The bar-worker scene was fascinating and fun; yet, it assured I would forever be in poverty as long as l worked in it. Desperate to bolster up my situation and finances I came to a moment of clarity. I would need a better job, a second job, or both. I ended up calling my old boss at the bus company in Whitewater. After two years Ol' Jack didn't even skip a beat. "Be here tomorrow," he said. It was as if the last time I had spoken to him was that morning - it had been two years. It was now 1981. Job Thirteen and 24 years old - lucky thirteen.
While I bided my time between the two jobs, I returned to reading books. I did most of the reading in my attic apartment. I reread Dickens, Hemingway, Heller, Uris, Capote, Joyce, Roth, Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, Twain, and Vonnegut. I read new books and old ones - new authors and old ones. I must have read 50 books in six months. There was a book store in downtown Lake Geneva. I would stop in there often on my walk from the attic to the bowling alley bar.
I worked in the bus repair and warranty shop. In the summer I worked on refurbishing buses and repainting them for customers. I also drove the city school bus route that spring and again in the fall. The kids had gotten more brazen about the world in just two years. They seemed more political savvy. We still had hostages in Iran. Viet Nam echoed through the school curiculum as something that might have changed our lives forever, yet little was taught about it - we had lost. The kids were smarter than people gave them credit for.
While at the bus company again, my hours at the bar varied from zero to 30 per week. I would cut back at the bar and three weeks later I was right back up in hours again. I drove Uncle Art's old 1966 Ford farm truck into the ground. The truck disintegrated around the durable straight-6 engine. Art had only driven it to the feed mill and grocery store about every 10 days for years. It was 30 to 40 miles from the bus company to the bar depending on how I went. I also drove my 1975 Kawasaki 500cc motorcycle. It was a work horse as well. Both got fairly good gas mileage.
Dad was watching from a distance as good dads do. He scrounged up a used 1974 Mustang II with 200 thousand miles on it and let me have it. It had a 4-cylinder engine and got great gas mileage. Before I went in the Army I bought a 1974 Ford pick up truck. It did not get very good mileage as it had an 8-cylinder engine so it sat in the garage out at the farm for the most part. It was a great truck, but eight miles per gallon, and gas at a dollar a gallon, in an economy that paid a guy like me $3.00 an hour did not cut it.
In the haze of never ending work I asked Heide if she wanted to get married. She said yes, I barely had time to contemplate what I was about to embark on. She had her own battle commuting down to Chicago to college and coming home on the weekends. I was so tired, I sometimes slept on the sofa in the bus office lounge. They also had a kitchen, so I bummed a piece of toast and a fried egg now and then. There was always the private bar in the back room if things got really rough.
There was a hydraulic hose company next to the bus company. We shared a parking lot and a picnic table. There was a crass, salty guy who was a supervisor at the hose company that sat out at lunch time and chatted once in a while. He was a few years older than me, maybe 30.
One day he smiled and said, "Hey man, I see you drive a different vehicle almost every day in here to work." He pointed to an old Ford Pinto with three different colored quarter panels most likely from junk yard cars.
"Look at that car, boy," he said and then looked off into the corn fields that skirted the two companies on the edge of town as if something was waiting for him out there.
"I used to have a nice pickup, a motorcycle, a sporty car, and a boat. I been married ten years now. I ain't got nothing left but that old Pinto." He smirked at me, took a drag on his cigarette, and then ended his caveat, "I hear you are get'n married. Let my Pinto be a lesson you can take with you in the back of your mind where ever you end up." Then he smirked one last time, flicked his cigarette about 10 feet, got up and went in the factory. I never saw him again.
This week's Wisconsin soldier to remember is Army Ranger Specialist Robert J. Cook, 24. He was killed in an accidental explosion at a weapons cache west of Ghazni, Afghanistan, near the village of Dege Hendu, about 90 miles southwest of the capital, Kabul on January 29, 2004. Specialist Cook was Wisconsin's first soldier to die in the Afghanistan War. Specialist Cook was sent to Afghanistan in August of 2003. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said Robert graduated from Sun Prairie High School in 1997. Cook played football and was a defensive tackle when the team went to the state championship in 1995 and won the only state football championship for Sun Prairie. After high school Robert spent three years working in construction and carpentry. Cook joined the Army in 2000. His first duty station was in New York. He was assigned to Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division. Robert is survived by his mother Sandra Selheim and a sister.
3,829 Americans have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
445 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
28,276 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
1,652 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
81 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
5 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
118 journalists (several nationalities) have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
9 journalists (various nationalities) have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
Soldier of the week, military casualty, and journalist casualty information sources: Committee to Protect Journalists; cnn.com; and, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
