An Audio Letter from Wayne Gustafson
Speaker: Wayne Gustafson
brother to Lucile, Petey Pie, Gustafson Coe.
Date: Late Winter/Early Spring (Mentioned 9:00 AM)
Location: Sacramento, California
[00:00]
Well, your worst fears have finally come true. It is actually little old me sending a tape letter to the Coe family. It's 9:00 in the morning. I just got back from taking Laurie to school, and I'm sitting down in my study with a cup of coffee, looking out the window at a beautiful breeze and sunshine. We have actually had some very nice weather for the last few weeks. The temperatures run in between 50s and 60s in the afternoon and it's very lovely. Things are green. The daffodils and jonquils are blooming, the daphne is blooming, our camellias are blooming. So all in all, it's very enjoyable.
I really should have—excuse me, I've got a frog in my throat—I really should have sent you a little letter or note inside the cover of this tape to invite you to sit down in the chair and hold on tight before you played the recording. It's been so long since I've made one of these to you; I've been making some to Mother.
But a couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from your lovely daughter Michael, in fact, it was dated the 25th of January, I guess I got it around the 27th of January. And in her nice letter to me, Michael commented on the fact that you and March were trying to record a tape to me the other night when everyone was home for the weekend. And Michael said you spent the whole evening on a trial and error basis until you thought you had everything perfect, except March had forgotten to press the record button.
Well anyway, she said that you would probably get the thing recorded and send me one. However, as much as I've been looking in the mailbox for a tape, I have yet to see one. So I thought I'd send you one. I've been meaning to record one for some time, but I just never get around to these things. And of course, I never write; I hate to write letters.
But I just received a tape from Mother yesterday, or the day before yesterday. And yesterday I pulled the machine out, listened to the tape, and tried to record a letter, which I did, and mailed it yesterday. So while I had the machine out, I thought I'd just let it sit here, and then today I'd try to get this little tape off to the Coe family.
I hope all of you are in good health—Richard with his airplane and gasoline, and Michael with her upcoming wedding. And Melissa, I still owe Melissa a letter, but tell her not to hold her breath waiting for an answer. Like I said, I just have a hard time sitting down and writing a letter to anybody. But I appreciate the fact that she wrote me some time ago, in fact, I think it was about a year ago. And at the time, I thought I'd answered it, but I guess I didn't. Or if I did, it never got there. Anyway, Melissa, don't think too unkindly of your old uncle; he's a pretty good old scout. He means well; he just never finds time to do all the things he's supposed to do.
[05:00]
Michael, I certainly would like to come to Cynthiana this summer or this fall, in August, to be at your wedding. However, at the present time, I don't see how I can do it. You requested or hoped that I'd be there, that I could take a vacation this summer and then come down to Cynthiana. Well, as you know, I'm on a permanent vacation now, so I don't go taking other vacations and flit around the country anymore. I don't have the money to do that now, unless I get another job.
And I've been considering this, but I haven't come to any definite decisions or conclusions yet as to whether I will or I won't. I've been toying with the idea of getting into real estate, but so far I haven't decided definitely whether I want to do that or not. But I'm still looking into it. But getting back to your wedding, I hope it's a beautiful wedding. I hope you send me some pictures of it if I don't get there. And if I don't get there, I'll be there in spirit if not in body. And I wish you'd send me a picture of this husband-to-be so I can see what he looks like. Maybe I might not like him, then what will you do? I'm sure you'll figure out something there, you'll probably tell your uncle to go to. But anyway, I really hope you have a nice wedding, and I hope you're very happy.
So now Lucille, let's see. You just got back before Christmas from an extended visit to Europe, and I was sort of hoping that you would send a note or a little itinerary of where you've been, what you saw, and what you did. But I haven't heard from you. I got two postcards from you, one from Spain, one from Ireland I believe. But maybe if you have a tape recorder now, when you answer this you can tell me a little bit of what you and Dick saw, the places you visited, what kind of food Dick ate, what kind of museums you went rummaging around in, etc. I'd be very interested in knowing, because I'm sure that I've visited many of the places that you've visited, and we'd have something in common there.
I mentioned that I'd gotten a tape letter from Mother the day before yesterday, and in her tape letter she said that Karl had come home, spent a few days with her, and that he looked very worried. He wasn't his usual self. So she said finally he told her what was ailing him. Just before he left Memphis, he'd had a telephone call from the sales manager of Dodd, of the Heck Corporation of America. And the sales manager had told him that they were going to realign the territories and that he would probably have to move to Atlanta, Georgia. And of course, he didn't want to leave Memphis or the St. Louis area either, and he'd rather stay in Memphis. He didn't care about going to Georgia. Well, as it turned out, while he was in St. Louis, the sales manager called back and told him that he didn't have to worry, that he'd be kept in Memphis. They'd finally decided not to move him off to Georgia and he could stay in Memphis. So everything worked out for the best, I guess, and he's happy again.
Also in Mother's letter, Lucille, she mentioned the fact that you had asked her for her recipe of that graham pudding with lemon sauce that she used to make when we were children. She didn't think that I would remember it, but I do. I remember it very vividly. And so in my tape to her, I asked her to send the recipe to me. I've often thought of that pudding, but I've never found a recipe that sounded exactly like the one she made, so I've never attempted to make it.
Since I've been out here and retired and hanging around the house during the daytime, I've done quite a bit of cooking. I cook a lot of cheesecakes and pecan pies and all kinds of coffee cakes. There's a good little recipe for coffee cake in the Fannie Farmer's cookbook called Lightning Cake. It's a quick, easy, one-bowl thing and you can add any kind of fruit to it that you want. And it really has a good texture and flavor. But my favorite of all is my cheesecake, and the recipe that I developed over a period of time. You may have heard it; I put it on a tape to Mother, I think before Christmas. I read the recipe to her in case she wanted to make it. I make it all in the blender. If you didn't hear it and want the recipe, why I'd be glad to send it to you, just let me know.
Mother mentioned that you'd sent her a subscription to the Christian Science Monitor for Christmas and she was real pleased with it. She likes the paper very much, and of course, it is an excellent newspaper.
[10:00] It looks like this tape is just about run out Lucille, so let me stop and turn it over.
Tape stops and flips
Along the side of the house, we had a long grape arbor that someone had built years ago. And originally when I bought the house, it had about seven varieties of grapes growing on it. Well, about five of these vines, while the people who lived here while I was in the service—I guess they failed to water them, so five of them died out. I'm going to replant, but I'm not so sure it's a wise idea.
Also in that arbor area and along the front wall—we have a white concrete block wall that runs from one side of the lot to the other side of the lot and curves in front of the house. And of course, we have a semicircular driveway on the other side of that. But along this front wall, on this side of the house with the grape arbor, somebody had put in some English ivy years ago and this thing was just taking over the whole yard, the arbor, and the house. And I was very concerned about the house; this ivy or vines, any type of vine getting underneath the wood will just tear the house apart and create leaks and the roof leaks and everything else.
So all last week—or in fact, all this week—I've been pulling that ivy out. Patty helps; while I pull it out from the ground, she can't pull that, it's too hard. I pull it out of the ground, and the roots extend forever practically, some of these roots. They'll be as big around as my thumb and be 30 and 40 feet long. And no other—they're not all roots, they're stringers or runners. And every place they touch the ground, why they root and then sometimes they'll bury underground for two or three feet and then pop up again. And they look like big long snakes. It just seemed like I was in a sea of octopuses or octopi, depending on which way you want to pronounce the plural.
Outside of that, there are a couple of other items she talked about. Just the fact that she doesn't do too much. Of course, she sits with the baby next door, and occasionally she plays cards with the Campbells—they're playing pitch, she said, high-low-jack-and-the-game. And she hasn't been out with the Youngs very much lately. They used to go to the hockey games a lot, but she hasn't been doing very much of that. The Youngs are off on a big tirade about Social Security, she said, it made her a little unhappy. He doesn't—he thinks Social Security is a bad thing, that the average person doesn't get out what he puts into it, so forth and so on. So that upset her a little bit. And that's about the gist of what she had in her tape letter.
Since we moved into this house in September, last September, it may seem strange if I say I'm lying around or kicking around the house all day, but that's a little bit far from the truth. I don't think I've ever shown you a picture of the house. It's an older house, I guess it's about 27 years old. It's in a section of East Sacramento, towards the mountains, that was laid out as rural estates. They're all one-acre lots or more. This lot, I think, is about one and one-tenth acre, something like that. And there are so many things that need to be done, not only to the house but to the yard itself. With all this land and all landscaped, it's a never-ending job just to keep up with things like grass cutting, etc.
Most of the people around here, of course, are professional people—doctors and lawyers and so forth—and they're working and of course they make quite a bit of money. So they all hire, or for the most part they hire, gardeners who come in once a week to do all this kind of work. Of course, I paid many times to have a gardener come out here and take care of the place when it was vacant for a period of time in between tenants. And about the cheapest you can get a gardener for is 50, 60 dollars a month just to cut grass and do a little edging.
[15:00]
But finally, after five days of work, why I got this all out. While I pulled it out, I threw it over in a pile and then Patty would load it into the cart. Then when the cart was full, then I'd stop and start up the tractor and haul the stuff back to the rear yard. And I've got to let it dry out now so we can burn it. I still have two other fairly large areas of ivy, however not quite as large as that particular area to clean out.
To keep up with—or be able to cope with—the work, I don't know whether you saw that picture I sent Mother, but I bought myself a little Sears lawn mower tractor-type thing, a little yellow job, fairly powerful, about six horsepower. And then I built a large, fairly large cart to go with it, a trailer cart to put debris, leaves, grass, and so forth in. That is without a doubt the best thing that I ever made. It's the handiest thing and I don't think you could keep up with this work around here unless you had some power equipment of that type. The cart has been a virtual Godsend to me, saving a lot of back-breaking work and many steps.
During the fall we have a lot of trees here, maple trees, silver maples, and some ash. And during the fall we must have had 100 tons of leaves. Well, I used the cart for hauling those leaves back to the rear of the yard, the backyard, where I could burn them.
Last—oh, before Christmas—Patty and I got out and pruned a bunch of the old oleanders and pyracanthas in the front of the house. And we had a mountain of pruning debris that we had to haul back to the rear of the yard and burn. In the summertime, of course, it's the weekly job of cutting the grass. Well, the power mower I have cuts that down pretty easily; doesn't take too long. About a couple of hours to get the front and the back and the side yard.
And then my next chore is to repair the backyard fence. Behind our backyard, which is fenced in, there is another area I guess about maybe a quarter of an acre that used to be a corral for keeping horses. This particular area all through here is zoned as a rural estate zone and people are permitted to keep a burro, a horse, or whatever you want to call it—a horse. Well, since we've been here, I haven't had time to repair the fence, and so we have been keeping Laurie's horse up at the stable which is a couple blocks away up on the corner here.
But now that the weather is getting better, I bought a roll of barbed wire and I bought a few fence posts and I'm going to get out there and dig some post holes and put these posts in and then string about three strands of barbed wire and then bring the horse down here. There's a little bit of grass for him to graze on, and this will make it handy for Laurie when she comes home from school; she can feed him and ride him and so forth. The only thing about the corral back here, we don't have a shelter or a barn for him. And if we decide to keep him here year-round, I'd have to put up some sort of a shelter just to keep him out of the rain when the weather is bad.
The people behind us, they have a corral and a barn back there. They used to have a horse, but I guess the child has grown up now and they sold the horse. When we first bought the house they had a horse, but now they don't. I may go over and talk to him and maybe he would allow me to use his barn, which practically is on my property—or right adjacent to the property line. And I could set it up very easily for our horse. But I haven't as yet talked to him, so I'll have to see how that works out.
Then after I get that done, I've got to pull down the backyard fence which separates the backyard and the corral. It was an old criss-cross lattice fence and of course the stringers and a lot of the posts have rotted out and it's in a bad state of disrepair. So I've got to pull that fence up and I'm going to replace it with a grape stake fence. The only problem there, of course, is the amount of work involved. The fence starting from one side of the house to around the backyard to the other side of the house is about 300 feet long. It's not only a lot of work, but it represents a lot of money to put in a new fence. Everything about this place is—everything you look at and want to fix that way, it represents money.
I've spent a lot of time since even before we moved in, in fixing up the inside. We painted practically all of the rooms; I did most of that. I cleaned rugs—I rented these professional rug cleaner machines and went over all the rugs. And then I had to work on plumbing in the bathrooms. Of course, nobody's ever changed the washers or gaskets in the plumbing fixtures, and most of them leaked, so I had to redo that and several of them. For instance, in the shower, to get to the mechanism to change the washer I had to chip through the plaster wall and make an opening large enough to unscrew the fitting to bring it out. So that took time.
Then in Laurie's bathroom, which is down at the other end of the house, down here near the study here—she has a bedroom and there's a little bath and then the study and then there's another little room next to it, in between here and the living room, which I guess was used as a dining room at one time. In her bathroom, it was in such a mess. The floor had been worn out; I think they had some sort of linoleum or vinyl on it and it all rotted out. So I tore all that out. I took the basin out, the medicine cabinet, the commode, the shower door, the floor. And then I put a new bathroom floor in, new modern vanity, white and gold vanity and basin, a new gold, white and gold framed medicine cabinet. Put the commode back in, painted the room, cleaned the shower out, and that took a lot of work. The mineral deposits from the water had to be scraped off, and the only way you get that stuff off tile is just with a razor blade, taking one square of tile at a time. It just took forever practically. In fact, I still have some tiles in there I haven't cleaned off. But the only way to get them off, like I say, is with a razor blade and that's slow work.
[20:00]
I've held off taking the course because I wanted to get a few of these projects around the house completed—get them out of the way first. But I'm seriously thinking that next month, which would be starting in on this six-week course, and then lining myself up with one of the better real estate companies in town. I'd like to sell the homes, the superior quality homes, I don't want to get involved with tractor production and stuff like that. I'd like to sell homes in this area and around this area because they are so much of the town—they're lovely homes, and I think that would be interesting and I don't think the work part of it would be too hard for me.
Then after I get the corral fence done, I've got to start on her room. I want to tear her room up and update it, remodel it. We have bought rugs, wall-to-wall carpeting for it. I want to tear up the old carpeting, I want to replace the wallboard and the ceiling board and update the electrical outlets—there aren't enough of them. So while I have the wallboards off I can string new electrical outlets. And then I want to convert the one end of the room into a storage closet. At the present time, about half of that end is a closet and the other half is nothing. So I thought I'd put a complete storage closet across one end of the room with these modern bifold louvered doors. And when I get that all done, why her suite—her bathroom and bedroom—will be pretty nice.
I've got some time down the road, I've got to probably change the furnace. This has an old furnace which is an air furnace, hot air type, but it isn't a forced air; there's no blower in the system. So this is very inefficient and it costs too much money to heat the house in the winter months. So I'm going to change that and put a forced air system in, one which could be adapted to air conditioning at some future date if I ever thought I needed one. Actually, the house is very cool in the summertime because it's shaded by so many trees. So I really don't need the air conditioning, however, it might be a good selling point when and if I decide to sell the house.
Well Lucille, I guess that's enough information and hullabaloo and malarkey about the house. Needless to say, there are many more things to do, but they'll be programmed out over a period of a couple of years. While I think of it Lucille and Dick, I want to thank you for the nice Christmas present. Laurie was very happy with her horseman's Bible and the ornaments you sent to put on her bridal—I don't know what those things are called, I just call them bridal ornaments, I'm sure they have another name but I can't think of it right now. And the cufflinks were lovely, Patty gave those to me. As for me, you couldn't get me a better present than that Sap-Sago cheese. I think that's one of the finest cheeses in the United States. I never really knew that Cynthiana was famous for cheese-making, they really should push that and set up an advertising program and production. It beats the Krafts at their own game.
[at this point it sounds like two recordings were recorded on top of each other]
Of course with my gift now, it has become necessary with my retirement present for Lucille and Dick for the couple, Lucille and Dick. Maybe later in the future, things will change. I'll probably get out and get some sort of a job. I'm thinking seriously about, like I mentioned, the real estate business. They have two real estate schools here in town and I've been to both of them just to see what they offer and they look pretty good. There's one right downtown that runs a course for six weeks and it covers all the aspects of the real estate business. I know several people in the real estate business; a few weeks ago I was at a real estate symposium at a hotel here in town to discuss the real estate field, salesmanship, etc. It was an all-day affair with a lunch. And the next day, I went down and paid my five dollars and sat in on the whole thing while these people talked and talked all day about all the aspects of the real estate business and how to get loans and all this sort of stuff. Found it to be very interesting; met several of the real estate people there, ate lunch with some of them.
Well Lucille, I just looked up at the tape recorder and I see that I'm just about out of tape. Give a big kiss to Melissa for me, and for Michael, Lucille, and for Dick. I hope I can get out to the West Coast and give you a little visit. I'd love to take you around and show you the country out here. It's beautiful country out here, as I'm sure you're well aware of that, but if you've never been out here, I wish you would try to come out here. Well once again, my best to each of you and all across the family. I'm going to stop now before I run out of tape. Bye-bye for now. This is Wayne. Bye.