The Lamp

My dad struggled a bit with school. He once told me that he had Rheumatic Fever as an eighth grader, missing two whole months at the one room, country school he and his siblings attended. He said he felt like he never caught up. Nevertheless, he graduated from Bloomfield High School in 1951. Dad was a sophomore when he met my mom, an incoming freshman, and the two of them clicked immediately, despite their differences. She was an outgoing cheerleader who lived in town; he was a quiet farm boy. She excelled in school, while he had to work hard to pass some of his classes. She walked the few blocks to and from school everyday. Dad and his older brother, Lee, drove an unheated Jeep the ten miles to and from their isolated farmhouse. But in the winter, when the harsh, northeastern Nebraska weather made travel difficult, they boarded with an older woman in town, recalling, in later years, how she never gave them enough to eat. Like most teenage boys of that era, Dad took a shop class i...