IF you are going to fight why not use rocks?

 Living on a gravel road which dead ends at 1 mile north and 3 west from Grainola was a great privilege.  First off when you see a little dust in the air, that means you have a visitor coming and we would watch them from the front porch coming.  It was about 1/2 mile from the top of the first hill from our house to the front porch.  I should also mention it was a great place to sit and watch the storms and an occasional tornado coming.  Yep, we would sit on the front porch and watch the storm.  The second great thing about living on the dead end of a gravel road is that you could ride your back as fast and as hard as you can muster.  The only bad part is if you fall which Larry Wayne did once and it scun (slang for scratched the heck out of his leg, arms and body and even his face) him up something awful.  

The third thing that was great about living on a gravel road is there were plenty of rocks and when you were having fun or even having a fight because you are mad, there are plenty of rocks.  Yes, you can have a rock fight and not be mad.  You do have to admit it is better throwing rocks at each other than shooting a gun at each other.  

So I remember one time Kenny Kelsey was at our house and he was on one side of the car and I was on the other.  We were tossing rocks like hand-grenades.  At least that way you would not get hurt as bad as a hard thrown rock.  EXCEPT, when one of those rocks is a little too big and sharp.  Kenny's head decided it was too large and too sharp.  It busted his head wide open and he bled like a stuck hog (that means it really bled a lot).  Now, the good news is Kenny lived and it was only a few stitches, plus we did not get in trouble.  

That is our house which you can barely see, and the barns are to the left.

So, what do you learn in the Osage?

• Sticks and stones may break my bones, but ROCKS can still hurt
• A little too much fun can hurt, but you can laugh about it later
• If you can't take the pain don't play the game

Thanks for listening,

gary

Golson21@hotmail.com

Rotten Egg fights

 Some folks from the city think there is nothing to do in the country.  Contrary to their thinking, there is an unlimited number of things to do, like finding rotten eggs.  Sometimes it was the boy scouts which included Larry Wayne and his buddies but not me, but that is another story.  Other times it was just some friends from church, Grainola Methodist, but we would find things to do.  Living on the farm with multiple barns and lots of chickens you could always find a few eggs that had been laying around a little too long.  

This story is about the time the boy scouts and I should remind you that Mom/Opal was the scout mother, were having an egg fights, rotten egg fights.  Mom did not endorse it.  I included myself in the hunt, but what we did was go through all the hay barns looking for abandoned eggs.  Sure, enough there were plenty.  As I was sneaking around the hay barn next to the milk barn I ran into Kenny Kelsey, who had an incredible ornery laugh, and I laid one on him and took off running.  Then there was Pat Conwell who had peeled off the shell and just the thin film held the egg together.  He tossed it toward the rafters in the barn just as Debbie Sue (my sister) walked out and it splatted right on top of her head.  It was a very rotten egg.  Basically, if you do not know it, rotten eggs are like Sulphur on steroids.  I bet mom washed Deb's hair a dozen times that day just to get the smell out.  As I recall she also used milk and even tomato juice to get rid of the smell.  I don't know all the criminals involved but I believe Larry Stephens, Billy Don Head, Bill Snyder, Harvey Harrington, Glen Jones and Joe Conner were involved in the war.  I can assure you that most of those boys are in this picture from 1956 but they all grew up. 

So, what do you learn in the Osage?

• it is probably better not to look up as there might be a falling rotten egg
• now when you are in trouble it is a good idea to look up to Jesus for some forgiveness
• Forgiveness comes from Jesus, but consequences come from MOM
• Boy scouts were fun but as we all got older, we became girl scouts, go figure

Thanks for listening,

gary

golson21@hotmail.com

Folks call me an entrepreneur and I would tell you I was full-a-manure.

 I cannot explain why it happened, but I figured out early that to make money I had to multiply my time and find something other folks wanted.  So, when I was about 7 I started competing in the Grainola District Fair.  The first thing I should tell you is I was always way too big for my age.  (see pic of our basketball team, Mr. Morris was the only person taller and the three littlest guys were the only ones my age, the others were up to 3 years older) The first thing I remember competing in was riding in bicycle rases during the fair and then I tried to learn canning from my mom so I could enter the canning contest.  Then there was the horseshoe contest and the greased pig contest and the big one for me was turtle racing.  

Now here is where it got good, I figured that winning depended on the turtle and not on my ability.  So, I decided to collect turtles and sell them to fellows wanting to race during the fair.  That was very profitable and I would attempt to keep the fastest turtle for myself but that did not always work.  

My next full-a-manure venture was when I decided to borrow money from the bank ($70) to buy two ewe lambs.  That is another story but I should mention I was 9 yrs. old when I went to the bank and asked Mr. Andrews for a loan.  Alright, I will tell the rest of the story.  He asked me how I was going to pay back the loan and I gold him we would have baby lambs and wool to generate money for the loan.  He asked me how we would have baby lambs if I did not purchase a ram.  I told him they were already pregnant.  He said, "then I will make you the loan".  I should also mention that dad never came in the bank with me but sat in the pickup.  I should also mention that I sold one of the first lambs to my sister and I thought I kept the best lamb for myself.  She won the Osage County Spring Livestock show, I did not.

This is getting long so I will tell more in the next story.

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• Hard work and a little risk taking can get you ahead in life
• Being the biggest guy in the school was not cool, until later
• A college education can hinder a person from reaching their best
• Hard work and tenacity can overcome 

Thanks for listening,

gary

Golson21@hotmail.com

Soups fishing hole

 When you grow up in the Osage you learn about where to go fishing.  Larry and I fished mostly about 1/4 mile behind the house on Beaver Creek.  We would sein for minnows in the creek or grab some liver out of the freezer and head out.  Interesting enough we never brought water or food, and mom never seemed to worry about us.  She always said, "when they get hungry, they will come home".  

Now if you walk about another half mile west and a little south there was a deep water hole called Soups fishing hole.  Now Soup Wade was his name, and his wife was Letha and she was a schoolteacher in Shidler, and I don't know what Soup ever did besides tell stories.  Letha was a full blood Osage and sweet to me, always.  Just past Soups fishing hole was a beaver damn, and it was fun to watch the beavers working.  It was a great hole, and I caught many a bass there.  My brother Larry always caught more than me.  He fished with a fancy real and mine was an inexpensive Zebco (manufactured in Tulsa).  One time I caught but not landed the biggest bass ever.  I am guessing it was well over 5 lbs. and maybe up to 8.  The other outstanding thing I caught one time was a rod and reel, yep, a rod and reel.

I have to admit that if the fishing was not going well, we would start shooting turtles with a 22 rifle.  One   of the best times shooting was David Goldenberg (my second most favorite Jewish boy) was with me and he had never shot a gun.  He grew up in Queens, New York.  I guess they did not live on a creek.  

He was also surprised when he saw mom's crocks full of cucumbers turning into pickles.  He had not given much thought to cucumbers make pickles.  He was also surprised that I did not know what a bagel was.  He also was surprised that I was not aware he was Jewish.  I told him that where I came from, we just had three types of folks, black and white and red.  It was strange to me that I never really cared what color a person was.  

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• everyone likes to fish
• not everyone has a creek 
• the color of the skin or the ethnicity of a person does not make the man
• character is what makes a man

Thanks for listening,

gary

golson21@hotmail.com

How did the depression make a difference in your life?

 I know that I did not grow up in the depression, but it certainly made a difference in my life.  Mom and dad grew up during those times including the Dust Bowls, Depression, WWI and mostly WWII plus lots of presidents and lots of politics.  

Did it make a difference in my life?  Certainly, because mom became extremely thrifty, and she worked like a dog every day providing for the family.  Dad wanted to own land and raise a family that he could be proud of.  They both worked long hours 7 days a week from before daylight to after dark.  They both wanted their children (Larry, Debbie and me) to go to college and they taught us hard work, discipline and respect. They gave us values, honor and faith.  We virtually never missed church and knowing about the life of Christ.

Let me be specific:  We always had a huge garden and literally hundreds of chickens and I would guess over 100 hogs, and milk cows (a dairy for many years) plus beef cattle and even a few sheep.  Every year we put up (canned) hundreds of jars of vegetables for the winter.  We butchered chickens for meat and harvested eggs for the kitchen plus we traded eggs at Dale's Feed Seed and Fertilizer store for groceries.  We separated the whole milk and sold off the cream and then the milk for income.  We even made our own butter for years and to tell you the truth, I was glad to see those sticks of butter in the store and then our kitchen.  It saved a lot of work.  All of this was a reflection of mom's thrifty ways.  She made clothes for the entire family, except for the Levi's and even those were patched many times to make them last.  

Another reflection of the lasting effects of the depression is that being the youngest, I got to wear the used clothes of Larry, my brother, and Billy Snyder, my first cousin.  That is, until I outgrew them and that was about the time I hit 12 or 13.  Debbie, my sister, and the Shumate girls all learned to sew and make their own clothes.  Mom was a great teacher.

Another thing my parents did, and I believe it was due to the depression, was giving or I could say sharing what we had with others.  They gave even when it hurt as they saw others in need more than us.  I would say they happily gave, and they never asked the government to take their place in that giving.  They did not require something in return, because they understood the law of giving was a gift in itself.

Leftovers were never wasted with the one exception of liver.  Dad hated liver, so we got to use it for fish bait, so maybe it was not wasted either.  Vehicles were driven for years and were totally repaired and maintained by us.  Even the tractors were maintained and never traded for a newer model.  We used everything until it could be used no more.  

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• A great life is made by the values you learn, the hard way or should I say hard work
• Without a good example of a father and mother, growing up can be very difficult
• Give and give until you can give no more and give some more, you will be richer for it

Thanks for listening,

gary

golson21@hotmail.com

Array Manufacturing - a great idea is not always a great idea!

A great idea is not always a great idea, Array Manufacturing.

Remember when we had continuous feed printers and it was a hassle getting paper to feed to the printer? Well, Bruce Milner and Kevin McAfee and I started a company called Array Manufacturing (around 1983) to solve this problem and make millions. IBM had one and it was a lot like ours but different (see pic below). We actually sold a lot of these, but we also had a lot of left over inventory.

It was fun but, it was a great idea at a great price, for the consumer anyway. I was in the computer industry and saw the need as personal computers were new and dot matrix printers were the cool new thing. Those computers were desktop only and had 8 to 16k memory with floppy drives using cassettes which had 32 to 64k. YEP, that is k as in 1000 bytes. Did you know it takes 8 bits to make a bite? And then there was ASCII and EBCDIC, try that on for size! I was an EBCIDIC person with heavy experience in assembler language and banking programs, but those are another story.

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• Great ideas are great ideas only if you execute on them, but it can still fail.
• Time moves on, so you better seize the day and get it done, NOW
• Profit margins do not mean a thing if you cannot put a little change/cash in your pocket
• * Fun can be expensive

Thanks for listening,

Gary

Golson21@hotmail.com

do me a favor and share my blog with your friends.

Never thought I was a baby boomer

 Growing up in the Osage, I never heard of Baby Boomers, but I am one.  Here is a list of things I never thought about:

• Gay Marriage - well maybe I did think about that, but it was focused on HAPPY Marriage
• Woke - never thought about it other than I needed to Woke up and do my chores, in fact we used the word Wake.
• when would I stop working - 65?  you have to be kidding me, all farmers I knew worked until they passed away
• GPS guided tractors and certainly not pickups or cars that would guide you.  If we got lost, we just had to figure it out and as a boy in the Osage I needed to know North, South, East and West.  I remember Billy Snyder telling dad where to run when going to see Grandma Annie in Oologah, Ok. (yep, that is the real name of a town).  Billy told dad to turn where the chicken was in the road.
• How about a telephone in your pocket?  and you can talk to it, and it will talk back and there was never a twisted cord to hassle with.  Who would have thought?
• I never thought you could not store your gun in the back seat window of the pickup and certainly I never thought you would have to LOCK your pickup.
• An HP calculator?  why would I ever need that?  I knew how to multiply and divide, add and subtract and the rules to do math.  We called it Algebra and my folks thought it looked crazy.
• Online?  what the heck!! The only thing online were the clothes drying in the back yard or maybe a chicken hawk on the telephone wire.
• Smart phones, you gotta be kidding me?  A smart aleck maybe like Jon Tanny or John Murphy, just kidding.  In fact that is what they were always doing, kidding.  I should through in Eddy Harris and he was closer to a smart aleck.
• Work Safety or helmets for riding a bicycle.  Naw!  Parents assumed you had enough sense to not do stupid things, like playing with dynamite (you might want to go read that story), hunting from the back of the pickup while someone was driving or trying to hoist Jim Heath up the flagpole. Naw, never.
• There could ever be anything better than an AM/FM radio with an 8 Track
• That putting a ring in the nose of a hog to stop digging would become common in people's noses.
• maybe people are digging in the dirt, and I just missed that as well.  
  
  
  

Well, what did I learn in the Osage?

• A simple life in a small town is as good as it gets on this earth.
• A good book and The Good Book and the lack of technology is a good thing.
• People are more forgiving of mistakes in a small town.
• Hogs are not the only animal with nose rings.

Thanks for listening,

gary

golson21@hotmail.com

Funny things Dad would say

 I am one lucky guy.  My dad had a great since of humor and was a great storyteller.  But here are some of the things that I loved and yes, some of them are off color.

1. yesterday, one of my close friends (Rich K.) told me I needed to drink more water.  Now I should preface this with it was a gathering of 11 guys for weekly fellowship that meet at Mike Cunningham's office (my old office before I retired).  Mike and Steve and staff are wonderful hosts.  Rather than make it such a long sentence which I used to get in trouble for with Mrs. Head, let's just say it is a bible study/prayer group.  Anyway, after R. Kanaly smarted off, I gave him one of my dad's sayings, "Piss on you".  Most folks would get their underwear in a wad saying something like that at a bible study, but I figure even if I don't say it, God knows what I am thinking.  Well, it got a good chuckle, kind of like Chuckles Codding more normally known as Harold.  

2.  Since I had shared one of my dad's little sayings, I figured on sharing another.  Dad use to say he was a FART KNOCKER and then he would double up one of his fists and knock on my shoulder or arm.  Do you get it?  Well, I did that to you know who yesterday.

3. This is the last one today, but there are many more:  Dad would take his index finger and make it look like a hook.  Then he would say, "do you know what this is?".  And if you did not know, he would say it is a shit hook.  Then he would proceed to hook you one the arm or somewhere to let you know you were the shits.

He always laughed and I cannot thank him enough for the great times.  I hope you can remember some great times with your dad.  If you do, check out the free invite below, where you can start writing or telling your stories and record them for your kids and grandkids.

So, what do you learn in the Osage?

• laughter is great medicine
• when you use words that are not especially acceptable by folks, just remember, God knows what you were thinking
• Words can hurt and they can heal but only Jesus forgives and does not judge, if only you put your trust in HIM.

Thanks for listening,

gary

here is my special invite:  gary.olson@finaciti.com

Facebook

Gary L. Olson

10m  · 

Shared with Public

well, here is a new one and i need your help. I think many of you know I have an app called Finaciti and if you would like to try it out for FREE (always free to you up to 1000 of my friends, family etc.). All I need is for you to try it and give me feedback to gary.olson@finaciti.com

so, here is what you need to get it free: download the app and when it asks for an AID number use srem8z

let me know you signed up and try it out. there are two things we are doing, and it will be expanding rapidly as we get a few things adjusted.

1. if you would like to get some education and organize your personal information secured on your phone, not on our files, so that is something happens to you, your family or spouse will know what to do.

2. if you go back to the main menu on the app you can start writing your story for your family and children and grandchildren. I personally have written a lot of stories about growing up in the Osage and especially stories of mom and dad and our ancestry.

And it is all FREE to you if you use the code srem8z

tell me of any problems you might have or suggestions. we are going to add end of life planning as well.

thanks for helping,

Gary L. Olson

gary.olson@finaciti.com

What should I not do when I lose a family member?

I found this to be an interesting problem for folks, not because I am smart, but because I had some friends tell me what happened to them.

One of my friends and financial clients (I am a retired financial advisor) lost their husband suddenly.  She immediately notified the credit card companies and her banks.   She shared that they immediately shut down / locked her accounts and she was not able to buy gas without cash or travel or even purchase groceries.  Wow!!  What did she do?

Well, the first thing is she had to get some friends to loan her some dough/cash until she could reapply for a credit card.  It took a couple of weeks, and she was stressed out by more than just the sudden loss of her husband.  

What about the checking account?  If things are done correctly there is generally no problem as long as the account has "right of survivorship".  You better go check with your bank.  There are other ways of handling, but this is the most common.  The bank may ask for a copy of the death certificate and/or identification proving you are the surviving account holder (depends on the bank's policies).  BUT, and there is always a but, if the deceased was the primary account holder, and you were listed only as an authorized user (not a co-owner), the bank may freeze the account.  This is a possible probate problem.  

Well, I hope this helps a little, but!

So what do you learn in the Osage

• check with your bank on what your options are
• check with your credit card company on are you a joint or authorized holder and ask how they would handle it
• on the credit card you will want to verify (by state) if you are liable for the debt and how they would handle the notification.
• talk to your financial advisor and lawyer 

Thanks for listening,

gary

gary.olson@finaciti.com

Facebook

Gary L. Olson

10m  · 

Shared with Public

well, here is a new one and i need your help. I think many of you know I have an app called Finaciti and if you would like to try it out for FREE (always free to you up to 1000 of my friends, family etc.). All I need is for you to try it and give me feedback to gary.olson@finaciti.com

so here is what you need to get it free: download the app and when it asks for an AID number use srem8z

let me know you signed up and try it out. there are two things we are doing and it will be expanding rapidly as we get a few things adjusted. 1. if you would like to get some education and organize your personal information secured on your phone, not on our files, so that is something happens to you, your family or spouse will know what to do. 2. if you go back to the main menu on the app you can start writing your story for your family and children and grandchildren. I personally have written a lot of stories about growing up in the Osage and expecially stories of mom and dad and our ancestry.

And it is all FREE to you if you use the code srem8z

tell me of any problems you might have or suggestions. we are going to add end of life planning as well.

thanks for helping,

Gary L. Olson

gary.olson@finaciti.com