Episode 33: Summers in KS

On this podcast, Seth and Joel discuss summer experiences growing up in their KS communities. Thank you for listening!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to the Flyover Guys, a show by two middle-aged Midwestern fellas who are just trying to figure out what was, what is, and what will be about aspects of American culture from our little plot of soil here in the Heartlands. So jump on board with this week's episode, Steph, and I'm Joel, and we're getting into lazy summer days. So we decided to tackle a podcast on summer memories. Um maybe, I don't know, how would you describe your summers? I mean, what's maybe that's just a simple way to start it? How would you describe your summers?

SPEAKER_00 0:37

I grew up on the farm, so there was a lot of stuff to do when school was out. Um we kind of shifted gears into just chores, and in the summertime, a new season would always bring on like new work and stuff like that on the farm. So um, but we can kind of get into it later on. But it also meant the the county fair, and I've mentioned uh 4-H, so that's right, you're 4-H baseball work, 4-H stuff, and then whatever free time with friends and some other activities. But but I will say it was always hot and dry and windy.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Yeah, yeah. Um, well, you said it in almost that one sentence. Uh, you talked about doing work and and then playing uh sports or or and then being with friends. That's I think that's gonna be try to, is that right? We're gonna try to break it out into work and play and friends and family as our three categories. So I think one of the hard things to do on this about summer memories is it's almost like pre-teen days versus teen days, because I think it's almost like you live two different childhoods. Um, one where you have less adulting to do. Um, but again, maybe that speaks to my experience compared to yours. But I I think once I start to get about 15 or so, I have summer jobs. And so I kind of think a pre, you know, 13, 14 years old, and then that you know, 13 through 18-year-old range, that second range. So we'll try to break it down that way. So we have our three categories, and since it's summer, it seems only natural that we should probably start with being at play. Um, so take me through like uh what was play for you in the summer or having fun, if that's another way to say it.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Yeah, there was like organized fun, like the baseball baseball team where we were heavy into playing our league games during the weekdays, and then on weekends we would travel to tournaments state, regional, and if we qualified for a national tournament, which my team did twice when I was in uh middle school. So what league were you in? I played at West Urban. You remember? I mean, we were at West Urban, but uh but we went heavy to Oklahoma, Topeka, Kansas City literally every week every weekend we had at least a double header, like a friendly, I guess, or an actual tournament where we were playing. So uh that was that was like the organized play. Plus, my like I said, my my older siblings also played, and and I was bat boy for my oldest brother's team, and we traveled, they all traveled, and we all played at West Urban or Twin Rivers, the softball that was that was right next to it, like the sister league for softball players. Um they were both on this basically the same plot of land, uh just softball complex and baseball complex. Uh so we would be there and then we would be traveling, and that was mainly in the evenings. Uh but during the day we would try to play at home. I was the youngest of siblings, so we would make up games. Like my parents didn't really buy us video games. We weren't really video game families, so we would just play, we would always come up with something new and just play it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Do you have any memories specifically, like good, bad, ugly memories? Let's start with what you were saying with baseball. Uh because they shape they they cast a long shadow on our life, right or wrong. Do you have any memories when you were playing when you were little um that have stuck with you from playing baseball?

SPEAKER_00 4:37

Um as far as the you know, when I coached, I always would tell my players, this was basket I'd coach basketball, and and and I really tried to emphasize a lot of team building and activities outside of practice and games, because I would always say, hey, if you build a good team and you have good teammates, your memories when you look back 10, 20, 30 years from now, are always gonna be that other stuff you did with your teammates, not the actual games. A lot of times. Yeah. Uh so I remember a lot of uh I became really good friends with a couple of the people on my baseball team. So we would um have sleepovers the night before tournaments, and then I would always ride with them to the tournament. So I I remember the sleepovers more what what we did at that rather than the actual tournaments, tournaments themselves. And and then like um the other kid that I became friends with, his he also had siblings. So a lot of times he and I would have to travel by ourselves to the tournament with our coach. So we would always room together and have and we became really good friends because our parents weren't there, so we were always like roommates. And he ended up being a major league baseball player, uh pitcher in the major league. So so I always can say that one of my good friends growing up on my baseball team was a first-round draft pick. So he and I became pretty good friends, and um he actually went to Wellington High School and stuff, which is is this Nate Robertson? Nate Cornejo.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Norton Nate Cornejo, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so he and I would always room together uh because our our parents a lot of times were going to other siblings tournaments, so we were kind of stuck together. Um yeah, so a lot of that stuff stays with me a lot more than the actual games and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

So what you're telling me is your baseball career didn't quite go the distance of corners. Yeah, not even close. Not yeah. Well, no, that's cool. That's cool. Um I was never see uh growing up, we all thought West Durban was like the major leagues of Wichita baseball. I was always in the single or double A of Blessed Sacramento uh League, which uh if I go preteen, I I think of it was about two and a half blocks I would walk in College Hill over to the field, which is over at uh Quentin and Douglas. And so I would walk in my uniform or ride my bike over way too early. So if it's a 6:30 game, I'm probably there at 5.30 playing on the playground in my uniform, and I just felt like the coolest kid walking to the game by myself. And then, you know, you play in the game, and then I just have this memory afterwards of my parents taking us to Dairy Queen, which would have been over on um near Kellogg and Oliver. It does it, obviously, none of that exists anymore, and collecting uh the hot fudge Sunday baseball helmets and trying to get as many of those, and so it's just that real distinct memory of playing one or two games a week. And I don't know if it was fourth grade or whatever, I tried West Urban, and I remember we had to play a 10 o'clock at night game, which I was like crying going to the game because I'm like, I just want to go to bed. I I I'm that kid who crawled up the stairs at 9 p.m. And I remember playing in a game and seeing a curveball for the first time and swinging maybe 12 swings and having four strikeouts and just bawling going home, going, I hate this. I cannot who's throwing curveballs, what the heck kind of pitches? And I think that was my one dalliance with with West Durban before I I ran from that because uh I don't know. I I I was not good enough uh for for the major leagues of of when we were that little. Um so I never did tournaments or anything like that. That what you're that's a very different kind of existence. But it's it's pretty common nowadays, honestly. Yeah. Um as opposed to just the church league where you go out and you play. I bet we maybe played 12 games a year, but it felt like the biggest 12 nights of the summer, you know.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

I I spent way too much time playing baseball, you know. And that's and that's one thing that I I think everybody should emphasize is just uh have fun and don't take sports too seriously because we tend to put a little too much time and money into some of that stuff and not really focus on the uh the other parts of summer, like just playing with your friends, which reminds me, did you have a slip and slide growing up?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Neighbors did. I don't think I don't think we ever did. Um it would always be you would go a couple blocks over and jump on somebody's trampoline, or you go down the street for a slip and slide. I mean, I I think our big thing in the summer was um there were so many kids in our neighborhood, and so you would organize kick the can or games like that, um, particularly in the evening. And you just run through people's house and then through their backyards. And I mean, it is kind of that existence where I think today of how many of my neighbors I've been in their house, and I bet in our little neighborhood I've been into three of our neighbors' house. And I remember on our street, we lived on the 200 block of Yale, and there's probably, I don't know, 15 houses on that block. I bet I was in 13 of the houses at some point. And you're just you're just in people's house and you're going through their backyards. And um, now maybe I wasn't invited into nine or ten of those houses, but I I think that was just kids ran in and around houses. That's just what you did. And for the one or two houses on the block, you're just like, stay away from that creepy house. But everything else was fair game. So yeah, what about you? Yeah, I you didn't have a full neighborhood.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

I didn't have a neighborhood, period. So you didn't have that at all. So that's why doing a lot of these things with my siblings was kind of what we did. But I remember one summer we tried to make our own slip and slide with like landscaping plastic that you can buy in a big long roll. And we had this we had this strip of like Bermuda grass, which was always softer, and we would we would see how long of a slip and slide that we can make on our own and get out the hose. And and so we became really good. I think it's almost like you laugh when you watch the NFL or things where like quarterbacks don't know how to slide correctly before they get tackled, and it's like, did they not have a slip and slide? Like we used to be able to everybody's supposed to dive head first, you know, and it just went so naturally with baseball with stealing it. So if I was kind of slow, so I didn't steal a lot of bases, but you know, pick off moves and you dive back or try to steal second and you just lay out, and then you forget that it's not a slip and slide, so you have like strawberries on your arms and your knees from trying to like go as hard as you can and dive like it's a slip and slide, but it's actually rock hard dirt. But yeah, that was always fun.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

We do we do sit as kind of a strange generation in that we grew up without too much. I mean, we had electronics in the sense of we could have you could have had an Atari or Nintendo, but it really wasn't a part of our lives the way it is today. Um I remember I getting a VCR and in the early 80s, we never had cable, and so some of the afternoons it would just be sitting there and like recording TV shows on VHS. Those are just kind of lazy summer activities of oh, I'm gonna put on Return of the Jedi on my VHS or Jewel of the Nile or Romancing the Stone or something like that, where you just kill two hours in the afternoon. But a lot of it was just m wandering around, riding a bike and seeing what you could find, which um again, I'm not trying to make a judgment of better or worse times. Just I I I hate to moralize and say how somehow that that we live in better times or worse times, but I will say that the idea of play was truly a lot more exploratory. You you just kind of wandered and see what see what you encountered, and sometimes I would say most of the time it was nothing, and every now and then you'd encounter something sinister or bad, and sometimes you'd stumble on something really cool, but I don't know. It's just that that's what I think of with summer is particularly once you get to July. Now that we're in early July, is the days are long and hot, and like you said, it's that that heat is oppressive. And so if you're not out and about with your friends, you're just kind of lounging and you're trying to find something to do to occupy your time. And I I think I a lot of it was reading books or looking at uh baseball cards or sticker books for baseball, uh something like that. Um just I I I don't remember. I it's you say that about hot and windy, and I just remember our house faced west, and in the mid-afternoon, my parents pulling the blinds down, so our house would be a little darker, and me putting my feet over the vent uh on the wall where air conditioning would come out, and just kind of sitting there, and you could kind of feel the heat radiate in off the west sun, the July sun, and then the cool. You just kind of pass out and fall asleep for a little bit and then go look at sticker books of Pete Inclavilia or Robin Yant or something like that. And it was just a it was a slow pace that I look at fondly uh now, but I also know that was probably just hours and hours of boredom, too.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Well, the difference between growing up in the city and growing up out in the country or on a farm is we had 40 acres of land and we had all kinds of livestock and animals and a huge garden. So my parents literally had like a list of chores that we had to do. And when I say chores, I mean like work on the farm.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

So it was not Okay, give take us through these. What are the chores you had to do? I I this is great.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

So we had um so we had cows and sheep, and we had chickens and turkeys and ducks. So you had to feed and water all of those animals multiple times a day. So so you had to uh it we had automatic waterers for like our pigs and our sheep, but we also had to like feed them grain and hay, and we had to c cleaning out the barn. Like you drive by a farm and you just oh how how nice they have a barn. Yeah. You have to clean that out by hand with shovels and like they would they don't have a bathroom, so they just there's manure everywhere, they trample on it when you have heavy livestock and herds of sheep. So you literally have like inches to almost a foot thick of just manure that gets trampled down that you have to scrape out with shovels. And what do you do with that? You put it in. We had a manure spreader, which was like a wagon that you would tow behind your truck in your field, and it would fling manure everywhere like fertilizer. So that's what we had to do, and that would take like two days to do that. Um you had to do that like every month.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

I got a whole litany of questions, so be ready. This is rapid fire questions because I've I've never been out lived on a farm. So did you ever milk cows?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

No, we didn't have dairy cattle, just we would we would slaughter one cow a year to eat the beef, our family would.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Did you ever watch that happen? The slaughtering of the cow?

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Um so we would take on Main Street in Valley Center, there's Richard's Cold Storage. It's still there today, it's a slaughterhouse. Okay. So we would load them up and we'd take them there in the evening, and you would drop them off, and we didn't ever see it. Uh, but because they would always do it early in the morning the next day, and they would just kill it with like that thing on No Country for Old Men that he walked around with that air. Oh, yeah, yeah. So they would just have that and they would one shot and it would basically kill the animal dead. And then they and then they would butcher the animal and clean it and package it, and you would go back in like a week later in the actual cords cold storage, they would have like meat lockers and stuff, and they'd have all of your meat labeled f in your baskets, and you would just load them up and take them back to your house, and we had like a big uh a deep freeze, a big freezer that would be like uh you would lift the lid up and you would store all your meat in there, like in your garage or yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

So did that change your relationship with the cow that because you knew you were gonna eat them?

SPEAKER_00 18:05

It changes your relationship with eating in general because you didn't waste like you literally were eating the animals that you raised. So you didn't just like eat a couple bites and throw it out and say out of sight, out of mind, or whatever. Like that was the cow that you raised to eat. So yeah, you didn't waste it. And it was kind of sad. You would name the cow.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Did you ever feel guilty?

SPEAKER_00 18:26

A little bit, yeah. It was sad, but that's a life. There were so many lessons that you learn on a farm. Like specifically, it's just like life and death right there. Um, but but to answer your question, we also did that with chickens. We would raise chickens, we would we would buy little chicks, like if you go into like one of the tractor supply company or something, you could buy little chicks every spring. We would raise those, it would take about a month and a half for them to get to the size of butchering, and we would load them all up and take them to a place in Bueller, Kansas, and there was a Vietnamese couple that we had slaughter all of our chickens, and you could sit there and watch them. So they would just slit their neck and hang them up over a barrel, and it would drain all the blood out, and then they would like steam them, and they had this machine that took all their feathers off, and then they uh they would dress them, they would take out all the organs and put them in a plastic bag and twist, tie it up, and then you had to take like coolers with ice, and then you would then that's at least this is the way we did it.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

And that was so you're taking the organs? They did the organs you're taking?

SPEAKER_00 19:41

No, they would throw the organs out. You could ask for, but you didn't want to take those home. No, they they cleaned and dressed the like they would dress it, like they would take everything out. So it's ready for bow ties? What do you mean dress? Like what open it up and take all the organs out.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

That's undressing, it seems like.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Uh but they did all that for you. So it's just like buying a uncooked chicken at the store. Okay. And then you would take it home and you'd put all that in your freezer with your meat. Or you would give it away. We would give it to family members too.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Did you name the chicken?

SPEAKER_00 20:18

No. No, you're talking like dozens. Like we would get like maybe 50 chickens slaughtered every year. Okay. And so the the worst part was you'd have to put them in cages, and then like I don't know if you've ever driven down the highway and saw like a semi-truck with either like cattle or chickens. You'll see them. You'll see them with chickens. Those, I mean, those are all Tyson trucks or s well, they don't. That's usually done all on one property, but but yeah, they you have to transport them to where you get them butchered if you raise them yourself. Um, and we had one time we had a cage open up and a chicken fly out on the highway. So we had to have to He made it. Yeah, it well. No, you got him. No, by the time it hit the highway. Jeez. Um, but yeah, we had to do that. Um as far as like other chores, I guess you could say.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Did you and your brothers ever use that manure and throw it at each other? Or I gotta think just through multiple guys, that stuff's gotta be used for price.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

So my okay, so cow patties in the wintertime, they you would have an actual cow patty or cow chips, and they and pioneers used to like burn that in the wintertime. Yeah. You could burn it as like a fuel source, but we would just have to pick it up and and get rid of it. But in the wintertime it would freeze, and it's almost like a frisbee, like an actual cow patty. And we used to have like wars with that when we would have to pick it up, uh, because you could just get a pair of gloves and just reach down and pick them up because they're frozen. But I was always I was the youngest and the stupidest, and I would fall for my oldest brother had it perfect where we would have like stand, I don't know, like 10 yards apart and see if you could hit each other, like a little war. Um, my brother would always throw one high in the air, and I would just look up at it, and then he would throw one straight at me while I was looking up and just nailing. And and when he gets I can't think anything worse than getting hit with a cow pen. And then when he gets really good at it, he gets so accurate on the first one that he throws straight up that you're like, I'm not falling for that. And that first one will fall down and hit you on the It's like, how'd you do that?

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Wasn't he a catcher for Wichita State?

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

So his accuracy was probably better than most. Oh my gosh, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

So as you could as you could tell, the work also turned into play. Like it would take us hours to complete something. We would get so sidetracked, and I mean, who throws poop at each uh manure at each other? I mean, that's just it's part of growing up on a farm, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

That's fantastic. I I'm trying to I'm sure there's probably other questions I have, but okay, how many how many times did you encounter snakes?

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Yeah, snakes all the time. I mean, they were the worst is so we had chickens and we would have to uh collect the eggs every night because they would lay eggs and our family would eat the eggs. Um but a lot of times if you were busy during like the school year and you had like uh like Tuesday and Friday nights, there's like sports games, basketball games. So you would get home late at night, but you still had to do the chores, you know, because just because you were gone didn't mean that you couldn't feed your animals or collecting the eggs is always interesting because if you go out at night and you have to reach your hand in there, you never know what you're gonna find in the nest. And there's been times where we hens would roost at night, and sometimes they would get up in their laying boxes and stay. Um sometimes you would reach you'd have to reach under the chicken to gather the eggs, and there are times where you'd reach under the chicken and there would be something else in there, like a snake curled up under the chicken. Oh, yeah. And it would eat the egg. But if you reached under there in the dark and felt the snake, that would kind of it would I mean that's happened multiple times. So you have to be careful when you reach your hand under a chicken at night.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Anybody ever get bit?

unknown 24:27

No.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

No, but there's been you know, you go out there and you forget a flashlight, so it's just pitch dark, and there's been like possums that are in the chicken house, and so there's all types of critters, whether it's snakes or possums or skunks. Skunks are the worst, you know.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Skunks, yeah. Um did you guys have like dogs or anything then?

SPEAKER_00 24:48

Yeah, we had we had multiple dogs, but they're you know Okay. They were never inside dogs, they were always out, but they didn't they couldn't mess and chase everything away.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

There's just too much wildlife, so yeah, we were our our memory of dogs, it's probably inhumane now. We had them in a cage in the backyard and then we'd put them on a chain, and I remember his enjoyment was an old bitty basketball that he just humped. And but I gotta think nowadays if people saw that, where you'd it'd be one of those chains that you could run around a yard, but you kept them on a chain. Nowadays people would be probably so angry about that, but that's kind of like it was an out he never the dog never came in the house. And so yeah, just okay. Max. All right.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

Well, with also my education farming with living on the farm, though, you also had 4-H, and every summer we had that 4-H, the county fair. So you would actually um like show the like show the pigs, you would yeah. I don't know if you've ever seen at a county fair, but people would actually take their livestock. So we did Yeah, sure. So we did all kinds of stuff. We would do pigs, uh sheep, but we also signed up for projects and and that's we've kind of mentioned what 4-H was and stuff, but throughout the year you would do projects. So I actually made a list of all the projects that I did in 4-H. Uh-huh. So besides the swine, which is pigs and the sheep and chickens, I did like arts and crafts, geology, rocketry, leathercraft, cooking, horticulture, photography, entomology, and geology. And you would with that project, you would create some product and you would take it to the fair to have it judged. So if it was like horticulture, which is like gardening and stuff, you would actually pick vegetables and take them in to get judged. Um same thing with like entomology, which is like insects, you would actually catch insects and you would have to freeze them, which killed them, and then you would pin them in like a shadow box, and you try and then you had to identify what species it was, and and then they would like give you a ribbon on how well you did all that. And so if you ever went to a county fair and saw like big barns or buildings and they had all these projects and stuff, a lot of 4-H kids would do those projects throughout the year. In the summer was when we really had the time to actually do a lot of that. So, um, so that's that kept us busy in the summer with those projects.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

Do you have one of those that you m were most proud of in terms of entomology or photography or geology? A lot of one that stands out to you?

SPEAKER_00 27:35

A lot of a lot of the stuff that I enjoyed the most was arts and crafts. So I would do like drawings or paintings, or I'd even create stuff. Um but photography, we would always my dad with his newspaper, he always had his camera, so we would learn how to take uh pictures of basically anything. And when you live on a farm, there's all kinds of stuff that you can take pictures of, whether it's puppies or flowers or insects or sunsets. So my mom still has a bunch of the stuff that we did in her house, like whether it's pictures framed or like artwork. She still I remember one year I created a paper towel holder with a goose and stuff. She still has that in her kitchen to this day using that. That's awesome. Um, but then also just I don't know, I I liked oh, one thing, I'll mention this and then I'll kind of be done with this. But the leather craft, my grandpa, my mom's dad had all of these uh like stamps and leather tools, and I and I made a belt and a bill fold with my grandpa, and he taught me how to um like stamp the leather and and then like oh that's cool, kind of treat it and all that stuff. And and I just remember sitting in his kitchen and doing that for my project for that year to take to the fair.

SPEAKER_01 28:59

And do you do you at all uh wish your kids would have had that same kind of childhood experience or not?

SPEAKER_00 29:08

We tried. We did. Sydney was actually in Sydney and my two daughters were actually in 4-H for just a bit. Okay. Um and like my my brothers and my sister, they all of the grandkids did pigs one year and or maybe maybe even for a few years. But it just got to be too much work and they didn't have the interest that we did. And we also, as parents, didn't push them like my parents pushed us. We we kind of just let them off the hook. And they didn't have I can honestly say that they didn't have a ton of interest in doing it like we did. So when I was growing up, the county fair was like a big deal, like it was something that we had on our calendar that we always look forward to. And it and the Sedgwick County Fair is in Cheney, Kansas, outside of Wichita, and it's still a big event. They they do a good job. That small community every year that county fair is a big deal there, so I love going there.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

What about state fair? No, did you go to the state fair then?

SPEAKER_00 30:10

No, I never did really go to the state fair.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

Just curious.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

Yeah, it was always out in Hutchinson, maybe it was kind of too far away, and we just never did. We always did the county fair stuff.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

No, I was curious. Well, we dedicated a lot of time to play and and let's get to work now as you get older. So, in your teen years then, what were the type of jobs you had in the summer that you remember that that left kind of an indeliable or we had imprint on you?

SPEAKER_00 30:38

I s my brother and I we had a lawn mowing business, landscaping and lawn mowing, and and I did that even to when I was teaching.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

Until I got to the point where I was like, I I'm spending all my time outside of teaching, and and as your spouse and you know, as you start to make more money, I didn't I wasn't making enough mowing, so I got rid of that. But but growing up, since I was the youngest, uh, I started mowing when I was like a second, probably a second grader. And so I was push mowing, and we did that all the time. And before we were old enough to drive a truck, we actually had a riding lawnmower with a trailer, and we lived about a half a mile out of town, so we would drive that riding lawnmower with the trailer into town and mow all of our yards, so that's how small of a community we were. Uh, we could just drive our riding lawnmower down the street and people didn't ask questions or anything. So yeah, so yeah, that was our job, and we actually made pretty good money because there weren't there wasn't a lot of competition, there weren't big landscaping services like there are now. The way you see that today. Yeah. So it was just a small town kind of word of mouth thing, and and people at your church or friends of your family that knew you, and they knew you mowed yards. So we probably we probably had uh a you know, like a dozen to twenty yards when we were in like grade school and middle school. And then when I got to high school and college, I expanded to I was probably mowing about 40 yards a week. So that's and I had commercial account, like I would mow like the grocery store and interest bank in town and my church. I I mean we did not just residential but also commercial properties. We did the post office, we did we did the schools, the school subcontracted us out materially, and yeah, I mean we grew that thing big time, and then it put me through college. Uh I I paid everything off and you know, had bills that I drove cars and stuff, and so so it started off, and kids that say I don't have anything to do, well, it just started with a push mower, you know, and we mowed three yards to start off with, and then we grew it pretty big over time. So I don't know. But it kind of sucked because it's Kansas and it was always hot. Yeah. So you're outside all the time.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

So my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

But I I like I enjoyed it because it is kind of outside work is better than inside work, in my opinion. So I liked it.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Yeah. I I worked at um McDonald Golf Course. It was a few blocks from my house as a cart boy. Um I remember that being one of my outside of we've already talked before about my job at video stores, but I do remember a couple summers working as a cartboard cart boy where you just clean the golf carts and then put them out, and then you just clean them, and then you find whatever else, odd jobs you can do around the clubhouse. And the club at the time was run by a guy named Mike Consolver, he was the head pro. And his dad was Tex Consolver.

SPEAKER_00 34:04

Yeah, which was out of Texas was Tex Consolver was the golf course. Well, they named it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

That was actually Pawnee Prairie.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

That was the Yeah, it was long, long fairways out there.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Yeah. So I Mike Consolver was always chomping on a cigar, and he was pretty laid back. I gotta say, one time I was sitting out there and it was like July and it's a hundred degrees out, and it's three in the afternoon, and nobody's golfing. So I'm in the cart room on a cart and I just fall asleep, and I come out and and I can s I wake up and I can smell the cigar smoke, and he's chomping it looking over me too, and I'm like, oh, I'm dead. And he just blows a big thing of smoke in my face, and he goes, Well, I'd probably be doing the same thing if I were you. I'm like, Thank God he was nice about it because anytime I was in the clubhouse and Tex showed up, because he showed up, it seemed like every week or two, he was mean, and we were like scared of Tex. He was always yelling at somebody. So I was glad that Mike was uh more understanding, and uh it's just one of those kind of easy summer jobs where you don't have too much to think about or too much to do, and um so that that's kind of I remember part of high school of doing that besides working at video stores.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Did you get so I was not yeah, did you get any like free rounds of golf with that or discounts, I guess?

SPEAKER_01 35:32

I feel like I started playing golf around 15 or 16 because it was a hundred dollars a year for all the Wichita courses for juniors, and then you paid a dollar uh every time to go out and play. And I got pretty good. I mean, I I got pretty good in high school and into college, but then I just stopped um sometime after college, shortly after college. But yeah, I I think we got like one day free where you could go out there and play, but it had to be after two o'clock uh because the nobody's gonna be usually golfing in the summer at 4 p.m. Um when it's that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

It's like in Caddy Shack where they gave the caddies 15 minutes to swim. Spalding no.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

That's kind of how they treated us. Um, well, so our okay, our last category then is kind of family and friends. So we'll finish up on a lighter note, too. Um what were the things you did with friends? What did you have family? Um we've already done a podcast on summer vacations. Um so maybe this will be more friend related. I don't know, maybe family.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Well, family, I did want to mention family-wise, I don't know if this was common, um, but we always had in June, I think, at the beginning of the summer, we always had like a family reunion. And okay, yeah. And so, like in Valley Center, we had a community building, and my dad, my parents would like reserve the community building. It was from my dad's side of the family, and so that was like the one time a year where your extended extended family with like your dad's cousins and stuff that you didn't, I didn't even really know who they were, but we would meet like once a year and have like a potluck lunch and play cards or something and talk with people that you see once a year, but but it ended up stopping, like we stopped doing that, and uh and you kind of miss that because you just lose. Do you know why it stopped? No, I mean there were people who passed away and stuff that were kind of driving forces for that, but I will say my dad's dad got remarried, and and so my dad had like this whole other side, like step brothers and their families that we didn't see very often, but they started their own family reunion, and they and this is weird, they would always do they would have enchiladas and they would bring and they would bring tattoo artists and they did tattoos on site and enchiladas, and and this this is like a different world. This is not my family, like none of us had tattoos.

SPEAKER_01 38:12

So you're not you're not nothing to show right now, is what you're telling me.

SPEAKER_00 38:15

And I never attended it. I couldn't. Like my dad was like, Yeah, they're having the tattoo and enchilada reunion. I was like, I'm not going. There's no way. So you know how like family family reunions, there's always like the weird people in your family, you know. Even though you're the ones that are actually the weird ones, um, everybody thinks all the other families are weird, but but yeah, that was out there. Enchiladas and tattoos, enchilada and tattoos. So I just remember um that was always kind of kicking off the summer was the family reunion, and then like I said, we had a bunch of other stuff that we did. Um but later on in life when I was like 20 or 21, my parents bought a lake house at Council Grove. So we would do um we would do a pig roast. Have you ever done a pig roast? Okay. So one time so we had a smoker, um, and you would put a whole hog on there. Basically, like they would have it cut in half, and you would have um you had to stay up for 24 hours, and we were 21, so we could drink and we played like an all-night poker game when we would roast the pig. And so, like every hour and a half we'd go out there and baste it over, and then the next day, it was usually around 4th of July, so at this time, and then we would invite all the people from the lake that we knew. We we knew a bunch of families up there, uh, but we would have all this meat that from a pig that we butchered, you know, that we raised, and so I always look forward to that at the lake. We would do that kind of stuff, and I enjoyed that.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

That's fancy, yeah. That's great. So you that started though uh during college or after college, you said during college. Okay. Does your mom still have that place or not?

SPEAKER_00 40:08

No, we we sold it before my dad passed away. Um we had it for about 10 years, and then it just got to be too much. Like my parents wanted to be like actually retired and travel. And so this was before like Airbnb. And it just kind of sat there if you didn't use it, and and we were ready to pass it on to somebody else who could so like the the I think it was the president of Kansas State University bought it from us, he and his family. Uh so we sold it off to people from Manhattan and interesting. And that was just kind of a short time period that we had that for about 10 years, but you know, we would go we'd go to the lake like every summer, like five or six times, my wife and I. So it was fun. I enjoyed that.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

That is, that's cool.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

What about you guys?

SPEAKER_01 40:58

Well, I I just I just got back the other day from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in St. Louis, and my sister and her husband and my niece and nephew, they met us there, and my parents were there, and so that was our summer trip, and so it was kind of fun to go back. Um, our summer trip was always to Cape Girardeau because that's where my grandparents lived, that's my mom's parents, and we would see them at Christmas, and then we'd see them in the summer, and in Christmas, they would drive to to Wichita. Um, but in the summer we'd drive out to Cape, and we always went in July because I feel like it was after baseball season was over. Baseball season always ended right around now for us in our double A, you know, Blessed Sacrament League. And um, so we would go out there for a week, and then one of the days we would drive up in the morning to St. Louis and go see a Cardinals game, and then drive back down to Cape. Um, my cousins sometimes came with my aunt and uncle, and so we went back um just this past week, and it was really something I've been back there since 2014 to bury our grandmother. Um, but you know, Cape Girarde is just this sleepy Mississippi River city right on the border of Missouri and Illinois, and it's grown obviously compared to what it once was. We drove by their house, um, and then we then we went to St. Louis, but this time we did two days in Cape and then two days in St. Louis. Went and took my parents to a Cardinals game, um, went to Union Station and did some of the things we did when we were younger. So I just remember that was for me, that was just kind of magical to go there. There was, and when you go back, there's absolutely nothing special about Cape Girardo. Um, it's it's sticky, it's humid, it's you in the early evening you hear the cicadas, and you're just kind of dripping with sweat. And I remember running around my grandfather's garden and his garage, and so the smell of tools and fried fish and a fresh garden, that's all my kind of memories of growing up, and so um that would be our one thing. And it and you know, I told our kids they've got to travel a lot more than we did growing up. That the trips are great, but you really just remember the time with your family and the location's almost secondary, and so it is something that all these years later that there's still something magical about weirdly magical about Cape Girado. Um, and that's just tied to your childhood, you know. I'm sure uh you probably think that same way about you know some of the times you've expressed. And so that that happened all the way through high school because my grandparents lived until the late 1990s. I graduated in the early 90s, so that was all that was really fun to do. Um that was kind of how that was kind of the end of the summer. That that kind of marked the end of the summer where you got back, you had a week or two, and then school was gonna get going. So um it's powerful to go back there in your middle age, bringing your own children. And then I I walked the streets with with my parents, and my mom was like, Oh, that was the the store that we all shopped at owned by this Jewish couple, and obviously it's abandoned now. And oh, this building, this is where we'd all go with the teens, and we'd go dancing there, and then I, you know, that would have been in the early or early late 50s, early 60s. So it's just kind of it's fun to walk that and see and listen to my mom, who's in her 80s now, kind of carry those memories with you, and it's so it's kind of like you're walking with ghosts in a way of of your past, and you try to pass that on to your kids. Um, because I don't know. I uh I don't know what that will be for them someday. Um, because we didn't have we we go to Minnesota, uh we go up to Lake Superior in Minnesota, so maybe that'll be their place that they kind of hold. Um, but that was fun. We just got back from that, and so you and I were battering around this idea of what to do about summer memories, and I'd just kind of been bathing in that the past week uh in southern Missouri, and as always, St. Louis was hot as crap and humid, and we were at a one o'clock Cardinals game this past Sunday, you know. Can't tell you how many EMS people were out with feigning people. It's just man, yeah. But yeah, well, I'm I felt like I learned a heck of a lot more about you and farming in this one, which was worthwhile though. That's this is that was great because that's what summertime was. Isn't it funny though? We're both Kansan, and we probably would have lived within 45 minutes of each other, and yet it's a completely different existence. Yeah, it's just completely different. But I love that. That uh because people assume when you're from Kansas everybody's a farmer or everybody's somehow, and uh it speaks to how varied the experience is, even in small distances.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

Well, my my friends that lived in the town that I grew up in had a totally different childhood than I did half a mile out of town. So yeah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Oh, that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 46:04

But I I wouldn't change it, you know, for anything the way that I grew up. Yeah. So I learned a I learned a lot and uh I'm happy that that happened.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

So it it sounds amazing. What your parents put what your parents made you guys do, and and saying that that way made you guys do sounds wrong, but um what they put forth for you was I don't know. I think it sounds um it sounds fantastic, yeah. Completely foreign to me, but it does. It sounds great. Um, well, that's our lazy summer days podcast, just kind of a lazy summer day kind of podcast. So we will be back next week uh hopefully answering readers' questions brought in to us. So it'll be on our many, many thousands of listeners to submit possible questions. Yeah. Otherwise, take care, everybody. Stay cool, stay cool forever. Bye bye.