Caryn
Most cars, these days, have a fairly streamlined design. Much of this is to make them more fuel efficient, and to make the ride less wind resistant, and therefore smoother, I’m sure. It wasn’t always that way, however. For a time, running boards were quite fashionable, and most cars had them. I never could really see the draw to that, because in reality, actually stepping on the running boards, to get into the car, loosens them, and will eventually cause them to need to be reinforced. I suppose my opinion on this comes from my 41 years married to a mechanic, but it is nevertheless, a reality. Many of the cars from my parents’ and in-laws’ era had running boards, especially the pickups, but it is something that is not seen as much these days, and if it is, it is usually something that was added later on, and as I said, not really for use as a way to enter the vehicle, but rather for show.
Be that as it may, running boards were something that used to be important, so they say, because of the fact that vehicles were higher off the ground back in the day, than they are now. The fashionable running boards of this day and age are pretty narrow, and really aren’t very much like the old ones at all. The old running boards were wide, and could easily be used for a seat, or even to give enough room for an adult to lie down on them. I remember my mom telling me about one of her brothers who used to take an afternoon nap out on the running board of my grandfather’s car. I always thought that was rather comical, but she used to say that her dad always had to walk around the car to make sure there wasn’t a kid on the running board on the other side, before he could leave for wherever he was going.
It also seems that the running boards of a car make a great place to gather the family for pictures, because 
there are pictures of people sitting or standing on the running boards among my family’s pictures, as well as Bob’s family’s pictures. The car seems to have been the backdrop of choice at that time. I suppose it ‘s not so different today. People like their cars, and they are a part of life, with or without running boards, so why not include them in your pictures sometimes…especially if they are a hot car, which I’m sure was the case at the time, even if we wouldn’t think so these days. The look of cars changes from era to era, and while the big clunkers of old, were not the sporty cars of today, they were cool then.
It’s strange…how often society prefers old money to new money. Maybe these days it’s not as common, but in the late 1800s, it was a little bit more common. That was the world Margaret Tobin grew up in. Who is Margaret Tobin, you might ask. Well, we didn’t really remember her as Margaret Tobin, but rather as Molly Brown…or more likely as The Unsinkable Molly Brown. That’s because on this day April 15, 1912, Molly Brown not only survived the sinking of the Titanic, but she heroically saved other people in the water, and kept the people in the lifeboat calm with her stories of life in the west.
Molly was born the daughter of an impoverished ditch-digger. As a teenager, Molly went West to join her brother, who was working in the booming silver mining town of Leadville, Colorado. While there, the manager of a local silver mine, James J Brown, noticed her, and they fell in love. The couple married in 1886, and a short time later, James Brown discovered a large deposit of gold. They quickly became very wealthy. They moved to Denver, and tried unsuccessfully to take what should have been their rightful place in society, but the high society of the time…old money, just weren’t prepared to let these unstart, new money people with little social grooming into their ranks. Apparently Molly was a little too flamboyant for the stuffy, old money high society people. She was a little too much for her husband too, because they soon separated, and with her estranged husband’s financial support, Molly was able to live comfortably…for a time anyway…until most of the money ran out.
Molly left Denver and decided to travel. The Eastern elite, didn’t seem to mind Molly’s flamboyance, and soon accepted her as one of them. Socially prominent eastern families like the Astors and Vanderbilts prized her frank western manners and her thrilling stories of frontier life. It was her friendship with these people that brought her to the Titanic, on that fateful trip, but it was Molly herself and her heroic ways that brought her fame, even though 
she obviously wasn’t the only woman who survived the sinking. After the ship hit an iceberg and began to sink, Brown was tossed into a lifeboat. She took command of the little boat and helped rescue a drowning sailor and other victims. To keep spirits up, she regaled the anxious survivors with stories of her life in the Old West. One the newspapers heard of her heroics, she gained national fame. She was dubbed “the unsinkable Mrs. Brown” and she became an international heroine. Before very long though, the money ran out, and she faded into obscurity, dying a woman of modest means in New York City in 1932. It was the Broadway musical that would revive her claim to fame, and change her title to The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
I don’t think that we spend very much time considering the importance of words in our lives, and yet, they are a vital part of our lives. Whether we speak the words, sign the words, write the words, or type the words, words are a vital part of communication. We are isolated without them, and we are indeed, isolated when we don’t understand them or know their meaning. When the United States was first formed…a melting pot of people from different countries…all with different languages. Communication under those circumstances if difficult at best, and often impossible. People tend to stick to their own family and friends from their country, so they can talk to each other. Eventually, through trial and error, people began to learn the chosen language of the United States…English.
Still, there are many words, and if you don’t know their meaning, or don’t know how to spell them, communication again becomes stalled, and isolation sets in. I think that might have been what Noah Webster had in mind, when he decided to publish his American Dictionary of the English Language. Noah Webster was a Yale educated attorney who had a huge interest language and education. He decided that people needed a way to learn to speak better, to know the meanings of words, and to know how to spell them, so on this day in 1818, he published his first dictionary. His dictionary was unique in that it was one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words. Over the years, it has had to be changed, simply because as new things are invented, there have to be words invented to describe them. That makes the dictionary an ever changing book that would need to be updated often.
Noah’s dictionary took more that two decades to complete, and in it were 10,000 “Americanisms”…words that 
were unique to America. The dictionary standardized English spelling, a process that started as early as 1473, when printer William Caxton published the first book printed in English. The fact that dictionaries were printed so quickly and dictionaries were updated so often, resulted in increasingly standardized spellings by the mid 1800s. Coincidentally, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published almost exactly 63 years earlier, on April 15, 1755. Nevertheless, Webster’s dictionary quickly became the standard, and without it, the English language would not be the amazing language it is today. I never really gave much thought to language or words in general, until I began writing on a regular basis, and discovered my love of words.
Before scientists learned how to predict the weather, and before the weather predicting equipment came into being, people often found themselves outside, without any place to get under cover, during some really bad storms. Such was the case on Monday, April 13, 1360…later dubbed Black Monday, when a hail storm killed approximately 1,000 English soldiers in Chartres, France. England and France were in the middle of the Hundred Years’ War. The war began in 1337, and by 1359, King Edward III of England was pushing forward to conquer France. In October he sent a massive force across the English Channel to Calais. The French wouldn’t fight back, but rather stayed behind protective walls that Winter, allowing the King Edward’s men to pillage the countryside.
Then in April of 1360 King Edward’s forces burned the Paris suburbs and marched 
toward Chartres. The night of April 13, while they were camped outside the town, planning a dawn attack, a sudden storm developed. Lightning struck, killing several soldiers, and hailstones began pelting the men, and scattering the horses. One man described it as “a foul day, full of myst and hayle, so that the men dyed on horseback” Two of the English leaders were killed and the troops panicked…they had no shelter from the storm. They were at it’s mercy. King Edward’s forces suffered heavy losses that some of the men saw as a sign from God, that they should not be fighting against France. King Edward was convinced that they needed to negotiate peace with the French, and on May 8, 1360, the Treaty of Bretigny was signed, marking the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War. King Edward renounced all claims to the throne of France, but he was given control of the land in the north of the country. Nine years later, fighting resumed 
when the King of France claimed that King Edward had not honored the treaty. the last phase of the Hundred Years’ War finally ended in 1453.
Hailstones have long been known to be very deadly. The larger the stone, of course, the more deadly it is. Some have been known to crush the roofs of cars. The largest hailstone recorded in modern times was found in Aurora, Nebraska. It was seven inches in diameter, about the size of a soccer ball. Hail typically falls at about 100 miles per hour, which explains why getting hit with one can really hurt you, no matter how small the stone might be, and why huge hailstones would mean instant death.
Many things changed on the day, Jennifer Schulenberg Parmely, my sister-in-law, was born. No, it wasn’t something that she or her parents did, but rather in the world. On this day, April 12, in 1961, the year Jennifer was born, the world saw it’s very first manned space flight. That was the day that the Race to Space ended with Russia putting the first man in space. That man was Yuri Gagarin. The United States had hoped to win that race, but we were not ready to put our first manned space flight into space for another month. I’m sure that all this meant nothing to Jennifer, or her parents, Walt and Joann Schulenberg, but it is, nevertheless, a historical fact, and it happend on the day she was born.
Jennifer grew up, and became the mother of three boys, Barry, JD, and Eric. There was hope that she would have a daughter, but that was not to be. It seemed to be some kind of tradition in the Schulenberg family…at least with the grandchildren and great grandchildren. Whatever the first baby was, the others in that family were the same. The only one to break that tradition to date is my daughter Amy Royce, who managed to have a girl and then, shocker…a boy. All the others in the family have one or the other. That didn’t leave Jennifer much hope of having a granddaughter either, but Eric and his wife, Ashley broke with the boy tradition in Jennifer’s family and had two girls, Reagan and Hattie. They still kept with the tradition of what the first one is the others are too, however. Of course, there is always a possibility that they will try again for the boy, and maybe…just maybe, they will succeed like Amy did. Until that time, Jennifer is enjoying the little girls she never got to have, and that is very nice for her, because they are little sweeties, for sure.
Jennifer is a nurse at Wyoming Medical Center, and has worked there since she was just seventeen. She 
started as a Candy Striper, and after college, was hired in the Obstetrics department as a nurse. She has always loved newborn babies, and this way she gets to see lots of them, but the good news is that she can hold them and then give them back to their mothers, because as most mothers know, there is a time to have your babies, and a time to be the one to just spoil those babies and let their parents handle the fallout. It’s called being the grandma, and believe me, it’s awesome, as any grandmother will tell you. Today is Jennifer’s birthday. Happy birthday Jennifer!! Have a great day!! We love you!!
Years ago, when my sisters, Cheryl Masterson, Alena Stevens, Allyn Hadlock, and I took a trip to Seattle, Washington to visit our sister, Caryl Reed, who was living there then, we had the wonderful opportunity to go to the Tulip Festival. We drove north from Caryl’s house until we reached Tulip Town near Mount Vernon, Washington. There we were treated to the most amazing sight. There were tulips everywhere. It looked like miles and miles of them. They were planted by color, so we saw rows and rows of each color. It was like looking at a tulip rainbow. That trip, taken in the Spring of 1993 has many lingering memories for me, but I must say that the Tulip Festival was one of the coolest of memories. You just don’t easily forget something like that.
Now that my daughter, Amy Royce lives in Ferndale, Washington, she finds herself right in the area where the 
Tulip Festival is held every year. Before they moved to Washington, they took a trip there at the perfect time, and were able to catch the Tulip Festival, so this year was Amy’s second, of what I am sure will become an annual visit to the Tulip Festival. This year, she went with her friend from Elementary School, Karen Bradley Sargent, her husband, John, and her two little boys, Oliver and Logan. The pictures she posted were lovely. They were just as I remembered it, but of course, pictures could not possibly do justice to being at the Tulip Festival. You have to see it to truly experience it.
I know that they all had a wonderful time yesterday, and I really wish I could have joined them, because I would love to go to the Tulip Festival again. I can’t say that I ever wanted my daughter to move away, but I 
suppose that if she had to do it, there could possibly be a few perks here and there. I really do love the North Western Washington area, and the Tulip Festival. I know that somewhere down the road, I will have to make the trip up to see Amy, when the Tulip Festival is going on so that I can go to it again. For now and for this year anyway, I will have to just settle for the pictures that Amy sends, and the memories I carry in my memory files, because the Tulip Festival is over, or would be before I would be able to get there anyway. So Amy, thanks for the beautiful pictures, and for the memories.
When we think of the greatest changes the world has been through, many of us think of things like airplanes, automobiles, television, and cell phones. These great inventions were amazing, and they have changed the world as we know it, but there are other events that have had a far greater impact on the world as we know it than these great inventions. Those events were the wars our world has been involved in. I think that when a war ends, many people just want to forget it ever happened, but in reality, that will never happen. There are always lessons to be learned from war.
Wars are fought for many reasons, but often it is because one side has taken the rights of the other side away from them…such as the Civil War, which was fought over slavery. When it was over, the right to 
own people was gone. Those who would try to own slaves in the future would find that it was illegal. The Revolutionary War ended with the United States becoming a sovereign nation. Wars like World War I and II, were fought to end oppression, and of course, the War on Terrorism, to stop those who would try to control other nations and indeed, the world, through fear. I have to think that the War on Terrorism was one that had the greatest impact on the world.
Since the beginning of the War on Terrorism, much has changed in the area of national security. Our airports are required to scrutinize travelers much more carefully than before. What used to take an hour, now takes as much as two or three. Metal detectors have been installed at all federal buildings. Screening have become normal…the new normal. We don’t like it, but we can’t change it either. Like it or not, it is for our safety. Terrorists don’t care who they hurt, their entire goal of bringing fear on the nations, is all they 
care about. Because of those people, we have had to change the way we look at…everyone!!
Now, we are in the middle of a new kind of war. It is a type of war on terrorism, but the targets of the attacks are very different. They aren’t going after any particular type of building, a particular size of building, or even a particular country. Nevertheless, their motive is to bring fear and terror to everyone they come in contact with. They are after complete submission. Like it or not, these are wars that had to or have to be won. If they are not, many lives will be lost, and unfortunately many things have to change to win this war.
The year was 1959, and things were changing rapidly in the world of flight. Airplanes had been around, and actually flying since the December 17, 1903 flight of the Kitty Hawk by the Wright brothers. Air travel, while not as common as it is today, was fairly common. Now, it was time for the next step. We had looked through telescopes, found the planets, their moons, and other suns. We discovered galaxies beyond our own, and then, someone…somewhere, decided that it was time for mankind to go out there and have a look for ourselves.
By late 1958 plans were well underway to take that first step. Seven men were picked, and on this day April 9, 1959 NASA announced that they had decided on the first seven astronauts, who would take that very first space flight. The men were dubbed The Mercury Seven, but were also called the Original Seven or Astronaut Group 1. The men were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. They piloted the manned spaceflights of the Mercury program from May 1961 to May 1963. They weren’t the first men in space, but they were the first from the United States. The first human to journey into outer space, was Yuri Gagarin, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961. Alan Shepard became the first American in space 
when the Freedom 7 spacecraft blasted off from Florida on May 5, 1961, just under a month after the Russian flight. Ten years later, Shepard would fly again to become the fifth man to walk on the moon…and the first to play golf there.
Most of these seven men went on to fly in many successful missions, with Gus Grissom being the only one to die young and on duty with NASA, in the Apollo 1 fire. Members of the group flew on all classes of NASA manned orbital spacecraft of the 20th century…Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle. John Glenn, the oldest, is the only one who is still living. He went on to become a United States senator, and flew on the Shuttle 36 years later to become the oldest person to fly in space. The others all survived past retirement from service. These men played a key part in the world as we know it today, because space travel has played a key part in many of our modern medicines and scientific research. And it all began on this day in 1959.
As I walked in to my bedroom today, my gaze landed on a bottle of perfume that sits on a shelf there. The bottle then took me back to my childhood years, because it always reminds me of the loving things my dad did for my mom. Evening In Paris Perfume by Bourjois, was a beautiful floral fragrance created by Ernest Beaux in 1928. It was reformulated by perfumers Jaques Polge and Francois Demachier, nearly fifty years later. The top notes are bergamot, apricot and peach, green notes and violet. The floral heart is composed of rose damascena, jasmine, heliotrope, ylang-ylang, lily of the valley, and orris. The base includes amber, musk, sandalwood, and vanilla. I have no idea how they managed to put all those ingredients together to come up with such a beautiful perfume, but they did. My mother, Collene Byer Spencer loved it, and my dad, Allen Spencer loved how it smelled on her. Dad would buy Evening in Paris for her on occasions like birthday, Christmas, and anniversaries. It was considered one of the most precious gifts he could give her.
After Mom’s passing on February 22, 2015, as my sisters and I were going through her things, we came across several bottles of the perfume, some were empty, others has a little bit in them, but we each were able to have one of those bottles. It didn’t matter if we wore that perfume or not, we knew that just having the bottle would remind us of our parents, and of the deep love they had for each other. That perfume had such sentimental value, and in fact, I don’t believe that any of us ever took any without permission. Some things are too precious to touch, and even kids understand that. They create a respect of their own, and are given a place of honor in the home and in your heart. That was the case with Evening in Paris perfume. Little girls love to get into their mother’s makeup and perfume, but I really think we understood that Evening in Paris was off limits…and not because we were afraid of the trouble we would get in. It’s like you are in awe of it or something.
To this day, seeing that bottle of precious Evening in Paris perfume, makes me smile, because of the way my parents looked at each other when the package was opened. Mom always looked at Dad, just a little teary eyed, but with a great big smile on her face, and Dad looked like a little boy who had just brought his girlfriend her first rose. There was such a sense of pride that she loved the gift. He just felt good about it. He knew it was a special thing for her, and he hoped it was a surprise. She always acted like it was, whether she suspected it was coming or not. That was just their way. Theirs was a love without end, and they loved blessing each other with the best things they could give them, with the leader always being their love.
Time changes everything. Forty five years ago today, my sister, Cheryl Masterson became a mother, making my parents, Allen and Collene Spencer grandparents, and my sisters and me, aunts. It was such an exciting event for all of us, and it changed our lives forever. Never again would Cheryl be just a woman, she would be a mother from that day forward, as our parents would always be grandparents, and my sisters and I would always be aunts. At that time, the thought of that little baby growing up never crossed our minds, but my niece, Chantel Masterson Balcerzak had other ideas in mind…but then don’t all children. If they would just listen to us…they would stay babies forever
Not only was Chantel the first of the grandchildren for my parents, but she was quite little…not premature, just little. As with all grandparents, it seems like the cute little nicknames come out of the woodwork. Our family was no exception. What started out as little teeny baby, soon became Teensy, Little Teense, Chantsy, Chant, and even Chan. It’s a good thing that somebody, somewhere called her by her name, because otherwise, she might have thought her name was Teensy. And believe me when I say that Chantel grew into her nickname…or in her case, didn’t grow so she could fit her nickname. Chantel as an adult is all of four feet ten inches short. So, I can’t say that she grew up exactly, she simply became an adult, and I don’t think we were expecting that to happen so quickly. Nevertheless, before we knew it, Chantel was grown up, and my sister, Cheryl became a grandmother, our parents became great grandparents, and my sisters and I became great aunts. It seemed impossible that it could have happened so soon.
As we all know, time changes everything, and now, my niece Chantel has become a grandmother to Izabella Harman, Cheryl is the great grandmother, and my sisters and I are 2nd great aunts. Where have the years gone? And they aren’t slowing down either. Little Izabella is already more than 3 months old. Of course, she isn’t always called Izabella, because her grandma, Chantel likes to call her Belle or Bella. And she sings all the 
cute little songs to her…adding her name to it. Chantel loves being Belle’s grandma, and Belle loves her too. Of course, Chantel’s own nicknames haven’t gone away. Sometimes, I can still hear my dad calling her Teensy. Now that I think about it, I’m sure that he would calling her Grandma Teensy instead, because after all, time has changed that too, and now she can’t simply be Teensy…not when she is grandma to Belle. My dad would have loved that and he would have loved calling her Grandma Teensy too. Today is Chantel’s birthday. Happy birthday Chantel!! Have a great day!! We love you!!
