E. F.

On our way home from a trip to Rochester, we took a short detour down Memory Lane.

In the fall of 1975, we moved to Waseca so I could attend the University of Minnesota Technical College in order to learn how to be a farmer. My wife supported us by performing quality control checks at the E.F. Johnson CB radio factory.

It was my understanding that she had to work because the money I brought in as a dishwasher in the school cafeteria fell short of supporting her in the manner to which she’d become accustomed – breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It’s been twenty years or more since we’ve been back. Things have changed.

For one thing, my school is now a woman’s prison.

So, that’s different.

I don’t think that Waseca ever claimed it was my alma mater. I signed up for a two-year course, but only stayed six months before my internal pressure to start my real life overwhelmed any level of practical desire for a useful education. I still use things I learned in business law and accounting, but I don’t really remember anything else. I will admit, though, that seeing the campus enclosed by a tall fence and razor wire was a little disconcerting.

That would not have happened if I’d gone to Harvard.

The plant where my wife worked was only a couple of blocks from the campus. E.F. Johnson started making radios in 1923 and by 1975 his CB radios were a hot item. He must have known a tremendous amount about electronics, so it surprised me that he didn’t appear to know much about automobiles. On cold days when I’d walk from the school to meet my wife after she punched out, I’d hear him start his diesel Mercedes and zoom away. But since he didn’t give it time to warm up, what I actually heard was every rod and piston rattling and banging.

We hadn’t been able to find an actual apartment, instead rented an individual, two-room unit in a tiny roadside motel. We paid $15.00 a week for it, and it was worth almost every penny. The bathrooms, his and hers, were across the road, and we had a sink, but with only cold water. Luckily, we’d gotten an electric frying pan for a wedding present, so we’d make supper in it and then fill it with water and dish soap for washing dishes.

Oddly enough, we didn’t feel maltreated by the universe. After all, our cabin was pretty spartan, but before we moved there, we lived in the house we still live in now. Of course, it had sat empty for ten years and our furniture consisted of a mattress on the living room floor and a red bean bag chair. Even that felt plush, because before that we lived in a two-person pup tent for a couple of months while we wandered around Europe, living off stale bread and love.

In hindsight, and actually even at the time, we thought life was pretty good. We had a roof over our heads and made enough money to put food on the table. It’s probably the closest we’ve ever come to being carefree. We left Waseca to start farming in 1976, just in time for the drought of the century. A year after that our first child was born, which was wonderful, but not stress free. A couple years after that we bought two quarters of farmland for $900/acre, only to see it worth half that much three years later. We’ve had a wonderful life, but with the exception of those first few months in that tiny cabin, pretty complicated.

The cabin we stayed in is long gone, replaced by a seasonal RV park. The E.F. Johnson company has been sold or absorbed by bigger companies a half-dozen times and is now owned by a corporation in Yokohama, Japan. Plus, there’s the razor wire. That’s okay, we know we can’t go back to where we were, and we wouldn’t want to if we could.

But we sure had a good time remembering where we came from.

Copyright 2024 Brent Olson