How He Lived

In the movie the “Last Samurai”, in the final scene Capt Algren is presenting a samurai sword, to the Emperor of Japan, that belonged to the last samurai – Katsumoto. The scene ends with the Emperor saying to Captain Algren “Tell me how he died.” Captain Algren responds, “I will tell you how he lived.” Let me Tell you how Curtiss lived.

First I must say, we are not a close family. There aren’t daily phone calls or emails or letters. There are status checks once in a while. I believe there are a multitude of reasons for this. No regrets, it is just the fact that we aren’t a close family.

When four boys and a girl are raised in a three bedroom house, and transported in a two door coupe (Ford), you spend a lot of time together. Living on the edge of town, we became our own community. Once we traveled to Blue Hill Nebraska. We weren’t really headed to Blue Hill, we were headed to Hastings, but the car that had two adults and 7 or maybe it was 8 kids in it broke down. This cadre of 9 jammed into a Chevrolet Corsair with another adult (we found the owner and the car in a haunted house) and went to the nearest town of Blue Hill Nebraska, where we spent one of the best days of our lives. The 5 kids and two parents also crammed into the Ford Coupe with make a circuitous loop through Colorado, to Arizona, New Mexico and back to Kansas.

Now throw into these adventures the fact that these kids, Don, Iris, Curtiss, Myself and Brad are basically 1 year apart on birthdates. Looking at the five of us, in retrospect, there were 5 totally different kids. An outdoorsman, a hippie, a family person, a nerd and a mad scientist. Curtiss was a mad scientist. Who else would buy a device for listening to a baby’s heartbeat to see if it could do something else, or a oscilloscope so he could watch sound, or build electric motors from nails and copper wire, or crystal radios from scraps. Curtiss was willing to try something cautiously, and fix anything.

We were a family. We were raised to believe in God, and know the difference between right and wrong. We shoveled the neighbors sidewalks when it snowed, at no charge to the folks – because that’s what Mom said. We learned it is great to give, and good to receive, and there are some things you shouldn’t charge other people for. We were taught to do more than was asked, and expect little in return. We got hurt, we got tired, maybe we went hungry once in a while, but that memory didn’t stay. We were the benefactors of gifts and love from many people in our hometown of Beloit. We sang in church; with 5 kids we were the choir sometimes. We sat in the back pew of the Evangelical United Brethren Church where Dad taught us how to sew our fingers together with needle and thread. You have to have thick calluses on your hands to do that.

I think that we saw so much of each other, and that we spent so much time together, fighting, laughing, playing around and horsing around, that when we started leaving home we were glad to say goodbye and begin new lives and new adventures. From that point on, our mother was the glue that bound us together. She was the clearing house for information as we moved about the world and about our lives. When mom passed away, Iris picked up the responsibility, but her health now prevents any routine interaction with us. So once in a while, I did a communications check, and our lives continued, not dependent on any other, but tied loosely to each other.

By the time Curtiss left home to go join the United States Air Force he had started to form his view of the world, as he learned in our little town of 4000. This would is very black and white, right or wrong, good and bad. A man’s word was his bond. He traveled the world. He was an electrical guy that repaired power grids in Taiwan after a typhoon. He was a Red Horse, and Prime Beef engineer – these are the quick responders when a AF Base has infrastructure issues, and they usually end up helping the locals as much as they help their own. Later in his career he became an electronics engineer. He retired from the military and took on a new career, which was simply a civilian job that was similar to his military job. He married Cathy, and they raised two children, Steven and Debbie.

Curtiss could complain with the best of them, and many conversations with him were kind of one-sided. If Curtiss said he was going to do something, he did it. If you crossed Curtiss, you knew it. If you had a question Curtiss had answers. Because we are not a close family, there are many many things that I can’t tell you about Curtiss. Like his RV adventures. You need to talk to Cathy, Debbie and Steven to hear those wonderful stories and find out what other great things Curtiss did.

When we were young, one of our grandmothers use to tell us that no man ever walked on the Moon, it was a Disney movie. Curtiss and I once discussed that she thought this because she had seen so many inventions in her life, that it wasn’t plausible to imagine another new invention.

In Curtiss’ lifetime he saw the invention or creation of:

Space Travel

Teflon

Modems

Lasers

AstroTurf

ATMs

Televisions

Kevlar

Solar Cells

Airplane Black Box

Fiber Optic Cable

Pull tab tops

8 track tape players

Compact Discs

Cassett

VHS

BETA

DVD

Huggies/Pampers

Glen Elder Dam

MTV

Mobile Phones

Portable calculators

Electric Typewriters

Personal Computers (32 MB of storage)

Liquid Crystal Displays

Plasma Displays

Leaf Blowers

The Internet

MRIs

CT Scans

POGs

Ipods

Disco

Digital Cameras

Thumbdrives

And so much more.

In years to come, many will never know how Curtiss lived, they will see only some memorial, But if you listen closely you will hear the echoes of his voice as he made his opinions known.

If you look close, you will see his footprints where he stopped to help.

If you open your heart and soul you will feel the breeze of change created by Curtiss’ life.