Family Archives

June 15, 2013

Dad at 14

It’s hard to imagine your parents being young. Here’s a shot of L.V. Steinhoff when he was 14. The photos are from a scrapbook he put together when he was in high school on Pacific Street.

Dad’s full name was Louis Vera Steinhoff. The Vera came from an aunt’s name, if I remember correctly. He didn’t exactly advertise his middle name. The “Junior” nickname was because he was named after his father.

He dropped the “Junior” when he got older. (Much like I’ve tried to get shed of “Kenny.”) Only a handful of his oldest friends and family used that term. Most of the men who worked for him called him Louie or L.V.

Big feet

You can barely read the fading “Big Feet”caption on this photo. It says underneath the photo that it was taken at May Greene School. He must have been friends with some of this teachers because he has pictures of some of them in casual poses around the school grounds..

Maybe being a photographer gave him access that normal students wouldn’t have had. He and Master Photographer Paul Leuders were contemporaries and members of the Kodak Club in high school.

Not Enough Words

I usually start with a picture, then wrap some words around it. This time, though, I have an endless supply of pictures and not enough words to express how I feel about Mary Welch Steinhoff. So, on this Mother’s Day, here’s a small sample of Mother with her family.

Every picture I ran across led me to another, and there are scores that I remembered and couldn’t lay my hands on quickly. Mother sure has packed a lot of livin’ into her 91 years.

Mary Welch Steinhoff, my Mother

Click on any photo to make it larger,then click on the sides to move through the gallery.

May 7, 2013July 14, 2021

Blowin’ Black River Bridge

Dad’s construction company had a couple of simple tasks:

Build a new bridge over the Black River near Williamsville in Wayne County.
Remove the old bridge.

Both tasks taken individually were routine. The catch came with Task 2. The old bridge was between the new bridge and some big phone lines. It would be a Bad Thing to take out either of those things. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

Things were kind of tight

The phone and electrical lines are hard to see, but they are about as far from the old bridge on one side as the new bridge was on the other. If the bridge toppled over, it would hit one or the other.

So, how do we do this?

Dad said the bridge had to drop straight down. If they used cutting torches to take it down, there was no assurance that it wouldn’t twist if one side let loose before the other. Dad decided they’d dynamite it. This was in the days before building implosions and blasting were used much for this kind of thing.

There’s a lot of rock in Missouri, so explosives weren’t an unknown to him. In fact, I remember taking a length of blasting cord to school for a show ‘n’ tell. It was neat how the orange-colored fuse would burn under water.

Dad didn’t like handling dynamite, which is basically sawdust soaked in nitroglycerine and compacted. He didn’t like it, not so much because it was dangerous, but because the nitro would “sweat” out of the sticks of dynamite and give him a headache.

Dad would let me hold a stick of dynamite, but he warned me to never touch a blasting cap: they were just too sensitive to handle casually. Since he let me do so many other things that some people would consider dangerous, I took his warning seriously.

Crimp the blasting caps with your teeth

The old style fuse like you saw in Road Runner cartoons used blasting caps that were metal cylinders that were open on one end and closed on the other. The fuse would go into the cap and then be crimped down. Oldtimers would use their teeth to make the crimp. You can see how that could go wrong, right?

Because both sides of the bridge had to go off at exactly the same time, and because a burning fuse might not hit both blasting caps at exactly the same time, Dad opted to use an electric blasting cap.

The first task was to remove the approach on one side of the bridge, and to take off as much steel and flooring as possible. Brother Mark has some of the steel in his backyard garden in St. Louis.

We’re ready for the show

When the bridge was reduced to a skeleton, explosives were set on two key trusses at one end and everybody stepped back with fingers crossed.

Flash! BOOOOOM!

Watch the video to see how things went. Dad was playing cinematographer with the family’s Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera, so the quality wasn’t all that hot to begin with. It’s subsequently been moved over to VHS tape and then digitized, so don’t expect IMAX 3D.

All went according to plan. The bridge dropped like a rock and remained standing upright between the new bridge and the wires. You can see that the next step was for a worker in a hoist at the end of a crane to start cutting the steel into manageable pieces.

That also went mostly well. Right up until one bad cut caused it to collapse unexpectedly. You can tell it was unexpectedly because everybody started running. A good portion of that area’s phone calls were cut off abruptly.

It’s fortunate that this was a silent movie because I imagine Dad’s narrative at that point would have made it non-PG-rated.

Dad came home cranky one night from another blasting project that didn’t go exactly as planned.

March 25, 2013

Birthdays Come and Gone

When do birthdays stop being a big deal? March 24 is the date of my birth, but I have lost all concept of how old I am. I was prepared to tell folks I had been around the sun 67 times, but that can’t be true because I got my Medicare card last year. Guess that makes me 66.

Back in 2011, I shared a whole page of photos of childhood landmarks in time. I was telling someone the other day that most people think of major milestones and identity crises in even-numbered years like 20, 30 and 40.

I had those periods of self-assessment at odd years, like 24, 27, 32, 57 and 60. Wife Lila would probably say that’s because I never use round numbers in the microwave: 2:16 for popcorn; and that I take naps that are 22-minutes long. (I learned a long time ago that accounting was less likely to question my expense reports if I used odd number like $6.13 or $12.47 because they assumed people who put down stuff like $6.00 or $12.50 were either guessing or making up items.)

Photo staff remembered my 30th

Wife Lila and the folks on the photo staff pulled off a surprise birthday party for my 30th. They were ostensibly gathering at the house to watch the last episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show on March 19, 1977, so I was surprised when they pulled out this photo of me in a gas mask covering riots at Ohio University that the staff had signed. Across the top, someone had scrawled, “HAPPY 30! If you’ve survived this far, you’re bound to make it the next thirty!”

Maybe that’s one of the reasons my 60th was so traumatic: I was afraid that someone had set my sell-by date with that headline. It’s also disconcerting to note that at least half of the people who signed the photo – some of whom were younger than me – are dead.

No respect by my 40th

By the time my 40th rolled around, the staff was a bit less respectful. We had a bunch of turnover in the department about that time. I won’t say this artwork had anything to do with it….

My 50th was a major blow-out at the office, an event attended by all of upper management, including my friend the H.R. Director. I thanked her, in particular, for the shindig since the jokes and gag gifts showed a definite prejudice against older workers, a protected group that I had just joined. My discrimination lawsuit alleging a hostile work environment would make it possible for me to retire to a life of ease, I warned.

I got high on birthday cake and forgave them at the last minute, unfortunately.

A traumatic 60th

Dad and his two brothers died on or before their 61st birthdays, so I was afraid my days were numbered. I told my staff that I would just as soon let the day pass unobserved. As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about it because I came down with some kind of cold or other ailment that I was sure was going to usher me to the Other Side, and I skipped a few days of work. On my birthday, just about the time I was feeling merely miserable instead of on death’s doorstep, the whole Steinhoff clan from three states knocked on the door and dragged me out for a bike ride.

Once I made it past 60, I decided that I had a few more good years left in me. That’s when I stopped doing the math and keeping score. When I wrack up as many Birthday Seasons as Mother, then I may start counting again.

That brings us to today

When I go to bed at night, I usually pull a shade at the head of the bed to keep the room cooler and darker so I can sleep late after staying up until 2 a.m. or so doing these posts. I forgot to do it on the 23rd, so I felt unusually warm when I started becoming conscious on my birthday.

“Maybe I didn’t make it to my birthday,” I thought. Not wanting to open my eyes and confirm my fears by getting dirt in them, I elected to go back to sleep.

About half an hour later, I was jolted awake by a brilliant beam of light. “Darn, maybe I made the cut after all,” crossed my mind. After straining my ears for several minutes listening for harp music that never came, I opened my eyes and saw the open shade.

Light was terrestrial, not celestial

I was much relieved to determine the brilliant light was terrestrial, not celestial.

Later in the day, the whole family gathered out at Son Adam’s to help him put some solar panels on his roof. I waved my Medicare card and was exempt from wrestling 4 x 12-foot panels in 23 mph (gusting to 45mph) winds, but I did get to make a bunch of trips up and down the ladders.

The family wasn’t sure I was capable of blowing out my cake candles, so they elected to serve it outside where the wind took care of extinguishing them for me.

Thanks to all my Facebook friends who left me birthday wishes, including those who were kind enough to add “you’re looking good,” something they never said when it was really true.

The next step is for them to say, “Don’t he look natural?”

Category: Family