Richard H Grabmeier

My story goes back eighty-three years, when I was born on a small farm in Central Minnesota. Life then was a matter of an entire family working together to earn a living. By working together I mean just that. Everyone in a family actually worked in some way; a teen-aged son might plow fields or cultivate crops behind a team of horses while little kids might feed chickens or grudgingly weed the garden while Mom and sister washed clothes with a gas engine powered washing machine.

There was no feeling of deprivation by us kids, since this was pretty much the normal situation among all of us country folks. And it wasn't all work. On Sunday, after chores, we'd clean up and go to church, after which we'd have a big, special dinner that Mom was somehow able to prepare along with slicking up the kids for church. We'd maybe have a beef roast or some ring bologna Dad bought in town, not pork because that was our every day meat, and not chicken because it was too expensive unless our chickens were grown big enough to butcher.

After dinner we'd likely go visit friends or relatives; which meant us kids got to play ball or ride horses or heifers or some such activity while our parents caught up on happenings around the neighborhood and world.

For kids today, it would be difficult to imagine life without television or cell phones, central heating and air conditioning, a forced air heater in cars and no electricity as in the early days. The ball point pen had not been invented and our radio was powered by a car battery that Dad charged with a propeller driven wind charger on a small tower on the hill.

We had a party-line telephone which allowed neighbors to "listen in" to everyone's calls. There was no school bus, so we all walked to a one room school two miles away, rain or shine, hot or cold. We had no organized sports like they had in town, just whatever our lady teacher could oversee during recess time.

Dad did all the tough things like the hard field work no one else could do or tending to the birthing of a calf that the cow was having trouble with. He also started and drove the Model A Ford sedan that was his pride, to take us to church five miles away or to take cream and eggs to town for a little money for gasoline and essentials.

About once a month we'd go on a special shopping trip to a big town 20 miles away. Us kids would get all excited when we'd meet a big truck on the narrow highway. The "big truck" was no more than a single axle tractor with a single axle trailer attached, but it seemed huge when passed on the eight foot lane meeting ours. Those were my early years.

We did have a school bus when I was old enough for high school, but the road system was kind of primitive in many places. It was not unusual for the bus to get stuck in drifted snow, at which time the biggest boys would shovel and push while everyone else would move to the back of the bus to put more weight on the rear wheels and improve its traction

Once the bus stalled in a snowstorm and my sister and I had to stay at my uncle's place a half mile away over night. The telephone was working, so we called home and Dad skied across the section in the morning with skis for us so we could get home.

With little opportunity for a better education, at age nineteen I joined the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to go to the diesel engine repair school at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. I finished the course second only to a Canadian corporal who was far senior to me in age, rank, and experience.

with that good showing, I was selected to go to instructor training school where I barely squeezed through. My problem was not in academics but in stage presence; I was still a shy country boy. That is a problem that was soon overcome by 6 to 8 hours a day before assemblies of students ranging from enlisted reservists barely out of high school to officers in rank from Second Lieutenant to Colonel.

While the stage presence I developed has served me well through life, what I learned to do that I really cherish was to write. As instructors, my peers and I had to write all sorts of training materials, instructor lesson plans, course outlines, student workbooks, materials written for the type of class level it was intended, whether enlisted or officer.

The major stumbling block for some of my peers was that the material we produced had to make sense and be understandable. So we labored at our writing, not with typewriters, but with pencils and yellow legal pads which we printed in block print. This was so Tootsie, our long suffering typist, could actually read the pages and make corrections in spelling, punctuation and format as required.

After about a year of instructing troops in various class areas (Cummins, GMC, Caterpillar, International Harvester and fuel injection systems) I was awarded the Engineer School Outstanding Instructor Award.

In 1957 I was selected to join a four-man, MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group) team to train engineer troops in Vietnam. The team consisted of a Warrant Officer, two Master Sergeants, and me, a Specialist Third Class. When we arrived in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) it was in a little DC-3 prop airplane. The airfield was comprised of WWII steel landing mats and couldn't take larger aircraft.

I soon found out why we were instructed to wear light weight civilian clothing. The light weight because of the heat and humidity and the civilian clothing to conceal our military identity from the Viet Cong who hated military of any kind. We were housed in a seven story hotel with our own dining and bar facility.

I could tell many stories about my time in Saigon and the people I got to know there, but maybe at another time. I soon found out that I was the only member of the team who could type and run a motion picture projector.

I was by far the best writer in the group as well as an excellent instructor. Needless to say,

I was pretty busy during my time there. I prepared, with the help of two Vietnamese translators, in excess of 500 pages of teaching and student materials.

It was a good experience that I will always value fondly and it did much to create a love of writing in me. I received commendations because of my service there but I decided to opt out of the military when my time was up.

When I returned to civilian life I used my military training to my advantage in working with and supervising heavy construction equipment and large vehicles.

At one point, I wrote and taught a course on the construction of computer memory planes. The memory planes were the precursor to the memory chip and were the main reason big computers required large rooms to house them.

Here's why: Picture a thin plastic picture frame about five inches square. Now, divide the space inside the frame into four patches with a little space between them. Lay this out on an aluminum box with double faced adhesive tape on its top.

Now imagine little washers or cores made of carbon less than an eighth of an inch in diameter each, with a hole in its center less than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, Stand thirty two of these cores on edge in a row on one of the four patches on the tape at 90 degree angles to each other, Now add 31 more rows to the patch. You will have 1024 cores sitting on one patch, or 4,096 cores in four patches or one frame.

Now you are one trainee in a group of 20 nimble-fingered, smart women. You are sitting at a microscope which will become a friend or hated enemy. You have listened to me give my indoctrination spiel, your neighbor smiles at you and whispers, "He's kind of cute, this'll be a cinch."

You aren't sure of that.

Now comes the good part. While I explain what is about to happen, an associate passes out what looks like strands of colored horse hair with a shiny wire attached. In reality, the horse hair is a copper insulated wire soldered to a piece of thin piano wire.

Your job will be to pass this wire through each one of the cores standing precariously on edge on sticky tape while looking through a microscope. The real kicker is that you must pass at least three different wires through each core in different directions.

I had dealt with difficult situations, but never before one whee an employee gets up from the workbench, glares angrily at me and runs screaming from the room.

Anyway, it took thousands of these memory planes to provide less computing capability than is available in a modern personal computer. But, eventually the iMac came to our household and that's when I became serious about writing.