Armstrong kids Grandpa's life

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  1. 1. Shortly before moving out from Haines back to Juneau, we had over 4 feet of snow in 24 hours. It began in the afternoon, and since we heard the weather report I went downtown and got a few groceries. Then I went to the gas station to fill up the car with gas. I sat in the street waiting to turn in for about 5 minutes, there was one island with two pumps on it, but the snow plow was unable to keep up with the snow. He would go on one side of the pump and then the other. Back and forth and the snow was getting deeper and deeper between each pass where he cleared it away. I finally gave up and went home. At midnight, I had a fire call(I was a volunteer fireman) and got home about 1 am. At 8 a.m. there was between 2 and 3 feet on top of the car but even more surprising was how deep the snow was everywhere. We shoveled a path out of the door past the car throwing the snow to the side where it would not impact the picture we were about to take. When we had a path out past the car, Grandma was out there and she was wearing a stocking had with a pom pom on top. Looking out from the house that was a foot or more higher than the driveway I took a picture and all you can see of Grandma in the picture is the pom pom on top of her head.
  2. 4. Great Grandpa Alvin was an _______(ˈinəˌvādər)in raising poultry. In fact, at one point when I was 3 or 4 he was written up in the Saturday Evening Post (a very popular national magazine). He was the first poultry grower to put scales under the feed hopper and strictly control the amount of feed, the first to put feeders on a winch so that he could circulate the feed, then lower the feeder eliminating the problem of "pecking order" in accessing the feed, the first to put water on a winch and restrict access to it to keep the shavings that the chickens lived on from getting too wet because chickens tend to play in the water when its always available and they throw it all over by shaking their heads with a beak full of water. Many of the things that Great Grandpa Johnson did, became normal for all similar growers in the country within a few years.
  3. 7. In the years to come, I climbed the South Sister two times, once as a camper and the _____ time as the leader of a group of 5 boys from Valley Chapel in the Portland Area.
  4. 8. When I first went to Juneau I worked as a summer intern at Auke Bay Bible Church. Late that summer the ______ Ranch camp director came to Great Grandpa Johnny who was the pastor of the church and asked if he would be willing to send me out to help out at camp because their last boys counselor had to leave early due to a family emeregency. So that day or the next I arrived at Echo Ranch to take over a cabin of 22 junior boys. The other thing was that the counselor I was replacing was also the wrangler. Even though I had only ridden a horse twice in my life, I was soon leading trail rides because I had grown up on a farm and understood a lot about animals. By the time I came to town at the end of that week of camp and the one more in their season, 10 days I later I had spent so much time on a horse i was walking with my feet about 18 inches apart and could hardly walk or stand up straight I was in such pain!
  5. 10. In 1968 (the same year as grandma experienced the "big snow" we did in Oregon also. We had just bought the farm near Sutherlin but had not moved there yet. At 3 a.m. one Sunday morning your Great Grandpa Alvin woke me up and told me to get dressed in warm clothes because we were going to the farm. After a delay due to impassable hill on Interstate five at rice hill we finally made it to the farm and began the process of shoveling the barn roofs. As I recall we were at the process of shoveling for about a week. We walked to a neighbors house to sleep each night because there was not a house on our property yet. When we got up in the morning the snow on the roofs was just as deep as it had been the morning before! We shoveld so much snow off the roofs that we no longer needed a ladder to get on the roof, we could just walk right up onto the. Finally the day came where we were going home. I was overjoyed when your great grandpa Alvin gave the the keys to the truck and told me to start it up so that it would be warm when my brother and dad came down. I had no idea how bad my _____ (compound word maeaning under temperature) was until I got to the truck and put the key in the ignition. I found that I was unable to turn the key to start the truck no matter what I did.
  6. 11. When I was _____ years old, in the first grade, I went forward in church one Sunday night and accepted Jesus as my Savior.
  7. 15. Before the pituitary tumor was diagnosed I got to the point that I could not think clearly, I am not even sure at one point that I could have done the simple arithmatic probem of adding two ______ two.
  8. 18. There were three moutains close together to the east of Eugene and Springfield known as the 3 sisters. In Junior High our church had "wilderness camps" and wile in the 7th grade on one of these campouts I climbed the ____ Sister. (They are named the North Sister, Middle Sister and the South Sister).
  9. 19. When we were missionaries with GMU in Alaska, I was an interim pastor in Haines for 9 months. Durring that time I would often fly to Haines on Sunday morning and ride the ferry home in the evening. One week, after making those plans, a fellow missionary returning from furlough offered to take my place and give me a break. I ended up flying to Ketchikan to meet with some other missionaries that weekend. While there I received a call that the _______ I had arragned to fly to Haines in (that was carrying my fellow missionary and piloted by a friend) crashed on take off and the pilot was killed and the missionary who took my place spent 3 weeks in the hospital recovering.
  10. 21. One of the things that the Pituitary gland controls is the release of _______; the chemical that causes you to have a sudden burt of stregnth, fear...etc in emergency situations. In the several months that followed that Sunday, I refused to drive the car because I knew that if a truck was coming toward me in my lane I would have said to my self "that truck is going to kill me" and my response would have been "oh well I guess I will die" instead of quick turn the steering wheel and get out of its way.
  11. 22. When I (grandpa) moved from Eugene to farm and went to school in Oakland I encountered a strong resistance to "outsiders" The Junior High School I had attended in Eugene had about 1000 students in 7th, 8th and 9th grades. Oakland High school had just over 200 students in 9th - 12th grade. My sophomore year I was unable to get above a 2.5 (C+) average but I had a 3.75 (B++) average in Junior High. Our High School band literally played the very same song in a concert that my 5th grade band in Eugene had played in our very first concert. It was very disheartening....But by the time I was a senior in High School I received straight A's one quarter and did absolutely nothing to deserve it. The difference was that my family now had "_______" (see note)in the community.(NOTE: My father was arespected member of the business community; actual word is an antonym of sitting)
  12. 23. When I was a senior in high school my brother and I drove from Oregon to Chicago to visit my sister who was attending Moody Bible Institute. After spending the weekend with her, we started for _____ (the place I lived). We would take turns driving so as we got to the outskirts of Chicgo heading north, we stopped for gas and Started driving. I drove several hundred miles then stopped for gas. After I got the gas, my brother started driving and I took a nap. When he stopped for gas he woke me up and told me it was my turn again. I got out looked around and we were at the very same gas station that we were at when I had started driving before. He had got on the freeway headed back to Chicago instead of away from it and driven his whole shift headed the wrong way!
  13. 24. I was at _____ singing the Sunday before Christmas 2005 when suddenly I felt very strange. I turned to Ruth and asked her to take me home right away. It wasn't that I was hurting so much as a strange feeling I could not put my finger on. I learned later that my pituitary tumor had probably had an internal stroke(i.e. started bleeding) and that put pressure on my brain. Because you don't have nerve cells in your brain that are sensitive to touch it didn't hurt, but what it did do was squeeze my pituitary glad and it controls many other things that happen in my body.
  14. 26. As a preschooler, I did not always sit as still as my mother wanted. One day the lady in the pew behind us was egging me on to misbehave and my mother got very fed up with the situation, so she got up in the middle of the sermon and took me out. On the way down the aisle I cried out, "Mommy, don't ______ (paddle) me!"
  15. 27. When I attended Wilderness camp as a 9th grader we climbed two tall mountains. We camped at Green Lakes where the elevation is 6,600 feet. The South Sister (10,358 feet) and it's neighbor to the southeast, Broken Top (9,177 feet high) . It is named that becuause it has a very jagged top. To get to the summit we had to scale several 10 foot cliffs. That was scarry for me but nothing like what I was about to face. I was about 20 feet from the summit where there was a box with a register in it that you could sign your name as proof you had made it all the way to the summit. I was determined to get there and put my name in the _____, but there was a very narrow path about 10 feet long between me and the area around the actual summit. I thing everyone else just walked accross but I was so frightened that I straddled the path with a leg hanging down each side and scooted across.
  16. 29. One day in Juneau, I was riding in my good friend Lance Elphic's ______ when it started to snow. I began to get very worried, because visibility was declining quickly. Lance looked over at me and smiled when he asked if I was getting nervous. I said yes. He said "relax, there is still better visibility with this snow than flying in Los Angeles on a clear day".
  17. 30. When we lived at Harrisburg the Willamette river had its last big flood before the Cougar reservoir was added up in the mountains that prevented flood waters from causing damaging floods in the Willamette Valley (where Harrisburg is located on the banks of the Willamette River). By the way until just a few years ago there were remnants of a pier that was used to anchor ocean going ships. Harrisburg was as far upriver as they could come, after the locks had been installed that allowed them to get past the Wilamette Falls in Oregon City. But I digress. This flood meant that we could not drive the last quarter mile to our house but had to wade through the flood. Since the flood came up to my father's crotch I was too short to walk in it and had to be carried on my fathers shoulders. But Great Grandma Ethel, Great Grandpa Alvin, Aunt Paula and Uncle Rick all had to walk. When we got to our house the water was about 3 inches below the front door! Fortuneatly, it never got any higher.
  18. 32. Before I was old enough to attend school, we lived in Harrisburg, Oregon. Our house was so small we196 slept in the unfishihed _______ (the part of the house between the ceiling and the roof).
  19. 33. My senior year of high school my friend and I were goofing off during one class period and rigged a trash can of ____ over the door in the boys bathroom. When we came by a few minutes later we saw ____ on the floor and rushed in to find a teacher dripping wet. This was totally unexpected since teachers had their own bathroom. He grabbed us by the arm and started off toward the principal's office. As we neared the office, the principal came around the corner, saw the teacher and started laughing very hard, the teacher let go of our arms and we ran off (we never did get punished for that incident). This led to rigging small cups of water to many doors in the school. Including one on the last day of classes that most people including us thought was impossible for most of the school year. We figured out a way and went to school early to spend over an hour rigging up our water cup. As we were closing the door a teacher walked up, and knowing what we had been doing because of our reputation, she made us stand in front of the door and open it. But Jim was very sly and kept his finger on the string he had been shutting in the door so that he was still holding it when I opened the door and nothing happened, the teacher was puzzled and couldn't resist looking in. At that moment Jim released the string and we both jumped to the side-and we soaked our second teacher!
  20. 34. When I finished High School the VietNam war was in full swing and I was certain to be ____ (told I had to do compulsory military service) unless I went to college. Add to that, my parents had told me since I was very little that they wanted me to go to at least one year of Bible College. So even though I didn't really want to go to Bible College my parents would pay my way and i could get a student deferment so that I would not be ________ into military service until that deferment ran out. To make a long story short, my deferement ran out 1 month after they stopped drafting young me for VietNam.
  21. 36. I was a sophomore in High School I played football. (real american football not soccer). It was the last play before half-time and I caught a pass. As soon as I secure the ball and turned down field the opposing teams safety was directly in front of me so I did what I was taught to do, I put my head down and so did he and we colided head to head and both fell in a heap. Their helmets were red, but we hit so hard that all the paint came off his helmet and it was silver the rest of the game. I was so dazed that the coach came over with smelling salts and passed it under my nose. Looking back I am certain I had a concussion, but they didn't think about that in those days, if you were tough, you just got up and kept playing. It took all of half time to feel like I could even walk back to the field at a normal pace unassisted. Today they eject players from the game for helmet to helmet contact of that sort because the colisions are so dangerous.
  22. 37. During the year after my Pituitary Tumor surgery I wrote a Christmas Play entitled The _______ (synonym: amazing) Arrival. You watched the video several weeks before Christmas at Aunt Karen's house.
  23. 38. When I was in grade school our family would often go to the Oregon coast on Sunday afternoon in the summer. One time when I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade my brother, sister and I were playing on a large log that had washed ashore during a storm. It was 20 feet or so above where the ocean waves were coming up on the beach. My back was turned to the ocean as I played and the next thing I knew I was compeltely underwater! A _______ (snēkər) wave had come ashore. This kind of wave is a disproportionately large coastal wave that can sometimes appear in a group of much smaller waves without warning and can be twice as high as the other waves in the group.
  24. 39. When we moved to the farm, I took hunter's safety class and decided to go hunting deer for the first time. I didn't know much about hunting but was determined to learn. So on ____ (the first) morning of deer season I got up well before the sun and hike up the hills to the spring at the top of our property because my Dad told me that would be a good place to see a dear. It was a cold fall morning so I put my uncle's rifle across my lap and put my hands in my pockets to wait for first light. When I could see about 10 feet a forked horn (two year old buck) came slowly walking accross the road. I couldn't believe it! But now I had two dilemas. 1) my hands were in the pockets of my jeans and I was sitting down, I knew it would take too long to pull them out of my pockets and pick up my rifle because I could only see about 10 feet the deer would be long gone before I could get a shot off. Which really was a good thing because the second problem I had was that it was about 15 minutes before civil light when it was legal to begin hunting. I did not get a deer that morning.
  25. 40. When I was 4 years old I had my first experience "driving" a truck with no one else in the cab and I thought it was a roaring success but unfortuneatly my father thought it was a terrible failure. At that time we lived on a farm in Harrisburg Oregon and had a few cows that we raised in addition to the chickens. Great Grandpa Alvin had learned that during the bean harvest when the canneries were canning beans they had some that for whatever reason were not good enough to be canned. These "cull" beans could be hauled away for no charge (or very little money) and made excellent cattle feed. So Great Grandpa Alvin would drive to the canary in Eugene, get a load of cull beans then bring them home and spread them in the field for the cows to eat. When he spread them in the field, he would put the pickup in first gear (a manual transmission) and point it across the field, then get on the back with a ______ (the implement often picutured in the devils hand when he is shown in a red suit with a pointy tail) and pitch the beans off the back. Unfortuneatly the pickup didn't always keep going straight because the field wasn't all that smooth, so he would sometimes let one of us kids "drive". Which in this case meant holding the steering wheel so the truck did not turn while he was using the fork unloding the beans. Well as a four year old, I was soon bored with steering and that gas pedal was oh so tempting. Of course I could not hold the steering wheel straight and press on the gas at four, so I slid down off the seat and punched the gas pedal to the floor. Wow did I think that was fun! However, Great Grandpa Alvin had a very different view and my driving days were done for many years.
  26. 42. About a year before moving to Michigan, Grandma and I went to see the Steens Mountains in Southeastern Oregon. Access to the mountains is via the tiny community of FrenchGlen (population 12). Between Frenchglen and the Steens mountains is the Malheur Natinal Wildlife Refuge an area that is shaped like a T and is 60km wide accross the top of the T and 60km long down the body. The body of the T is largely a swamp that is inhabited by untold billions of mosquitos. As I discovered the girl ones were quite thirsty for blood the boy ones are much better mannered and do not bite). We were following a driving tour (staying inside of our truck almost all the time) when I discovered we had a tire that was leaking air quickly. Since I didn't want to change the tire when there were billions of mosquites within range of my body I drove as fast as I could to try to make it back to our campsite (away from the mosquitos) about 30km away. But fate was not kind to me and the tire was so flat in about 15km that I had to stop and change it. Things went very well until I tried to lower the spare tire to put it on. After a few minutes of trying I gave up and got in the truck. After 10 minutes of killing mosquitos I was in the process of calling to get someone to come out and help us when a local rancher stopped to see if we needed help. He told us the "secret" to getting the spare tire down and within 5 minutes I had the tire on and we were heade down the road. In all I spent 20 to 30 minutes outside the truck and I had over 3000 ________ bites on each leg! Amazingly I did not get sick from them.
Down
  1. 2. I attended Oakland High School (in Oakland Oregon). We were known as the Oakland Oakers. I played in the band and assisted the band teacher with the 5th grade band as a senior. I had played baritone for years but at the request of the band director I tried to learn _______ (a brass intrument with a slide instead of valves) for the last year.
  2. 3. You may remember that the cable in the back yard of our house is the second ________ that I have set up. The first was at Echo Ranch Bible Camp. We called it the Sky Trolley and it started at the top of a 30 foot cliff and ended on the front beach several hundred feet later.
  3. 5. When I had the tumor removed in Portland at the Oregon Health Scienes University (OHSU) there were three surgical teams involved: An Otolaryngologist (Eye, ear, ___ (the big part of your face that sticks out between your eyes and above your mouth) and throat surgeon), a neurosurgeon and a neurologist/Endocrinolgist who specialized in Pituitary issues.
  4. 6. When I was in the 5th grade there was a terrible flood in Oregon. I remember vividly going to a dam in the cottage grove area and watching trees flying off the dam like they were toothpicks. It happend during the week of _______, the last holiday of the year.
  5. 9. When we were buiding the roof over Great Granpa Alvin And Great Grandma Ethel's mobile home on the farm, I heard a strange loud ________ (forceful expulsion of air) along with the caterwalling of one of their barn cats. Because it was such a strange combination of sounds I went to investigate, and saw a snake blowing itself up with air, then forcefully blowing it out to make the _____ sound. I have not heard a sound like that before or since that time.
  6. 12. When I was a freshman in college I did pretty well in my classes except for ______ class. This class required me to speak in front of people and I didn't feel like I had anything important to say. I have often said that I only passed the class because of how frequently I visited the professor in his office. One day he told me "John you have the most perfect monotone I have ever heard". I would have never made it in Thailand back then because Thai being a tonal langauge and me being a monotone.....well you get the picture.
  7. 13. Great Grandpa Alvin and Great Great Grandpa Albin were both uniquely gifed ________ (a spirtual gift focused on telling others the Good News of Salvation). Great Great Grandpa Albin used to say that if he met a person and did not know where they stood with God within 5 minutes he felt that he had failed. One time he was called by the pastor to go to the home of a couple who were having such problems they were planning to get a divorce (quite rare in the days before 1960) Well, he knocked on the door, when the lady answered the door and he introduced himself she was so angry at the church getting involved in her personal life that she slapped him as hard as she could, then seeing his reaction of still trying to show love and concern, she broke down and cried and the marriage was saved. Great Grandpa Alvin would pick up hitchhikers when driving his truck and use the captive audiece to witness to them. One notable time a man was very fidgety and uncomfortable.He said I will listen to what you have to say if you can tell me why I can't put my hand in my pocket. Great Grandpa Alvin said "I don't know". Then the man explained "I have a gun in my pocket and was planning to take your vehicle away from you" (now known as carjacking). Great Grandpa Alvin said, now I can tell you why. "The Holy Spirit is protecting me and preventing you from putting your hand in your pocket." The man became a Chrisitan and Great Grandpa Johnson disposed of his gun.
  8. 14. After my first year as a pastoral intern at Valley chapel they asked me to come up to ____ (a form of speaking) a sermon during summer break. Just before school was out there was a really bad business meeting that was still threatening to cause a church split. Knowing this I worked very hard on a sermon to address the problems head on. This sermon was the one and only sermon that I read word for word because I was so afraid of saying something wrong and making the situation worse. Well, I got there on Sunday Morning to _____ and at that church if you were going to _____ you had to sit on the platform for the entire service. This church had about 40 people most Sundays, but even though there were about 40 this particular Sunday I had never seen about 1/2 of them. I began to pray and ask God for a new message because what I was going to read would not apply to these visitors. But God was silent, so when it came time to preach I got up and read my sermon. The other thing about this church was that if you preached you were expected to stand at the back door and shake peoples hands as they left. When people say something like "nice sermon" I don't think they really mean it, they just don't know what to say. But this morning as these people who were visiting left almost everyone commented on how meaningful the sermon in a very specific way. But the strange thing is that nothing the visitor said was in my sermon. It was so strange, that as soon as I could I went back to read every word of my sermon and what they commented on was simply NOT THERE. I can't explain it, I just know that God did something special to give them a blessing they must have needed. How would you explain it?
  9. 16. When we purchase the farm near Oakland/Sutherlin Oregon the first summer Great Grandma Ethel was not feeling very good and Great Granpa Alvin was very busy with his "Egg Route" (hauling eggs from farms to hatcheries). So Uncle David, Aunt Paula and myself lived alone on the farm. Aunt Paula was preparing to enter College that Fall and Uncle David was home between years at College. I was going to be a 9th grader in Junior High that fall. There are great things about living with no parents around at that age and one of them was _______ (skīˌlärk -ing). We would explore the hills behind the farm on old logging roads and try to see where we could (and could not) drive the old 2 wheel drive pickup. On such day, we (Uncle David and I) had drove the pick up around one of the barns to see how far up the hill we could go. Unfortuenatly, we were not watching the time very well and we suddenly realized that our dad (Great Grandpa Alvin) would be there any minute and find us _______ instead of doing the work assigned to us. So Uncle David turned the pickup around and began racing back to where it was supposed to be parked. As he came around the corner below and behind the barn, he did not take into account that the ground was a bit muddy and the pickup when sliding down the hill. As it slid it turned backwards, and came to rest on a huge boulder that had the back wheels 6 inches off the ground! We had no tractor, no winch, hardly any tools we were going to be busted for sure! So we thought about it and our only hope was a lever. But how could we find a lever big enough to lift the back of a truck? Well to make a long story short, we cut down a tree wedged it under the truck and the two of us were able to push the pickup off the rock and get it back to where it was supposed to be before Great Grandpa arrived.
  10. 17. During the years I was in High Scool we raised chickens for thier eggs. These eggs were sent to a hatchery and the offspring of those eggs were the chickens you would buy in the store. When they were still very young we would use a special machine with a red hot blade that was moved by pressing a foot lever. We could hold the chicken's head in such a way that our first finger would press up just behind the lower beak of the chicken which would pull theior tounge back out of the way so that when we pressed down on the foot pedal causing the red hot _____ (cutting bar) to cut off their the tips of their beaks but it did not touch their tongue. The hot blade would sear the small blood vessels so that they did not bleed. This was done to prevent the chickens from pecking on one another to the point that some would die. One time a man that was helping us do this sat near me and we talked about the Bible all day long. God gave me words to answer the man so that I was surprised at how I knew how to answer things I had never studied. At the end of the day he told me he was a Mormon Elder and would have to go home and study his Bible because he had never met anyone who could challenge his beliefs as I had.
  11. 20. When we were preparing the the site for Great Grandma and Grandpa's mobile home on the farm, we had borrowed a tricylcle type tractor from Uncle Lloyd (who had a dairy at Cheshire Oregon about 10 miles NorthWest of Eugene. Tricycle tractors have two small front wheels very close together and alarge back wheel on each side. The seat was mounted on a 3 1/2 foot, 1 1/4" pipe hinged at the front with a mounted to the tractor directly below the seat. As with many tractors the brakes did not work very well. There was a VERY steep hill at one corner and Great Grandpa Alvin rolled over the endge of the hill on the very steepest part backwards. The back wheels landed in the ditch between the bottom of the hill and the driveway beyond it. Because of the tractor's trajectory the front of the tractor should have flipped over on top of him. But God was very gracious, and protected him. The tractor bounced straight up and back down at the very steep angle. He hit so hard that he broke the seat off the pipe and had bruises that went from his crotch to his kneees. When I watched the tractor go over the bank I was certain that I was watching his death.
  12. 25. When we moved from the farm in Harrisburg at age 5 to Eugene, Great Grandpa Alvin formed a new business of picking up ______ (bound for a hatchery) eggs from farms all across western Oregon from Roseburg to Portland and hauling them to the hatchery. There were 5 different hatcheries that he hauled eggs for. The furthest south was in Jenks hatchery in Shedd Oregon about 20 miles north of Eugene to Standard Hatchery in Winlock Washington (home of the worlds largest egg). Perhaps the most interesting hatchery that he hauled egg for was Shanks hatcher in Hubbard Oregon. They supplied baby chicks to Sear Roebuck Company. The baby chicks ordered through Sears were mailed to the purchaser. This meant that they needed a lot of different breeds of chickens but only a few of each. Great Grandpa Alvin would drive by many farms that had old chicken houses from when fryer chickens were all raised locally. Part of what he did was to stop at these farms and try to convince them to raise several hunderd chickens for the egg that could be hatched for Sears. Other hatcheries were involved in hatching eggs for chickens to be eaten. These hatcheries sold all of the baby chicks before they contracted a grower to put chickens in. This is what we did when we bought the farm in Sutherlin/Oakland. Your Great Grandpa Alvin was a real innovator known all over the United States. He was the first farmer to raise many thousands of chickens at a time (when he started doing that it took 12 weeks to get a 4 pound chicken to be sent to market). By the time Uncle David sold the farm in Oakland/Sutherlin 45 years later he raise similar chickens but they grew to 5 pounds in 6 1/2 weeks because of selective breeding and leaning much more about what to feed them. When we raised hatching eggs were were raising breeding stock, it was the 12th breeding cross to produce the best possible chicken for eating. The first seveal breeding crosses were done by hand, putting this hen and that rooster together. Chickens have become the proving ground for genetic experpimentation because of their short life cycle. In fact when Uncle David was raising fryers just before he sold the farm, he could see differences from one flock to the next, started just 8 weeks later.
  13. 27. One evening while in High School I was going out to do chores on the chicken ranch and I had a plan. The deer in the area were creatures of habit so I expected to see a fawn between the cow barn and upper chicken house. I was prepared with a great big flashlight. Sure enough they were right where I expected. I turned the ______( oppposite of dim) flashlight on and they froze staring at it as I thought they would so I quickly set it on the ground and ran up to the fawn. My goal was to grab it and trow it to the ground, take a good look at it then let it go without hurting it. All was going according to plan till i nearly had my arms around its neck. It bolted for the trees and I took off with it trying to finish getting ahold. Well, let me just say I was looking at the fawn not where we were going and it chose two trees about a foot apart, plenth of room for it to get through but definately not enough for me to make it. I ran headlong into the tree and crumpled to the ground in a heap. Not surprisingly it wasn't around in the evening after that.
  14. 28. The experience that night on the side of Mt. Hood profoundly changed my life. When I returned to Bible College the next fall I signed up to be a pastoral intern at a small church on the south side of Portland. I did many things that next year including preaching and ______ Scripture. But I, the guy who had beeen told I had the most perfect monotone the professor had ever heard, received the most positive responses from the church for my _____ (the skill of reading printed matter aloud) of Scripture. They told me I was so expressive that it made it much easier to understand. That is God's doing not mine!
  15. 31. When we lived in Harrisburg before Great Great Grandpa Albin died (when I was 5 years old) I remember that at breakfast if his coffee was too hot he would sometimes pour a bit of it into the saucer under his cup to help it cool off quickly. Great Great Grandma Ida had a collection of tea cups and _____. One of these _______(little plates) had decorative holes around the edges. So one morning I convinced Great Great Grandma Ida to put that under his coffee cup and see what would happen if he poured his coffee into it. He acted as if nothing was amiss and poured his coffee into it and the coffe ran out onto the table to his "shock" and my amazement.
  16. 35. My life was radically altered during the late spring of 1994 when I decided to climb Mount Hood again with a friend. He was a very experienced climber and had particiapted in many rescues. We were hit with a storm and due to the conditions we were not able to dig a snow cave for protection so we set up his tent and tried to build a bit of an igloo to protect it. We gave up after getting a semblance of a 2 or 3 foot high wall on the upwind side. Visiblity was about 10 feet in the blowing snow and when we went to bed we didn't expect to live through the night. That is enough to make a person ____ like they have never _____ed in their life! My relationship with God was changed that night in a profound way. In the morning when it began to get light we realized, that though the tent had managed to protect us through the night, it would not last much longer so we packed up, prayed some more and headed down. It was a perilous descent because we had to avoid a several hundre foot cliff direclty below where we started out, then find the correct ridge to follow below the cliff there was one place where 4 or 5 ridges met that we had to locate then be sure we took the right one, it would take us to a ski area the others we were quite certain would lead us to our death. Praise God we found the right one.
  17. 37. Great Grandma Ethel was an ____ (see note)(when it came to decorating for banquets and other events. When we were growing up in Eugene attending a church of 1200 people she was chairman of the decorating committee for many years. I remember making hundreds of party favors to put on each plate and dozens of centerpieces to put in the middle of each table for banquets that could be as large as 500 people.(NOTE: a person who practices any of the various creative arts.)
  18. 41. Our farm was destroyed in 1962 by the ______day windstorm. This storm hit the entire Nortwestern part of the country with winds up to 179 miles per hour. Grandpa Alvin was driving home from the Portland area in his truck on Interstate 5-a trip that normally took 2 hours took 5 because he was driving directly into the wind. During that 5 hours he saw 5 barns completly disintegrate and blow away. We had 3000 baby chicks in a barn on our farm at Harrisburg that blew down in the storm, there was no way to help them so they suffered and died of cold and starvation in a few days. It was very sad. Our house in Eugene was one of very few in the city that never lost power, so we ended up having many friends over after the storm and had a big party.