Jon Tanny Olsen - smarter than a two yolked goose egg

Jon Tanny Olsen and Opal Olson and yes I spelled it right

First off you are probably struggling with the title but I thought it was cute, not that it really had any meaning.  By the way there really are a lot of two yolked goose eggs and that means there are twins.

Now for Jon Tanny: Jon Tanny and I were raised in Grainola and went to school together for 11 of 12 years.  Jon Tanny and I were always in the top five during our first 7 years of school except possibly when Joy Frank showed up.  You can see from the picture below she added a lot of good looks to our class. 

Joy Frank

 The reason Jon Tanny and I went to school only 11 out of 12 years together is I went to Shidler one year early so I could play football.  And the reason we were almost always in the top 5 in our class is there were only five in the class except when Joy came.  We must have been a big problem.

Pam Olsen (Jon Tanny's wife) and Marguarette (Jon Tanny's mom)

Anyway there at least two reasons you can see that Jon Tanny was smart:
a. he Married Pam (see picture)
b. He sold Pam on marrying him

Well back to Jon Tanny, he lives down by Giddings, Texas and they named a street after him for some reason and hopefully a good reason.  For some reason anytime you bring up Jon Tanny, Eddy or myself someone starts talking about the trouble we got into as youngsters.  In fact David Harris and Bob Harris and don't forget Janis Harris generally are the ones who propagate those lies.  We never killed anyone and I don't remember too many people even getting hurt.  Now there was one time when Jon Tanny and I were out feeding cattle and we decided to see how fast a truck could go on ice.  Well we don't know the answer but somewhere north of 95 miles an hour (that is as far as the speedometer would go) is how fast we could go and not move forward.  Now I will tell you once you did get a little traction on some grass or frozen ground that truck would lurch forward with a jerk and man it was a rough ride.

Jon Tanny could weld anything and fix anything.  I remember riding in the combine with Jon Tanny and the wheat was a little too damp so it clogged the rollers (actually I don't remember what we called that area which got clogged) and we had a heck of a time getting it cleaned out.

McConaghy's combine

try unloading that combine while still driving the truck and the combine

We could not have been 14 or 15 years old and we drove the combines and the trucks as we harvested wheat.  I remember how cool we were in that we figured out how to keep combining the wheat and unload into a moving truck and never stop.  We thought we were pretty smart.

Well let me tell you Jon Tanny turned out to be a good business person and most of all from what I can tell he and Pam are great parents.

What do you learn in the Osage:
a. kids are gonna be kids so let them grow up
b. give your kids some rope so they can be creative and learn to think
c. give them some responsibility and trust them but let them know there are consequences when you violate that trust
Thanks for your time,
gary@thepioneerman.com

Go read a book:  I met Tom Hill today who started Character First which I first experienced several years ago.  Many schools and companies teach these principals described in his book.
Making Character First
 Making Character First: Building a Culture of Character in any Organization