The World in 1776 by Marshall B. Davidson

Book Review - Five Stars

The World in 1776 by Marshall B. Davidson is a monumental synopsis of the world’s transition into the Industrial Revolution. Well-written, with excellent editing, makes this historical book read like a thriller novel. This enlightening story lays out the foundation for the world we live in today and answers more questions than a thousand wise men could ask. This is one of the few books I would deem worthy of a reread.

Excerpts:
For forty years, from her accession to the throne until her death in 1780, Maria Theresa played a vigorous and significant part in the wars and politics of Europe. Her family, the Hapsburgs, had been the ruling house of Austria since 1282 (and would continue until 1918).
The success of the American Revolution had given a decisive blow to the royal system. In this new and growing nation across the Atlantic, the ideas of the Enlightenment, to which the European despots had paid lip service for several generations, were actually realized, institutionalized for the first time on a large and practical scale, and all trace of monarchy had been eliminated in the process.

The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. As a classic example, Smith cited the manufacture of pins by “modern” mechanical means.

There is no rich man that does not speedily become a noble, so that the body of the nobles includes the body of the rich, and the cause of the privileged is no longer the cause of distinguished families against a common class, but the cause of the rich against the poor.
(It was Lavoisier’s improved gunpowder that early in the next century du Pont de Nemours started to make in his powder mill on the banks of the Brandywine in Delaware, which was the seed of today’s gigantic Du Pont enterprises.)

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Book Review - Five Stars
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
                              An autobiography from his beginnings.

Dreams from My Father is honestly and openly written giving you an insight into how and why this very special man climbed one step at a time on his astonishing political rise. Being good was not good enough, he had to be the best of the best dodging pit falls of entrapment viciously contrived by bigot bastards and other hate mongers. Barack Obama would mark a pivotal point of world history.
Excerpts:
All you know is that college is the next thing you’re supposed to do….The real price of admission...
“And what’s that?” “Leaving your race at the door,” he said. “Leaving your people behind.” He studied me over the top of his reading glasses. Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.



Thomas Paine issued his brilliant and inflammatory pamphlet Common Sense, in which he pronounced, directly contrary to Gibbon’s conclusion, that a new social and political order must be wrought by whatever violent means necessary and that America was at that moment the place to undertake such action; the principles of contemporary government must be challenged and changed.

River-Horse: A Voyage Across America by William Least Heat-Moon

Book Review - Five Stars

River-Horse: A Voyage Across America by William Least Heat-Moon
The author, William Least Heat-Moon, is a man with an original thought and a dream that desperately needed doing.
This wasn’t a whim of the moment. This was meticulously researched, investigated, and rehearsed. Driven by single minded determination, the author dedicated himself to see this perilous and dangerous voyage to its arduous completion. I was impressed. The story progresses at an ever intensifying rate.
Excerpts:
Who can say where a voyage starts? Not the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way.



It was pointless to be afraid, for fear is useful only to those who yet have hope.
The rock-riven river drops more than three thousand feet from our starting place to the mouth, a distance of only 130 air miles.



On the international rating scale, rapids on the Salmon range up to 4 (“difficult”), with the exception of the one nearly at its mouth, a mean constriction with the seemingly playful name of the Slide which in high water can become a class 6, “substantial hazard to life.”

The Lords of Creation: The History of America's 1 Percent (Forbidden Bookshelf) by Louis Fredric Allen

Book Review - Five Stars

The Lords of Creation is true story of clever crafty unscrupulous money grabbers playing a financial shell game in a country with the very best politicians that money could buy.
For an understanding of what drove the financial markets into frenzies that put masses of working people out of their homes and onto the streets penniless and made the manipulators of finance even wealthier, read  The Lords of Creation. This is a true classic.

Excerpts:
The net income of the duPont powder concern (after amortization but before interest on bonds) had been only a little over 5 ½ millions in the dire year 1914. In 1915 it had jumped to 57 millions, in 1916 to 82 millions. The total cost of the war to the United States was over thirty-two billion dollars, a staggering sum. (As Noyes points out, it was more than ten times the cost of the Civil War to the Union!) How could such an incredible amount of money be raised?
One embarrassing result which conservatives discern in public-works campaigns in peace time: it did not “compete with private business” by producing useful goods which would remain to satisfy the population and limit their desire to buy. What it produced was conveniently useless except for purposes of destruction, and much was promptly blown sky-high. But inflation it did produce on a gigantic scale. Those who distrust governments which run into debt in order to feed the hungry should reflect that in less than two years the American government went over twenty billion dollars into debt and other governments went other billions into debt, with consequences which plague us to this day, not to feed the hungry, but to kill and maim and destroy.

There is no surer engine of inflation than war.

Many long-term debts, especially mortgages, were in default, but new ones had taken their places. The cold figures show what was happening: according to the computations of Dr. Simon Kuznets for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the amount of money paid out in interest in the year 1932 was only 3.3 per cent less than in 1929, though meanwhile salaries had dropped 40 per cent, dividends had dropped 56.6 per cent, and wages had dropped 60 per cent.

Bicycling to Duluth 1950

1950 Recollections: from the book Sailing to Lake Superior, 2020.

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.” Mark Twain

Seventy years ago the world was a different place before TV and Internet. Bustling Duluth/Superior was the second largest seaport in America and serviced by 9 railroads.

Ron Hartman and his grandchildren Torie and Corbin Peterson, 2001.
Ron was my neighbor and best friend from my childhood.

Bicycling to Duluth – I was ten years old in 1950

On a frigid blustery December morning at the head of the Great Lakes, Duluth-Superior was unseasonably snow-less, bleakly gray and dismally stark.

Superior is not a beautiful city, but a city surrounded by beauty.

Looking for a new frontier with my youthful enthusiasm spiriting me on, and a bicycle to propel me, I connected with my neighborhood pal, Ron Hartman, who delighted in adventure.

We were on a lark, it would take us where the wind blew and the fickle finger of fate steered.

Reflecting on memories inspired by stories of pioneers who first peopled this virgin country motivated my insightful prospective.

The bone chilling unrelenting wind storm known as the Siberian Express blasting out of the Canadian tundra did not dissuade our youthful enthusiasm, and we bicycled on.

While passing the stately old mansion a few blocks away from home that was the city orphanage, Ron and I thankful in our good fortune, we were free to roam.

The Superior Children’s Home, overlooked Superior’s bay on East 2^nd St. The Victorian-era mansion was built by Martin Pattison in the late 1800’s. When Martin Pattison’s widow Grace left Superior in 1920, she left her mansion with the express purpose of a children’s home. The mansion is now a museum.

Superior also had another children’s home off North 28^th street in a place known as hobo jungle. St. Joseph’s Orphan Home was completed in 1917 and operated by the Catholic Church.

Ron and I had friends and schoolmates residing in the homes who couldn’t even begin to dream of the lark we were free to pursue.

These affection starved kids became good friends, and they were easy to like but it was also easy to see that their situations were hopeless even though they tried to give such an optimistic outlook.

Our bike route continued west through Superior’s old Central Park neighborhood. This was the city’s

first up-scale neighborhood with ginger-bread adorned 1880s vintage mansions. They were constructed by cash-flush East Coast entrepreneurs whose fortunes came from depleting the area’s natural resources. The World War II cash infusion still had momentum, but it didn’t buy house paint for the old mansions. Depression era austerity mentality was a hard thing to leave behind.

Our spirits were up and the idea of biking across the harbor to distant Duluth that loomed ahead on the hills of Lake Superior’s north shore spurred us on.

Another mile across Superior’s flatland found us in the north of the city where Northern Brewery was actively producing beer, emitting steam and aromas from its tall smoke stack.

The Northern Brewing Company was another early memory of the downtown. I still remember many trips to the loading dock around the back of the brewery next to the railroad tracks with my mother. This is where a case of beer could be purchased for 85 cents. The beer was in the tall-necked returnable bottles and the beer boxes were made of wood. It was a busy place. I believe that the number one amusement in Wisconsin was drinking, and this was where the price was right and the product excellent.

Next we were in the poorest part of town and passed several government housing projects, over numerous railroad crossings on our way to Connors Point.

Leaving the city’s north end on a two lane road, which was also the main interstate highway, we meandered west around the low wetlands area of Howard’s Pocket that separated Duluth-Superior Bay by a lengthy sandbar.

In 1950 Howard’s Pocket was the home of a shipyard that five years earlier frantically produced battleships twenty-four hours a day for America’s war effort. Now they were back to maintenance of the Great Lakes freighter fleet that transported grain from the Dakotas, iron ore from Minnesota, and coal from Pennsylvania. A lock was built in 1855 allowing large freighters to pass that connected Lake Superior to all Great Lakes shipping and the recently built Erie Barge Canal in New York State.

Superior was full of contradictions and paradoxes that perplexed my young mind. At ten years of age I hadn’t perceived of what whore houses and gambling dens were all about but our seaport city was filled with them and ironically churches abounded. My dad used to say: “if you want to find a hypocrite you have to go to church.”

Next we pedaled on to Connor’s Point. A word about Connor’s Point; Connor’s Point is a sand spit barrier within the Duluth/Superior harbor at the entrance to the St. Louis River that forms the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota. At the end of this sand spit is Rice Point in Duluth, Minnesota.

Before the arrival of Europeans, Connor’s Point was a seasonal Indian settlement in a virgin pine forest on a crystal clear river teaming with an abundance of fish. The first rustic buildings were trading posts built by French voyagers.

History had nearly stood still here at this “Head of the Great Lakes” for thousands of years until 1870 when the Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad first arrived in Duluth linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River at St. Paul.

The trans-continental rail from St. Paul to Washington State came next in 1893. This made Duluth-Superior a transportation link between the Atlantic and Pacific in the geographic center of the North American continent.

Gold rush mentality hyped by explosive expansion and speculation fueled a massive influx of eager European immigrants with glorious illusions.

Connor’s Point developed Detroit Pier for marine commerce. Several businesses sprung up including saw mills and a small residential neighborhood.

A few unpainted buildings still remained as a testimony to those boom times before railroads and steamships when Connor’s Point, Superior’s first settlement, was the only trading outpost at the terminus of Lake Superior on the western end of the Great Lakes. Freight docks and lumber mills would soon be built and operating to full capacity at that very spot. The Duluth-Superior Bridge Company, backed by the Great Northern Railway built a bridge connecting Connor’s Point in Wisconsin to Rice's Point in Minnesota. The completed bridge was dedicated in April of 1897.

One building still stubbornly standing on Conner’s Point in 1950 was the Grimsrud Meat Market, the first grocery store in Superior, Wisconsin.

This is where my grandfather Christ and his brother Hans went to work for their older brother Martin upon their arrival from Norway. At that time the timber baron, Weyerhaeuser, the clear-cut king of the logging industry, had recently arrived. Eventually the Grimsrud Meat Market moved to 1306 North 5th St. in Superior’s North End.

Our bicycle ride along the Duluth-Superior harbor was unsurpassed for its impressive scenery even on this bleak snow less winter day.

Ron Hartman and I continued our bicycle ride on to the 1897 era Interstate Bridge. We were each prepared to pay the 5¢ bicycle toll, though we had to walk our bikes most of the way across because of traffic.

Nowadays five cents, then known as a nickel doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but when I was a kid you could buy for a nickel any of the following: a newspaper, five U. S. postcards, three second-class postage stamps, a soft drink, a candy bar, an ice cream cone, a refillable cup of coffee, a pack of Kool-Aid, use of a pay phone, or a bowl of rice in a Chinese restaurant. I would push a hand powered lawn mower half a day for 25¢ back then.

Bicycling to Duluth in my youth was like striking off into a foreign country.

This end of Duluth at Rice's Point on Garfield Avenue was at the foot of the Interstate Bridge. Here was as hardscrabble a place as could be imagined in America. It conjured up mental images of post-war bombed out East Bloc countries. We saw tar paper shanties and ragged tattered children this freezing morning toting burlap sacks scrounging bits of coal dropped from steam locomotives along the railroad tracks so they could heat their humble shanties. These were mostly Indian kids pushed to the bottom rung of society’s social strata. A hundred years earlier these once proud people were the custodians of a pristine virgin forest and crystal clear waters teaming with nature’s abundance.

Back to our bicycle journey into Duluth’s down and out waterfront that boasted “where sail meets rail” in 1950.

The only retail business on Garfield Avenue was Goldfine’s Trading Post, a relic of the past. It was housed in an old bare bones three-story wooden warehouse building with a railroad loading dock dating from another era. Goldfine’s truly was a trading post. Farmers brought in their hay bales, live stock, or anything of value as currency to buy farm supplies and furniture.

From there we had two choices for getting into the downtown business district, continue on Garfield Avenue to Superior Street or take a short cut on Railroad Street. Either way we would enter downtown in the skid-row Bowery district. We took Railroad Street. This route directly through a huge railroad switching yard was an absolute nightmare in an automobile. On a bicycle crossing hundreds of rails at various intersecting angles among switch engine locomotives and freight cars gliding off in all directions and no defined rail crossings was a terrifying experience for ten-year old's.

A few months earlier on my way to school one morning I had a nightmare experience. My father had always admonished me to get off my bicycle and walk it across railroad tracks. On this particular day I dismounted and as I was halfway across a train whistle blasted. I looked up and panicked when I saw a steam locomotive bearing down on me. I fumbled the bicycle, and a pedal got stuck between the tracks. The engineer frantically blasted his whistle. It was too late to halt the rapidly rolling train. I pulled and jerked the bike, and at the last second I stepped clear just in time to see that locomotive rumbling by while the engineer shook his fist at me in frustration. I am sure that the engineer shared the same recurring nightmare with me.

Those massive steam locomotives, in the eye of a ten year old, are intimidating in the extreme. The adrenaline rushing, heart pounding incident removed all thoughts of the arctic cold temperatures.

Duluth was not a bicycle friendly place, as we soon found out. Gigantic electric powered buses connected to overhead cables that sparked and snapped along seemed to play bumper tag with the motorists. Everybody was in a hurry looking for nearly non-existent parking places.

We found a lunch spot at Joe Huey’s Chinese restaurant on Lake Avenue in the heart of the downtown business district. Our pocket change was limited, but 5¢ would buy a large bowl of rice, and we could help ourselves to all the soy sauce we could tolerate. It was salted to kill, but we were hungry kids.

Window shopping and cruising the streets of Duluth on that winter day on our bicycles lost much of its appeal with the tundra temperatures and wind blasting. On warmer days our bicycle adventure trip to Duluth would be repeated many times in the coming years.

When Ron and I decided to return to Superior, a sickening realization came over us when we discovered that we didn’t have enough money for our return bridge toll.

We didn’t have the courage to attempt walking our bicycles across the frozen bay. It could be a very dangerous endeavor because near the bridge center span the river current flowed swiftly and thin ice is unforgiving.

Ron had an idea, and we didn’t have many options at this point. We stood at the bridge approach and Ron said that we could walk our bicycles up the narrow sidewalk in the wrong direction to the middle of the bridge and cross over to the other side at a service area in the center, avoiding the toll taker and then continue in the correct direction off the bridge. We could stand around and freeze to death or take our chances on the questionable ice. It was time for action; away we went, safely crossing the bridge to Connor’s Point.

Elvina Martinsen, a Norwegian immigrant living in the Duluth-Superior area in 1889 described taking a horse drawn trolley from Superior to Duluth and crossing the bay by ferryboat. The fare was ten cents.

Prior to 1897, ferryboats connected the two cities. The ferryboats did not run in winter, but as soon as the bay froze over people crossed on the ice. *

What a treasure trove of wonderful memories I have of Ron Hartman, my best friend from my childhood.

These everlasting recollections are priceless...thank you Ron!

*Note: That bay ice was harvested by sawing in large blocks, stored with wood shavings as insulation that kept it through the summer months and was used to cool perishable foods. Residential “ice boxes”, using this ice were still in use in Superior when I was a child until 1950.

Photo of Ron Hartman courtesy to his daughter Kelly Peterson.

We had a Dream - Half a century of Honeymoon

December 20^th, 1969, our wedding day.

By the way: We didn’t get married on the shortest day of the year but the longest night.

We had a dream:

We were going where the wind blows, when the spirit moved us, and the price was right!

A half century later on December 20th 2019 our ongoing honeymoon continues.

Here is a synopsis from our book Sailing Beyond Lake Superior: Travels of Dursmirg.

When my father died in 1969, I thought about life and where it was going, realizing the most important person was Jane. I would marry her. When I asked she responded, “I suppose so.” I said, “You suppose so?”

On Jane’s lunch hour we drove to Carlton, Minnesota, a 17-mile trip in minutes. We filled out papers, paid a $5.00 fee and waited five days. They gave us two big bags of groceries. We had been together five years and found this humorous. Within an hour I had Jane back at her job.

Our secret was safe. Little did we know!

The rest of the story: The reporter from the Pine Knot, a weekly paper in Cloquet, Minnesota, gathered marriage information just after we received our license and went to press that afternoon. Jane’s friend picked up the paper and phoned her parents eighty miles away in Cloverland, Wisconsin.

The plot thickens!

A couple of hours later Judy’s parents got together with Jane’s parents for dinner.

The beans were spilled!

Five days later, we were back to Carlton and Judge Nordstrom’s house. He was a sprightly 85 year old and surprised us with an offer. He had to send our marriage document to the state, he could give us a copy with any date to show the family and friends. We amusingly declined.

My Jane was so very pretty. Excitedly she couldn’t decide which hand to put the ring on.

We had no plans for the day and drove to Duluth. Lunch was at a nice restaurant on the hilltop. It was an extraordinary day. Being together with my wife having lunch and looking over expansive Lake Superior, a frozen, snow covered vista that extended out beyond the eastern horizon. This was the route we would take on our soon to be completed 46 foot yacht.

My father had just died so we decided it best to have a get-together with friends and celebrate our wedding quietly. That evening we had a house full, and Jane cooked dinner.

Incredibly as long as we were keeping our secret, the family was keeping it too.

Time passed and Jane and I were sure we had kept our secret to ourselves.

We planned a nine-day honeymoon trip to Mexico City and Acapulco over Easter Week. I won the all expense paid five-star trip from a company I was doing business with. Our reasoning for Mexico was we would never revisit. Amazingly our home has became Yucatan in Mexico.

Before leaving on our trip, we thought it advisable to inform Jane’s parents of our marriage.

After dinner at Jane’s parent’s home, I told the group I had something important. Jane’s father said, “No, I have something to tell.” He couldn’t help chuckling while telling his story.

A happy man is a man who marries the girl he loves.

An even happier man is the man who loves the woman he married!

The half century of years from 1969 to 2019 have been an ongoing adventure for our tour group of two that generated four sailing books, two Yucatan travel books, several blogs, and a web site.

As I was lamenting the rapidly passing years, Jane said to me, “Be happy for what you have got.” and I replied “Yes, and what I have had.”

Our books on Amazon.

Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome,1944 by Lloyd Clark

Book Review - Five Stars

Anzio, a little known quiet coastal town that marked a turning point of WWII, got caught in the cross hairs of time.

My uncle Lawrence Grimsrud, rifle in hand, somehow survived this deadliest of allied landings but sustained mental scars that plagued him his entire life.

This moving story helped me put a human face on this blood bath.

Excerpts:
Anzio had gained a reputation for being one of the most dangerous places on earth. Troops arrived not expecting ever to leave.


The war correspondent Eric Sevareid entered the town soon after it had fallen and was shocked by the utter destruction that he found there. There was no longer any pattern to the streets, merely broken walls, brick dust and thousands of spent cartridge cases. In the wake of the tumult Cisterna had taken on an eerie stillness. Sevareid wrote: In the little park the palm trees lay blackened and uprooted. Over them a shining white victory statue stood erect on a pedestal. It was the figure of a woman holding aloft a torch in a gesture of triumph. Though her marble head and her torch were gone, in its present attitude of shocked surprise the statue seemed the only vital, living thing within the town.
Operation Overlord was to be the beginning of the end of the war against Germany for the Western Allies, not Operation Diadem. The price of this pyrrhic Italian victory had been too high, with 44,000 Fifteenth Army Group casualties since 11 May, whilst a large proportion of Tenth Army had managed to escape to fight another day. Rome had always been of limited military value, and few people, apart from Mark Clark and the Italians, got overly excited about its capture. For most, Allies and German alike, the events of 5 June were to merely usher in a new phase of the war in Italy. In a remarkable case of strategic myopia, Clark had been blinded by the Eternal City.

From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs

BOOK REVIEW-FIVE STARS
From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs by Andrew Weil

Defining, describing, analyzing, cautioning, and comparing a wide spectrum of drugs along with many substances not normally considered as drugs. Fascinating, informative, and well written, everybody needs to be aware and this book delivers the message.
Excerpts:
Our purpose is not to encourage or discourage the use of any drug but rather to help people learn to live in a world where drugs exist and not get hurt by them.



We pay a high price today for our rejection of natural medicines in favor of potent chemicals. The tendency of pharmacologists and doctors to regard more potent drugs as better drugs encourages the use of dangerous derivatives of plants, when often the milder, natural originals would do as well.



It is clear that drug laws have done nothing to discourage people from becoming addicts. There are more addicts than ever, and the kinds of addiction are worse than before those laws were passed. The prohibition of opiates has spawned an ugly criminal underworld, given rise to powerful drug warlords, and led to the widespread corruption of public officials. Campaigns to stamp out heroin, while popular with politicians, have invariably had the opposite of their intended effect, ultimately causing more heroin to enter the world market, not less.

Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life by David Treuer

BOOK REVIEW-Five Stars
Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life by David Treuer
America’s ruthless history of “Manifest Destiny” with land free for the taking with Winchester repeating arms was unquestionably out and out genocide. This malevolent greed had no limit and was sold to the public as their inalienable right over savages.
This must read book is an honest look at America outside the bubble.
Excerpts:
I think it is safe to say that many Ojibwe would go back to using wooden spears and birch bark canoes if non-Natives simply fished with cane poles from shore, with bits of pork rind on the end of their hooks, only as far west as the Ohio River.



Tom Shingobee has in his possession a grocery receipt totaling seventeen dollars that his father had to settle by signing over his 160-acre farm. During World War I, when many of the men were away fighting in Europe, the timber stands were cut down by large timber outfits. One man remembers coming home to his beloved forests only to find a desert of slash and brush and not a tree in sight for miles.



In all, during the forty-seven years the Dawes Act was on the books (the Indian Reorganization Act, passed in 1934, officially stopped allotment but did not formally rescind the policy), Native Americans lost more than 90 million acres of tribal lands, about two-thirds of the lands held by Indians when the Dawes Act was passed; Indians lost, roughly, land that equals the size of the state of California. Ninety thousand Native Americans were left landless and largely homeless. The problems of this kind of landlessness were felt well into the 1970s and are still felt today. During that time, many Indian families were found to be living in cars, under porches, and crammed eight and sometimes ten to a room in dilapidated shacks across the country.

Travel complications 2019

Jane and John, Palma de Majorca, May, 2019

First let me say, everybody has problems.

My youthful frugality has served me well and has seen me through some troubling times.

I had a plan to finish my last two years of school that required saving money, which I did. Without complicating the story, somebody beat me to the money leaving me desperate. My dear old dad extended me enough to carry me through if I was extremely frugal and worked after school and weekends.

He set an example for me. As a young man my dad had developed three newspaper routes, cleaned a drug store before high school every morning, and repaired bicycles in his spare time. He walked five miles a day to save a nickel bus fare to get his pharmacy degree...my dad was no stranger to frugality.

When I finished my school I paid dad back in full...I know that he would have forgiven the debt, but I knew that this was a point of trustworthiness and honor. We both were happy. I then went on to pay off my house mortgage only making bank interest payments on while finishing school. By paying ahead on the mortgage I made my last mortgage payment at age 28, owned my home, car, and business, never again needing to feed bankers. Thank you Dad!

Being debt free the rest of my life set me free to fulfill my dreams and see me through two devastating economic collapses without being foreclosed upon. Frugality was resumed!

Four years ago I went to the doctor with a urinary infection and came away with problems: walking in and coming out crippled. Thirty days of the antibiotic Cipro left me with tendinitis, painful leg spasms, and sudden onset instability from low blood pressure. I still had my urinary infection which I resolved myself. Trust in the Mexican government social security medical system was gone.

This led to a long and tedious recovery that has not been 100%, the tendinitis could be lasting. A special diet, daily full body massages, plus walking with trekking sticks was imperative.

I longed to bicycle again, but that was looking impossible.

Eventually I discovered I could use my small folding bicycle as a walker for daily therapy. After two months I put the seat low and tried getting on...this was very difficult. Next I tried pushing with my feet. Eventually I was able to get my feet on the pedals...I had some colossal crashes. After a month my instability still held me back. My persistence story continues.

Today I ride my bicycle every day...it is limited to quiet streets on relatively level ground. Getting started is difficult, and it is imperative to dismount to cross busy intersections.

To this day I can not step up or down a curb without a hand rail or my little bicycle used as a walker. Standing in line for five minutes is painful and my limit. I am thankful for what I can do and always think of my dear old friend George Tappin, who on his deathbed said to me, “John, I would give anything if I could just walk out that door”.

This year we planned a Europe trip to Madrid, Palma de Majorca, and northern Germany/Netherlands. Our health was the number one consideration. Jane’s blood pressure and asthma had to be under control. She has done heroic measures over the years of diet, exercise, and radically reducing medications by strict adherence to diet, not imbibing corporate prepared foods plus low salt and sugar. Our ecologically friendly home and surroundings are virtually chemical free and that includes insecticides.

I will keep this brief …nearly twenty years ago Jane had a heart attack, her wonderful doctor got her on a strict diet that enabled her to get off all of her medications while controlling her weight, and she was cross country bicycling within two weeks...at a sensible rate. She later needed glaucoma medications that she eventually developed an allergic reaction to. Luckily the one eliminated did not cause any eye complications, but blood pressure needed controlling.

Jane was at the IMSS Mexican social security medical clinic for her yearly vaccinations, and they took her blood pressure. It was too high, they gave her medication and asked when the last time her doctor tested her. The doctor never tested her though Jane had visited monthly. The IMSS director made a schedule for Jane to get daily blood pressure evaluations. Jane’s doctor prescribed three asthma medications. Amazingly Jane’s asthma became severe and her blood pressure erratic. Jane in desperation made an appointment with her private doctor. Her doctor heard her coughing in the waiting room, and when she came in told her that the problem of high blood pressure was caused by her cough and an infection. Then her private doctor saw Jane’s medications prescribed by IMSS and discovered all three of them induced coughing complications. He prescribed a blood pressure medicine to be taken only when needed. This was the answer and Jane’s health miraculously improved, and we both were feeling great.

We were happy and our Europe trip plans could be put back on schedule.

Two more health calamities occurred. The first was the blood pressure medicine bought for our three month Europe trip turned out to be a fake, and Jane nearly had a stroke due to spiked blood pressure. Thankfully our dear friend Helga in Germany got Jane good medicine and that problem was put behind us. The next problem was a mysterious fluke. Briefly: When we were disembarking our flight at Palma de Majorca we noticed a baggage handler give our folding bicycles flying lessons complete with crash landings. Jane’s sprocket was badly bent, but I had the ability to bend it back into alignment. Less than a week later we were biking in Germany, and I took a colossal crash, broke my bicycle helmet and received a brain concussion. My sprocket was also broken but the chain guard has splintered and formed a hook that snatched my bike pants into the sprocket and sent me flying. The reason this didn’t happen at Palma de Majorca was that  I wore short biking pants when bike there.

A note: Our Dahon folding bicycles made eight trans Atlantic crossing and miraculously survived brutal handling, this was the crowning punishment. They are still rolling with us.