Counting Bugs on the Wall

My Altenburg friend Warren Schmidt was riding herd on a youth group that stayed overnight at the museum. He posted this as his Facebook status: “I think the effects of trying to sleep on a church pew in the museum last night are catching up with me. I don’t suppose I should make up for it by sleeping in a church pew tomorrow morning.

My parents put together a scrapbook of my first grade experiences at Trinity Lutheran School. It had photos, school papers, drawings and my lessons. Dad was away working Kennett during this period, so we kept in touch by phone a couple times a week and on weekends. I think he must have been responsible for the diary portion of the scrapbook.

Seeing Warren’s status report made me think of this entry from Sunday, September 19, 1953: “The whole family went to 8 o’clock church. I didn’t wiggle very much. To pass the time away, I counted 13 bugs on the wall….

Exhibit preview Oct. 16

Warren must have been standing guard to keep the kids from drawing mustaches (and worse) on my photos being exhibited in the museum.

I’m going to be doing a preview “picking party” slide and video show at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum Tuesday, October 16, at 6:30pm. I have more material than will fit into the slot allocated for my presentation at an immigration conference scheduled for the next week, so I’m looking for folks who can help me trim. (“All of the above” might be the correct answer, but, please, be gentle.)

I’d love to have folks see the photos hanging in the exhibit and have a chance to hear my war stories. (I’m pretty sure some of my old teachers figured that I had pretty good chance of hanging, but they were thinking of Jackson’s Hanging Tree, not a museum.)