Tell me a funny story about one of your siblings

My older brother Greg and his friends bought an old school bus and rented a campsite along the Stillwater River at the Triple R Ranch, located a few miles west of Troy, Ohio at the intersection of State Route 55 and Kessler-Frederick Road.  They got to be good friends with the owners of the farm, Bill and Helen, and would frequently help out with farm duties like getting firewood for bonfires and hauling hay for the horses.  When I turned 16 years old, they allowed Greg’s little brother to tag along, and while I didn’t drink beer as they did, I was useful for driving them into town for more, and I made sure to bring along a few bags of snacks to share.  After awhile I was accepted as part of the gang.

We went to “The Bus” pretty much every weekend, driving up on Friday night and coming back sometime on Sunday.  In addition to helping on the farm, we played football, fired shotguns, canoed, raised a vegetable garden, went skinny dipping after dark in the summer, and skated when the river froze in winter.  We would hike on the since-abandoned, Penn Central train tracks, which included walking over the river’s towering train trestle, to see the Christmas lights at Ludlow Falls.  Camping there was a year-round affair and we would keep warm in the winter with the help of a dozen sleeping bags and Coleman stoves. 

My brother liked to sleep outside under the stars.  The farm was divided by a gate that kept the animals on one side and the campers on the other.  We entered the farm, which was about fifty feet higher in elevation than the campgrounds, drove down the hill where someone would jump out to open the gate and close it after the car went through.  But not always did the gate get secured properly.  That all led to my brother waking up one morning next to his burned-out campfire staring upward into the face of one of the many sheep that had come through the open gate.  We all thought that was hysterical, particularly since the sheep really did seem to like Greg.  We would tell him that the sheep seemed to wink at him and we would bray “Gre-a-a-a-g” in our best sheep imitations whenever he was close to them, a joke that lasts to this very day.

What was the neighborhood you grew up in like?

 I grew up on Ashwood Avenue in the North Riverdale section of Dayton, Ohio.  In 1955 my parents bought this house, the largest on the block, not that 1,173 square feet is all that big, particularly when it would eventually hold seven people.  My parents were in the process of moving from Vandalia and by the time I arrived on October 8th, they brought me home to the only house I would live in for my first twenty-two years.  

North Riverdale was mainly single-family homes with some apartments and mostly populated by empty-nesters.  We had a variety of businesses within a few miles, plenty of parks, schools, cafes, and a library.  There was Shawen Acres, now known as the Montgomery County Children's Home, a scary place to deliver fifteen Sunday newspapers in the dark.  The area had quite a number of alleys, something you don’t see much of today, and many garages were accessed that way, which provided convenient places to mount a basketball hoop, a favorite pastime of mine.

Ashwood Avenue runs east-west, but because it runs uphill from Riverside Drive to North Main Street, and maps always had up as north, I grew up believing my street pointed north.  To this day when I see a map of North Riverdale, part of me is shocked to see Ashwood running right-to-left.  The particular section of Ashwood I lived on, between Kathleen and Merrimac, was the steepest section of the street and after a few inches of snow had accumulated, my siblings and I would put on our Sunday shoes, with their slick bottoms, walk up to Merrimac and spend hours sliding down the sidewalk.  The biggest thrill was getting a short start and making it all the way to Kathleen in a single slide.  By the time we were done the sidewalk was pretty much a sheet of ice.  I didn’t realize until I was an adult that our neighbors probably didn’t that like it so much. 

My grade school, Our Lady of Mercy, was about half-a-mile away, and I walked or rode my bike to school most days.  On the way was Victor drugstore, my favorite place to buy comic books.  Across the street from Victor’s was the Riverdale Ice House, where my Dad would back in the station wagon to its 40-foot-wide dock and load up on soda and beer.  North of Riverdale’s was the Shell station that my father always took our General Motors cars to get gas and any needed maintenance or service.

About three miles north of our house was Liberal Markets, at the far end of Forest Park Plaza, where my mother would do all her grocery shopping.  Just beyond Liberal’s was the Putt-Putt golf course, where you could play from 9 am to noon on Saturday mornings for only 60 cents.  I would wake up early, ride my bike to Putt-Putt and play as many rounds as I could squeeze in.  It’s also the place where I had my first cream soda.  Forest Park back then had a Woolworth store and that’s where I got my first post-paper-route job.  Also the first time I got fired.  I could be a stubborn cuss.  Across from Forest Park was Sherer’s Ice Cream, my second job and one I loved, and didn’t give up until I began getting jobs during college related to my computer science major.

Tell me about your scariest experience as a child

It didn’t take even a second to pull up my scariest memory, but I took time trying to recall others that might be more intense.  I recalled being about ten years old, in fourth grade, going to the doctor for bad stomach pains, going straight from there to the hospital, and getting an appendectomy.  I laid in a strange hospital for three days, mostly alone, not able to stand up, and being relieved when finally discharged to go home.  I also recalled the few spankings my father administered, all well-deserved of course, but that short time between being told you’re getting one and it being over is well-etched in my memory.  Finally, like the curious little boys and girls that we all are, when I was about four years old, the equally young girl next door and I, well, showed each other what made us male and female.  We were caught in the act, my mother angrier at me than I had ever seen, and I spent the next two hours waiting in my bedroom, scared out of my mind, for my father to get home.  When he arrived, I was called to dinner and nothing was ever said about it.  Total relief and disbelief!  But the scariest experience, by far, was getting lost at the county fair.

After a great day of rides and games, it was time to leave the fair and go home.  Instead of following my parents, I decided I knew how to get back to the station wagon and turned the wrong way.  At that age, my Mom and Dad had five children, two in diapers, and they’re not to blame for not noticing I was gone before I was out of sight.  I was expected to follow and I didn’t.  When I realized that I was lost, my family nowhere to be seen, panic immediately set in.  As best as I remember, I just started bawling and someone took me somewhere and called out my parent’s names over a loudspeaker to let them know where they could find their lost child.  While it seemed to last forever, my parents claimed me and as we walked to the car, I was glued to my mother’s hip.  

What fascinated you as a child?

There’s no single answer to this question, but the one that stands out very fondly is my Grandfather Otto’s workshop.  It was located in his garage at his house in Beavercreek, Ohio, and was full of tools, pieces of wood, and dozens of old Dutch Masters cigar boxes filled with nails, screws, nuts and bolts, and things I couldn’t imagine their purpose.  While my father had a few of the common things in his basement workshop to do normal home maintenance chores, Grandpa’s collection was more an invitation to imagine what could be built.  I remember him letting me use a few pieces of wood to make an imitation Mjölnir, the hammer of the Norse God of Thunder, Thor.  

That garage was a launching pad to a life of seeing how things worked, taking them apart, rebuilding them, or creating something new.  Another fond memory, and one no young child will likely ever have again, is watching my Dad remove the set of vacuum tubes from our one and only television set, taking them, with me in tow, of course, to Victor drugstore where they had a machine where you could test each tube to see if it was working properly.  One by one my Dad would insert a tube into the slot that matched its pin configuration and hit the test button until the offending tube was identified and a new one purchased.  Back at the house, he would put all the tubes back in the television and, like magic, the black-and-white set would be working again, much to the delight of my mother and siblings.  

 

What is one of your favorite children's stories?

I was an avid reader when I was a child.  I also watched a lot of television, played sports with the neighborhood kids, rode my bicycle everywhere, liked to free-hand draw, learned to bake, and always seemed to be on the go.  We didn’t have computer games or texting to fill out our days, and for that, I’m very grateful.  

When I first saw this question I thought of books that my Mom and Dad might have read to me.  While I’m sure they did, I really don’t remember any.  My favorite anything is something I’m active in, not a passive passenger along for the ride.  So I turned my thoughts to the books I read and there’s a lot of memories.  I read the Highlights magazines at the doctor’s and dentist’s offices.  I read the Reader’s Digest after my parents had finished them.  When I was a teen I dove headfirst into Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.  As an adult, I read just about everything that Raymond Fiest and David Eddings wrote.  But the books I started reading in my early school years stand out the most because they really got me going.  Those were the Tom Swift and Hardy Boys series. I believe my mother signed me up for a book-of-the-month club and when the next book came in the mail, wrapped in cardboard, I couldn’t wait to pull on the perforated tab, pull the book out and see what the title would be.  

The Hardy Boys series were mysteries that teenagers Frank and Joe Hardy would solve.  The Tom Swift series, or more specifically, the Tom Swift Jr. series, were about inventions and dramatic adventures, and that’s the series I liked the most.  Tom invented repelatrons, robots, and solartrons, to name just a few, and he used his inventions and intellect to defeat the bad guys.  

But to answer the question posed, I feel I should select a single book from that series, and the one that stands out is “Tom Swift and his Diving Seacopter”.  The Seacopter, named the Ocean Arrow, could fly like a plane, submerge like a submarine, and is just the right vehicle to locate a rocket that’s come back from space with evidence of living things on another planet, but has been diverted by an unknown force and landed in the waters off South America.  Tom, his friends Bud Barclay and Chow Winkler, and two expert oceanographers set off to locate the rocket and have to overcome an underwater landslide to defeat their enemies. 

What was your first big trip?

The keyword here is “big” and how to apply it.  As a child, my parents most often rented a house for a week at Indian Lake, an hour north of Dayton, but one year decided to take us to Mackinac Island in Michigan, a seven-hour drive, but that’s a child’s view of “big”.  From a distance perspective of “big”, driving the family to Dallas and Disney World each clock in at about one thousand miles.  But neither definition seems right.

I’ve decided that “big” is going to mean the most impactful, the trip that would change the course of my life, my wife’s, my daughter’s, and my wife’s sons.  So my first “big” trip was the first time I went to Europe.  I managed the Mead Corporation’s Network Services team back in the 1990s and had worldwide responsibility for all data and voice communications, and needed to visit a few locations in Europe to begin the process of connecting their networks to the corporate network.

My teammate Jeff Boyett and I flew to Paris for the first leg of this trip.  That started off with an overnight flight, and although we flew first-class, we arrived at the Orly airport with only a couple of hours of sleep.  We rented a car and drove north, taking the Périphérique around Paris, and taking our proper exit to the city’s streets where we were unable to find any street signs.  We miraculously navigated to our hotel using our map, counting intersections and roundabouts.  After checking in we decided to try to walk to the Eiffel Tower and after a few blocks found that all the street signs are embedded into the sides of buildings.  We even managed to buy some bottled water after correctly interpreting a question, in French, asking if we wanted still or sparkling water.  Our business began on the second day with a number of meetings and on the third day, we drove three hours south to Châteauroux.   At that point in the trip, I would have given anything to go home and never go back, I was so frazzled.  The turning point was after the business meetings in Châteauroux we were asked to help resolve a problem one of the staff was having with their analog modem on, of course, their French PC.  With the help of an interpreter, Jeff and I were able to fix the issue.  On the drive back to Paris I started feeling a lot more confident about my ability to handle all the different things being thrown at me and no longer wanting to just go home.  Solving that computer problem put me in a much better place, and that was good because the next day was going to be crazy.

We started that second leg waking up early, driving to Orly, and catching an early flight to London’s Heathrow airport.  We again rented a car, a Volkswagen Scirocco with seven miles on the odometer and a steering wheel on the right, in a country where you drive on the left side of the road.  Jeff handled the two-hour drive west to Bristol where we had more business meetings and a lunch served at the office which included beer.  I handled the drive back to Heathrow and to this day the memory of driving on the left side of M4, in the left (slow) lane is still vivid.  We then boarded our third flight of the day to Vienna International Airport in Austria.  We landed late and quickly decided that we could not handle a rental car in the dark.  While working with our travel folks to get that canceled, and with the crowd at the airport thinning out, I heard over the loudspeaker a call for a “Mister Muerman”.   When that announcement was made a second time, it sparked a memory of my high-school German class and how the teacher would pronounce my name.  With almost nobody left in the airport, except the armed guards, I approached the service desk and found that our Vienna office had arranged a driver to take us to our hotel, a prayer answered.  We checked in and immediately headed to the bar for a beer, which turned into two, maybe three.  There were five tables of people in the bar, each one speaking a different language, and we tuned them out.  We spent a couple of days in Vienna before flying back to the U.S. and experiencing our first long westbound travel, arriving exhausted in the middle of an Ohio day.  We were already planning on the next trip and over the next several years I added Switzerland, Germany, and Italy to the countries I visited.

If it had not been for surviving this first European trip, I might have let the rest of my Network team handle future trips without me.  I probably would not have taken my daughter to Paris as a sixteenth birthday present and she might not have taken a high school trip to the U.K. and probably not honeymooned in Greece and Italy.  My wife and I might have not honeymooned in St. Thomas, explored a number of Caribbean islands, partied at Munich’s Oktoberfest, or driven her son’s around Ireland for a week.   That week in Europe changed not only my life but the lives of those I love.