Project Complete, ------------ Finally!

I suppose a number of my faithful readers have wondered why I haven't posted for a while. I hope neither of you were worried I was leaving you. I have been hard at work finishing up my family genealogy and history book This project has been 20 years in the making.

Much of it was researched and written in the late nineties. Then I went through about 15 years of procrastination. Actually, assembling and editing have been the hardest part. I am happy to say, however, that today it went to the printers. 210 pages, 93,000 words.

Why so long? My family lines all came to America  before the Revolutionary War, so that's a hell of a lot of folks and families. My first immigrants came to the colonies settling in Massuachusetts in about 1635. Early birds. The rest came in the early 1700s through Philadelphia. In other words my family all became British citizens at one time, even though they mostly came from Germany.

In addition I researched and wrote about the major events that were occurring during their time. Genealogy and family history are more than dates and numbers. These were real people with real stories. Ever life is a story, not a born, died and buried statistic. It has been a long and rewarding journey.

In the opening paragraph of Vladamir Nobakov’s memoir, he states, “There is a common sense that tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.  In the context of cosmic and human history, each life is but the briefest flash of an eternal strobe light -- so brief that it may be little noted nor long remembered.”

However, when each crack of human light is linked with other little cracks of human light, they illuminate the history of the world, the history of America and the histories of our families.  Our own little crack of light is the sum of all those little cracks of light that have flashed before.  

Finding where you came from helps you find who you are.

Have a Nice day!

Sam

Moving to the Front Row

Several years ago, Doe’s favorite aunt, Anna Marie passed away. At the funeral home on the night of the visitation, the row closest to the casket was occupied by the surviving siblings of the Owen family. They were the older generation. In the row behind were the sons and daughters husbands and wives of those in the front row. Behind us were the grandchildren. Today the front row is gone and my generation is now sitting in that front row of life’s journey. We are now the older generation, and I have become the patriarch of the current living Arnold generation. The time has come for us to be the older generation.

This last weekend was special. Thirteen of the Arnold lineage, plus husbands and wives, kids, and couple of girlfriends and grand kids gathered at my brother Terry’s home in Cottage Grove, Oregon. There were only two families missing. We had such a good time reminiscing the old days a in Indiana. Lots of good stories and laughs. The only sad note is that this is probably the last time this many members of our family will be together as a unit. Eventually this is what family comes to. The older generation moves to the front row, and is replaced by they next generation.

My two brothers and I are now sitting in the front row. It is a fact of living in today’s world. All of our genealogy lines moved from the East to the West, one step at a time. They all ended up in Indiana, where the next generations stayed for over a hundred years. My generation then spread out all over the country. We were a nomadic generation. In the group that was in Oregon, we were from, South Florida, New York City, San Antonio, Texas, San Diego, California, and finally Cottage Grove, Oregon. If you took a roll call, ten years ago, many would be living somewhere other than what is listed. And so goes the nomad life in our family. Something is lost, when family lives so far apart.

I am about to finally finish our family history book. In rereading things I researched and wrote about over fifteen years ago, I was reminded of our family roots. I uncovered so many stories because every life is a story. God Bless our family and yours.


Have a nice day.

Sam

The Importance of Stuff or Not

I hope you have noticed I haven't posted in a while. I have been hard at work on writing and editing our family history. It is a big project. This is a little jewell I found stuck amonst my papers.


Father Dick Rice works with a group of eight priests in community service.  It is his everyday work.  They would occasionally get the proverbial question, “What’s your Fax number”.  The group had decided that they were the only people in St. Paul without a FAX machine and they should get one.  They had pretty much made up their mind when one ask, “How many times would we use it?”  They decided that it would probably be necessary only about three times a week.  It now seemed silly to spend the money on a fax machine for that amount of usage.  They inquired who in the church area might have a fax machine.  They discovered that the church office six blocks down the street had one.  It was managed by a person that worked for the church they didn’t know.  They worked out a deal to use their fax machine.  For the three times a week they might need a fax machine they would use that one.  In the mean time they made a new friend in the other office.  Not accumulating more “stuff”, saved money and found a new friend.

That week he had listened to the poems of that new found 82 year old friend.  She ask him if he would listen to her poems because she had no one else to listen to them.  And he spent the time and listened to this little old lonely lady.

Time rushs by too fast. Slow down and listen every once in a while. Poems are not stuff.  The Bible is not stuff. We are not stuff.

Sam

A Man of Many "Wowies"

In Walter Isaakson’s biography of Steve Jobs he writes of what he wanted from a prospective employee.

“Job’s primary test for recruiting people in the spring of 1981 to be part of his merry band of pirates was making sure they had a passion for the product. He would sometimes bring candidates into a room where a prototype of the Mac was covered by a cloth, dramatically unveil it, and watch. If their eyes lit up, if they went right for the mouse and started and clicking, Steve would smile and hire them.  Recalled Andrea Cunninghm. “He wanted them to say Wow!”

I quote this passage to show that when a someone says “Wow”, the person is amazed and awed by what he sees. It was a term Steve job used in everyday life. It’s the WOW factor.

In a eulogy at Steve Jobs’s funeral, Mona Simpson, Job’s biological sister, talked about Steve’s last minutes on Earth.

“Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for long time at his children, then his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

“OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW”.

Did, Steve Jobs, a true visionary and world changer once again show us the future we might expect in our life after life. Heaven must truly be a WOW, awesome and powerful.

Steve Jobs will help God change the world.

Sam

Note: Not sure where I stole this, but thanks

Crash!

I ran across this on Mark's Facebook Page. The boy did have some adventure in his life.

October 5, 2009 at 6:55pm

Ok, so day was a little bit crazy, I have tweeted a lot about today's events. Here's the whole story.

Around 12:15 or so I was sitting behind my computer, playing Farmville and listening to music. I here a plane fly over, louder then normal. It sounded close but we live a few miles from Flying Cloud Airport. About a minute later I thought I heard my mom call from downstairs, I wondered downstairs and she was around. I got that feeling that was not right. I slipped on my shoes and walked outside.

Across the street I could see smoke coming from across the street in between two houses and I heard screaming. I ran across the street, a neighbor was wandering around in a bathrobe. When I got around the side of the house there it was. A small plane on fire!

As I was running across the street a red pick-up came screaming down the street, one guy jumped out and ran not the muddy and steep slope towards the plane.

I will admit that my thought was "Shit, this thing is going to blow up."

I heard "We need a crowbar or a hammer to smash this window out! We need a crowbar!"

I ran back to my house and searched for something big and heavy to swing, of course there wasn't much there, I ran into the house and grabbed two hammers. I ran across the street as two Eden Prairie cops pulled in. I started down the slope towards the plane, without much of a plan. The cops screamed "Sir, get back here, we got it!" I was not one to argue with them or try to be a hero.

At this point they my neighbor Bob and the guy in the pick-up truck had busted the window open and was carrying him to safety. At that point more cops where there. I started to panic a bit because I didn't see my mom anywhere. "Where's my mom?" I asked the weird neighbors. "I haven't seen her"

I realized that her car was here, and I calmed down. I called her. "Where are you?"
"I'm almost home-"
"A plane just crashed across the street"
"Wha-"
"Just get here"

A fireman asked me to move my car further down the street and I did. Mom pulled in around the same time. Around this time, I posted my first tweet from my phone.

"Plane crashes in Eden Prairie. Film at 11. Across the street from me. No shit."

At this point things calmed down, firefighters were putting out the fire and cops and fire were everywhere.

Not more then 10 minutes later I got an @reply from @myfox9

MyFOX9 @Drtiehead can you call 952-946-5767 with any info?

Wow, really, the power of Twitter.

I saw the two guys from the pick-up truck and I talked to them. It turns out they were headed to Lifetime fitness, which is about a mile from my house. They saw the plane, which was a twin engine plan, flying low and they knew it was in trouble and they followed the smoke.

Too call these guys heroes is an understatement, both them and the Bob the neighbor both throw caution to the wind and risked it to save this guys life. Hats off.

I posted this picture, http://twitpic.com/kdzau about 30 minutes after the crash. You can see the two neighbors houses, the plane crashed right between those houses. Bob and his wife Joy lives in the house on the left. Joy was in there kitchen and saw the plane crash into the ground.

Of course my Mom wants me to comb my hair and put on some nicer clothes. I was wearing sweatpants and a zip-up. I decided to change, because the media was here.

I spend the rest of the day, tweeting and talking to the media, I spoke to Fox 9, Pioneer Press, MN Sun, Minnesota Public Radio and a few others.

This could have been a disaster. Had the plane hit any of any of the houses...you don't want to think about it. The fact is, other then a banged up pilot, no one was hurt, no houses were hit, I feel very lucky.

Once everything calmed down I got to admit, I had fun being "that guy" with the media. The first time I was flagged down by the media, I almost started laughing. I kept thinking of the scene from The Informant, "I'm a person of interest in an on going investigation."

Currently it's about 9 at night and there is a mobile command center parked across the street and the wreckage is going to be moved tomorrow morning.

Crazy day...

Return to the Old Watering Hole--Friends and Dreams are There to Meet You! (African Proverb)

According to the dictionary, a memoir is a personal reminiscence and narrative of life’s events based on the writer’s personal experiences.  It is a series memory vignettes.  Why does anyone take the time and effort to write a memoir?  I can only address the question from the perspective of my own motivations.

A memoir is very personal, very self-centered, and, therefore, must involve a certain amount of ego-indulgence.  You must have a rather large ego to believe that someone may be interested in reading about the personal events in your life and perspective facts about family history.  I write this for future generations in order to help those generations add a personal perspective to Sam Arnold as a person, a personal history of the times, I lived and a perspective of our family’s history. 

When my father and mother passed away, I found pieces and parts of their lives and those of other ancestors told in pictures (often without names or circumstances attached), clippings, letters and documents stored away in the attic.  They left many unanswered questions.  I can only provide an educated guess and attempt to piece together what I think their stories were or might have been.  I want to leave you with better facts than were left to me.  It can be viewed as a duty for and to the generations that follow.  It is a project of love.
Most of us wait too long to ask the important questions about family heritage and personal memories.  God gives us overlapping generations whose stories of the past and present could easily be linked by asking the older generations to tell their stories, and to relive their memories and the stories told to them.  Sadly, in most cases, the questions never get asked until there is no one around to ask.  Younger generations are often bored with the stories told by the senior members of the family.  However, those that memories are their lives.  Young people by chronology are only beginning to assemble their memories.  Your memories will be your life

Life stories are a pieces of real history.  They represent a search for the right and the wrong decisions I have made in my life in order that others might perhaps learn something of value to them.  Life stories pinpoint, to the extent one’s memory allows, those life-changing turning points in life, and the people who have made a difference in their life.
Life stories provide a fantasy for those who follow as to how it must have been in times before.  The little pieces of history gave me insight into the personalities and events of my parents and grandparents.  I want to give my descendants as clear a picture of the events and times that shaped my life and generation, as well as a history of our family from a personal perspective.

Lives and events occur sequentially in the flow of time.  One day, one week, one year, one decade, one lifetime accumulating one after the other.  Time does march on.  Lives may be lived in linear time, but they are also a multi-leveled and multi-textured collage of experiences and meanings.  Memories are a patch work of the life—snap-shots.  Sometimes the real meaning of the various events are linked with other later events.  The true meanings and their long term affects are not revealed until later, when they are examined in the context of maturity and/or a life lived. 

Have a nice day!

Sam

Connecting

In researching the history of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection and my grandfather’s participation in it, I went to the Minnesota Historical Society’s Research Center to see what they might have in the archives.  Even though my grandfather wasn’t from Minnesota, I thought there might be some documents or books concerning the participation of the 13th Minnesota Regiment in the Philippines during that war, just like my grandfather.  I hoped I might find something to help me get a feel for my grandfather’s experiences in the same place.  I browsed the bibliography and found a listing for a file of letters written by a Minnesota soldier who had served in the Philippines.  The staff retrieved the file box from the back and brought it to my seat in the center of the room.  I wasn’t sure what the box and the letters held, but I was totally unprepared for the experience I was about to have.
 
The box contained about twelve neatly labeled manila folders filled with the personal letters of Edmund P. Neill, a twenty year old soldier from Red Wing, written to his parents, detailing his life as a young soldier in the 13th Minnesota.  The letters contained wonderful descriptive details of the experiences and observations of a young man away from home for the first time.  There must have been nearly a hundred letters in the folders, telling of his unit’s assembling point at Camp Ramsey in St. Paul, of his train trip across America, of Camp Merritt in San Francisco, of the cruise by ship to Manila, of the ugliness of the war and finally of his trip back home a year and a half later. 

The letters were written in his hand, in pencil and in pen, and on stationery and plain notebook paper of varying sizes, each painting beautiful, ugly and sometimes humorous word pictures.  His hand writing sometimes wiggled as he wrote from the train taking him to San Francisco or from the ship transporting him to the Philippines.  The letters had not been written as history, but as simple family letters home from a loving son.  However, as I read them, they became the living history of a young man capturing an adventure, not unlike my grandfather.

While the letters gave me a deep sense of personal connection with a man I never met and long dead, it was another small bit of paper that brought his story home on even more connective terms.  In the last folder there was a small note, written in ink, on heavier manila paper.  It was a pass, hand-written by a superior, intended to serve as his passage on a train into Manilla on army business.  It was not the note itself that grabbed my tears; it was the discolored stains of his sweat around the edges.  I could see him folding it and placing it in his pocket on a hot and steamy jungle day in the Philippines.  I could see him taking it from his pocket and discovering that his perspiration had dampened and discolored it.  This small sweat-stained remnant of that hot and humid day lay before my eyes nearly a hundred years later.  His personal thoughts and observations had flowed from his mind through his pencil and pen onto the pages of his letters, but his sweat had flowed from his physical being.   I could almost feel his presence.  He was as real to me as my own grandfather.  His sweat and the stains it left behind told a story of the human side of history.

Our ancestors were a part of the history of their time, no matter how small.  We are part of the story of our time and our descendants will someday want to know our stories and the events that helped shape us as individuals, as families and as Americans.  It is an obligation to attempt to preserve our stories in order that future generations might see the history of this country in human terms—in family terms.  In order to tell the stories of our families, we must be willing to make a personal commitment to recording their legacies by extracting the stories from our own memories and those of other living relatives, the archives of dimmed photographs (often without names), family bibles, diaries, letters, newspapers, obituaries, yearbooks, census records, land records, birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, military records and other little scraps left behind that begin to paint a picture of a journey through life and the history of a time. 

As you patiently piece together these small webs of human information and marry them with the recorded history of their time, wonderful stories of individuals, of families and of America begin to emerge.  You will begin to see that each life—each crack of light --  has a meaning of its own.  We tend not to look at our own lives as human history, but each of us should consider it our obligation to leave a part of ourselves behind.  These simple acts of recording our lives, no matter how mundane we feel our lives may be, will give your life a perpetuity for generations to come.  But most of all it will add meaning to your own life.

We are all unique, but also linked together as human beings.

Sam