The Concordia College Library

When my family lived on Faculty Lane, I could walk to the Concordia College library in a couple of minutes. I spent a lot of time there.

I don't remember how I was able to check out books. I don't think I had a library card. As I remember, the place where the books were checked out had a set of cards with the names of faculty kids who used the library, and I simply stated my name, and the clerk verified that there was a card for my name and then checked out the books to me. I used the library often enough that usually the clerk recognized me and so did not have to look for the card.

The library had a special room with books for children -- for elementary-school pupils. While I lived on Faculty Lane, I selected most of my books from this room.

One of the books I found in the children's room made a huge impact on my life. This book was a history of Soviet espionage in the United States. The book included a chapter about a Soviet spy ring that was discovered because of some information that was provided by a paperboy. The story is told in this website:

On June 22, 1953, a paperboy for the Brooklyn Eagle, knocked on the door of one of his customers in an apartment building on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn. The paperboy was going through the month-end ritual of collecting from his customers. The lady customer only had a dollar bill and the paperboy did not have enough coins to make change so he asked the neighbors next door if they could help. The neighbors pooled their coins and produced enough change for a dollar, and the bill was paid.

As the paperboy was leaving the apartment building, and jingling the change in his hand, he could not help but notice that one nickel weighed less than the other nickels.

As he examined it, it fell to the ground and opened up after hitting the cement sidewalk. Inside was a miniature photograph showing numbers arranged in columns.

Two days later a New York City detective casually remarked to an FBI friend about the hollow nickel a newsboy had discovered. The detective had received the information from another police officer whose daughter was acquainted with the paperboy. The New York City Police picked up the nickel with its contents and turned it over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

FBI agents in the New York City office examined the hollow nickel. The interior of the coin appeared to be what agents described as a microphotograph portraying 10 columns of typewritten numbers. There were five digits in each number and 21 numbers in most columns. Suspecting a coded espionage message, the agents shipped it to the FBI Laboratory for further analysis.

Following its arrival in Washington, the coin received careful scrutiny by a team of FBI scientists. Hollow coins, occasionally used in magic acts and only occasionally seen by the FBI, were seldom if at all, seen by ordinary citizens. The coin was indeed unique, even for the FBI. It was a Jefferson nickel with a tiny hole drilled in the letter R of the word "TRUST." Investigators concluded that the tiny hole had been made to accept a device to open the coin. The other side of the coin had been made from another nickel minted during World War II and composed of a copper-silver alloy.

As efforts began to decode the message on the microphotograph, FBI agents in New York launched an investigation. The neighbors who had given change to the newsboy for a dollar bill knew nothing of the coin and confirmed that they had never seen such a thing. Proprietors of novelty stores and other businesses in the area were contacted and photographs of the hollow coin were shown to them, but this failed to produce anything positive. A detailed canvassing of the neighborhood did not yield any useful information. The meaning of the microphotograph seemed destined to remain a mystery.

From 1953 to 1957, attempts to solve the mystery of the hollow nickel by interviewing former intelligence agents who had defected to the free world from communist-bloc nations shed no light on the case. FBI investigators checked out hollow subway tokens, other hollow or trick coins but none appeared to suggest a tie to the one discovered in Brooklyn. The search for the person for whom the coded message in the nickel was intended was nowhere to be found.

Seemingly unrelated events can occasionally bring solutions to insolvable mysteries. The key to the paperboy's hollow nickel proved to be a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet State Security Service (KGB). The 36-year-old officer telephoned the United States Embassy in Paris and subsequently in an interview stated that he had been operating as a spy in the United States and needed help. The spy, Reino Hayhanen, explained that he had just been ordered to return to Moscow and felt defection was better than returning for an uncertain future.

Mr. Hayhanen had been born on May 14, 1920 near Leningrad to two Russian peasants. Despite this modest background, Hayhanen became an honor student and in 1939 earned the equivalent of a certificate to teach high school. In September of 1939, he was appointed to a primary school in the village of Lipitz. His high level of proficiency in the Finnish language, however, attracted the NKVD or secret police. Two months after beginning his job as an elementary school teacher, the NKVD drafted him to go to the combat zone and translate captured documents and interview prisoners during the Finnish-Soviet war.

When the war ended Hayhanen was ordered to review the loyalty and reliability of Soviet workers in Finland and to develop sources of information in Finland. His real job was to identify anti-Soviet elements in the intelligentsia. By 1943, he had gained considerable respect for his knowledge of Finland and Finnish matters and was accepted into membership into the Soviet Communist Party. At the end of the war Hayhanen received promotion to the rank of senior operative and worked in the village of Padani, identifying dissidents. The KGB called Hayhanen to Moscow in the summer of 1948 and gave him a new assignment. He would be required to learn English, sever all connections with his family and receive special training in photographing documents as well as in the encoding and decoding of messages. While his training continued, he worked as a mechanic in Valga, Estonia, and in 1949 entered Finland as Eugene Nicolai Maki, an American-born laborer.

[The article continues on the linked website.]

This story captured my imagination. Another chapter in the book claimed that the Soviet Union had a secret town where everyone spoke English and all the signs were in English, and this town was where the Soviet spies learned to speak English like native Americans.

This book gave me the idea that I should learn to speak Russian perfectly and then sneak into Russia and secretly convert a lot of Russians to Christianity.

The library's children section did not have any books about how to learn Russian, so I went into the adult section and found three books about the Russian language. None of these books was useful, because they were not introductory books. One of them was the second-volume of a old textbook set, and the other two were collections of reading texts for intermediate students who had learned some of the language from other books. I checked out all three books and took them home and looked through them, but they did not enable me to teach myself Russian. (I described how I eventually learned Russian in this article.)

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The library's children section also enabled me to learn about sex. I found a few books about puberty, and I read them thoroughly. A couple of those books I read many times, always the same few pages. I noted the Dewey Decimal numbers of those books and then went into the adult section, and there I looked through the books with similar Dewey Decimal numbers. The books in the adult section provided me with more details and with some vivid illustrations.

Another group of books that I remember checking out from the adult section was about boxing. I went into the adult section to look at books about sports and physical fitness, and I found several books about boxing techniques. I checked out these boxing books and took them home and practiced the techniques that the books illustrated.

One of these boxing books included instructions about how to make barbells out of a piece of pipe, a couple of tin cans and concrete. I followed those instructions and made a set of those barbells. I used these barbells to try to build muscles in my arms as I practiced my boxing techniques. The barbells looked like this:

The events I have described so far in this article happened before I began in seventh grade. In particular, I found the boxing books and built the barbells during the summer between my sixth grade and my seventh grade.

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It was during that same summer that I acquired a lot of old magazines in the Concordia College library. I was in the library's adult section browsing around for books about some subject that interested me at that point. I don't remember whether I was looking for books about spies, about the Russian language, about sex, about boxing or some other subject. Anyway, while I was browsing through the shelves, I saw a college student, apparently working part-time in the library, who was taking a lot of old, bound volumes of magazines from some library shelves and loading them onto a cart. This college student was talking with someone else, and from that conversation I understood that he had been assigned to throw all these old, bound magazines away.

I asked the college student whether he really was throwing all these magazines away, and he replied that he indeed was doing so. I then asked whether I could have them all, and he said that indeed I could, because otherwise he intended to throw them into a dumpster. So, I took all the magazines from him and carried them home.

This was a lot of stuff, and I had to make many trips back and forth between the library and my home in order to move it all. I carried it all in my arms.

The magazines were all from the first half of the 1940s. The magazines included Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post and a couple other titles. Most of the magazines were bound by quarters. For example, all the Life magazines for the months January through March 1940 were bound in one volume, and all the Life magazines for the months April through June 1940 were bound in another volume, and sor forth. On that day I carried home a total of about 30 bound volumes of these old, various magazines from the early 1940s.

My Mom allowed me to keep all these bound magazines in our study in our home. I looked through those volumes many times, especially during the summer when I acquired them. This experience gave me a sense of what life was like when my parents were young. My mother was born in 1932, so during that period, 1940-45, she was ages eight to thirteen. I myself was eleven years old in the summer when I brought the magazines home from the library. Perhaps that is my Mom allowed me to keep them.

Those old magazines remained with our family as long as we lived in Seward, Nebraska. I think I had to get rid of them right before our family moved to Eugene, Oregon, but I don't remember whether I gave them to someone else or threw them into the garbage. It is possible that we did take them to Eugene, but much of our family's belongings burned up in a fire in a storage facility while we were waiting for our new home in Eugene to be built. If we did take them to Eugene, then they burned up in that fire.

My Failures as a Paperboy

(This article follows an article about how I became a paperboy and a second article about how I delivered newspapers and a third article about paper-route economics.)

From the beginning of my paperboy career, I understood the importance of increasing the number of customers on my route. The time I spent delivering papers every day was practically constant. Delivering one more newspaper took almost no more time, but my profit increased by more than a penny a day.

I did more arithmetic. If a new customer subscribed to both the daily and Sunday deliveries, then in a year, my increased profit at the end of the year would total (42¢/month * 12 months = ) $5.04. If I put that extra profit into my savings account at Cattle Bank, then at a 3.5% interest rate I would earn 18¢ interest every year afterwards -- EVERY YEAR AFTERWARDS !! -- PLUS COMPOUNDING !!!

And that was just for one more customer. My brain feverishly fantasized about the profitable results of several new customers added to my route every month.

During the first couple of months after I took over my paper route, I spent a couple of hours on Saturday afternoons knocking on doors of non-subscribers in my route area and trying to sell subscriptions.

I had read the guidance in The Newspaper Carrier's Handbook about how to sell subscriptions. The following pages depicted the paperboy scouting for prospects on his route and then approaching those prospects to sell subscriptions.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

There also were various sales instructions like this ...

Click here to see the above leaflet in larger sizes.

... and this.

Click here to see the above leaflet in larger sizes.

I did not have the self-confidence or the ability, however, to sell like the boy in the manual did. I was only nine years old and was easily intimidated. When I knocked on a door and someone opened the door, the conversation usually went like this:

Me: Hi, would you like to subscribe to The Lincoln Star?

Adult: No, thanks. [Closes door]

After a few such Saturday afternoons of rejection and frustration, I gave up.

However, the newspaper's distribution office in Lincoln regularly conducted various contests and prizes to entice the paperboys into trying to sell subscriptions. One popular prize was a group trip to the state fair in Lincoln. If all the paperboys in a district together sold a total of so many new subscriptions in a particular time, then all the paperboys (even paperboys who did not sell any subscriptions at all) got to go to the state fair for a day.

I would try to sell subscriptions when the prize was a trip to the state fair. I cannot remember whether I did sell any subscriptions on those occasions (maybe a sold a few) but I always got to go to the state fair, because all the paperboys in the district sold enough for everyone to go.

The trips to the state fair were a lot of fun. In the morning we paperboys would fill a bus, which drove us to Lincoln and dropped us off at the fair. I think each of us received some discount coupons for rides and games. Then in the evening the bus would drive us all back to Seward.

The state fair had a much larger selection of rides and attractions than the county fair in Seward had. The state fair had some burlesque attractions. There were some view machines, where you put a coin in the machine and then you looked into a visor and saw a short film of a woman dancing around in lingerie. Then the woman would start to take off their lingerie and the scene would go black. There also was a live burlesque show with real women dancers. I was too young to get into that, but a couple of the very oldest paperboys were allowed to enter. I spent a few coins looking into the viewing machines. A couple of the guys bought some playing cards that were illustrated with pictures of women with lingerie, and those guys would show the cards around in the bus on our ride back to Seward. This was the funnest day of the year for us paperboys.

During the first year that I worked as a paperboy, a bunch of us won a trip to watch the University of Nebraska's football team play a game. There were a lot of empty seats in the stadium, because the team always had a bad record in those days. Paperboys were allowed to attend free as a promotion, just to fill some of the seats. I remember that we boys spent more time running around and playing in the stands then watching the football game. (The Cornhuskers began to win football games and become popular after 1962, when Bob Devaney became the coach. My father sat next to Devaney on an airplane flight and had a conversation with him when Devaney was flying from Wyoming to Nebraska to take over the coaching job.)

After I quit working as a paperboy, there was one subscription contest where the prize was a trip to Omaha to go on a tour of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) air base. My brother Steve Sylwester went on that trip.

I remember one subsciption-selling contest where I did sell a couple of subscriptions. One summer afternoon each of us paperboys received a phone call telling us we were supposed to report immediately to the home of Austin Neihardt, Seward's distribution manager, for an important meeting. This never had happened before. I rode my bicycle to Neihardt's, where the living room was filled with paperboys. A distribution manager from Lincoln introduced himself and gave each one of us a small catalogue showing prizes we could win for selling subscriptions. The prizes were very attractive. Then he told us that we would get triple credits for all the subscriptions that we sold by 7 p.m. on that very day and double credits for all the subscriptions that we sold by the end of the weekend.

Of course, all we paperboys raced out immediately on our bicycles to our route areas and tried to win these prizes. That day I sold one subscription, and then I sold another subscription by the end of the weekend. The I won a good Swiss Army pocket knife and a couple of other prizes. Normally we had to order our prizes from the catalogue and wait a few weeks to receive them in the mail, but when I returned to Neihardt's house at 7 pm with my first new subscription, the manager had one of the prize knives with him, and so he gave me that prize immediately. I opened the blade and barely touched it to my finger tip, and the blade was so sharp that it cut my skin and caused me to bleed. What a cool knife!

That particular contest has stayed in my memory for several reasons -- the unexpected phone call, the catalogue, the sharp knife and my immediate success selling two subscriptions. This success bothered me, because I felt that I probably could have sold more subscriptions during those years if I had continued to try regularly. I could have improved my sales skills and could have earned more money. I pondered my inadequate effort and sales failure often during my last months as a paperboy.

I did sell a few subscriptions by giving prospects the newspaper free for a week. On the first day we would leave the first day's newspaper at the foot of the door and hang this announcement on the prospect's doorknob.

In my experience, this method worked rather well -- certainly much better than knocking on doors with cold calls. I think that about half of the prospects who received the newspaper for a week eventually subscribed. I wanted to use this method more often, and I do not remember why I did not. Maybe I was supposed to take more initiative and propose good prospects to the district manager. Or maybe these free newspapers were a bonus for paperboys who already were selling more subscriptions with other methods.

In general, my attitude, effort and service declined significantly during the last year or two that I delivered newspapers. I got up later and later and delivered the newspapers later and later. I dawdled. I forgot to deliver papers to some customers. The number of subscribers declined to a lower number than when I had begun delivering the route. I became dissatisfied with the amount of money I earned, but I did not want to make any effort to sell subscriptions.

I made a special effort to deliver the newspapers early only during the month before Christmas, because most of my customers gave me a Christmas bonus. Some customers gave a cash bonus -- as much as five dollars. Other customers gave me boxes of candy. During the Christmas break from school, I would spend my days eating boxes of chocolate-covered cherries and watching television (Jack Benny movies, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies, Abbott and Costello movies, etc.).

A major reason why my attitude declined was that I foresaw that I would be able to work in the Concordia College cafeteria during my eighth-grade year. That job payed 60¢ an hour and did not include exposure to freezing, windy weather. I could foresee an escape from my paper route and a big step up in my employment.

For some boys, delivering a newspaper route was the beginning of a life-long career in entrepreneurial business. I, however, grew up in a family of teachers and pastors, and so during those young years I had no role models or mentors or coaches who provided guidance and encouragement for a business career. When I think back at that experience of delivering newspapers, I cannot escape the conclusion that I did not succeed as I initially hoped I would succeed and perhaps could have succeeded.

Paper-Route Economics

(This article follows an article about how I became a paperboy and another article about how I delivered newspapers.)

I think my paper route had an average of about 20 customers, varying from about 17 to 23. The below account statement, for the four-week period that ended on December 11, 1964, records that I delivered about 19 daily (Monday through Saturday) and 18 Sunday newspapers during that period.

(Larger sizes of this image can be seen here.)

Let's do the arithmetic for a four-week period when a paperboy delivered to 20 customers who subscribed to the daily and Sunday newspapers. The Agency Carriers' Collection and Billing System included the following Price Schedule:

In order to apply the simplest arithmetic, we will use the third column, labeled "Both" (i.e. both daily and Sunday deliveries) and we will use the bottom part, labeled "FOR THE 4-WEEK PERIOD".

The row labeled "Your collect" indicates that the paperboy collected $1.50 from each customer. Since the paperboy had 20 customers, he collected a total of ($1.50 * 20 customers = ) $30.00 for the four-week period.

The row labeled "Your cost" indicates that the paperboy had to pay $1.08 to the delivery manager for each customer. Since the paperboy had 20 customers, he paid a total of ($1.08 * 20 customers = ) $21.60 for the four-week period.

The row labeled "Your profit" indicates that the paperboy earned a profit of 42¢ for each customer. Since the paperboy had 20 customers, he paid a total of (42¢ * 20 customers = ) $8.40 for the four-week period.

Since the paperboy earned a profit of $8.40 for a four-week period comprising 28 days, he earned about 30¢ a day, which was an average of about 1½¢ for each newspaper he delivered.

I estimate that I spent about 1.5 hours delivering the newspapers every day, so my hourly earnings were about (30¢/day @ 1.5 hours/day = ) 20¢ per hour.

In addition to the time that I spent delivering the newspapers, though, I also spent time collecting money from my customers and spent time trying to get new customers. Therefore I probably earned 15¢ or less per hour.

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According to the Agency Carriers' Collection and Billing System, the paperboy was supposed to pay the delivery manager within the seven days following the end of the four-week period. You can see from the account statement at the beginning of this article that the four-week period ended on December 11, 1964, and that I paid on December 19, 1964, so I paid one day late on that occasion. I don't think there was a monetary penalty for paying late, but if a paperboy paid late chronically, then the delivery manager might eventually fire the paperboy.

Continuing with the hypothetical case where a paperboy delivered to 20 customers who subscribed to the daily and Sunday newspapers, the paperboy would have to pay $21.60 to the delivery manager within seven days after the four-week period. Since each customer paid $1.50 for such a subscription, the paperboy would have to collect from at least 15 of his 20 customers within those seven days in order to pay the delivery manager the $21.60 on time ($1.50 * 15 = $22.50).

The paperboy would be able to collect some of the money while deliverying his route. If the lights were on in a customer's house when he was delivering, he could knock on the door and collect. Mostly, though, the paperboy would ride to his customers' homes during the afternoons, evenings or weekends to collect. Often during such trips, the customers would not be home or perhaps they did not have the money available, and so the paperboy would have to make several attempts to collect the money. Therefore a paperboy normally spent three or four hours a week collecting the money.

The paperboy recorded the customers' payments with collection cards.

The collection card, along with instructions, can be seen in larger sizes here.

The card was about nine inches long and made of light-yellow paper, a little stiffer than a playing card. The paperboy made a pair of identical cards for each customer. He filled in his own name and address on the top and his customer's name and address along the left side of each card. He gave the customer one of the pair of cards and kept the other of the pair for himself. The paperboy kept all his collection cards, in customer-delivery-order on a large, metal ring that he carried with him when he collected. When he collected the money from a customer, the paperboy would use a paper punch ...

... to punch a hole in the space marked with the date that ended the four-week period. He would punch a hole in the customer's card and in his own card.

Practically all my customers always paid in cash. I carried a drawstring money bag to hold the collected money and to be able to make change. My money bag was something like this ...

... but, of course, it did not have a dollar sign on it. My money bag was made of soft, green cloth and it had a white drawstring.

After I had collected enough money to pay my bill, I went to home of Seward's delivery managers, Austin and Josephine Neihardt, who lived next to the water tower. Josephine received all the payments from the paperboys. When she counted a paperboy's money, she was extremely slow and fussy. She carefully straightend out each bill. She put the bills into piles by denominations -- one pile for the one-dollar bills, one pile for the five-dollar bills and so forth, and she piled all the coins by denomination likewise. Then she used a big, old-fashioned adding machine to do all the multiplications and additions and subtractions, writing each calculation carefully on a sheet of paper.

Then Josephine would slowly and carefully write an account statement, like the one at the beginning of this article, as a receipt for the paperboy. In the above receipt she calculated that I delivered 456 daily papers and owed her 2.92 cents for each one, totaling $13.32, and she calculated that I delivered 71 Sunday newspapers and owed her 13.5 cents for each one, totaling $9.59 -- with a grand total due of ($13.32 + $9.59 = ) $22.91.

Watching Josephine do this procedure so slowly was maddening for every paperboy. Another unpleasant element of the procedure was that Josephine did not have any teeth, just gums, and she often licked her thumb to count through the bills. A couple of paperboys got checking accounts just so they could write her an exact check.

I did not have a checking account while I was a paperboy, but I did open a savings account at Cattle Bank, which looked like this:

I tried to put five dollars in my saving account every month, which left me about four dollars to spend. I loved to figure out arithmetically how much money I might eventually earn in interest. If I deposited five dollars every month, then the total deposits would amount to $60 at the end of one year. If my account earned about 3.5% interest, then I would earn $2 in interest. At the end of two years, I would have about $122 in my account, and I would earn more than $4 in interest. At the end of three years, I would earn more than $6 in interest. And so forth.

These projected interest earnings were fantastic, but my fantasies went really wild when I imagined my accumulation of savings and interest if I could get a lot more customers in my route.

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Robert Sylwester wrote:

Interesting. I just figured out that I made about $3.50 an hour during 1964 as a Concordia professor -- with a doctorate and a family of nine to support. It comes out to maybe 40-cents an hour per person in our family. So given the circumstances, you didn't do too badly with 15 cents an hour. As I recall, it cost maybe 50 cents for an adult to see a film at the Rivoli Theater.

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Gene Meyer wrote:

Loved your description of the lady who collected the money. I can still see her licking her fingers and counting and arranging the dollar bills. I only subbed for Steve Roettjer and Jim Hardt…it was way too cold in the winter for me.

What’s 20 cents per hour worth day?

Per this site:

In 2008, $0.20 from 1960 was worth:

$1.45 using the Consumer Price Index

$1.17 using the GDP deflator

$1.81 using the value of consumer bundle

$1.73 using the unskilled wage

$3.26 using the nominal GDP per capita

$5.49 using the relative share of GDP

$4.53 using the nominal GDP per capita

$7.40 using the relative share of GDP

Delivering the Lincoln Star Newspaper

(This article follows an article about how I became a paperboy.)

Three daily newspapers -- The Lincoln Star, The Lincoln Journal, and The Omaha World Herald -- were delivered by paperboys in Seward. The Lincoln Star and The Omaha World Herald were morning newspapers, and The Lincoln Journal was a weekday afternoon newspaper. The Star and Journal newspapers were owned by the same parent company, and the paperboys who delivered those newspapers had the same route manager in Seward. I delivered The Lincoln Star.

Peter Kolb, who lived at the other end of Faculty Lane, delivered the Herald, and my brother Steve substituted for Peter when the Kolb family went out of town. (See that Herald route list in this Flickr set.) Eventually Steve and my next brother Tim became a Lincoln Star paperboys too. My sister Tricia delivered the Lincoln Star into coed dormitories on the college campus.

A few boys in town delivered a newspaper called Grit, which was not a local, daily newspaper but rather a newspaper published for the entire USA a couple times every week. Grit advertised for paperboys in boys' magazines like Boy's Life. Grit printed articles with good news and practical advice, and it eventually went out of business.

The Lincoln Star newspaper routes in Seward were managed by Austin and Josephine Neihardt, who lived on the edge of downtown on Seventh Street next to Seward's water tower.

A bundle hauling truck drove from The Lincoln Journal/Star printing and distribution facility in downtown Lincoln to Seward early every morning, and then delivered Seward's bundles to a covered area along the back wall of the Seward Post Office. If the Neihardts were waiting when the bundle hauler arrived, they could receive the bundles directly from the truck into the back of their station wagon. (One morning the truck was very late due to a late press run, so my brother Steve bicycled to the Neihardts' house and was present when the truck delivered the bundles of newspapers there.)

The newspapers arrived in separately prepared route bundles that were bound with wire. Each bundle had a top bundle cap that was labeled by route number so the paperboy could identify his bundle.

The Neihardts loaded the bundles into their station wagon and drove to each paperboy's home and threw the bundle onto the yard. I often heard the bundle of newspapers hit my yard at about 5:30 a.m. and heard the Neihardts' car drove away. I got up, dressed and walked outside to prepare to deliver my route. Since my bundle was bound with wire, I had to cut the wire open with a wire cutter and throw the wire into the garbage. (On one occasion I got into trouble because a wire I had left in the grass wrecked the lawn mower of Alan Meyer.) Then I counted the newspapers and put them into my paperbags.

The paperbags were a pair of large, canvas pouches that were joined by a long, narrow, canvas neck. The paperboy would wrap the neck around the middle of his bicycle handlebar, and one pouch would hang down from each handle.

We Lincoln Star paperboys (and, I think, Omaha World Herald paperboys) all wrapped our paperbags around our bicycle handlebars. (Paperboys who delivered Grit wore their paperbags over their shoulders.)

I delivered about 20 newspapers. I think the number varied from about 17 to 23 during the course of my career. On weekdays the newspapers were thin and fit into the paperbags easily. On Sundays the newspapers were thick, and 20 newspapers filled the bags rather fully. (See a couple of my route lists in this Flickr set.)

I rode a one-speed bicycle that my Dad had bought me, used, soon after we moved into Seward. During my last year as a paperboy I rode a three-speed bicycle that I bought used.

It was dark every morning when I began. In the summer, the sky was turning light as dawn approached, but in the winter it was very dark for a while. I had a small generator attached to my bicycle's rear wheel-frame. As I rode, the revolving tire turned a mechanism on that generator, which lit a red light on the rear of my bicycle and a white light on the front. The street lights provided enough light for me to see where I was going, but the generated lights enabled car drivers to see me.

My route started just west of the water tower -- just west of the intersection of Seventh Street and Jackson Avenue. According to Mapquest, the trip from my house on Faculty Lane to the start of my route was about nine-tenths of a mile. After my family moved out to remote North Columbia Avenue, the trip from my home to the beginning of my route was about a mile and a half.

My route covered an area from Seventh street on the east to Forteenth Street (the swimming pool) on the west and from Bradford Street (the block north of the water tower) on the north to the south edge of town. Looking at the area on Mapquest and tracing the route within that area, I suppose that I traveled about two miles within my route area. So, the total distance I rode my bicycle was about a mile from my home (on Faculty Lane) to my route area, about two miles on the route itself and then about a mile from my route area back to my home -- a total of four miles. After my family moved to remote North Columbia Avenue, the total distance was about five miles.

My route ended at about the intersection of Eighth Street and South Street (a block south of McKelvie Road, which was Highway 34). My last customer was the Pollock family -- the father was Seward's sheriff, and one of the sons was my classmate Robert Pollock. From there I would ride through the town square on the way home. At that time of the morning, the smells from the bakery dominated the town square, so I often stopped to buy a maple bar in the bakery.

I suppose the entire trip took about an hour and a half on a normal morning. In the early part of my career I would leave at about 5:30 and return home at about 7:00. Gradually, I left later and later, so by the end I was leaving after 6:00 and returning after 7:30. Eventually I got so bad that I had to rush to get to band practice at school by 8:00, and some customers complained that I delivered the newpapers too late.

There was one old guy who lived toward the end of my route and who often sat out on his porch in the mornings when the weather was nice. He always tried to engage me in a conversation for as long as he could, talking about nothing. I didn't mind talking with him for a while, to be polite, but if it was on a day when I didn't have school. Otherwise I rarely had any contact with my customers while delivering the newspapers. (I will write about collecting money from my customers in my next article.)

There were a few homes with barking dogs, and some of those dogs did not get used to me even though I came every morning for four years. On one occasion a strange dog that was running wild bit me on my thigh. A man saw the dog bite me, and he took me to the hospital, where the wound was treated. The bite punctured my skin, but since the bite was through my jeans, the doctor figured that no dog saliva got into my body, so I did not have to get rabies shots.

I often encountered John Garmatz while he was delivering his own route. We would stop and talk. There was one other paperboy I often encountered, a public-school kid, and we would stop and talk too.

When the wind blew, it seemed that the wind always blew against me. When I was riding from my home to my route area, the wind blew against me. And then when I was returning from my route area to my home, the wind had changed direction and blew against me then too.

In the winters, delivering my route was painfully cold. I hated to go out into such cold, windy weather so early in the morning. I would get out of bed, dress and go lie down next to the heat vents along the floor in our house, trying to store up warmth before I went outside. I would wear two socks one each foot and two gloves on each hand. Sometimes by the time I returned home, I was crying because my fingers and toes hurt so much from the cold. I would rush into the bathroom and hold my fingers under lukewarm water for five minutes.

When it was snowing or raining heavily, one of my parents would drive me around on my route in our car. A couple of the roads at the south end of town (around the egg plant) were not paved, and they became quite muddy after a rain or after snow thawed. I would get mud stuck in the spaces between the tires and fenders of my bicycle and would have to push the mud out of those spaces with a stick every block or so.

One pleasure I had from delivering my paper route was that I saw the sun rise every morning. On some mornings when the weather was nice, the sunrise was beautiful, glorious. All the birds began singing as the sun rose. I would think to myself, surely there is a God, because our world is so wonderful at such moments.

I delivered most of the newspapers onto the front porches or into the area between the screen door and the front door. Most people on my route had front porches. A couple customers lived in apartments without porches and also without screen doors. Some customers had special wire holders or boxes next to their front doors. I did not roll up my newspapers with rubber bands, and I never threw the newspapers onto the customers' properties. I placed every newspaper carefully.

One morning I remember well was August 6, 1962, the day after Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her bed. I had not known that news until I opened my newspaper bundle and saw the headline. I hurried through my route, eager to spead the news to all my customers. I placed each newspaper as artfully as I could on each customer's porch, imagining the impact the headline would make on each customer. (I have no such vivid memory of delivering my newspapers after the assassination of President Kennedy.)

Toward the end of my paperboy career I sometimes had problems with absent-mindedness while delivering my route. I could deliver my entire route without thinking about what I was doing. Sometimes I would end with one newspaper still in my paperbag, and so I would have to wrack my brain to re-think which house I might have missed, and I would have to back-track to a house to see if I had left a newspaper there. There were a few times when customers complained I had not left a newspaper at their home.

I ended my paperboy career in eighth grade, because then I was able to get a job washing dishes in the college cafeteria.

The boy who took over my route was the younger brother of two sisters who were in our eighth-grade class for a couple months. These sisters had got into some trouble with the police because of their promiscuous behavior, so they were enrolled at St John School to straighten them out. After a couple of months, as I heard, the police caught them one night with some men in a car, and so the two sisters were sent away to a juvenile-detention facility. Anyway, a few weeks after these two sisters disappeared from my eighth-grade class, the time came for me to teach a new boy to take over my paper route so that I could quit. The new boy lived in a house on North Columbia Avenue, between my family's house and the school, so I went into his house a couple times while I was waiting for him to get ready to go with me. He was a few years younger than me, maybe in about fourth grade. As we talked while delivering the route, I learned that he was the younger brother of those two sisters and that they no longer were living in the home. I did not ask him for any further details about his sisters' problems, and he did not tell me.

After I quit my own route, I substituted a couple times for other paperboys who had to leave town for a week or so on family vacations.

For many years after I ended my paperboy career, I had bad dreams about that experience. The dreams were about me forgetting to deliver newspapers to customers or about me promising to substitute for another paperboy for a while and then forgetting to do so. I still have these dreams sometimes, although more than 40 years have passed.

How I Became a "Lincoln Star" Paperboy

I delivered the Lincoln Star newspaper in Seward every morning from 1961 until 1965. For me, that was from the age of 9 to 13, or from fourth to eighth grade. Being a morning paperboy was a major part of my experience of growing up in Seward. I still remember my old paper route 44 years later, and I have retraced it whenever I have returned to Seward for visits.

I was recruited in 1961 by my classmate Ken Uhlig, who already had a paper route. Ken came to my house one day during the summer after we had finished third grade because he wanted me to take over his route so that he could transfer to a route closer to his home. He told me that I could earn ten dollars a month if I took over his route. This seemed like a huge amount of money to me, so I was eager to begin immediately.

Ken and I then discussed the opportunity with my parents. They thought it was basically a good idea, but they wanted more information. Arrangements were made, and a couple weeks later a Lincoln Star delivery manager traveled from Lincoln to Seward to visit our home for a couple of hours one evening. He interviewed my parents and me and explained the job. He then left me some printed materials to read.

As I recall, the Lincoln Star company had a rule that paperboys should be at least nine years old, so I had to wait until my birthday, November 6. However, I think that the rule was not enforced strictly. I remember that the delivery manager visited our home again several weeks after the first visit in order to complete the recruitment procedures, and I began delivering newspapers after that second visit.

One of the printed materials that the delivery manager gave me during the first visit was the The Newspaper Carrier's Handbook, which I studied thoroughly during the weeks between those two visits. My brother Steve Sylwester later became a paperboy too, and so he received this same handbook and has kept it all these years. When Steve told me he had this handbook, I was delighted because I still had a vivid mental image of it. When Steve then e-mailed me the scans, I recognized all the pages because I had read them thoroughly and repeatedly as a boy. I have uploaded the scans of all the pages into this Flickr set.

The delivery manager emphasized during both visits that I should try to sell more subscriptions to people on my route. Let's suppose, he explained, that a paperboy has a route delivering 25 newspapers, which takes him about one hour. The paperboy would earn about 30 cents an hour in that situation. If, however, the paperboy were able to sell 25 more subscriptions and thus increase his daily delivery to 50 newspapers, then he would double his earnings to about 60 cents an hour. Delivering 50 newspapers does not take significantly more time for the paperboy than delivering 25 newspapers, because they all would be along the same route that he travels anyway. This logic was clear to me, and so I studied the manual thoroughly because I was eager to double my earnings from $10 to $20 a month.

The The Newspaper Carrier's Handbook explained that this job would give me business experience that I could develop positively throughout my life.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.)

In the photograph on the left page, we see the young paperboy dressed in a suit and tie, fantasizing about becoming a successful businessman as an adult.

The following pages depicted the paperboy scouting for prospects on his route and then approaching those prospects to sell subscriptions.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

Soon after the second visit of the delivery manager, I became a paperboy. I accompanied Ken Uhlig on the route for about a week in order to familiarize myself with it, and from then on I delivered the route by myself.

Of course, I also was given a Route List, which stated the name and address of each customer and whether the customer wanted daily and/or Sunday deliveries. Below is a Route List that my brother Steve has saved from his own route.

Click here to see the full list in larger sizes.

Pictures of the Sylwester House on Faculty Lane

Here are three old pictures that were found by Steve Sylwester and scanned by Liesel Sylwester. They show our house on Faculty Lane (Faculty Lane House 01) in mid-1964, shortly before the house was moved.

The above picture has been uploaded to this Flickr webpage. This shows Steve Sylwester sitting on the railing and probably Larry Sylwester standing on the stair.

The above picture has been uploaded to this Flickr webpage. Printing on this picture records that the it was made in July 1964.

The above picture has been uploaded to this Flickr webpage. The house's foundations have two rectangular holes that were made in order to pick up and move the house.

On each Flickr webpage you can click on the ALL SIZES click-point above the picture to see the picture in larger and smaller sizes.

Learning Spanish from Señor Schmieding

Late in life, Herman Schmieding decided to learn Spanish, and then he decided to teach Spanish to his sixth-grade class. I think our class, which he taught in 1963-1964, was the first or second class that learned Spanish from him. I don't know whether he continued teaching Spanish to the following two classes before he retired.

He told our class that he could have taught us German instead, but that he thought that Spanish would be more useful for us in the lives we probably would lead. That might be true, but I think that the primary reason was that he himself was more interested in the Spanish at that time in his own life.

He did not teach us very much Spanish. We didn't have textbooks, and learning Spanish was not part of the school's curriculum. He didn't teach us Spanish every day, and when he did teach it, he didn't spend any more than about 15 minutes on his lesson.

He taught us the meanings, spellings and pronunciations of a few common words and phrases. I still remember the following:

Buenas dias,Señor Schmieding ¿Cómo está Usted?
Good day, Mr. Schmieding, how are you?

Estoy bien, gracias. Y usted?
I am well, thank you. And you?

¿Qué día es hoy?
What day is today?

Hoy es lunes ... martes ... miércoles ... jueves ... viernes ... sábado ... domingo.
Today is Monday ... Tuesday ... Wednesday ... Thursday ... Friday ... Saturday ... Sunday.

Por favor, cuente hasta diez.
Please count to ten.

Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Muchas gracias.
Thanks a lot.

He made only an experimental attempt to teach us some Spanish grammar. One day he passed out to each student a mimeographed sheet that introduced grammatical gender. Every noun is masculine or feminine (even if it seemed neuter to us English-speakers) and the possessive pronoun had to match that gender. So, for example, the word libro (book) is masculine and the word pluma (pen) is feminine, so we were supposed to say un libro and el libro but una pluma and la pluma.

After only one or two such grammar lessons, however, he abandoned his efforts to teach us grammar. He recognized that he could not teach us grammar in occasional 15-minute lessons. He continued only to teach us various word groups, such as niño - niña (boy - girl), and desayuno, almuerzo y cena (breakfast, lunch and dinner). We never progressed significantly beyond that primitive level of instruction. In the end, we learned only a smattering of Spanish.

Even at that time when I was only about eleven years old, however, I was impressed that Mr. Schmieding himself had decided to learn Spanish when he was in his sixties and nearing his retirement. His motives for his decision and for his expenditure of time and effort intrigued me. As I recall, he mentioned that he had attended summer-school classes at the University of Nebraska to study Spanish, and he mentioned that he intended to travel (or already had traveled) on vacation to Mexico to practice his conversation skills.

A year or two after I finished sixth grade, I had to go to Mr. Schmieding's house on some non-school day to drop something off or pick something up. I can't remember what this task was about; perhaps it had something to do with my job delivering newspapers. This was the only time I ever went to his house, and I was there only for one minute at the door. I came to his door and knocked, and he came to the door, and I gave him whatever the item was or he gave me whatever the item was, and then I left.

What suprised me in this incident and what I still do remember is that he came to the door wearing a brightly-colored, floral-design, short-sleeved tropical shirt. I normally would call it a Hawaiian shirt, but in this context I suppose it actually must have been a Mexican shirt. Also, his hair was not groomed as tightly as usual; he was not wearing any hair pomade, so his hair was a little tousled. Any of you who had Mr. Schmieding as a sixth-grade teacher can imagine my surprise. We students saw him only as a very formal man. It seems that his Spanish-language hobby stimulated a different part of his personality than his students normally saw.

---

After I graduated from the eighth grade, I began to teach myself Russian as a hobby. Looking back now, I think my new hobby was encouraged by Mr. Schmieding's example, although I was not conscious of that association at the time. He had not given me any useful foundation for language study or inspired me with any passion for language study, but he had showed me that a person can teach himself a foreign language on his own. That was the seed that he planted in my mind that eventually became fruitful in my own life.

The idea of learning Russian occurred to me the first time when I was browsing through books in the children's room in the Concordia College library, when I was in about seventh grade. I happened to find a book about the history of Soviet espionage in the United States. This book claimed that in order to train its spies to speak English well, the Soviet Government had set up a small, artificial-American town where everyone spoke English and followed an American way of life. The spy students would live in this artificial-town for many months and thus perfect their English-speaking and other spy skills. Of course, this information captured my imagination, and I intensely envied those Russian spies who enjoyed such an unusual and fascinating experience. I imagined how wonderful my own life would become if I ever were selected to learn Russian in an artificial-Russian town that the US Government likewise might maintain in some remote location to train its own spies.

I soon adjusted this fantasy from a spy scenario to a Lutheran-missionary scenario. I figured that if I could learn to speak Russian like a native, then I should sneak into the Soviet Union and encourage and guide the underground church there and convert individual Russians to Christianity.

My fantasies about learning Russian for secret purposes remained idle and inert until my family was visited by my Aunt Marion and Uncle Hal in Seward in the early summer of 1966. Aunt Marion was not my biological aunt, but she had been informally adopted into my mother's family and grew up as a quasi-sister of my mother. After I was born, Aunt Marion became my godmother, a responsibility that she took seriously. She tried to develop a close relationship with me, and I tried to reciprocated her effort.

Aunt Marion's husband Hal (my Uncle Hal) had served in the US Navy for a few years and had received Russian-language training during his service. It so happened that during their visit to us in Seward in the early summer of 1966, the movie The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was opening in the movie theaters, and of course Uncle Hal wanted to see it, because (he had read) it had a Navy theme and had a lot of Russian dialogue. The movie was not showing yet in the Seward movie theater, but it had opened in movie theaters in Lincoln. Being the dutiful wife and godmother, Aunt Marion wanted to make Uncle Hal and me happy but doubted that we would want to travel all the way to Lincoln to see a movie, but after some discussion Hal and I agreed that we indeed were willing to travel so far. I wanted to spend time with Aunt Marion and Uncle Hal, and I also was intrigued by the opportunity to see a movie where there would be a lot of Russians talking.

So, we traveled to Lincoln and watched the movie, and we all liked it very much. The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming is a delightful movie. The movie was nominated for four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor (Alan Arkin), Best Film Editing and Best Screenplay Adapted From Another Medium). I have seen it five or six times in my life, and I always enjoyed it.

The movie depicts a comic situation that develops after a Russian submarine accidentally runs aground on a remote beach in Massachusetts. Nine members of the crew sneak ashore to find and borrow a motorboat to use secretly to push or tug the submarine off of the beach. Despite their efforts to avoid detection, the Russians soon are noticed by some inhabitants of a nearby small town, who deduce mistakenly that the Russians are part of a major Soviet invasion of the United States. Eventually, however, the Russians explain their accidental grounding, and the Americans recognize that these Soviet sailors simply want to get away without causing problems. The Americans help the Soviet sailors get away, which is a happy ending.

The movie does include a lot of Russian dialogue, because the Russian characters do speak Russian among themselves. Since the role are played by American actors, the Russian is not spoken with native accents, but the words are Russian. After the movie, Uncle Hal told me that he understood most of the Russian dialogue, which impressed me strongly.

I decided that I would teach myself Russian, so the next time that I traveled to Lincoln with my family, I bought a Berlitz teach-yourself-Russian book and began to teach myself. I never had any audio help -- records, tape recordings, a real Russian speaker -- to help me with my pronunciation. I just sounded out the words as best I could from the book's written descriptions of pronunciation.

I kept at this hobby on-and-off for the next three years. I would work at it for a few months and then drop it for a few months. My family moved to Eugene, Oregon, after my sophomore year in high school. At my new high school I had one study hour every day, and I usually spent that time studying my Russian.

Between my junior and senior year in high school, I attended a first-year Russian class in summer school at the University of Oregon. Then during my senior year I commuted to the Univesity every day to attend the second-year Russian class. After I graduated from high school, I enrolled in the University as a full-time student and continued to study Russian, although I considered myself to be a pre-med major. During my sophomore year at the University, I decided not to become a doctor, and I became a Slavic Languages major.

In order to graduate with a degree in Slavic Languages, I had to study one other Slavic language and either German or French, so I studied also Czech and German.

In the summer of 1971, I attended a two-month Russian-language program based at the University of Leningrad and then traveled around in Czechoslovakia by myself for one month. In the following summer of 1972 I attended a two-month Czech-language program at the University of Brno in Czechoslovakia and then traveled around in Poland for a month.

During the following years I taught first-year Russian, first-year Czech and first-year Polish at the University of Oregon as a graduate student and eventually earned a Master of Art's degree in Slavic Languages.

In 1978 I joined the US Air Force and then served for 14 years in Intelligence. During 12 of those years I served in the organization that interviewed immigrants and defectors for the US Intelligence Community.

I left the US Air Force in 1992 and then worked the next decade translating documents for the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, which investigated and prosecuted former Nazi collaborators who had immigrated from East Europe to the USA after World War Two. During that decade I translated hundreds of documents from German, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and Belorussian.

---

Perhaps if Mr. Schmieding had not made his brief effort to teach us Spanish in the sixth-grade, then I would not have bought that teach-yourself-Russian book a couple years later. My life then would not have followed the course that it has followed. He planted one small seed in my mind, and that seed grew and gave me the main direction in my life.

---

Steve Sylwester commented:

Mr. Schmieding taught my class — his last class — Spanish, too. I was a poor (read: uninspired) student, but I did learn the greetings. Years later, I was bold enough to greet Mr. Schmieding in Spanish one day, and then the inevitable happened: he responded to me in Spanish, and I had no idea what he was saying. We both laughed about it, and that was the last time I ever saw him.

Toy Guns

Soon after my family moved to Faculty Lane -- when I was about eight years old in 1960 -- I got my first cap gun, which looked something like this.

At that time the state of the art for cap guns was ammo in the form of roll caps.

The gunman opened his pistol's ammo chamber, fit the roll over an internal wheel, and closed the chamber. Then every time you pulled the trigger, the roll would advance the next cap, and the hammer would hit that cap, causing a bang and releasing the smell of burnt gunpowder.

Oh, how I loved the smell of that burnt gunpowder! The smell is still a vivid memory.

We boys enjoyed that bang and smell so much that we would unravel a roll out onto the sidewalk and hit the caps with a rock.

Cap guns were mostly pistols, as I remember. Sure, there were cap-gun rifles too, but they were far less common than pistols, as I remember.

---

I think (I'm not sure) that this fascination with exploding caps is the reason why my brother Steve and my neighbor Dave Hackmann began to play with fire underneath the porch of our Sylwester home on Faculty Lane. (Some other kids might have participated, but I remember only Steve and Dave.) There was a dirt-floor, dark space underneath our porch, and I suppose we began by going into that space and shooting cap guns in order to see the sparks. Then we would have progressed to unraveling a cap roll onto a brick and hitting it with a rock to see lots more sparks.

Eventually we would make a small fire on the dirt floor and hold the ends of sticks in the fire. Then we would draw and write on the under-the-porch walls, using the burnt ends of the sticks as charcoal pencils. After we were done doing that for a while, then we would always extinguish the fire very carefully.

Of course, when my parents found out that we were doing this, they got all hysterical about how we might have burned down our house. But as I have told my parents a million times, WE WOULD ALWAYS EXTINGUISH THE FIRE VERY CAREFULLY!! So there was really nothing to worry about.

I clearly remember us setting these fires and writing with the carcoal on the walls under our porch at Faculty Lane, but I can't remember how or why we started doing so. The only explanation that makes sense to me now is that we started going under the porch in order to see the sparks from the cap rolls.

---

Pistols were fun because we could practice quick-draw techniques. Doing a quick-draw and firing a cap gun was much more realistic and difficult than doing a quick-draw and just yelling "BANG."

The television show The Rifleman starred a cowboy, Lukas McCain, who did quick-draws with his rifle and always won his gun fights. In every episode, he would kill a few bad guys by quick-drawing his rifle faster than they could quick-draw their pistols.

We kids were too little, though, to quick-draw a rifle. Lucas McCain was about 6'5" tall, so a rifle was relatively small for him to handle. His son Mark McCain -- like we Faculty Lane kids -- was big enough only to fire a rifle by the normal method. The only firearm we could quick-draw was a pistol.

---

In Seward there were essentially two kinds of boys. One kind of boy had parents who really trusted and loved them, parents who really wanted them to have fun, parents who did not want their own boys to be jealous of other boys, parents who knew how to raise boys right, parents who did not want their boys to cry themselves to sleep every night -- parents who let their boys have beebe guns. The other kind of boy unfortunately had parents who did not let their boys have beebe guns. I was the second kind of boy.

Beebe guns were always rifles, as I remember. A boy with a beebe gun could shoot at a target -- such as a piece of cardboard nailed to a tree -- and really test and improve his aim. Then as he improved his aim, the boy could shoot pesky birds that were sitting on the lawns or in the trees.

Beebes were cheap. A cylinder container of beebes held dozens of beebes.

I liked all the fuss involved with removing the beebes from these cylinder containers and loading them into the beebe guns. If you didn't do it right, then the beebes might fall down all over the place. So, you had to be fussy about doing it, and my heart broke every time I watched all this fussing being done by a boy who did own a beebe gun. How careful, responsible and grown-up he had to be, compared to me with my childish, stupid toy rifle!

My friend Jim Hardt was in the Boy Scouts, and he subscribed to Boys Life and another magazine or two of the same type. These magazines had a lot of advertisements for beebe guns, and when I visited him and browsed through his magazines, I always studied these beebe-gun advertisements with much envy.

Parents who did not let their kids have beebe guns always had the same excuse -- we might shoot someone's eye out. That excuse was absurd, in my opinion. The chance that you might hit another kid in his eye with a beebe was infinitesimally small. Even if the other kid was being a jerk and deserved to be shot, I would have shot him in his arm or back, not in his eye. Lots of kids -- like Toby Beck and Danny Janzow on our own Faculty Lane -- had beebe guns and didn't shoot anybody's eye out.

---

My Dad (I'm sure my Mom had nothing to do with this) did make me very happy one Christmas -- our first or second Christmas on Faculty Lane -- by giving me and my brother Steve drill-team rifles as presents, which was a total surprise. I think my Dad was tired of my nagging him for a beebe gun, so he figured he could divert us with drill-team rifles.

Our drill-team rifles were essentially high-quality toy rifles, made of real wood and metal, not of plastic. They came with illustrated instruction manuals that showed how to handle and manipulate them in armed drills. The manuals showed pictures of kids who belonged to clubs where they wore uniforms and did armed drills in parades. I wasn't able to find any old pictures of such rifle-drill clubs on the Internet, but I did find this video of a current club that shows the concept. The essential differences are that the club members in the video do not wear uniforms and include some girls.

Steve and I tried to teach ourselves rife-drill from our manuals for a while, but we didn't have any mentors or other kids to practice with, so we never developed the skills. Eventually we just used our drill-team rifles as combat rifles when we played War in the neighborhood. We just pointed the rifles and yelled "BANG BANG" as we ambushed and killed the other kids.

---

My brief exposure to rifle drill did continue to intrigue me, however. During 1962 and 1963 NBC had a situation comedy called McKeever and the Colonel about life in a military school for boys, and I always watched it with great interest. Whenever I saw the cadets doing rifle drills on this TV show, I envied those boys because they really were able to be in a rifle-drill team.

Many years later, I joined the US Air Force and went through basic military training first as an enlisted troop and then again as an officer cadet. On both occasions I learned and practiced march drill, which I loved a lot. We USAF pukes never drilled with rifles like the other military services, but just doing military march drill was always fun.

Audio-Visual Equipment

A Teacher's basic audio-visual device is the blackboard. The blackboard's visual advantage is that its large size enables the teacher to write words and draw illustrations on a large scale that the entire class can see easily. The blackboard's audio advantage is that the teacher can use his hand's knuckles or a long, wooden pointer to hit the most important markings on the blackboard so that the loud impacts focus entire class's attention on particular concepts. However, the blackboard has several weaknesses:

While writing on or pointing at or knocking on the blackboard, the teacher is looking at the blackboard and not at the class.

The teacher spends class time writing and drawing on the blackboard.

The teacher's writing is hurried, sketchy and messy. Drawings are primitive and notional.

The blackboard does not show photographs.

Most of the markings are erased soon from the blackboard.

Chalk is messy.

Those of us who attended St John Elementary School at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s witnessed the introduction of new instructional technologies into our classrooms. We watched our teachers struggle to use slide projectors, film projectors, tape recorders and televisions in an educationally efficient and effective manner.

We watched Educational Technology -- we'll call this baby Eddie Tecky -- trying to learn how to walk. Since we ourselves were still children, we watched with passive amusement as if Eddie were our own stupid, clumsy baby brother. We watched Eddie stand up slowly and then step forward tentatively -- and then fall face-down onto the floor.

When I began to attend St John Elementary School in third grade, in 1960, classroom slide projectors were at about the stage of technological development shown in the following image:

The teacher would stand behind the projector and feed one slide into a metal frame, push the frame so that the slide was inside the projector. The slide that had been in the projector was pushed out the other side. While the class looked at the projection of one slide, the teacher removed the previous slide from the frame and put the next slide into the frame. Basically, the teacher had to insert and remove each slide individually as the teacher conducted the slide show.

With this kind of slide projector, the teacher easily could make mistakes -- insert a slide upside down or backwards or insert a series of slides in the wrong order. Any such mistake disrupted the presentation. (Slide projectors with reliable carousels that held and fed a prepared series of slides conveniently into the projector became available on the market in about 1964.)

I have only a few, fleeting memories of teachers using a slide projector in classroom instruction. I remember seeing a couple slide shows of Lutheran morality lessons. These were short stories of photographs of posed puppets, perhaps Davey and Goliath or something similar.

I remember seeing also some slide shows illustrating some arithmetic lessons and showing foreign countries. For us kids in those years, these slide shows were colorful and novel. I marveled at the colors. We had only black-and-white televisions in those days. So, a large, brightly-colored photograph or illustration projected largely onto a big screen was impressive.

I think, though, that the teachers soon lost interest in showing such slide presentations. Operating the projector was troublesome. The lights had to be turned off, which was a condition conducive to mischief. And the slides cost the school money, which the teachers had to justify.

Teachers showed films more often than slide shows. There was a special room in the basement of St John where our teachers took us to watch films. By the time the teacher took us all down to the room, seated us all, threaded the film into the projector, showed the 15-minute film, and then led us all back to the classroom, an entire hour was spent. When teachers showed the films, there were frequent problems with the film misfeeding or breaking.

Each class had one or two boys who knew how to thread the film into the projector. Whenever the film misfed and jammed, a know-how boy opened the side of the projector and rethreaded the film into the mechanism.

There were two films that I saw at St John and still remember. One film showed track-and-field techniques -- in particular how to broad-jump, high-jump and hurdle-jump. I remember it because these actions were shown in slow-motion, and the flexing of the athletes' leg muscles looked grotesque. The other film was about the geography, people and animals of Australia. I remember it because the Australians' accents were so thick and the film's sound quality was so bad that nobody in our class could understand anything. It was like listening to Martians jabbering.

St John also had a tape recorder or two. I remember that we used them occasionally, but I can't remember what we used them for. Perhaps some of the slide-show presentations were packaged with tape recordings that the teacher played while showing the slides.

The only practical use of the tape recorders that I remember is that my Dad borrowed one sometimes so that our family could record an "audio letter" to my grandparents (my Mom's parents), who lived in Nigeria. Everyone in our family would talk into the tape recorder until we filled a tape, and then we would send the tape to our grandparents. A couple months later we would receive a tape recording from them and would listen to it. (We tried this with our cousins' families too, but we kept it up only with those grandparents.)

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In a recent post, I wrote about summer workshops that Concordia College professors conducted in order to teach their college students how to teach elementary-school students. I have a strong memory of one such workshop, about art and music, that was conducted by Reinhold Marxhausen and a music professor (I don't remember which music professor). I think I attended this summer workshop when I was about ten years old, so in about 1961 or 1962.

When I attended this workshop, I did not recognize its entire scope and purpose. Now, however, I suppose that the workshop was a practicum for college students attending summer classes to earn academic credit in art and music education for elementary-school pupils. I remember the workshop as lasting about two hours every weekday for two weeks, but the college students' summer class probably lasted four or so weeks.

I suppose that the professors had a major problem assembling enough guinea pigs children for these workshops, and so they asked their fellow faculty members to persuade their children to particpate. I don't think I especially wanted to participate, because I was having a lot of fun already without wasting my precious summer time on some stupid workshop. Of course, a lot of other faculty kids were manipulated likewise into attending, so I cheered up when I saw so many other kids there too. (I think any kid in Seward could have participated in any of these summer workshops.)

The workshop was conducted in the art classrooms in the basement of Weller Hall. There probably were about 30 elementary-school kids of various ages, about a half-dozen college students, and the two professors.

On the first day, the professors showed us a musical, abstract film and told us that we kids too would make a film of the same type. The film was around two minutes long and showed a lot of rapidly changing colors and shapes. The film was accompanied by a tape recording of non-melodic, jazzy, mostly percussion music. The film was amusing, because its visual and audio components were obviously random but seemed to match well.

The professors then revealed to us how the film was made. A blank film strip had been colored manually with magic-marker pens. For example, a colored line drawn lengthwise through the middle of a section of the film would be see as a vertical line on the screen. If the line were drawn in a wavy manner, then the vertical line on the screen would shift right and left. These lengthwise colored lines were the main method of drawing onto the film.

Then the professors revealed to us how the music was made. They had crafted several odd instruments, mostly out of junky objects. Most of the instruments were of a percussion kind -- you hit them to make various drum-like and bell-like sounds. There were a few metal pipes that served as simple wind instruments. There were a few string instruments. The teachers then used these invented, hand-made instruments to make some jazzy music that they tape-recorded and then played back to accompany the film.

Then the professors explained to us that we kids would make our own film and music. Each student was given a length of blank film that would comprise about ten seconds of the complete film. After all the film lengths had been illustrated, they would be spliced together into one film. Since there were about 30 students, the entire film would last about 300 seconds, which was about five minutes.

The students also had to invent their own hand-made musical instruments and record their own ten seconds of music into a tape recorder. The film and music sections would follow the same order so that, in theory, each student's film section would match his tape recording.

Also, the kids were encouraged to decorate their musical instruments. They could paint them or wrap them with paper or paper mache or whatever else they thought of doing. There were lots of art supplies available for us to use.

The kids could work individually or could organize themselves into small groups to illustrate their film lengths. For example, if two kids wanted to work together, then they could splice their two film lengths together right away and record 20 seconds of music together. Most of the kids did organize themselves into groups.

I preferred to work individually, because I immediately had a bright idea and did not want to share the artistic direction and credit with anyone else. I spent most of my two weeks drawing tiny, inticate shapes onto each frame of my strip of film with magic-marker pens. Then in the last two days I made a string instrument with a cigar box and some rubber bands and tried to compose and play a bluesy melody.

My part of this project was a total fiasco. When the entire, spliced-together film was played with the continuous tape recording, neither my part of the film nor my part of the recording were recognizable. Other kids who had drawn fewer and simpler lines on the film and who had simply pounded objects did recognize their parts of the product. Also, they had spent most of their time decorating their instruments, so they had something interesting to take home.

Although I wasted all my time foolishly on this project, I did learn from my mistake. I learned that I should have spent more time studying my tools and media and then doing a project that worked within the limitations and emphasized the unique capabilities of those tools and media. My mistake was that I started with a fixation on an idealized final product that was not achievable with my tools and media.

Looking back, I think that Professor Marxhausen and the music professor were undermining the college students' belief in the instruction they were receiving in their pedagogical classes about the practical use of audio-visual equipment. The workshop was kind of a two-week mockery of such instructional equipment and prepared instructional materials. Think about it:

The professors used film that was completely blank.

The professors cut the film into pieces and distributed the pieces to the kids.

The professors told the kids to draw on the film with magic markers.

The professors told the kids to make music with pieces of junk, mostly by hitting the junk pieces together loudly.

The professors told the kids that visually decorating their musical instruments was just as important -- maybe even more important -- than using them to play music.

The essential idea was that the drawing on the film and the music seemed to match, even though both the drawing and the music were random.

The workshop was an exercise in Marshal McLuhan's idea that "the medium is the message." This exercise was a lesson for those college students and for us kids, if we had enough sense to recognize and ponder that message. Study and experiment with your tools and medium before you fixate on an application or result.

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After the slide projector and film projector, the next development was the overhead projector.

Here is a relevant excerpt from the Wikipedia article about overhead projectors:

It [the overhead projector] began to be widely used in schools and businesses in the late 1950s and early 1960s. .... In 1957 the United States' first Federal Aid to Education program stimulated overhead sales which remained high up to the late 1990s and into the 21st Century.

The overhead projector facilitates an easy low-cost interactive environment for educators. Teaching materials can be pre-printed on plastic sheets, upon which the educator can directly write using a non-permanent, washable color marking pen. This saves time, since the transparency can be pre-printed and used repetitively, rather than having materials written manually before each class.

The overhead is typically placed at a comfortable writing height for the educator and allows the educator to face the class, facilitating better communication between the students and teacher. The enlarging features of the projector allow the educator to write in a comfortable small script in a natural writing position rather than writing in an overly large script on a blackboard and having to constantly hold his arm out in midair to write on the blackboard.

When the transparency sheet is full of written or drawn material, it can simply be replaced with a new, fresh sheet with more pre-printed material, again saving class time vs a blackboard that would need to be erased and teaching materials rewritten by the educator. Following the class period, the transparencies are easily restored to their original unused state by washing off with soap and water.

During the mid-1960s my Dad wrote a justification for a government grant to establish a facility in Seward where teachers could experiment and work with audio-visual equipment and materials. My Dad's proposal was approved, the government granted the money, and the facility was established in downtown Seward, about a half block from the town's central square. There were a couple occasions when I was accompanying my Dad on an errand and we dropped by to visit that facility for a while. There always were quite a few teachers in the facility during my visits. I didn't recognize most of the teachers, so they probably came from the public schools of Seward and of surrounding towns.

The inside of the facility looked kind of like a modern Kinkos shop. There were several large tables with large surfaces and various tools for cutting, pasting and combining sheets of paper or plastic. I think the most important equipment devices were laminating machines. The main idea was to arrange cut-out letters, numbers and shapes onto plastic sheets and then to apply heat and pressure to attach those items permanently to the plastic sheets, which then would be shown with overhead projectors. The facility essentially enabled teachers to make their own big slides for instruction with overhead projectors.

The teachers would greet my Dad and say that the facility was great. I suppose, though, that the facility was used mostly by only a small portion of teachers who were wanted to make a lot of slides and were willing to spend the time and energy to do so. I did not notice that any of my own teachers at St John made and used such slides -- or used an overhead projector at all. In any case, the facility closed after a couple of years, because the government grant was not extended.

Robert Sylwester added:

I was one of three Concordia faculty members involved in that project. The other two were Darrel Meinke and Jack Middendorf. Jack (the Concordia AV prof) was the real brains behind the project. Darrel was the Concordia librarian and so was integrally involved in the media project. My major task was to actually write the grant and the final report -- so don't give me any more credit than I deserve. Jack did all the wheeling/dealing with the local school administrators and government. I think it was an NDEA [National Defense Education Act] grant, but my memory is hazy.

It wasn't a big deal in my life or work. I think I got involved because I was Director of the Campus Lab School (St Johns) -- director, not principal (Bob Lemke). As I recall, several of the St Johns teachers used the resources of the program, but again, it's all kind of hazy after 40+ years.

Jack Middendorf was a constant wheeler dealer and actually brought in a lot of federal money to Concordia, something no on else had done before he arrived n the scene. Jack always got others to go along with him on his enterprises. I was a friend of his who could write good text, so he got me to write the grant proposals. It always paid well if we got the grant, so I did it. Jack is still a friend -- we email back and forth.

The project was done principally in conjunction with the local public school systems. As I recall, it also involved a research project that gathered information on AV knowledge/usage/etc by regional teachers. The project hired Will Robinson, a cousin of mine who Jack knew, to serve as director.

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At Concordia High School, history teacher Ron Stadsklev used an overhead projector constantly. He did not normally use individual, prepared slides, however. Rather, he attached a huge roll of slide plastic to the overhead projector's body and then fed the plastic across the projector surface continually and wrote notes continually onto the plastic as he talked. He saved the plastic he had written onto, and then would show his notes again when he reviewed his lectures before a test or to show the students after a test how he had taught a certain point. I never saw any other teacher use an overhead project with this method, but I think this method was very effective.

Mr. Stadsklev also used a slide projector more than any other of my teachers. He did not use it to show prepared instructional presentations, however. Rather, he used it to show photographs that he himself had taken. Before he came to Seward to teach, he had spent a year traveling and camping in Europe (and South America?) with his family in a van. During these travels he had taken a lot of photographs (he also took a lot of photographs while participating in auto-rally competitions), and he sometimes showed them in his history classes so that we could see places in Europe that he was lecturing about.)