Curt’s Biography – Long Version

 I can’t help it. I’m the third child. Call it a congenital defect.

 What I have read of birth order suggests the third child (or at least the third son in a family of three boys) is cosmically preordained to be a comedian. I think all would agree in this case, seeing that in comparison with my two older brothers, I lack most of what makes them tick: Mechanical aptitude, mathematical capability, athletic prowess, problem-solving skills, the audacity to attack impossible projects and the luck to succeed.

 I thus endeavored to capitalize on my only identifiable strong suit: Delivering acerbic one-liners with quick grace, impeccable timing and an endearing smile. 

Farm

 Dad moved his young family to Anthony, Kansas, in 1950 (population 2,792) because he did not want his children to grow up in the evil of a metropolis such as Hutchinson, Kansas, at that time with a population of 33,575.

 From his father-in-law, he bought a quarter-section farm (160 acres) with two barns, a chicken coop, a water well and cistern, and a drafty two-story tinderbox of a house. During my childhood, there remained a large heap of musty coal in the dark recesses of the cellar, although the furnace had been converted to propane. We did have electricity and indoor plumbing.

 I had no idea we were dirt-poor.

Post Office

 In 1958, the local Post Office opened a position for a new rural mail carrier. Dad and 49 other men applied for the job, a God-send of federal money in a rural community. On the civil service paper-and-pencil test, he scored in the top three. A local banker had befriended Dad, probably recognizing capability and integrity despite his humble situation. The man told him, “You’ve got to go see each of the County Commissioners because they are going to choose which man gets the mail route job.”

 The last thing Dad wanted to do was humble himself before the local politicians by asking for the position. But I suspect he was desperate, and he made the visits.

 One of the commissioners was a woman whose adult son owned the electric appliance store in town. In her living room over coffee, Dad looked at the ceiling and said, “You know, if I get that job, I’ll be needing a new refrigerator. It sure would be nice to upgrade from our wooden icebox.” He probably felt cheapened by the comment, but apparently, it worked. He got the job, and in a month a new fridge showed up on the farm. I’m quite sure the payments lasted for many months.

Cars

 With the advent of the mail route job, we not only got rid of the cow and began to buy milk from the store, but we also upgraded the vehicles. Dad required reliable transportation, as the job came with the responsibility to provide one’s own car. He maintained the vehicle himself, of course, seeing the mileage reimbursement as a perk of the job. For that reason, I spent my childhood not only working farm chores but also huddled under a raised hood or sliding underneath a car on jack stands for various routine maintenance.

As a teenager, I did not recognize the huge financial benefit of having a 300-gallon fuel tank on the farm. Purchasing gas from a service station was unheard of when it was free (to me) at home. Half my peer group, however – farm kids – were in the same situation.

My two brothers are RC, nine years older than I, and Mike, six years older.

 Mike spent his high school years with Lizzie, the 1914 Model T Ford that Grandpa Ray had purchased brand new. It had remained in the family, was Dad’s principal set of wheels when he was a teenager (it was ancient even then), and was a fact of life in our family. It resides with us still, at Mike’s home in Georgia.

As a teenager, it was Mike’s daily driver, regardless of weather.

In 1966, the local Ford dealer offered Mike a straight-up trade for a new Ford Galaxie, two-door hardtop, custom interior. My brother refused (Dad would never have approved it anyway) and I still marvel at the questionable tactic by the dealer to put that temptation before an 18-year-old.

RC was Air Force ROTC in college and deployed to Vietnam in 1970. Somehow the car he and his wife Mary had purchased, a 1966 Mini Cooper, became mine. I’m still not sure how that happened, or what the family financial arrangements were, and I would hate to ask RC now for fear of the claim of reparations. For me, at age 14 I acquired, or rather was assigned, the Mini. I am sure Dad wanted it for his mail route car, but Number Three son was not to be denied.

I kept the car for 25 years and sold it only when it became clear I could not stay ahead of the rust and major mechanical rebuilds. It sorely needed a complete body restoration, and I found a buyer in Ohio who paid twice the original purchase price. I still miss the car but not the daily maintenance frustration.

Public Face

I made my public-speaking debut in sixth grade. A teacher had arranged for me to perform before a women’s church group in someone’s living room. There were probably 15 women present, and I stood before them with my memorized spiel… whatever it was, I don’t remember. I recognized most of the audience from church, and while it was intimidating, I do not recall being nervous. There was universal adulation, of course, and it gave me a brief glimpse of glory.

From then on, I sought every opportunity to be on stage. I also read voraciously, a trait I shared with RC and Mike, and Dad, for that matter. My fare was things like Hardy Boys mysteries and Sugar Creek Gang. Later I turned to science fiction: Heinlein, Clark, Azimov, Bradbury.

I have to say that sci-fi was almost a complete waste of mental energy. While there is some redeeming value in the exploits of protagonists with high morals and intrepid courage (Heinlein’s Space Cadet, for example, or his Farmer in the Sky), a world created of interstellar travel and alien intelligence must by nature reject our actual created world. I cannot even now see how science fiction can be reconciled with a Christian gospel.

Much better would be the works of G.A. Henty (Under Drake’s Flag) or C.S. Forester (Horatio Hornblower), but, unaccountably, I was unaware of them at the time.

I resisted the works of Tolkien because a loud-mouth girl in my class for whom I had little respect at the time — although eventually, she grew up, like all of us — had read Lord of the Rings and was incessantly speaking of Frodo’s exploits. If she liked it, I was completely uninterested. I have since corrected that woeful assessment, both of the literature and the lady. Tolkien is just about the best thing in print.

In high school, I began to come into my own through debate, forensics, vocal and instrumental music. As a senior, I starred in the high school play in a rendition of Dobie Gillis. To the state speech tournament, I took a dramatic interpretation, a 10-minute memorized presentation. My subject was a humorous selection from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which got me into the finals round and was immensely satisfying.

At the state music contest, I garnered five medals, first-division ratings, which was the maximum possible and which no one else at Chaparral High School matched that year: Vocal solo, instrumental solo, vocal ensemble, two instrumental ensembles. My instrument was tuba, my vocal range was bass. I also played string bass in the jazz ensemble.

Christian Conversion

I have covered this extensively in my non-fiction book about the leukemia experience, Alligator Wrestling in the Cancer Ward, so I will not detail it here. Suffice it to say I always thought I was a Christian, but when confronted with the Gospel message in a clear and intellectually honest way as a freshman at college I embraced it fully for the first time. The mercy of God extends where it will, and we who accept that message can make no legitimate claim to righteousness, only to the infinite and unpredictable grace of a God Who draws and forgives.

The message of the Gospel and the indwelling Holy Spirit changed my life. It’s an old story but one which is oddly and profoundly new in every instance.

College

I went to the University of Kansas, while almost everyone else from my graduating class who went to college attended Kansas State University. I suppose I went there because RC had, and because my best friend was going there for the music program. In spite of the high school highlights, I was not particularly interested in chasing a music or music educator degree, and once I became a Christian my focus shifted almost entirely to Bible study.

I would never say that was a bad thing, but academics took a decided back seat, and I lacked the maturity to bring a balance. As a result, I now consider my college years pretty much a waste of time. I would have been much better off joining the workforce for a year or two before beginning. But career opportunities in a rural town were quite limited, and it comes out the way it comes out. I have no regrets.

It worked for me, but I can see now that among the professors there was serious hostility to Christian faith. One instructor spoke derisively of the classic Isaac Watts hymn At the Cross, for the phrase “for such a worm as I.” Later versions have rewritten this line as “for sinners such as I,” but the prof was incensed by what he saw as destructive self-loathing. He had no vision of redemption, or even of the concept of sin.

An English Lit instructor made a great deal of Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, about the death of Abraham Lincoln. The teacher kept drawing circles on the chalkboard, showing how Whitman kept coming back to the concept of death until at last the poet was able to escape it with some transcendent view of the hereafter. I thought, “No he didn’t. Whitman actually died at some point.” But I held my peace, needing the grade.

A Western Civilization professor learned I was a Christian and openly chastised me before our small class, attempting at every discussion to humiliate me for embracing a fantasy book of self-righteous lies. She was bitter about something, and I was somehow a target. But I’m sure I brought some of it on myself.

I asked the Catholic nun who taught a 100-level logic class how to understand Colossians 2:8, which speaks of “hollow and deceptive philosophy.” She dismissed my concern out of hand, saying only that the passage referred to “a different kind of philosophy.” Maybe she was right, but her dismissive response did nothing to help my understanding of either the Bible or the study of philosophy. I concluded she was not of my tribe and thus an enemy.

A class in interpersonal communication had us pairing off with a member of the opposite sex, standing close face-to-face, and verbalizing to the other what we were feeling at the moment. Then we were commanded to relate our comments to the class at large. The significance of the exercise was lost on me then and remains a mystery to me now. I suspect the instructor used his position to satisfy his own lewd interests. My partner was a very attractive blond and I was thoroughly embarrassed. I believe he put her with me to highlight the Christian boy’s discomfort.

I graduated on time with a degree in Speech Communication, which was focused on interpersonal relationships in the workplace. It was not completely without value, but the only real benefit was that it allowed me to claim I had a Bachelor’s degree when I later applied for a job. At least that part worked.

Career

I landed a position with Southwestern Bell Telephone Company in their Marketing Department, selling business telephone systems. Like every other new hire, I was swamped with new material and an unfamiliar vocabulary. Technical fields have their own language, and most important terms are nothing more than acronyms. It took a year just to be able to communicate effectively. PBX (private branch exchange), POTS (plain old telephone service), E&M (ear and mouth), ANI (automatic number identification), CAMA (consolidated automated message accounting); CO (central office); RSO (remote serving office); LATA (local access transport area); NPA (number plan area), CNA (customer name and address), CPNI (customer proprietary network information); S&E (service and equipment). Trunk-side, line-side, ring generator, cross-bar, tandem office, interpositioning, conditioning, C-order, N-order, F&T-order, D-order, A-copy. “We have to A-copy the F&T for the POTS to establish the line-side to the RSO through the tandem.” I recognize every syllable you just uttered, but I have no idea what you meant.

Because of my obvious ability to communicate with actual people in plain English, however, I was promoted twice in the first two years and found that I could probably wallow out a spot for myself in a huge organization. In 1984, with a puny six years seniority, the Bell System underwent Divestiture, a court-ordered breakup of the company into smaller Bell Operating Companies.

I chose to remain with the regulated utility-side business (SBC) rather than follow most of my peers to the deregulated equipment sales unit (ATT-IS, AT&T Information Systems). Of 90 sales titles in our Wichita department, 88 went to ATT-IS and another spin-off unit. A year later, 73 had been terminated for lackluster sales. The two of us remaining at SBC were still good, and company leadership had turned the world on its head by repositioning the firm as an aggressive market leader in technology innovation.

In 1985 I worked on a 9-1-1 installation in Sedgwick County (Wichita, Kansas) because there was no one else available to handle the customer interface. It was cutting-edge (bleeding edge) technology and the first of a new generation of emergency communications systems ever deployed in our company. The project took almost a year to complete and effectively set the stage for huge leaps forward in public safety communications. It was also seen by most as a monumental career risk, coming as it did with the “lives are at stake” threat of failure. I found I liked it, discovered a delightfully irascible customer mentor, and with only a couple of detours, I remained in that business for the next 30 years.

Eventually, I was a sales manager handling an annual revenue stream of over $100 million and managing our interests in Texas and California, two of the largest markets in our U.S. footprint. I fought both vicious competitors and friendly vendors tooth and nail. In that business, both enemies and friends had agendas that involved garnering more and more of our dominant market position.

After 36 years of an intensely active and gratifyingly rewarding career, and with a sense that I had done work worth doing, I announced my retirement. I immediately leaped to the other end of the technology spectrum and bought a local firewood business, delivering winter-time oak and mixed hardwoods to residences and summertime smoking and grilling woods to local merchants. It was a completely delightful change of pace.

Marriage & Family

I met Lynn in 1981 at a conference of The Navigators, a parachurch organization I had known in college, at their international headquarters in Colorado Springs. We were married two years later. Blessed with the inability to have children of our own, we adopted two boys as infants, two years apart in age and unrelated to each other.

We raised them in the environment of our local church and sent them to a private K-12 Christian school in Wichita. At one point, one of them asked, “Why is it that everything we do is at church? We have school at church, we go to parties at church, we do workdays at church, and on Sunday we go to church at church.”

They both went to college, one to Kansas State and the other to Wichita State. Both went U.S. Army, one through the ROTC program, the other enlisting over the objections of a recruiter impressed by his twin Bachelor’s degrees. Both spent a tour of duty in Afghanistan, coming through relatively unscathed and with various hero medals, although one managed to get blown up by an IED in downtown Kabul. There were no noticeable permanent injuries, and because I had always considered him a little off his rocker anyway, as far as I could tell the PTSD disappeared into the background noise.

Both found civilian jobs, one a manager at a building materials plant in Kansas, the other a law enforcement officer in Texas. Both are married; there are three grandchildren.

The Farm

In 1999, a friend from work who himself was a Kansas farm boy, and I each bought a piece of rural pastureland near El Dorado Lake, a 30-minute drive from Benton where Lynn and I lived. We ran the land as a short quarter section, at first leasing it for cattle grazing and later hiring a neighbor for crop management. We raised soybeans, wheat, brome and prairie hay. Income from the crops covered property taxes, fence maintenance, and almost nothing else.

It was principally recreational land, with a dry creek bed meandering through the center of the property. After a rain, the creek would fill and cut the land in two; most of the time it was dry. We bought ATVs, kept them in a locked steel shed for security, and spent most weekends there.

While we experimented some with Dutch ovens (peach cobbler with Mom’s Secret Sauce was a favorite) Lynn organized bare-bones picnics: Stop at the grocery store on the way to the farm for four T-bone steaks, a case of bottled water and a pack of Oreo cookies. Build a wood fire and let it cook down to coals. Grill the steaks, hold them by the bone with your pliers (from a pliers holster on your belt) and slice pieces as required with the sheath knife on the other hip. When finished, toss the bones in the creek, have a couple of cookies, rinse your hands with the water and slug down the rest.

It was a rudimentary meal, totally and completely satisfying, requiring absolutely nothing in the way of cleanup.

The farm was a place for hiking, finding deer sheds (last season’s antlers), a little hunting, some shooting and fishing. Early on, I realized that once the ATVs came out of the storage shed, nobody wanted to do anything else but ride. We had to set expectations to avoid conflicts.

Vacation Time

Learning from a friend a few years ahead of me that he had organized dad/son and dad/daughter vacations around his three pre-teens, I followed his example. During summer breaks, starting when they were 10 years old, I took each boy to Colorado for a long weekend. The first two years we backpacked, carrying a tent and provisions for a two-night stay on the trail.

Staying for one night is easy; in the morning you just stuff everything into the pack and make it back to the car. Two nights is an order of magnitude more difficult, as everything you pack must be used the second night again.

The year the younger boy turned 11 was the first year I discovered it was legal for a child to operate his own ATV on a jeep trail in Colorado. That was the end of backpacking. After that, we engaged in Cat-Packing, my own term for backpacking from an Arctic Cat four-wheeler. Colorado rules require the child to be within visual supervision of an adult who is on his or her own ATV. No problem… we had ATVs at the farm at home, and it was a simple matter to load them on a trailer and drag them to Buena Vista.

Chaffee County, Colorado, is four-wheeler heaven (or hell, depending on your perspective) and is crisscrossed with jeep trails maintained by local volunteer groups. Primitive camping can be had almost anywhere, and there are national forest service campgrounds for those who demand a pit toilet instead of secluded bushes.

Legalities: The ATVs require current permits, available cheaply at any Walmart sporting goods counter. Some areas are off-limits to overnight camping but are clearly marked. A fishing license is required if you’re into that. Firearms are allowed about anywhere.

We became expert at navigating the Tincup Loop, a 56-mile trail from Tincup (near Taylor Park Reservoir, up and west from Buena Vista), across Tincup Pass to St. Elmo, across Hancock Pass to Pitkin, and across Cumberland Pass back to Tincup. The host vehicle can find parking at Taylor Park, St. Elmo or Pitkin. The trail takes about 8 hours at a leisurely pace. It is rugged but not life-threatening with a dirt bike, four-wheeler, UTV or jeep.

It rains every afternoon, of course, and if you’re lucky you can run into hail or snow flurries on Cumberland Pass, even in the middle of summer.

Church

You may read about this in Alligator Wrestling in the Cancer Ward. I won’t repeat it all here, but understand that Lynn and I decided as soon as we were married that we would live in Benton and attend church there. There was a small United Methodist Church, and as mature Christians we plunged into the life of the congregation.  We taught Sunday School classes and served on various committees.

There were others like-minded. Most of us in that tiny gathering held similar positions about things spiritual: The authority of the Scripture, the centrality of Christ, the necessity of an authentic born-again conversion experience. As a group, we were determined to stand against what we began to see as a leftward movement on the part of UMC global leadership toward liberal political positions.

I’ve got nothing against liberal politics (other than the fact that its modern manifestation will probably destroy the only nation still protecting individual property rights and standing against tyranny, depredation, poverty and starvation) but having left-leaning positions shoved at me from a well-meaning religious structure is something in which I am not particularly interested. The UMC I knew growing up in 1968 is not the UMC of 2020. I haven’t moved; the church has.

I was part of the movement advocating to separate our local church from the denomination. It was not a tough sell, although there were some who rightly mourned the loss of the traditional identity. So be it. Sometimes things need to change in order to stay the same.

We disaffiliated from the UMC in 2021 and became a standalone evangelical congregation. Membership is up, income is up, attendance is up, and enthusiasm is up.

Leukemia

It should be no surprise that I was surprised by the cancer diagnosis. I have always been active and reasonably healthy. Intellectually, I knew that leukemia was a type of cancer, but I had to focus my mind on that fact to embrace the new reality.

On the first night of a three-month hospitalization, I decided I would be a tough guy. Whatever procedure or pain or humiliation you must throw at me, I will overcome it with grace and humor. And maybe a little sarcasm. It was a coping mechanism, but it helped me steer clear of the ever-present fear and uncertainty that crouched at the door.

I decided to document my ordeal, initially having no idea that it would be such a hot mess before I was done. As my situation progressed from one deadly complication to the next, I came to realize that the story should be told. Several people asked me to publish the Caring Bridge (social media) daily updates, and as I thought about it an unavoidable question arose: Who else do I know who (a) has survived leukemia, (b) has had a half dozen exceedingly close brushes with death, (c) holds a manly, mature Christian view of responding to potential disaster, and (d) can express it in words that are at once entertaining and instructive?

It’s a short list. I began making plans to publish a book.

Roger, a friend from church, observed: “So you got a life-threatening disease, all you have to do is stay in the hospital and follow doctor’s orders, and you managed to turn it into a work assignment with deadlines and commitments.”

Yeah, I guess that would be me.