With Love Stan

Growing up in rural Southeastern Iowa was idyllic, laid back, and uncomplicated. Winter days were cold, the nights were long, but the change in seasons provided us with many activities like ice skating, sledding, and snowball fights. Summers were hot and sultry. Many hours were spent swimming in the farm pond or nearby river. We dug night crawlers for fishing, bicycled over dusty gravel roads to our friends’ houses, and helped with the family chores. Life on the farm wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. There was always something for us to do. We rarely complained of being bored, because we knew what the solution would be. All of us attended country schools and formed lifelong friendships with our school mates. Our lives centered around school, church, and farming. Potlucks and PTA meetings were a community affair. Mothers cooked their favorite dishes, fathers huddled together discussing farm prices or weather conditions. We discovered that baking potatoes on top of the heating stove in the winter was a wonderful way to spice up our dull lunches. Keeping Edwin Egli’s bull out of the school yard was a top priority. That was an experience I will never forget. We were playing tag one minute and the next we were eyeball to eyeball with a thousand-pound Angus. Today’s educators would have a hard time understanding how one person managed to instruct all eight grades, and keep her sanity, while making sure her pupils mastered the three R’s. If our teacher felt like taking the day off, calling it a field day and packing picnic lunches while we swam in a farm pond, we did it. No permission slips were signed, no safety issues addressed, we just did it! When we were old enough, we worked alongside the adults, baling hay, canning, or whatever the routine the day held in store. We were farm kids, and our dad worked the rich, black soil on the river bottom from dawn ‘til dusk, praying for nature’s kindness when the heavy rains came and the river flooded its banks. Stan was driving a tractor by the age of seven, cultivating corn, pulling hay wagons, working with livestock, whatever Dad asked him to do. Stan learned a lot about responsibility because our parents expected it. He was taught how to hunt with a gun and dress game at an early age, tagging along with Dad through the thick timber and rolling Iowa hills. He became a pretty good marksman and respected the power and danger of a weapon. He would rather go fishing than go to class, as our dad found out from our high school principal, George Stanley. Mr. Stanley was an imposing man, who took his job seriously. He had a soft place in his heart for my brother. It seems that Stan and a friend had been fishing every day instead of attending school. When Dad heard this he met my brother at the screen door and said, “So you don’t want to go to school? Then I guess you can pack your bags and get a job!” That was the end of playing hooky for my brother, as far as our parents knew. Mr. Stanley would become someone my brother came to respect. They stayed in touch with each other until he left for Vietnam. Stan held many jobs in his short 20 years. He worked at the Fina gas station in town, drove a school bus, did carpentry with Lyons & Miller Construction, worked and drove for Ideal Ready-Mix, and of course helped Dad and neighbors with field work. Our rural setting provided endless places to explore and hide, hills to climb, and streams to wade in. Stan enjoyed every minute of those childhood adventures. I’m sure he never dreamed that the cowboy and Indian games we played out as kids—dodging make-believe bullets and surviving play arrow wounds—would someday become real for him, a world away. var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));