Verlon’s Birthday

August 17th is the birthdate of our oldest son. We typically get to see him once a year when he comes back from Richmond, VA to speed a week or so with us and work on our house and yard maintenance. He has worked as a finish carpenter and boat builder over the years so has the necessary skills to do many things. Elaine spent most of the day he was born in the delivery room and though I worked at the local SCS office, spent a lot of time in the waiting room at the hospital. Finally at 5:15pm the nurse let me in to see her and learn that we had a baby boy. After Kiwanis today, I suggested to Elaine that it would be very appropriate for us to celebrate the anniversary 

 of his birth with a strawberry milkshake from McDonald’s. He called while we were gone but called back this evening, and we had a lengthy visit. This picture of him in the coaster wagon would have been taken the following summer in the front yard of our house on East Bradford Street. As is apparent, there were no houses across Locust Street to the east of us. While we had electricity and water in the house, it wasn’t until a year or so later that we connected to the sewer and built on a bathroom. During Verlon’s first 12 years we moved to a bigger house in Seward, he had a sister and 2 brothers, we moved to Lincoln and to Washington, D. C. Those were hectic times but looking back and visiting with him about some of the incidents tonight, They were great years for all of us.

This is a picture of Verlon taken about a year ago when he received considerable publicity in the Richmond newspaper on his having built this boat in the living room of his house. Only a bachelor would be able to get by with doing that.  He stores the little boat at one of the nearby lakes and said tonight that he considered getting it out to go sailing today but decided against it. Visiting with adult kids is always interesting what you hear for the first time. As we told him of Carolyn and Ben getting stung by yellow jacket wasps, he told of an incident that happened to him many years ago as a young carpenter. It seems that he and 2 or 3 other guys were working on an old house out in the mountains west of Charlottesville, where they were going to school. They would shuffle back and forth as their schedules demanded and he got stung all over his face and body while working out there alone. His eyes swelled shut to where he couldn’t see to drive but after 36 hours was able to drive for help.