Color Blindness

      Whose car is it?  Johnson’s?  Elliot’s?  Eccleston’s?  They all had ’56 Chevrolets, two toned in the familiar white-topped, white fender manner.

     The cars were either red or green.  I could never tell the difference from a distance.  Closer and in the right light, I could sometimes see which was which.  Brother Dave bought Elliot’s.  He had had it for a while before one morning as the sun struck it just right, I realized it was green, not red.

     The evidence of my color-blindness appeared early, but everybody ignored it.  I remember Cousin Jon scoring big by identifying colors in a plaid shirt.  I sat beside him and failed miserably at the task.  I thought it was because I had never learned my colors.

      I remember Dad remarking about the newly planted green wheat growing up in the rows west of the house, how pretty it was in the sun above the western horizon.  Except it looked red to me.

      The most memorable moment was in second grade, maybe around Thanksgiving or Christmas.  Miss Ebendorf handed out the 81/2 by 11 sheets of paper with the blue outline of a deer, still smelling pleasantly of duplicator fluid.  We dug out our crayons and colored inside the lines, but when she paper clipped the pictures to the wire strung across the front of the room, she made a comment about my green deer.       

     It caught me quite by surprise, but as I looked, sure enough, my deer wasn’t the same color as everybody else’s.  I chose a green crayon to flesh out my deer.  It looked fine to me, but it was different.  I took a lot of ribbing about that. It would be years before I thought I should have told them it was a John Deere.  I never cared much for art after that.

     In freshman biology, in the chapter about eyes, there was a glossy colored page full of colored dots.  I could see two words in the pattern, a faded “color” and a little brighter “onion”.  Still I never suspected the truth, that I didn’t see colors the same way other folks did.

     Finally, in chemistry class a year or so later, my lab partner Jake and I got into a terrible argument.  What color was the residue in the test tube?  Jake said purple.  No way.  We resorted to the judge, Mr. Hare.  Jake told him it was purple.  He asked me what color I thought it was.  I said it was a brownish color.  Mr. Hare looked at met, shook his head, smiled, never said a word as he turned to help other students.  So who was right? 

      Reluctantly, I had to concede the argument.  That’s purple?  I couldn’t believe it.  Over the years, I have come to realize there is no purple in my palette.  It’s either red or blue, or sometimes a yucky brown.  Anyway, I had come to the conclusion that I couldn’t trust my judgment when it comes to color.

     Color blindness, besides being a nuisance, also causes some legal problems When I was earning my pilot’s license, I passed all the tests with flying colors (maybe not), but one, the physical, because of the color test.

     “We” tried to cheat.  Good old Uncle Bill used his influence with some nurses to procure a book with the color charts in them.  I tried to study them and see what I was supposed to see, but it was no good.  The FAA color charts were different.  

    My physical certificate said right on it, “Not valid for night flying or light gun signal control.”  I understood the signal gun.  You have to be able to distinguish red, green, and white.  Interestingly enough, it wasn’t the red—green issue that was the problem.  It was a white—green issue, as I would come to find out.

     But why night flying?  Pretty much black and white, I thought.  I could appeal, so I did.   I went to Jeffco airport where a FAA guy took me out to where we could see the control tower.  During a lull in the action of takeoffs and landings, a controller aimed a light signal gun at us.  (Signal guns are used in case of avionics failure, or if radio silence is in effect, or if a radioless aircraft —like an old airplane with no electrical system—needs to land at an airport operated by a control tower.)

     I was able to see the red, but I couldn’t tell the difference between the green and white.  I failed.  Restrictions remain.  I could wait month and try again, the FAA guy said.  I could pass that light gun test the second time around I was sure, but it wasn’t a big deal and I never went back.

     The white—green is also a problem with stoplights at night.  I have no problem with the red light.  I see it, it’s bigger (or seems so), it’s usually the top of the three lights.  I don’t see the green among all the streetlights and signs.  The yellow light usually catches me by surprise at night.

      So it was when I went to trade in my Kansas CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) for a Colorado one, I had to take a CDOT physical.  I was doing fine until the color chart on the visual section rolled around.  The physical came to a screeching halt.  I had to have an optometrist certify I was safe to drive with my “impairment.”

      This could have been expensive, but only a week or two before I had purchased new glasses from Visionworks.  I went back and spelled out my problem to the optometrist who had examined my eyes.  She wasn’t exactly sure what to do, but promised me she would find out and let me know.  Since I had just been there, there was no charge.

      She sent me a copy of a letter she had written and sent to the clinic doing my physical.  I went back to the clinic and got my CDOT physical, which I then had to take to the Driver’s License examiner, who processed it all and I was good to go, after about a two-week delay all caused by colorblindness.  Harrumph!

     An interesting sidelight, 3-D images don’t work for me.  I see flat images with shadow lines.  Maybe that’s why colorblind folks aren’t fooled by camouflage and make good spotters.

      Perhaps the most frequent problem is the matter of dress.  Combinations that don’t bother me at all sometimes astound the females in my life.  When I was teaching school, I underwent a dress inspection every morning before I left for work.

      How many times have I participated in a conversation, “What shirt do I wear with these pants?”

     “Oh, anything,” followed by “You can’t wear that!” when I come out of the bedroom.    

      Left to my own devices, I choose black and white, generic, or gray trousers and a wild shirt.  If people look strangely at me, I try not to let the girls know what I wore to this or that place.  What they don’t know won’t hurt them.

      In the meantime, I won’t make a very good witness to a crime.  “What color was the getaway car?”

     “Well, it might have been green, or it could have been red.”

         

The Load Nobody Wanted

     “The dirty *******s!  They’re not open!”

      It was Saturday morning.  We approached the elevator scale with 500 bushels of wheat on the 1969 Dodge truck. 

     No wonder there were no trucks waiting in a nice orderly line, none on the scale, none sitting over the grate in the elevator proper.  There was nobody around, doors all closed.

     I had dumped a load just 24 hours earlier, with no warning that the elevator would not be open Saturday.  Now what to do? 

     I tried futiley to reach someone on my cell phone.  Chester pulled up beside us.  He recognized the truck and came over to see what he could do to help us.  His phone calls were more fruitful than mine, but no more helpful in solving our predicament.

      All the elevators were full and closed, or close to full, and we would be taking a gamble to drive at least another ten miles with a good chance of being turned away.  I asked Chester if he had a spare bin, half-jokingly, knowing they had just finished a good harvest.

     He said they might.  They had one that would need a little cleaning, but it was at our disposal if we needed it.

     The loathsome load of wheat nobody wanted headed back to the farm where it would sit until Sunday evening.  Our bin still had room, so the first priority was to harvest what we could.  We cut wheat all day Saturday hauling to the grain bin with the GMC 150 bushels per load.

      Sunday morning, we headed to Limon.  Nobody answered the phone at the Limon terminal, but sure enough the place was open.  The manager said he was filling up and would start turning away trucks when he got full.  Call before you bring the truck. 

       When we called, it was the same old story—get in line and take your chance.  No thanks.

      Over to Chester’s bin we went.  It’s an eleven-mile trip.  It needed a good sweeping, but it was empty, nearly.  That was our best option.  (We discussed dumping on the ground, but getting it loaded up again would be a real chore.)

      About 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon, our bin was full, the Dodge sat rejected, loaded, in the penalty box of the farmyard where it had been since Saturday morning.  The GMC had its 150 bushel load.  Nothing to do but go sweep out a bin. 

     We loaded up the 4X4 with shovels, buckets, brooms, a ladder.  I drove the pariah wheat load and we arrived for the second time at the bin. 

     The bin had held millet, a fine grain with lots of dust.  We were equipped with respirators.  This bin has a pit under it, meaning it has a cone shaped cement base extending down into mother earth for six or eight feet.  The idea of a pit beneath a grain bin was to reduce the need to shovel.  The steep pit walls allow the grain to slide to the bottom. 

      A 12-inch tube paralleling the pit walls allows an auger to be lowered into the bottom of the pit.  That auger raises the grain to ground level where it dumps into another auger, which takes the grain into a truck.  All this without manning a scoop shovel, the time-tested way of handling grain.

      Standing on the steep pit walls while running a broom proved a challenge.  It can’t be any harder than roofing, I thought. But I couldn’t stand up without sliding down into the pit bottom.  When I first slid down to the bottom, I thought there was spoiled grain in the point of the cone.  It proved to be liquid, a foul-smelling liquid, which brings up a second problem with pits:  they seem always to leak and collect water in the bottom of the cone.

      A small bucket used as a dipper, a larger bucket on a rope removed the bilge water.  Sweeping the top portions of the pit wall wasn’t going too well, however.

      Chester came along when we were about half done.  He asked if we needed a ladder.  It dawned on both of us that we had brought a ladder.  We could lay it down in the pit and use it to stand on.  Well duh!

      Using the ladder the sweeping was soon done.  A few more bucketsful dipped out of the tip of the cone, this time dust and millet residue, and the bin was clean.  Chester set the auger over the bin and hooked the tractor up and the bin was ready.   But we weren’t.  It was 7:30 p.m. Sunday evening.  The Dodge would have to bear its rejected load one more night.

     Monday morning found us in the GMC headed for the bin.  The Dodge finally got to dump the load it had carried since Friday evening.  The Dodge would visit that bin three more times by Wednesday afternoon, the GMC five times before we wore out the 2016 harvest about 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.

      In terms of yield, it is the best crop I have ever raised, coming in at over 40 bushels to the acre.  The quality is not the best at eight-to-nine percent protein. 

     It was a good harvest, but it did have its frustrations, the biggest being what to do with all the grain.  The golf cart went down just before the combine was out of the shed.  It awaits my attention.

        I had to replace the fuel pump on the Versatile swather to get it started and out of the way of the combine.  Neighborly was over Sunday when I was working on the swather.  He was pretty worried that I didn’t have the combine out of the shed yet.  I think he knew the wheat was ready to cut—our first load cut Tuesday testd 8% moisture, well below the 13% maximum moisture.

      The combine fuel pump needed some tinkering to get it to work.  Monday afternoon, the battery on the 4X4 retired itself.  Dodge Dakota substituted nicely for the 4X4 in the pinch.

    On the other hand, the old combine and the trucks behaved themselves nicely the whole time.  The heavy wheat dictated slow ground travel. We were taking out loads of wheat, but not covering much ground.  It was the slowest harvest in getting it completed, especially when you consider we had none of the weather delays we usually have.

     Harvest done, it’s time for a rain and a little help from the market.  Wheat prices have slid below $3.  Since I have no control over either of those factors, I plan to attack the weeds in the summer fallow.  There’s still next year.

Doing Dishes

      From 1940, when my parents were married, until 1952 when our youngest sibling, a sister, was born, my mother was the sole female of the house.  We boys were pressed into domestic service, whether by design or default.

    That is to say, we learned to do dishes, help with laundry and do some house-cleaning chores.  By the time I was old enough to handle laundry, we got our first automatic clothes-washer, a used Hotpoint washer and dryer from the International dealer in town.  It took away a lot of work such as rearranging the kitchen, moving the washing machine from porch to kitchen, and especially handling the heavy rinse tubs.  Mondays were a little less onerous.  I never helped much with laundry as a result of that purchase.

     There was no dishwasher yet.  We boys often did the dishes, especially in the evening. 

     Dish doing involved three jobs, clearing the table, washing, and drying.  “Clearing” was the most desirable or least dreaded.  Put away leftover food, the staples (bread in bread drawer, salt, pepper, sugar bowl shelved, butter stowed in refrigerator), scrape scraps from plates into dog’s dish, stack plates, silverware, glasses near the kitchen sink.  Clearing was finished when the tablecloth had been wiped down with the sponge or dishrag.

     The worst job was washing.  It also bore the most responsibility.  The dishwasher was responsible for getting everything clean, rinsed, and into the dish-drainer.  At the onset of the job, the water was hot, scalding hot.

     Miss Manners (or some such self-appointed authority) says you wash the things that touch the mouth first while the water is hot and fresh.  That would be the silverware and the glasses.  The silverware always went into the water first, but it generally came out last.  That way it had a chance to soak away the hard to get stuff, like egg yolk in the fork tines.  The silverware took the most time.

     The dish dryer took stuff out of the drainer, toweled it dry, and shelved it appropriately.  He was also quality control.  If a plate or fork came through unclean, splash, back into the dishwater it went.  If the washer got a little wet, served him right for not doing the job right the first time.  Again, the silverware took the most time and care.

     Worse than silverware was the separator.  We milked a couple of cows for quite a few years.  Before the family got so big, the folks hauled a can of cream to town once or twice a month, but later, we used everything the two cows produced.  Still, we separated the cream from the milk.  We drank the skim milk, put it on cereal, and used it for cooking and baking.  The cream topped off cereal, bananas, strawberries, pies, cakes, sugared bread, whatever.

      The separator had to be cleaned daily, especially in summer, or the cream and the milk got a rancid flavor.  Dad cleaned the separator bowl outside, but the two spouts and the disk mechanism came into the house and got stacked in line with the rest of the dirty dishes.  The disk mechanism looked like a funnel, but it was heavy, full of lampshade-shaped disks.  There were probably fifteen of them and they were graduated in size, thus the funnel shape. They had to be reassembled in the correct order.  It behooved the dishwasher and dryer to keep the order as well as possible during the cleansing operation. 

      The oily cream clung to the stainless steel.  Each disk had to be gone over separately with rag or sponge, no splashing the disk back and forth in the soapy water to get it clean.

      We had three meals in those days, mostly on a strict schedule.  Breakfast. Dinner (12 noon sharp or beware the consequences if you were late to the table), and supper, less regimented unless we had somewhere to go in the evening.  We nearly always did the supper dishes, getting relief from the parents only if we had a school function to attend.

       As a sidelight of our domestic chores, we learned a marvelous life-coping skill—turn the worst jobs into a game.  In the basement was an old makeshift ping-pong table.  Many a summer night, we all pitched in to clear the table, while somebody ran the dishwater and put the silver and the plates to soak. 

     Below stairs we went and the Ping Pong tournament began.  One person would begin washing the dishes while the other two vied at the Ping Pong table.  When the score reached 21, a dejected, defeated player made his way up the stairs to the sink and drainer.  The first dishwasher could hear as the players kept score and was ready, paddle in hand to try to dispatch the game winner to the kitchen as soon as the first game was over. 

     So it went until the dishes were done.  Lucky was the person who stayed downstairs by virtue of defeating the other contestants.  It seemed a fair way of dividing the dish-doing chores. 

     The tournament usually went beyond the time it took to do the dishes.  Often as not, the Denver Bears were playing baseball on the radio.  In later days, a pool table replaced the rickety Ping Pong table, and eight ball was the game, but the pool table was often converted to Ping Pong with a sheet of plywood.

     Finding a way to make a game out of chores proved useful in my teaching career.  Finding a way to make a dour subject a game made an hour fly by.  Sometimes, they actually learned something, too.

      Time went by.  The kids left the nest one-by-one.  A dishwasher found itself in the farm kitchen.  It’s been a while since a Ping Pong ball bounced off the cement floor, or “My serve” or “Seven all” has echoed through the old basement.   

      The automatic dishwasher is gone, removed for a stalled floor project.   The dish drainer is out and the kitchen sink once again hosts hot soapy water.  It may be my imagination, but I think the dishes are cleaner using the old way.

     Ping Pong, anyone?

Lynn Fisher

      Lynn’s funeral was a huge gathering, a fitting tribute to the role he played in the community.  The church was full top to bottom.  There was probably an overflow crowd, but from the last row of seats in the basement, it was difficult to see much of anything.

    Lynn made his last ride from church to cemetery in a horse drawn wagon.  It was a slow ride, fitting for Lynn as he demonstrated the past few years, being in no hurry to make that trip.  After visiting with a few neighbors and walking a hundred yards to my vehicle, the procession was just headed north on 109 as I turned west on 3J and headed for home.

     My memory of Lynn goes back to preschool days.  I can only think of one reason why we would have called on the Bud Fishers.  We borrowed what we called a “slush bucket”, a well-cleaning device.  It was a length of three-inch pipe with a flapper valve in the bottom.  Drop the pipe in the well, rope attached of course, and pull it up and let it drop a few times.  The silt and sand would work its way up into the pipe while the butterfly valve opened on the down stroke and closed on the upstroke.  Pull the pipe up, full of sand and silt.

      When we were there, my two brothers and I took a ride with Lynn on his farmhand to do some kind of chore.  After the ride, the three older guys all piled down from the Fatmhand and took off.  I was slowly finding my way off the machine when Lynn stopped, turned around, came back and lifted me off the farmhand and stowed me safely on the ground.  I was surprised by his thoughtfulness, but I always felt after that moment early in life that Lynn was a guy who would help a person.

     I never had any reason to change my mind on that. 

     There would be a couple of times when we would have to call on Lynn, usually to use his phone to call for help.  (The olden days when there were no cell phones.)  Once, the old Chevy started misfiring in a heavy snowstorm.  Another time the oil line broke on the old GMC truck.  There was a convenient telephone in the shop.

     The last time I saw Lynn to really visit with him was a couple of years ago in Anton.  I went there for an all-day seminar to renew my pesticide applicator’s license.  I was a little early because I wasn’t sure of my way.  Besides, I might get lost in Anton (grocery store, post office, Coop Station, grain elevator, and a few houses).  I did go to the wrong place, the service station instead of the grain elevator.  I was redirected from there.

     I didn’t know anyone, at the meeting, so I moved up to the front row where I had a table to myself and was close enough to see and hear.  A few minutes before the thing was to start, Lynn and Iris came wheeling in and pulled up beside me.  We conversed during the breaks throughout the day.  Lynn was lamenting that he had no sons who could take over for him, thus he must maintain his pesticide applicator’s license.

     No grandsons interested?  Not one, he said.  I commiserated, though Lynn had much more to offer to an interested party.

     Lynn was not without his detractors.  Many merchants felt Lynn drove a hard bargain.  Many an employee felt too much was demanded of them  But all would admit that Lynn demanded a lot more from himself than from anyone else.

     Lynn had an automobile accident some years ago that left him a paraplegic.  He would suffer yet another auto accident that would cost him his right hand.  He would have to learn to do everything left handed.  And he did it.

     The homily at his service was title “Not Yet”.  The speaker referred to Lynn’s perseverance in the face of all odds.  Many times Lynn came close to death, but he struggled back to go on living, as if to say, “Not yet” to death.  It was a fitting tribute.

     When Lynn first came back to take over the farm, his dad Bud still lived on the home place on the corner.  Lynn lived in a trailer house on a hilltop about a mile north.  He planted trees and made the place home until his father retired.  One of the trees, a giant blue spruce now juts fifty feet into the sky.  It has survived the hot summers, the cold bitter winters, and the wind that amplifies whatever Mother Nature sends.  It has thriven with the help of the good times.

    The tree, visible from miles around, now stands as a fitting symbol for Lynn’s life    

   

        

      

Pickup Shopping

     Shopping.

     Hard to imagine that for a major portion of the populace, shopping is the end-all and he  be-all.  I’d rather not, thank you, shop.

      Sometimes, it can’t be avoided.  I needed to buy a pickup.  I began glancing at the ads in Craigslist.  At first I concentrated on private sales.  There I found old junk and new high price stuff, but not much in smaller, lower mileage machines.

      I turned to dealers on Craigslist.  I found a 2003 Dodge Dakota with 120K miles.  It was in Greeley at a small lot known as Marty and Dan’s.  It looked OK to me with a few more miles than I would have liked, but close enough that I dropped  by for a look.  It had one drawback—a standard transmission.

     A week later, the Dakota was still there, so I took the Goodwife to take a look.  Within thirty feet, she saw a dent here, a scrape there that I had missed.  She opened the door and saw the gearshift rod.  It was a rather homely job of extending the lever with a chrome rod.  That finished it.  No deal here.

     As we walked towards our car, she spied the Ranger.  “Is that one for sale?” she asked Dan.

     “Yeah, just got that one in today,” Dan said.  “It’s a ’98, only has 47,000 miles on it.  Take a look.”  We did.  Thirty minutes later, we had committed to buy the Ranger.  We did take it on a drive first.

     Dan wanted to check out the pickup to see what needed to be done to it.  He hadn’t had a chance to clean it up.  We agreed to return in a week and finish the deal.

      A few hours later, it occurred to me that we hadn’t checked out the cruise control. Did it even have one?  I called Dan.  It didn’t.

     He had one, an after-market that would fit right on there.  It would add probably $200 to $300 to the price.  Well, okay, driving to Seattle without a cruise control could get tiresome, very tiresome.  I told the Goodwife it would probably cost $400, knowing that initial estimates are often low.

       A week later, when we went to take possession, Dan had a story to tell.  The after-market did not work out.  He went out to Anderson’s and got a used speed control.  He had to redo the steering wheel, where the controls reside.  He had to replace the brake master cylinder in addition to hooking the servo to the throttle body and wiring steering column, etc.  He said it took him a day to do.

     As Dan spoke, I could see he dollar meter running up.  Then he said, “I told you $150 to $200, so I’ll just split the difference with you--$175.”

      Wait a minute!  Am I in a used car dealer’s office?  That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.

      We finished the deal and I drove the “new” pickup home.  I drove the old Dodge to the farm.  Later, the Goodwife called to say she had put the pickup in Tom’s garage.  Tom is deployed to United Arabs Emirate for six months, and we are keeping an eye on his house for him.  She said it looked like a hailstorm, so she got the pickup out of harm’s way.

      When I went to get the Ranger out of Tom’s garage, I noted how similar Tom’s pickup and our pickup are, both gray Rangers.  His is quite a few years newer, however.  I wondered if anybody was watching, if they were thinking I was backing Tom’s pickup out for a drive. 

      I asked Tom, when he called, if any of the neighbors had reported to him that I was driving his pickup.  Tom laughed and said I was a pretty good thief, if I was driving his pickup.  The battery is disconnected, the keys hidden somewhere in the basement.  I caught him up on our purchase and use of his garage.

       I drove the Ford to the farm.  It was a warm May day.  The heater wouldn’t shut off.  When I tried to get some outside air flowing, it was hot air.  The regular AC couldn’t override the heater.  Maximum AC worked, so I made the trip in comfort.

       Then the check engine light came on, and a little later, the brake warning light.  I called Dan.  He said bring it in.  I did.  Some fluid in the brake reservoir took care of one light.  A quick engine analysis suggested improper tightening of the gas cap.  (I still haven’t figured out how to manage the gas cap correctly.)

      I had studied the heater problem, a faulty valve in the heater line.  My solution was to put in another valve, a manual one like on the old cars.  The old flathead V-8 Fords had a valve coming out of the intake manifold, with a flat blade handle, that you could shut off in the summer.  I don’t remember ever using that valve, as the heater controls always worked.  I thought it would be handy to have on this outfit, however.

     Dan nixed that idea.  I couldn’t find a suitable valve anyway.  He had me start the engine and run through the heater and AC controls.  “Valve works fine,” he said.  It’s in the controls.” Everything but Max AC turned the heater on.

      A trip to the auto parts store and then back to Anderson’s salvage, and the control was replaced, but it still didn’t work.  Knowing we were off to Seattle, Dan made a temporary fix.  All the colored lines, which I thought were electric wires, are really vacuum lines.  The heater-AC controls are all operated by vacuum.  Dan hooked the heater valve directly to the engine’s vacuum system.  If the engine is running, the heater valve is pulled shut by the vacuum.

      In the olden days, windshield wipers were run by vacuum.  The problem was, when the engine lugged down, as in going up a hill, the engine vacuum would be greatly reduced.  The windshield wipers would slow to a stop.  As you topped the hill and let up on the gas pedal, the windshield wipers would come to life and beat like crazy as if to make up for their abdication of duty on the way up the hill.

      That was the problem with the temporary fix to the heater control.  Going uphill, the engine vacuum reduced, the heater popped on.  I was prepared for this one.  I had stowed an assortment of twist ties and heavy rubber bands, the kind that hold the broccoli stems together, under the hood.  At a pit stop in Wyoming, I tried a rubber band to help hold the valve closed.  I had to supplement the rubber band with twist ties, but the heater doesn’t come on anymore.

      A bigger problem was the brake light came on again.  The fluid was down.  There was a leak in the reservoir.  It took a little more than a pint of brake fluid on our Seattle trip, topping it off every morning before takeoff.  Back to Dan. 

      We took a trip out to Anderson’s, where Dan is well known, in his electric hybrid car.  It took a few minutes to find the right vehicle with the right brake master cylinder, and  a few minutes less for Dan to have the cylinder out of the carcass.  Back we went, and in about ten minutes, the replacement brake cylinder was installed.

     Dan said he thought the heater solution might be a faulty actuator.  I told him I could probably handle that, having watched him take the radio cassette player out with a snap of plastic and four screws, exposing the temperature controls.  I took my leave, a little disappointed that I might never have the opportunity to visit with Dan again.  He is truly an interesting fellow.

      During my pre-Seattle visit, a Hispanic-looking guy wearing a GM shirt came in to visit with Dan about buying parts from them.  They knew each other and fell into a conversation about how the auto companies are charging a lot to give independent mechanic shops their data and the systems necessary for the independents to use their diagnostic tools on the company’s vehicles. 

     That led to other injustices in modern America’s attempt to stifle the mom and pop shops and put the corporations in charge of everything.  The subject got around to the 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S.  The GM guy obviously had a stake in that game.  He said he wasn’t Mexican, Central or South American.   He was Spanish-speaking German.   His grandparents migrated from Europe.  

     He further said he got treated like trash from all sides, from the white guys who assumed he was Mexican, and the Mexicans who knew he wasn’t Mexican.  Obviously, he had risen above all that to get to the position he now holds.

      Now Dan is in his sixties, an avid hiker, biker, physical-fitness guy, a good mechanic who drives an electric hybrid, who uses his vacation time to travel to foreign countries to hike and get to know  folks, partner in a used car lot with Marty, also in his sixties.  Dan took some time from working on my heater to explain his solution to the immigrant problem.

     Dan says every citizen, every guest worker, needs to have a chip card identifier, like a social security card.  Without that identifier card, a person cannot get a job or apply for any benefits.  The GM guy said the minute the cards are out, somebody will figure a way to counterfeit them. 

      Dan agreed, but countered with only ten, maybe fifteen percent  would cheat.  Our law enforcement folks would be able to deal with that ten or fifteen percent much more effectively than they can with the mess we have now.

      It was a very interesting conversation.  It was heartening to me to know there are still guys in the country like Dan and the GM guy who don’t mind working for a living and doing a quality job, too.

      The bottom line, if you need a quality used car, try Marty and Dan’s in Greeley.  In my experience, they break the stereotypical mold of used car salesmen.  You’ll get a fair deal. 

     In the end, my shopping trip turned up a nugget.