<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the summer of 1974, Professor Pat Farrell was both my instructor and boss at Northern Michigan University\u2019s Field Station just south of Melstrand, Michigan.\u00a0 All Geography majors were required to take a class called Field Studies to give us boots on the ground experience using tools of the mapping trade.\u00a0 My undergraduate advisor, Professor Richard Mahowski, had penciled this into my three year educational plan back in the spring of 1972.\u00a0 When I finally decided to pursue a teaching degree at the end of my freshman year, Professor Mahowski made it a point to tell me two important things:\u00a0 \u201c1) You are doing this [schedule] a year late and 2) There is no possible way that all of these classes will be available when you need them.\u00a0 You may have to substitute other classes because some of these are not offered every semester.\u201d\u00a0 I reminded him that it would not have been possible to do all this planning earlier because it took me a year of college to get a feel for what direction I wanted to go.\u00a0 It would also be no reflection on his advising skills if all of the classes he wrote down were not available in the order in which I needed to take them.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My last meeting to update my education plan with Professor Mahowski took place near the end of my junior year.\u00a0 He said, \u201cWe need to figure out what you will need to fill in for the classes you haven\u2019t been able to take toward your major and minor.\u201d\u00a0 In my file, he still had a copy of the original list of classes he had jotted down two years before this final meeting.\u00a0 His eyes narrowed into slits when I said, \u201cOther than the fall semester classes that I have already registered for and student teaching in the spring, I have taken all of them.\u201d\u00a0 We went back and forth for a bit and he almost seemed disappointed each time he pointed to a class and I said, \u201cYep, I took that one.\u201d\u00a0 He proceeded to tell me that he had never had anyone go through an entire program without having to substitute at least one class.\u00a0 \u201cWhat about Field Studies?\u201d he asked with a hint of \u2018Ah Ha!\u2019 in his voice.\u00a0 I replied, \u201cI am signed up for that this summer and Pat (Farrell) asked me to be the student manager at the Field Station.\u00a0 I will also be doing a directed study class with a mixed bunch of high school teachers and students to have enough credits to let me work there.\u201d\u00a0 He did not quite believe me because he dialed Professor Farrell\u2019s phone extension while reminding me, \u201cThe student manager position is always filled by a graduate student, not an undergrad.\u201d\u00a0 Professor Mahowski was right on that point, but he had to hear the job was mine from Pat: \u201cThere are no graduate students interested so Ken has already been hired.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Professor Farrell lived a half a block up the hill from my house on Norway Avenue for many years.\u00a0 His oldest son was a couple of years younger than me, but in our tight knit neighborhood, adults and kids were all on friendly terms.\u00a0 When Pat asked me early in the spring semester about the field station job, I was already working for the Geography Department as a twenty hour a week student worker.\u00a0 None of the student office help had returned after the first semester. \u00a0 When I paid my first visit to the department office in January of 1974, I heard Pat tell Ceta the secretary, \u201cHire him.\u00a0 Raisanen, do you want a job?\u201d\u00a0 Little did I think my response (\u201cSure\u201d) amounted to a job interview.\u00a0 Ceta wasn\u2019t sure I got the drift:\u00a0 \u201cYou know it is twenty hours a week, we can schedule around your classes, and you will be the only student worker this semester?\u201d\u00a0 I asked, \u201cWhen do I start?\u201d\u00a0 Ceta said, \u201c9 A.M. tomorrow will be fine,\u201d and all of a sudden, I had a job for the semester.\u00a0 When Ceta\u2019s husband was transferred to Dubuque, Iowa at the end of the semester, I ended up being the department\u2019s fill in secretary for a couple of months.\u00a0 By then I knew the ropes well enough to keep up with everything except the departmental meetings which I was excused from attending.\u00a0 As soon as we hit the middle of June, I was off to my summer classes and a new job at the field station (I didn\u2019t even meet the new office secretary until the next fall).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During my stint as the fill in secretary, they still kept me working twenty hours a week for the rest of the spring semester, three weeks in May, and two weeks in June.\u00a0 Much of the paperwork involved the upcoming summer classes at the field station, so I knew quite a bit about the place before I ever laid eyes on it.\u00a0 Pat told me to be in the science building parking lot at 8 A.M. on the Monday morning we were scheduled to depart.\u00a0 We picked up the two university vehicles we would be driving out to Cusino Lake and loaded up the equipment needed for the class.\u00a0 I still have a \u2018chauffeur’s\u2019 designation on my driver\u2019s license dating back to my summer job with NMU (I could not drive university vehicles with passengers without it).\u00a0 We had one day to get settled in, open up the buildings, store the food we were transporting, and be ready when students arrived on Tuesday.\u00a0 By late afternoon, Pat, his younger son Sean, and I were ready for dinner and our first real break since we had left Marquette that morning.\u00a0 Pat had already warned me there would be a cook on duty Monday through Friday lunch, but I was expected to feed anyone who stayed over the weekend when classes did not meet.\u00a0 Lila, the cook, wasn\u2019t going to arrive until Tuesday so I half expected the first night\u2019s meal would be up to me.\u00a0 Thankfully, Pat suggested a visit to a roadside tavern in Van Meer for a sandwich. \u00a0 We referred to it\u00a0 as \u2018The Silly Sisters\u2019 in reference to the two matronly women who ran the joint but its real name was The Club Majestic.\u00a0 On the way back to the field station, Pat said, \u201cDon\u2019t think this gets you out of making pancakes for breakfast tomorrow.\u201d\u00a0 When Pat first asked me about the student manager job, he had asked what kind of kitchen experience I had beyond being a dishwasher at the Huron Mountain Club for the previous three summers.\u00a0 I told him the scrambled eggs story.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0During my first summer at the club, the breakfast chef was a short blond woman named Tina.\u00a0 She had her hands full one morning making Eggs Benedict for the breakfast special.\u00a0 She grabbed me and said, \u201cHere, you take care of the scrambled eggs so I can get the specials done.\u201d\u00a0 The breakfast buffet always featured scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, fruit, various rolls, English muffins, and toast.\u00a0 The scrambled eggs were prepared from gallon glass jars of eggs that had been cracked the day before (I did a lot of the egg cracking on coffee breaks between dish loads).\u00a0 The eggs were cooked on the gas stove in the largest frying pan I had ever seen.\u00a0 After filling the buffet steamer tray with a couple of pans worth of scrambled eggs, I went back to work in the dish room.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As we were finishing the breakfast dishes, Ted, the head chef, stopped by and asked me if I knew that I had made Tina cry.\u00a0 My face must have shown my befuddlement, so Ted put on a serious expression and explained that nobody would ever eat Tina\u2019s scrambled eggs.\u00a0 \u201cShe likes to make the daily specials so she purposely makes runny scrambled eggs so nobody will eat them.\u201d\u00a0 Apparently, this was the only day that all of the scrambled eggs had been eaten.\u00a0 The committee of club members who oversaw the kitchen made it known they expected the eggs to be just like that for the rest of the summer.\u00a0 After I stammered a bit, Ted burst out laughing and said, \u201cShe really did cry about the eggs, but I have been telling her to get them right all summer.\u00a0 How would you like to be the assistant breakfast chef in charge of scrambled eggs?\u201d\u00a0 When I found out it would mean being in the kitchen every morning at 5 A.M., I declined and Tina never asked me to tend the scrambled eggs again.\u00a0 All Pat said at the time was, \u201cSo you know how to cook with gas?\u00a0 Good.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bright and early Tuesday morning, I was in the field station kitchen cooking a pan of bacon in the oven (another little trick I learned at the club).\u00a0 By the time Pat and Sean arrived, I had a plate of pancakes ready for them.\u00a0 Half way through the first plate, Pat said, \u201cYou didn\u2019t burn them.\u00a0 Nobody cooks on a gas griddle without burning something the first time.\u00a0 You didn\u2019t even burn the bacon!\u201d\u00a0 I told Pat my little secret about oven baking the bacon which he had never heard of.\u00a0 As long as I remember, we had a small gas stove with a griddle on it at our camp.\u00a0 By the time I got to the field station kitchen, I had a decade worth of experience cooking with gas.\u00a0 \u201cI have one complaint,\u201d Pat said after breakfast.\u00a0 I prefer my pancakes a little gooey in the center.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cYou should have told me that before breakfast,\u201d was all I could muster, but for the rest of the summer, Pat went back to Marquette on the weekends so I never had to cook for him again.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Being the student manager came with a list of chores that needed to be done when class was not in session.\u00a0 With no electricity lines, we had a big diesel generator that provided our juice.\u00a0 Number one on my job list was staying at Cusino Lake on the weekend to keep the generator running for the benefit of the freezers and refridgerators in the kitchen.\u00a0 The oil in the generator had to be changed after \u2018X\u2019 hours of operation, so Pat gave me a hands on lesson in changing the oil and filters. This\u00a0 routine maintenance would be my responsibility if the generator hit the magic number on my weekend shifts.\u00a0 I asked how long the electricity could be off before it would ruin the food in the freezers and was told, \u201cOh, they could be off for ten hours easy because everything is already frozen.\u201d\u00a0 After a couple of weeks, I started to shut the generator off for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday for the peace and quiet (and to delay having to change the oil for a couple more days).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mowing a couple of acres of lawn with a riding mower was another part of the routine.\u00a0 The weekly swabbing of bathrooms, kitchen, bunk rooms,\u00a0 and the dining hall took up part of Saturday.\u00a0 I was free to use anything in the freezers for weekend meals, but it was strongly suggested that using as many leftovers as possible would be a good plan.\u00a0 Most of the leftovers were fine for lunches but the volume of potatoes left from the past week dictated fried potatoes with breakfast, fried mashed potato patties with dinner, and the occasional bowl of potato salad to add a little variety.\u00a0 One of the teachers attending from lower Michigan stayed several weekends and asked politely why every meal included potatoes.\u00a0 I took him into the kitchen and showed him the many containers of spuds gracing the shelves.\u00a0 Lila expected a clean fridge on Monday morning so I was instructed to ditch anything not eaten after dinner on Sunday night and no matter how many ways I served them, there were always potatoes to toss.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When classes ended in early August, we did the closeout in one day.\u00a0 This included mopping and waxing the wood floors in the two main dorms.\u00a0 The second half of the cleaning day left my head feeling like it was stuffed with cotton. \u00a0 Apparently, I was allergic to something in the floor wax we used.\u00a0 Pat ran down the whole opening and closing checklist with me because I would be doing both on my own when the job extended into the fall.\u00a0 Groups from the college scheduled departmental retreats on the first six weekends of the fall semester.\u00a0 With no Friday classes of my own, I would head out to Cusino Lake in the early afternoon and open up the facilities requested by each group.\u00a0 Opening the camp included lighting the pilots on the water heaters and furnaces, firing up the generator, and doing a quick cleaning of the dining facilities.\u00a0 If the group wanted the fireplace lit in the main house, it was my job to tend it so they wouldn\u2019t burn the place down.\u00a0 Checking the gas and doing a test run of the firehose pump down by the lake continued into the fall as we were a long way from any local fire department.\u00a0 Most groups left soon after breakfast on Sunday and in a matter of two hours, I would have things ready to close up.\u00a0 At least I wasn\u2019t expected to cook for the weekend groups and most were pretty good about cleaning up after themselves.\u00a0 The one perk I was given was permission to fill my gas tank from the buried storage tank used to fuel the university vehicles during summer sessions.\u00a0 Having less stuff to do on Sundays was fine with me;\u00a0 it meant I had more time to do a little road hunting on the way home.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Some of the weekend groups were amazed that I had spent all summer at Cusino Lake with no company on the weekends and no TV.\u00a0 Most were agreeable to having the generator shut off for Saturday afternoon.\u00a0 Mostly, I spent my down time in the bigger dorm building across the road from the main compound.\u00a0 Between class work, playing guitar, and reading, my hardest task was keeping a low profile.\u00a0 They had free run of the kitchen so I had to time my meals around their schedule.\u00a0 There were one or two of the retreat participants who invited me to dine with them, but I preferred to keep out of the way.\u00a0 Once they were done with their meals, I could rustle up my own food and take care of whatever was left to clean up at the same time.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was the best summer job for me to have after spending the three previous summers living and working at the Huron Mountain Club near Big Bay.\u00a0 I was getting paid to spend my weekends in the middle of nowhere and it kept my college year routine of living at home during school and away in the summers intact.\u00a0 I felt like Emerson at Walden Pond although I had more modern conveniences at my disposal.\u00a0 The one area I could have made a few extra bucks was training people how to use that pesky griddle.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 From 1976, Steve Miller Band talking about cooking!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the summer of 1974, Professor Pat Farrell was both my instructor and boss at Northern Michigan University\u2019s Field Station just south of Melstrand, Michigan.\u00a0 All Geography majors were required to take a class called Field Studies to give us boots on the ground experience using tools of the mapping trade.\u00a0 My undergraduate advisor, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,12,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-humor","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2126"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2130,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126\/revisions\/2130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}