WARNING: THIS IS VERY FAMILY ORIENTED, probably pretty
boring for others.
I have been meaning to write about Oliver Miller for a long
time in the spirit in which I started this blog—to provide some insight into my
life, especially as that life was different or unique in terms of today.
Everyone’s life is unique when the people they touch are taken into account,
and Oliver was one of those unique influences to me.
Oliver’s wife, Jenny was my paternal grandfather’s younger
sister. An attractive, energetic and pleasant woman who raised two daughters, Carol
who lived in Valentine and Doris who married Ralph Ekwall. Doris was a
character, actually she suffered from some emotional illnesses over the years,
owned racehorses and her husband, Ralph, was a genuine gentleman. The “attractive”
reference is significant. Looking back at those old pictures, we are not a
family that made it on looks. The current Emma is a beautiful girl (see below)
but definitely an outlier.
Oliver was, by any measure, a highly-talented man in various
realms involving things mechanical. He was a mechanic by trade in St. Edward
before he took a job with Loup River Power, the Depression Era project that
built a canal and a hydro plant to serve the Columbus area. A great
photographer, he set up his own dark room in his basement along with a fairly sophisticated
shop where he would purchase a gun barrel and then manufacture the rest of the
parts for a rifle. That basement had a unique, to me, smell. They had natural
gas in Columbus, and they had gas appliances (furnace? Water heater?). The
smell was new to me, it was only years later that I learned the compound
responsible was ethyl mercaptan used as the odorant in natural gas.
He was responsible, despite only an eighth-grade education,
for developing and fabricating many of the dredge parts that were used to
remove the sand from the settling basins at the Loup Headgates where the Canal
started. The Loup River descended out of the Sandhills at a strong current and
carried a lot of sand. Before it could be slowed and diverted via the canal,
the sand had to be minimized so that the canal would not fill with silt immediately;
ergo, huge sand piles.
Just in the last 20 years, nearly a century after the canal
was conceived, the sand has become quite valuable and is being loaded and
shipped around the country for various purposes including glass and other
industrial products and sand for the oil frac process.
Mentioning my paternal grandfather, Homer’s siblings, his
oldest sister was named Emma. That first name has become pretty common in the
family, my grandniece/god daughter is Emma and she was born on November 5, 1999,
the same day my paternal grandmother, Emma, was born in 1886. Now, gets a bit
tricky: my grandmother’s maiden name was Emma Martenson, and when she married,
she became Emma Peterson. Homer’s sister was Emma Peterson and when she
married, she became Emma Martenson. (The spellings may be different, they were
pretty cavalier about that back in the day. The current relatives in Sweden
spell it Mårtensson).
Well, that got off track.
Come holidays, Jenny would cook and Oliver would hold court.
He knew a lot of stuff, was very well read and the discussions were fascinating
covering topics from aviation to guns to his favorite, automobiles. It was the
dawn of the jet age in aviation, so I learned the basic principles of a ram jet
engine, and it was a time of rapid development in the auto industry. I have no
idea how much of my education came from those discussions, but it had to be a
lot. I remember in particular a discussion about the basic principles of a
diesel engine, a topic I reviewed with my brother when he was in high school,
so I was no older than 11.
We always had to cut the day short in those holiday visits
as we had to get home to milk. Sixty-five years later, I can vividly remember
that house, the people and the discussions.
