Baker's Branch

  The captain's wife, my mother, Loys Marie Howell Vollertsen, died February 23, 2012. Today is February 17, 2022. Her second son, Vernon, the computer whiz, asked me to put together a companion piece to last week's blog titled "The Captain." They say that behind every great man is an equally great woman. Hooo, boy, I'm going to try and count the ways. To do this you are going to have to understand both the geography and the history of the times in which her character developed. If that sounds boring, then you need to get out of here right now because I'm going to do it anyway, whether you like it or not. Loys Marie was born a twin to Loyd Pete in Seminole, Oklahoma on August 9th, 1924. Seminole was as rough an oil boom town as Oklahoma ever produced, and there were a lot of them. In that time and in that place no man's life was worth one-tenth of the black gold being sucked out of the ground around them. Men, called "roughnecks," a perfect descr...

  I am still here... with Whoopi and Elvis Just to clear things up, I’m still here. Against all odds, maybe, but still here.  I'm still alive. Some of you that read my outdoors column regularly may have heard that I had “run aground” infection and heart problems linked to a back fusion two weeks ago. I did, for a fact. My wife, Pam, drove me to St. Francis Hospital post-back surgery after my heart rate had fallen to the low 30s. She kept me alive while driving the car with one hand and slapping me in the face with the other, at one point screaming, “You are not going to die in my car!” So I didn’t, fearing other consequences, apparently, more serious than death. You maybe don’t know the girl as well as I do. The initial operation, performed by Dr. Zee Khan at St. Francis, went well with no apparent complications; sent home after a Tuesday surgery, things went south in a hurry that first night home on Thursday when my body was invaded by a massive infection. Two wee...

  Looking back, my earliest memories are of my father handing me a rod with baited hook, and indicating with a nod of his head where I should make my cast, and where on that squirrel’s body up in yonder tree I might best hold my aim for the most satisfying result. We hunted and fished together all over the world. Dad was thirty-three years a sailor man, the captain of warships floating hundreds of men at a time thousands of miles from known seaports, and later a manager of a computer plant whose efforts enabled a company working for NASA to power the most powerful rockets skyward towards an absolutely unknown world. Both jobsites were a long way off from the one room schoolhouse where he first put pencil to paper up in Nebraska on a farmstead whose acreage was part of the Oregon Trail. There was no fishing other than the carp and the bullheads in the Little Nemaha River, but they pulled hard, and often, and provided the platform for incredible fishing to come. Dad’s first job...