More rain here - almost first official day of summer

 4:05 pm Wednesday, between rains here in Clarinda.  Rained much of the overnight and heavy clouds today.  At least we aren't getting the heavy rains and wind here like they are getting at our South Texas Home.  Storm warnings and flooding in that area from the tropical storm Alberto going ashore into Mexico to the south.

Been doing a lot of digging through old files and pictures, on the computer and otherwise.  Came across this one of Dad back in the 1970's.  He is standing in our living room by a photo of him when he was a kid, with his mom, dad and brothers and sisters he had at the time.  Have uncovered lot of things.  Today ran across a Cassette tape my brother Darrell made in Vietnam in the late 1960's.

    Picture at right shows Byron Olivier, 48, of Church Point Louisiana and his wooden sculpture bench he made to honor his long passed grandparents. This master craftsman carved the piece so that he could once again sit with his "mawmaw and pawpaw" and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes with them like he did as a child.

With all the memories jostled, I recall that about 30 years ago now, sometime in the summer of 1994, I made the decision to sell Coin Grain Corp. that we had ran for 20 years. The last several years we had totally owned it. In 1974 four other men put up money and had me put up one-fourth what they each did. At the time I was happy to have a little ownership. As the years went on, especially with one of the owners being a complete and total bastard, I regretted having ownership. Would have quit my job otherwise, which I then realized is why they had me put some money up. Over the years one, by one the others sold out and we bought shares. Got up to

a total of seven employees, counting ourselves, in the 1980's when we were running fertilizer. When started in 1974 most of the corn and beans at harvest time were brought in by tractors pulling small wagons. By the late 1980's we sold off the fertilizer part and cut back to only four of us. By 1994 we had only one other employee besides us. Many of the farmers had their own semi trucks and were bypassing local elevaators. Others hired the local truckers to haul out to St. Joe, MO and other places and didn't need the elevator. So, I made up my mind sometime in the summer and sometime in early August sent out letters to our customers we wouldn't be there in the fall. In 1989, when we sold the fertilizer business we couldn't get enough bid to sell the elevator itself, though we did get rid of the bagged feed business we had built in Clarinda. We had feed business in the elevator and ground and delivered feed to quite a few farmers in the area. In 1994 I sold various buildings to various farmers and a couple of brothers from Westboro, MO bought the elevator itself to use as their own storage. One of the brothers eventually went ahead and started a seed business out of there and burned the original wooden structure, which had been built in the 1950's, down and built a metal office building in it's place. I think he also ran fertilizer out of there. Anyway, we had started doing a sign business out of our bedroom and garage in 1984 and fell back to it, eventually building an office and doubling the size of the garage to use as a shop to build the bigger signs in. We ran the sign business until selling in November of 2008 when we retired effective January 1, 2009.

Lot of things happened in the last 50 years since we first started at Coin. Family has changed, we moved to town, started spending winters in South Texas to avoid the cold Iowa winters.

Well, I went off on a tangent there. Will finish up.

More later, L Carroll