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Health & Fitness

Box Kites and Well Pumps Have What in Common?

In 1958, the San Francisco Giants played their first season after moving to the West Coast from New York City. I was ten years old when that happened. I remember it because my father, who never listened to ball games on the radio, did listen to this entire season no matter where we were or what we were doing. But, never again. He only listened to this one season of baseball and never any other season after that. The reason I remember this is that we spent a few weeks that summer, salvaging wood from a migrant’s cabin we tore down.  This little house sat of the edge of a large barley field that sat in the middle of our Almaden orchards and vineyards. There weren’t many “hay fields” in our Almaden Valley. The bare flat lands were much more valuable for their crops of specialty vegetables that brought in so much more cash than alfalfa, barely or whatever grains that one might grow. We simply called these grassland parcels “hay fields.” Sometimes a cattle or dairy rancher might find it more economical to grow his own “hay” to feed his stock than to purchase it from another grower. Thus, we did have our few hayfields in the middle of our precious orchards, vineyards and row crops.

My dad was born during the first few decades of the twentieth century, having him grow up in metropolitan Chicago to live through the brutal deprivation of the 1930′s Great Depression. Until the day he died, my dad was a depression scarred hoarder. He never threw anything away.

If he couldn’t find a use for something, he’d find a cubby hole or a space in the attic to stow it, until he could find a use for whatever it was. If someone had an old car or sewing machine or radio that couldn’t be fixed, Pop had to examine it real close to see if he couldn’t salvage some one or two pieces of the device before it was committed to the dump. Even if he really didn’t know what it did or was supposed to do, he wouldn’t let it go to waste if he could help it.

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Of course, this penchant for scavenging kept my mom on pins and needles. She grew up some eight or ten years after him, living on a large cattle ranch in rural Indiana where the severe poverty of the depression was not known. She couldn’t relate to Pop’s obsession. In fact, when I was around 12 or 13, we had just bought an acre of land from our landlord and moved a nice house onto it, a house that was condemned to be demolished as it sat in the path of a new freeway in Santa Clara. The house was moved across the Santa Clara Valley and was plopped down on our Almaden acre. We dug a well and a septic tank and came out with a right, nice little homestead of our own. However, my dad stepped over the line when he naively suggested that the unused three-quarters of an acre that sat behind our landscaped villa be used to start a new family business, an automobile and truck wrecking yard; a junk yard, right there in the middle of Almaden Valley.

Well, it doesn’t take much imagination to know that this particular idea went over like a lead balloon. My mom and the neighbors took great offense to this suggestion of the Chicago city boy. To foul our rich farmland with the greasy, oil covered wreckage of the urban jungle, such a suggestion was a sacrilege. Of course, after a brief brouhaha, we never heard another word about it. The city boy was earnestly trying to be accepted by his agriculturally born and bred brethren of this rural neighborhood.

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When Pop heard that one of the landowners was going to tear a down an entire two bedroom cottage, he jumped at the chance to disassemble it and keep all of the building materials for himself. He considered this a gold mine. Pop volunteered me for nail pulling duty. As he stripped the siding off the . . .

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