in politics, government, movies, royalties and top level executives in various areas of major business operations. He has traveled extensively throughout the world and has encountered many fascinating events and experiences. As he was reminiscing and writing this book, he couldn't believe that he has done and accomplished all these things. We are very confident that, when you read this book, you will find it one of the most exciting and signifcantly interesting reading you will experience. For the most part, all the events and stories in the book happened and were not planned.
Just About - But Not Quite
By Dick CavenaughAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Dick Cavenaugh
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4567-5260-6Chapter One
The Beginning
On March 29th 1933, the world opened its doors to me to become a part of it. When I was born, my parents apparently didn't know what to call me so they initially set me up as "Baby Boy Cavenaugh" on my birth certificate. I guess they finally concluded that they had to give me a proper name so they hung me with the name Richard Patrick. Somewhere along the line, somebody thought that Dickie Pat would be a good nickname and they even named their motor boat in Flambeau, Wisconsin the Dickie Pat. When I was 2 or 3, I had a severe case of appendicitis and they removed my appendix. Later on I was told that they gave me a 1 in 10 change of surviving. I sure fooled them.
Our family history was quite a bit of a mish-mash of wives, homes and children. My grandfather RA, was married three times and had 5 sons. Ralph, Faye and Walter were the first three and they were all married three times and to the best of my knowledge departed this world by the time they reached 50 or thereabouts. My father, who we referred to as Pops, tied the knot six times and his younger brother, Bob, did it nine times. The alimony lawyers sure had a lot of field days. The family generally was not very close as I can recall. Pops' fifth wife was a year older than me and everyone thought she was married to me.
My mother was Pops' second wife and she died when I was seven-years- old. Unfortunately, I was the one that found her in her bed on a Sunday morning, but I didn't realize that she had passed on. RA's third wife, who we called Nannie Suie, set it up and told me that she had gone on a trip and wouldn't be back for a month or two. Needless to say, I did figure it out a short time later. Nannie Suie hated my guts because one time at a party, I told her she had a nose like a parrot. Pops had a daughter from his first wife and she was my half-sister named Joyce.
My grandfather, RA, started two mutual insurance companies in the health and accident fields and was extremely successful in making money. He had an estate in Pasadena, California; Palm Beach, Florida next to the Kennedy compound; a house in Atlantic City; and an apartment in Chicago next to the Wrigley family who owned the gum company and the Chicago Cubs. He managed to become the second largest stockholder in the Chicago Cubs for many years and I got to spend a lot of time at Wrigley Field watching the games in those days from a box just above the Cubs' dugout. I even got to watch the 1945 World Series against Detroit and a gentlemen who was a crooner in the Bing Crosby era, Dennis Morgan, sat next to me. When RA died, he left an estate of a couple million and Nanie Suie managed to evaporate it in a few years by socializing and taking the Santa Fe Super Chief back and forth to Pasadena at least once a month or more. When she passed on there was wasn't much left except the ownership in the Cubs and that was mortgaged to the First National Bank of Chicago, who took it over.
Unfortunately, the insurance companies were set up as mutual companies so that no one really owned them, but in those days the people that ran them had a license to in essence steal as they could write off virtually all their expenses through the companies. The companies developed an Just About - But Not Quite 3 excellent reputation and became well known for taking good care of their policy holders. The dumb thing is, that had they been set up as a private corporation, they could have become larger than Prudential and other insurance companies and the family could have had a significant future financially. When I first became involved with the companies, everyone that had been there for some time thought that RA walked on water. As I gradually came to realize, he had a very large ego and was very status conscious. When RA passed on, Pops and brother Bob took over running the two companies, one each.
In the late forties, I worked in the mail room of the companies prior to joining the Air Force and after I got out, I worked in the Claims Department for awhile, but I saw that there was little if any future there in a mutual company. Needless to say, the companies ceased to exist many years ago.
On Sunday, December 7th, 1941, I was sitting on my bed reading Captain Midnight, which was a comic book, when I heard on the radio that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. In the forties during WW II, I went to grammar school at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in Chicago. I was somewhat of an entrepreneur at a young age and published a weekly local newsletter from my bedroom closet. I also had a lemonade stand in the summer months. Additionally, I worked across the street at Doc Silverbergs Drug Store when I was 11 and 12 making milkshakes and other things at the soda fountain, cooking hamburgers and hot dogs. I also worked the drug counter and peddled cigarettes. They were hard to come by in those war days along with candy and I developed quite a following. The chauffeur for the Kellogg family came in once a week and tipped me $5.00 to sell him a carton of Ramsey Cigarettes. I also did deliveries for the store.
While going to grammar school, the Patterson brothers and I formed a baseball team that we called the Wellington Wildcats. If we lost the game, we won the fight or vice a versa. We lived on the 17th floor at 3000 Sheridan Road and because of the family interest in the Cubs during the baseball season and when the Cubs were in town, several of the players would come up and party at the apartment. Unfortunately I was too young to fully appreciate it at the time. During the season, several of the players lived across the street in the Wellington Arms apartment hotel, which was where the drug store was located.
Also, my Uncle Bob was into show dogs, particularly Great Danes. When they got to old for shows, he gave them to me. You can just imagine what it was like to have a Great Dane living with you on the 17th floor of an apartment building in Chicago. I lost count on how many times I had to clean the elevators after they made a deposit. One particular one was my favorite and her name was Hilly. She was with us for a couple of years until she was poisoned. There was a vacant lot about a half block away that everyone took their dogs to. A crabby, old woman owned a boarding house next to the lot and she did not like a big dog doing its thing in the lot, even though she didn't own it. One day she put out poisoned chicken bones and Hilly unfortunately got them. She made no bones about the fact that she put them out so I decided it was time to educate her. I got a bucket full of rocks and broke every window in her house. She called the cops and two detectives responded and they happened to be drinking buddies of Pops and told her that if she didn't back off, they would take her to jail for poisoning the dog. That ended that.
When I graduated Mt. Carmel, I elected to go to Marmion Military Academy in Aurora for my freshmen year. It was an uneventful year and nothing really exciting took place. During the following summer, Pops, along with Tim Mulcahy, the office manager for the insurance companies virtually kidnapped me and took me to Santa Monica, California to live with the West Coast representative for the insurance companies, Turner Wilson. The reason we went there was that Pops was in the process of getting an expensive divorce from his fourth wife, Louise. I entered the sophomore class at Santa Monica Public High School for a year. While I was there, I got heavily involved in bowling, which I stayed involved in for several years after. When summer came, we returned to Chicago and took up residence in the Belmont Hotel.
I then entered my junior year at Loyola High School. I got in a little trouble there one day as we had a smart alec that made fun of a handicapped person that was having trouble walking in a normal way and thought he was very funny doing it. I don't appreciate people making fun of anyone that is handicapped and I proceeded to deck him very solidly. The good old padres didn't really appreciate my actions and I let them know that that was tough patootie and I'd do it again if he or someone else pulled the same kind of stunt. I few weeks later I decided that high school and Loyola were not my cup of tea, and one day walked out in the middle of class and left my books on the desk, For all I know they may still be there.
Chapter Two
South Dakota
During the summers from 1939 to 1945, I generally spent at least two months on my Uncle Roy's ranch in Fort Bennett, South Dakota. Fort Bennett was located about 50 miles northwest of the nearest towns, Ft. Pierre and Pierre, South Dakota. The nearest house to us was my Uncle Faye's. They raised wheat, hay, cattle, turkeys and had milk cows and chickens. We separated the milk into cream and with the eggs took them into town and sold them. The ranch was located close to the mouth of the Missouri and Cheyenne Rivers.
The only communication we had was the radio station in Pierre. If someone was coming or wanted to get in touch, they had a special message program that was broadcast three or four times a day at the same time so we would always listen to it. Telephones didn't exist out there and we charged the batteries for electricity from a windmill. Our water pump was at the barn about a quarter mile away and we had to haul water in barrels or buckets to the house and to water the chickens and turkeys, which were housed near the house. Saturday night was bath night and when you had the first turn you got the clean water. Our toilet was an outhouse and when we ran out of toilet paper and Sears Roebuck catalogs we had to use corncobs (more on that later).
We had to play cowboy a lot in rounding up the milk cows at night and also at roundup and vaccination times. During the war years, the Army Air Corps had a bombing range across the river from us and quite often their practice bombs ended up on our property. One day I was on the roof of the barn repairing shingles, and they dropped one that exploded in our corral a few feet from the barn. It shook me up enough that I rolled off the roof to the ground and landed face first in a fresh cow pie. Don't know how we won the war. They also had fighter training going on with bombers pulling mesh targets for the fighters to shoot at. Some of the pilots were real jocks and would buzz us out in the fields where we were working Sometimes they were so low that they had to lift to go over the barbed wire fences on the property. One day they got so close that they panicked our plow horses that were hooked up to the hay rack and the horses took off and tipped the rack over on us. The area was also loaded with prairie dogs and rattle snakes. When we killed the snakes, we cut off their rattles and saved them in a stave barrel. The last time I was there, the barrel was almost full.
Entertainment was card games, barn dances twice a month and occasional visits to the Tibb's family ranch about 10 miles away. Casey Tibbs became one of the most famous Rodeo Cowboys of all time and much of his memorabilia is in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Just recently they opened a Casey Tibb's Museum in Pierre. There were no paved roads within 30 or 40 miles and all the roads were gumbo. When it stormed look out. We spent more than one night in the car coming back from Pierre stuck in the gumbo. If you were used to that kind of life, it really wasn't a problem but would certainly be a nightmare in this day and age.
In the early fifties, the federal government purchased the homestead and a good part of the surrounding area and created the Oahe Dam so that the old homestead is now about 75 feet under water. The relatives then moved to Midland about forty miles west of Ft. Pierre. I still visit my relatives that are still alive every few years and we reminisce about the good old days. It is usually a very relaxing visit as you don't have people rushing around in every direction and trying to be big shots and most of them are very common folk ranchers that are laid back and not promoting big egos.
RA who was a good friend of the Indian Chief Sitting Bull, purchased 300 acres in Northern South Dakota. He left it to me, my sister, Joyce, and my cousin, Richard A. Bob`s son. In the middle seventies, a neighbor rancher wanted to buy the property and the three of us agreed to sell it for $100.00 an acre. I would have liked to have bought it myself but I didn't have the money at the time. Several nearby ranches had small oil wells on their properties, but nothing significant at the time. Today, the property is on the southern end of the Bakken Oil Field, which is making millionaires of numerous people in South and North Dakota.
Chapter Three
Flambeau, Wisconsin
In 1948, after returning from Santa Monica, I started setting pins at Gabby Hartnett Recreation in Lincolnwood for a couple of weeks and then decided to go up to Flambeau and work as a chore boy at a resort which the family had spent vacations at since I was a wee one. As a matter of fact, I took my first steps there when I was growing up and that is where they kept the family motorboat that was named The Dickie Pat. Just couldn't live the name down. At nighttime, I would go into Woodruff, Wisconsin and set pins at the bowling alley. While I was at the resort one day I was picking up supplies in Minocqua and saw a pusher engine seaplane parked on the shore with a sign that said airplane rides $3.00 each. I had $3.00 so I signed up with two other people. We started our take-off run and all I could see was land coming on both sides of the plane. The land kept getting closer and closer and we were still down on the water. I was starting to get a little dubious about what I had gotten myself into when we started to come up out of the water. What I didn't realize and couldn't see was that we were heading into a channel. I still remember the pilot's name, Rick Green. At the end of summer, I returned to the Chicago area.
One day I was driving past Palwaukee Airport in Wheeling, Illinois, and saw a sign that said Pascal Rent-A-Plane guaranteed solo course $45.00. I went home that night and broke open the piggy bank and found that I had at least $45.00 inside. On Saturday I put the coins in a bag and proceeded to Palwaukee and the Pascal office, put them on the counter and said I wanted to learn to fly. They set me up and gave me a briefing and then I went to the airplane for my first lesson. It was an Ercoupe and very simple to fly. It just had a steering wheel and if you wanted to go left you turned the wheel left and the same for right turns. To go up, you pulled the wheel back and the nose lifted. To go down, you reversed the process and pushed the wheel down. I did manage to solo in the Ercoupe and then everyone explained to me, that if you really wanted to learn to fly, you had to get into an airplane that had rudder pedals. I followed their advice and started training in a Piper Cub with rudder pedals. On my first couple of take-offs I tended to over correct when I pushed the rudder pedals and if you were watching, you would think it was a drunk on a Saturday night going down the runway.
Before I got to the Cub, I was building time and was supposed to stay within 10 to 15 miles of Palwaukee until I got some Xcross country dual. I was starting to get bored and one Saturday, I had a friend, Willard, from the insurance company that had a cottage in Paddock Lake, Wisconsin that was about 35 to 40 miles north of Palwaukee. I followed the highways and got to Paddock Lake and buzzed his house. I was down very low and the group on the ground waved to me and wanted me to land. I spotted a farm field about a half mile from Willard's cabin and landed and walked over and had a coke. Then I got back in the aircraft and tried to take off . There was a cornfield at the end and after trying 3 times to get up enough speed for take-off I couldn't get it up so Willard and his wife drove me back to Palwaukee. When I got there I explained what I did to my instructor, Swede, and told him we were about maybe 15 to 20 miles away. He got into the car to go back with us to the plane. As we passed the Wisconsin border he looked at me and said how far. I told him just a couple more miles. He wasn't to happy and when we arrived at the plane, he said he would have to try and take off by himself because of the field and the weight. He got off on the second try and flew back to Palwaukee. Willard then had to drive me back to the airport. Needless to say when I got back, I got a very good lecture from Swede. They could have pulled my license, but they figured I had learned a good lesson. Over the next several months, I continued to fly at Pascal's and earned my private license and started working on my commercial license. Frank Pascal and I became very good friends over the years that followed.
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Excerpted from Just About - But Not Quiteby Dick Cavenaugh Copyright © 2011 by Dick Cavenaugh. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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