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What were your favorite activities as an elementary schooler, as a middle schooler, and as a high schooler? Well, as an elementary schooler it was just play. Play. Oh, you know, oh, one of my favorite though.

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Oh yeah, I just hit it. We had sand with iron finally. Oh yeah. And my favorite thing was to take a magnet and run it through the sand and pull out all the iron filings.

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You guys have no idea what that's like. Oh, I do. Trust me. Not you. These are kids. It was so much fun to do that. Love doing that. But you know, we had old metal swing set, jungle gym, tether ball, all that stuff.

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We just love to play and just love to run around and play ball games and four square and, you know, tether ball, all of that stuff. Just favorite activities as an elementary school was play. Middle school, you know, I don't know.

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Middle school was a little more serious kind of stuff. You're in between being a big kid and a little kid. And so it wasn't quite as free and fun. But then in high school, you know, I had a mixed high school up until my sophomore year.

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Everything was really pretty decent. But then sophomore year we had our school, George Washington High School was infiltrated with community members that were not good people. And we had to close down the high school for a month.

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It was in October. And during that period, I ended up going to Northwestern to stay with my brother who was at school there to hang out with him for a while. I don't know why my parents allowed me to do that, but they did. And it was a lot of fun.

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And it was interesting enough that my brother's friends thought I was older than 16. And I was, I think, barely 16. But and then we came back to school and the clubs were really limited.

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Gatherings were limited. We had no lunch. We were on split session. We were really the school was locked down for the remaining two years. So it was harder. I was in Honorary Cadets, which was kind of a drill team shooting group.

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So I learned how to mark was a Mark's ROTC. No, I was not in our or you are. It was called Honorary Cadets. It was a very different group. No, I was not ROTC.

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And so I did that. I was what was the other thing? I wasn't a cheerleader, but I was something else and it escapes me. So it must not have been that important. But I really liked Honorary Cadets. We did, you know, had a good group and I loved being on the rifle range and and doing that.

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And we did flag ceremonies. And so that was fun. But I remember trying swim team once did not do well in that. I thought, how can anybody swim the length of this like that? That was a definite no and I had good friends on swim team, but that did not go well with me.

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So, you know, I was, that was kind of my limited activities, I think. I can't think of anything else that I really did. I was probably pretty boring. I worked after high school, you know, get out at noon and get in the car, drive down to Cottage 313 and work. And that was kind of what it was about.

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How about you? Well, elementary school. It was free play, swimming down at the little swimming club, but no team because Nana and Grammy wouldn't get out of bed. We had friends that were on swim team, our dentist and his kids that we got to be close with and they were in Indian Guides.

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Then I started playing the trumpet when I was in fourth grade. And I think fourth and fifth grade is when I played football for the first time, organized football. Arnold Brothers Ford and Dr. Tanner was our coach and he played football at CU. And so that was a lot of fun. I enjoyed playing football.

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Started playing linemen, found that I did enjoy smacking people a lot and was fun camaraderie on a team, you know, it was my first team experience. So those two years were great. Then we moved to Houghton, got introduced to hockey and then there was basketball and that was pretty fun too.

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And skiing, those things. High school football, every place I went was enjoyable. Rockford, it was a bit more serious and I got hurt junior year in camp and that kind of held me back.

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And then my good friend Bruce Linster, who's still a buddy, we met fall of junior, summer of junior year. In those days, you know, you went to get a football physical. You had 50 or 60 boys naked in a line.

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And I was new to the school and I'm standing in front of Bruce Linster, my future friend forever. And we got talking and got to be buddies. Well, he could catch and I could block.

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So he ended up playing more than I did. But I was on the second team offense and second team defense, but I was sort of an animal for the hamburger squad we called ourselves. And I had fun and if I'd taken it a lot more seriously, I would have played more.

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But that was a fair, let's just, you know, go show up, mess around. No reason to get too excited. That cost me. Oh well. Then college played intermural, lots of intermural.

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Softball, we had a co-ed softball team tennis and played intermural hockey. And at that point, I was the the intermural hockey was I was a good enough skater and I was big enough and mean enough that that went quite well.

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My little brother played so he could score and I could I could body check. That was about it. That school too. We played intermural basketball. We were Bard Parker and the blades.

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And I played on the intermural football team. Yeah, we had a football team too and I knocked my front tooth loose. Yep.

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So yeah, sports. I was on I forgot the in high school. I was on the flag. And I still have my order back of the vet school team.

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All the girl classmates had a football team. They were not to be outdone. No, we had a great running back. Teresa Drotar. She was quick.

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Quick. So yeah, we had a bunch of hard headed. A lot of girls in my class were athletic. And the boys, the biggest mean the vet school teams played the regular kid teams.

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And we didn't have much trouble beating them undergrads, nor did the sophomores or the juniors, but the bloodbaths were playing the other classes. That was some serious stuff.

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Same with the vet school rodeo tug of war. That was another life or death battle. Somehow I should talk about ball de ballet.

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Yeah, you should. Yeah, Debbie was a debutante as a senior in high school.

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And then you got to go back to the ball de ballet was a booster for somebody. Ball de ballet. Yeah, the ballet.

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Then I got to go to the ball de ballet with your mom. Yeah, seconds, just seconds.

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Yeah, got my picture in the paper with Ken Hurd, my brother's friend. So yeah, yeah, the first year.

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That was pretty darn funny. Okay, but we didn't get to play a lot of organized outside club sports.

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Little league was a thing, but I didn't do that. And really, they were fairly non-existent for women and girls back then.

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Yeah, they were really non-existent. More for boys. There was baseball.

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Yeah, I don't think my brothers only did baseball. They did not do football hockey.

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Any of that soccer. No one talked about soccer. No, and I did track. I was pretty good discus thrower.

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And I was fast enough to be. Well, in Iowa, I could do the mile relay, which meant I had to run a 440 gasp.

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But then in Rockford, I became a much better discus thrower. And at the track meets in Rockford, they always had the wait men relays, which would be discus throwers and shot putters, because there was no javelin throwers because somebody got skewered a few years before.

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So that was kind of fun, because they'd usually have two shot putters and two discus throwers. And that was, we had a really good track team.

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We didn't lose any dual meets, and I got to go to state on the district. So that was kind of an offshoot.

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Sports were fun. And the trumpet.

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I played the trumpet all the way through high school and was rather accomplished. Our family played the piano, and we took lessons downtown on 13th and Ogden with Mrs. Beach.

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She had yellow hair and red lipstick, and she clapped like this for you. And she was the sweetest lady.

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And so all three of us would go down there. My mom would take us down, and my dad would pick us up on his way home from work.

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And we had a lot of fun hanging around. She had a one huge, one floor was her whole apartment.

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And I think she had three or four grand pianos there. And it was a lot of fun.

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And one of my favorite times was when we had dueling pianos. And I have the record, the vinyl of this.

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And I think it was 600 pianos. And it was a piano duet.

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Brad and I played. He played on one piano.

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I played on the other. And there were 600 of this in, I think it was in McNichols Arena.

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And we had this concert. And it was really cool.

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It was really cool. And then my brothers, I wish we had this music.

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At Christmastime, we had an arrangement for three of us on the piano of We Three Kings. And that was a very fun thing to play.

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And I wish I still had that music, but I don't. Okay. Are we good?

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Yeah, I just, I did have private lessons a lot on the trumpet. And I had to practice a half hour a day, virtually every day from fourth grade on.

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And as they say, I got pretty good. And when we moved to, you know, as good in Iowa, we moved to Illinois.

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And I got the first chair trombone of the Chicago Symphony also played trumpet. And I studied with him for two years.

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So I was one of the better trumpet players in town and hidden shoulders above the rest of people in my school. And in Iowa, we'd go to these contests where you play duets by yourself, solo of this and that.

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Marching band contest. Illinois, they didn't do that. The band was perfunctory.

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And so that's kind of high school life. What were your high school experiences?

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Did you like school? School, as Lauren would say, and you would say, Erin, school was school.

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You went, you did it. You expected to do well, expected to do your homework, expected to do your sports.

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And don't get in trouble. I liked school.

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And I think I liked the learning and I liked the friends and I liked the teachers. It was, yeah, I didn't mind going to school.

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I remember, you know, I'd come home from in high school, especially I'd come home from school, go right to work, get home. Eat dinner, go to bed and get up about two or three in the morning and do my homework.

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You know, that was kind of the way I operated back then. So you'd get up in the night and do your homework.

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I would get up early before, yeah, and I'd do my homework just because I, you know, I was too tired to do it when I came home. But I didn't mind school.

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I, you know, I can't say I loved school, but I didn't dislike it. I didn't like it when we were changed at George Washington.

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That was a mess. But up until then, it was a fun place to be.

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Yeah, I like, I generally like school. We moved so much that even though I was big, I was pushed around some and was reluctant to lay down the law to bully type people until I got to Rockford.

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And then I was good enough football player that it was very much a mixed race school, probably 25, 30% black and had problems like GW. I had a cop at the door.

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You can only come in one door and to show your Rockford West ID and kept the other guys out the black Panthers from elsewhere and this and that out. And so that cut down a lot on some of them, is Jeff.

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But I like, I like school and with Michael Bell and Charlie Black is my black friends. I had a cloak of invisibility that nobody ever screwed with me.

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My little brother was a little short blonde kid with thick black glasses that was in ROTC. He had troubles and God knows Debbie had troubles at Washington GW.

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So thanks to Michael Bell and Charlie Black. Somehow I had no troubles.

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They didn't even realize it. They just told me about the first week of school.

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What was up?