This week the Good Samaritan Society sponsored a fishing program for the residents of their Superior home. I wasn’t there to see it. So I can only guess how it was done. I suspect it was similar to carnival games where the players tried to hook a prize.
In country school, we sometimes played a fishing game in which we used a willow stick and dangled a hook over a blind made with a blanket or sheet stretched across a door way. The person on the other side of the blanket would grasp our hook and attach the fish which was a prize or instruction about what we were to do next.
Seeing pictures submited for this issue which showed the residents’ smiles of the Superior Good Samaritian Society’s residents playing a fishing game reminded me of the times my parents took Grandfather Blauvelt fishing.
Fishing was not something he did in his younger days but in older years he enjoyed being outside and with family. Fishing was one way to accomplish that.
During the summer months, he frequently sat in an old captain’s chair in front of the gasoline station’s store visiting with the station’s customers until closing time.
After the station closed, he would move to the yard in front of his mobile home and listen to the radio.
Grandfather closely followed the Kansas City Athletics baseball team and his transistor radio allowed him to sit in the yard listening to their baseball games. His wasn’t one of the small radios. It was about the size of a shoebox. If the A’s were playing a doubleheader on the west coast, he was in the yard long after I had gone to bed.
Grandfather frequently wore his false teeth in his shirt pocket. More than once he enlisted my aid in the wee hours of the night to look for his teeth. My help was often needed after Kansas City made a key play which caused him to whoop and holler and his false teeth to go flying. He likely didn’t miss the teeth until he was ready to go inside for the night. As he gathered up his straw hat, radio and lawn chair he would realize he didn’t have his teeth. And so he would call for help. I was expected to get down on hands and knees and feel in the grass for the missing chompers. Glad they didn’t bite.
I didn’t share Grandfather’s baseball interest and so I made him sit in the yard alone. If there wasn’t a baseball game to listen to, he was willing to go fishing with me. I had several nearby fishing spots but the elderly man had trouble walking down the steep banks which led to most locations.
We seldom caught a fish, and if we did, it was probably too small to keep or a carp we didn’t like. However, he liked to fish in the irrigation canal because of the easy access.
There was a livestock crossing bridge in the field east of the station. It was possible to maneuver an automobile onto the bridge and dangle a line from the comfort of a lawn chair or one of the automobile’s seats.
I enjoyed listening to his stories about things he had done as a boy while watching the water flow under the bridge. As I watched the water, I dreamed about how much fun it would be to float down the canal---if only it didn’t a siphon tube ever mile or so. If sucked into one of those siphons, there was no way a person would come out alive.
I heard stories about tree branches being stripped of bark while going through a siphon.
While sitting on the bridge, one didn’t worry about being bitten by a chigger or tick and most evenings the breeze kept the mosquitoes away.
I frequently crossed the banisterless bridge while riding my pony to country school or going to visit the neighbors. Perhaps I should have, but I never worried about falling into the canal at that location.
A few years ago, I was thinking about that bridge and the good times it offered. I wanted to show it to Rita but when I went to check on it. I was disappointed to see it was gone. Neither people nor animals can now cross the canal at that location.
As a I finished making these entries on my computer, I used the software’s spell check program. I had typed syphon but the computer program wanted to change the spelling to siphon. Siphon didn’t look right to me and I suspected the software was wrong. I looked the word up in dictionary and learned syphon and siphon mean the same. Syphon is the correct spelling for British English and siphon is correct for American English. In the United States, 79 out of 100 users prefer siphon.
So again I am in the minority for I prefer syphon.
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